5,620 karma · joined April 2, 2007
I realized this when trying to learn Salsa dancing. Some people have a natural talent, but most don't and that includes me. It was one of the most difficult things for me to learn and it took months of very very bad dancing to get to a passable level.
As a guy, it can be tough post-college to make other good male friends, but I look back at all my male friends now and they are almost all from Salsa. There's a real camaraderie that comes from passing through a challenge together and making it to the other side.
Sure - it's not a Navy Seal experience or something that intense, but the fear of social humiliation is a strong one and if you can get through that with some other solid people, it builds a real bond.
They usually don't go down during that time, but sometimes they do and their support told us to always expect outages during this time.
If you need your B2 data available during those windows, you'll need to also set up a failover data source for those times.
> How much taxes do you pay to the US?
Anecdata won't get us very far in understanding.
The point is there are plenty (no idea the exact number) of US citizens abroad that pay taxes. If you're making much over ~$110K and don't have significant deductions, you are paying US taxes. As you can imagine these people are typically experienced technical engineers, executives, business owners, etc. True, most US citizens abroad won't go over the ~$110K, but many do.
Either way, you still have the burden of filing taxes in the complex US tax system which is a non-trivial cost in time and resources - in addition to filing taxes in your host country. Is it worth it? Yes, for most, but simplifying the overly complex tax requirements would make it a lot less burdensome for all US citizens at home and abroad.
There is the direct financial cost of paying US taxes when living abroad, but it is also a significant cost in time and energy to file taxes for 2 countries. It can get pretty complex, so many need to hire a tax service to handle it properly.
Then there are the additional reporting requirements for any banks that you have accounts with, so some banks will not allow you to have an account with them because you are a US citizen.
The point is that there are some real downsides to maintaining US citizenship when living overseas.
There are many upsides of course, like being able to return to the US at any time and live and work there. If there were an emergency situation, I could probably count on the US embassy to help me evacuate if necessary.
Overall, it's a cost/benefit evaluation. If you have citizenship in another advantageous country (or country in a powerful union like the EU) and significant resources, I can see why it would be tempting for some to drop the US citizenship.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figu...
It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time.
This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2]
In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can't cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an "unschedule" where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I've applied this to different projects, it's amazing how much more I'm able to accomplish.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15799151-daily-rituals
In my thirties, I was so consumed with career that I let my health go, I was very overweight, didn't exercise and just put all my focus into work and getting ahead. I developed all types of health problems and pictures of me from that time look like a fat old baby with a beard. It didn't help that I was still wearing clothes from the 90's. Quite embarrassing and I keep pictures from that era buried deep deep below the earth's mantle :)
At age 40, I was recently out of a long-term relationship and moved to a new place and decided to get my health in order. I fixed my diet, started working out, updated my wardrobe, prioritized sleep, etc.
Over the next year, I dropped the extra weight, put on quite a bit of muscle, dressed for the correct era, and overall re-made myself.
A nice surprise was that losing weight and getting in shape resolved nearly all my health issues. I felt like I was in my twenties again - which was a small miracle since I felt like I was a senior citizen in my thirties.
Naturally, my mood and confidence improved. I was dating again, and quickly realized that sexiness-gap is much more of a factor than age-gap. If there's no age-gap, but you're waaaay less sexy than someone else, society will have a problem with it. But even if there's a large age gap, and you are both at similar levels of "sexy", then society accepts it quite readily. Not saying that is good or bad - it's just how our modern society seems to be and was something surprising to me.
Here are some things that helped me:
* Set the barrier to working out as low as possible. I used resistance-bands at home. It's surprising how much muscle you can put on with resistance-bands. Set yourself up for success - it's a much lower hurdle to working out if you can just roll out of bed and workout in your underwear while listening to music/audiobook/etc. You can get super heavy-duty bands that even bodybuilders will struggle with - so don't think you have to go to the gym to put on significant muscle. You don't need to make a big financial investment here - your muscles will grow when working against significant resistance and they don't really care how they get it - just that they get it in sufficient volume and consistency.
* Ignore fad diets and follow only science/evidence based programs. The best I've found are "Renaissance Periodization" and Jeff Nippard. You want to follow those who are non-religious about any particular approach and willing to adjust their approach purely based on the best studies. I wasted soooo much time following crazy diets and fad workouts before I found good reliable data to work with, and that made all the difference.
* Focus on the 99% that matters for diet and exercise. The essentials are very simple. But if you're looking for info on youtube and other places, the majority of videos/articles are focusing on optimizing the 1%. So you can waste a lot of time worrying about the 1% that matters very little and miss the 99% that matters immensely. Remember that fitness experts often get bored of focusing on the basics and will want to constantly explore the exotic fringes. Ignore the exotic fringes - they will be a huge waste of your time unless you are an elite athlete competing in world-class competitions.
* Track what you eat in a calorie/macro counter app - at least until you get reliable intuition about it. I resisted this for a long time, but when I finally did it, I realized that my diet was insane. I was 900 calories one day and 4000 calories another day. My intuition about food and calories was terrible. It wasn't until I started counting calories that I realized what was what. Figuring out my maintenance calories also helped me to keep my energy levels more constant (my 900 calorie days were, non-surprisingly, the days I felt like a wet bag of sand).
* For style, I found Pinterest to be a surprisingly good resource. If you find a style you like that is contemporary and works well for your age, body-type, etc, then you can find thousands of photos that provide good examples. Save all the ones you like and then go through them and look for patterns. Pay attention to colors, fit, etc. Start replacing your current wardrobe with the most common items that work well in the pictures. Observe what is working for others that are similar to you, and start modeling your style after them. This may feel a bit "vain" - but remember, you're not doing anyone any favors by showing up in poor style - do it for others if that helps you overcome that mental hurdle.
* Be patient and gentle with yourself. Taking a note from the parent article: If you notice your dog got fat and out of shape, would you whip him and shame him, or gently encourage him and make it fun to exercise? Treat yourself at least as good as a dog you love. This will take time. The changes will be extremely subtle in the short-term, but will make a big difference long-term. Loving your inner animal will ensure it goes as fast as possible. Shaming or punishing your inner animal will only slow things down and cause you to resent the process. Be creative - make it fun - only boring people get bored.
Most people let themselves atrophy as they age - so you may be surrounded by bad examples that will depress you about aging. Focus instead on the examples of people who are active, growing, and living amazing lives well into their 80's. Then the future of aging won't seem so dark.
I decided to try the Mistborn trilogy. The first book was great - a nice tight and satisfying story. But the second and third books got progressively messier and I found myself totally disconnected and eventually just slogging through to the end. I wish I would have stopped after the first book.
Sanderson admits loving to write write write and hating to rewrite and edit, which I think really showed in the latter books of the trilogy.
(The exception being the recent outages GoDaddy caused for them, but since they've moved to using Cloudflare as their registrar, I don't anticipate further issues there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119619 )
First, B2's pricing is pretty amazing, especially compared to S3 and similar competitors: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
Second, be aware those savings come with some downsides. The major one for us has been their maintenance window every Thursday from 2:00-3:00pm Pacific Time. Usually there's no outage, but sometimes there is. There's no warning - it's just down sometimes during that window. So, if uptime is important for your data, consider the cost of also implementing a fallback solution to cover your production use during those maintenance windows. https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone
(new acronym for me, and I imagine a few others too)
https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1362139948694966272
Insane that this exact thing happened a few days ago and they still haven't switched from Godaddy. Hope this really inspires them to take their customers seriously. This was really painful. Service disrupted for many thousands of customers.
This is still a topic with many unknowns, but we have to follow the evidence as much as we can. Evidence should always beat data-free guesses.
Before looking into this, I would have guessed 2X or 3X, but would you believe it's actually over 100X!
I bet most people's guess would also be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.
Even outdoors in the shade, it is over 50X brighter than indoors.
(For specific numbers and comparisons, see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6656201/ )
Apparently, our eyes adjust so quickly to the difference that we have a very poor sense of the magnitude of light change between indoors and outdoors.
I bring this up because one of the largest factors in myopia development appears to be outdoor light exposure in childhood.
Genetics are likely a factor too, but light exposure seems to have a huge effect: "The prevalence of myopia in 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity was significantly lower in Sydney (3.3%) than in Singapore (29.1%), while patterns of daily outdoor light exposure showed that children living in Singapore were exposed to significantly less daily outdoor light than Australian children." (from the same study linked above)
The obvious takeaway for parents, schools, and governments: ensure your children have plenty of outdoor playtime. It will greatly reduce instances of myopia (not to mention the benefits from higher Vitamin D levels, exercise, etc).