India is one of the last places I’d like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren’t very friendly, especially towards women.

One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It’s a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.

Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don’t really see much of either of those anymore though.

My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.

I didn’t realize he wasn’t trying to sell his game, so I guess we need a different analogy.

Ok, imagine you and your brother are making a website where friends can post about their lives and keep up with each other during and after college. You’re pretty open with your project and then one day the one weird guy in your friend group launches your project without consulting you. The project takes off and makes billions of dollars. You sue the weirdo and he gives you some money, but you’re still pissed about it. Did you get Zucked?

Ok, so imagine that you’re hungry and you come across a sandwich shop that has your favorite sandwich for $15, but the shop next door has the exact same sandwich for free. Which sandwich are you gonna eat?

No, wait, that’s not important. Most people are gonna eat the free sandwich, so even if you eat the $15 sandwich, you’re statistically irrelevant.

Yeah, maybe some people that weren’t hungry are gonna get a free sandwich, but the people who were hungry are also getting free sandwiches, which means that the guy trying to make a living selling $15 sandwiches is gonna have to close shop unless he starts lacing his sandwiches with cocaine.

Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

Pretty cool if you own a telescope and are into astronomy, but not exactly solar flare levels of hype here. Don’t wake up your SO and drag them out onto the lawn at 2am to show them this Nova.

You never know. Someone could make a time travel movie with it one day and then collectors will pay an arm and a leg for the left door.

Hm, interesting.

I can also have images when trying to figure certain things. For example, if I’m moving then I will have images of where to place boxes and furniture in the truck or in the apartment, but these images are typically combined with words like “if I put this here, then…” Or if I’m trying to remember where I put something then it’s memory combined with “after I got home I…”

In fact, the easier a problem is, the fewer words I use. But when something is really stumping me, the words are more prevalent. And angrier. More like “This doesn’t make sense! If the positive and negative are both connected then power should flow through. Maybe this f*cking thing is broken”

My experience is the same as yours. I have an inner monologue, but it is not constant. My thoughts do not always come in the form of words.

In fact, I would say that wordless thoughts are my default and the IM comes when I am trying to figure something out.

It sounds like your situation is similar to mine. My father is a sociopathic narcissist and I didn’t realize it until I was 30 when he effectively disowned me. It hurts to be rejected by a parent to such a degree and I was pretty depressed for a while, but it helps to know that he suffers from a mental illness. Knowing this also helped me to disown him, in turn. He was always toxic and harmful and I find now that I am happier without him in my life.

I do often wonder in what ways my life may have been better had I had a supportive father, but it’s much more productive to look forward than to lament over what could have been.

I hope that you are able to move past your father’s negative influence and be better off for it. Some men are just miserable people.

Psh, goats aren’t real

I’m so sorry

Oh, man, LotR is the exception to the rule. I can definitely still enjoy a 12 hour journey to Mordor.

Mine certainly is.

If you want to compare your attention span to what it once was, try watching older media. The wife and I were watching the walking dead and I was getting bored and that’s only 10 years old. Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey without any distractions. It’s torture.

Thanks for the tip. The line break works, but the stanza spacing doesn’t seem to be taking. I’m on Jerboa so that may be influencing the formatting.

But they were all of them deceived, for another chip was made. In the land of Texas, in the labs of Neuralink, the Dark Lord Elon forged in secret, a master chip, to control all others.

One Chip to rule them all,
One Chip to find them,
One Chip to network them all,
and in the TOS legally bind them.

Volvo has really improved their styling in recent years, IMHO. We bought an XC40 last year and so far we love it.

Black Licorice

My mother likes black licorice and so my sister and I grew up eating and enjoying it every Easter. Turns out most people hate the stuff.

I listened to a couple of his seminars on narcissism and thought, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about!” But the more I listened to him, especially his more recent stuff, the more I realized he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.

I guess he just had a handle on narcissism from his own personal experience as one.

Getting older means losing mobility, dexterity, and mental acuity. It’s not a question of if you will need assistance, it’s a question of when you will need it. Most retirees go on living independently for as long as possible until an event. Sometimes they set the kitchen on fire, sometimes they get in the car and get lost, and most often they fall and break a hip. Once they hit this event it changes their life dramatically.

The best case scenario is that you will have enough money to afford 24/7 care after your event. Idk what the current rates are, but 10 years ago it was $25/hr for CNAs and $50/hr for RNs. This means that the cost to have a CNA care for you around the clock was over $200,000/yr. This doesn’t include the additional costs of food, shelter, utilities, insurance. I’m sure that things haven’t gotten any cheaper.

The best case scenario is that your $1M nut grows enough to cover all your expenses before you die. Every other scenario means you will run out of money. So it’s really a question of how long you intend to live.

My scenario focuses solely on interest income for simplicity’s sake. There are other investments one can make to increase your gain, but such investments are more volatile. You could end up doing quite well and increasing your nut, or you could invest in the wrong stock and lose a large chunk of it.

I also left out other considerations for simplicity’s sake like the fact that most retirees are couples and past the age of 65 the odds that one of you will require significant medical treatment increases every year. Some elderly couples are getting divorced so as to only bankrupt one of them when this happens.

Life is messy and $1M will only work in the best case scenario. It’s just not realistic. By allowing people to think that $1M is enough, you’re actually leading them into ruin. We need to be aware that retirement is becoming a dicey proposition and we should be taking steps to ensure that the elderly will be provided for in the coming decades, especially since a large number of millennials won’t have children to make sure they are properly cared for.

Source: I worked in the elder care industry in Florida for a decade. I saw what happens when people run out of money.

This isn’t how retirement works.

If you try to retire on $1M you’re going to end up in a medicaid facility. Interest rates are high right now, so $1M in the bank may get you as much as $5,000/mo if you’re lucky. This is $60,000/yr and can be supplemented with social security to allow a person to live well enough at today’s cost of living.

However, inflation is a constant and is ideally restricted to 2-3% per year. This means that every year you live after you retire, your spending power is reduced by at least 2%. So even if interest rates stay high (they won’t) then by the time you hit 85 your $60,000/yr will feel more like $24,000. This will still be supplemented by social security, but you will also find that your needs are increasing by this age and you will likely need to start using your savings to pay a lovely nurse or two to help with, well, everything. In-home care and even nursing facilities are quite costly and will eat away at your savings, so if you only have $1M you better start dying soon after needing them.

This all assumes best-case-scenario. It doesn’t account for runaway inflation rates, pandemics, recessions, catastrophic events (it’s not uncommon for the elderly to accidentally set things on fire), or other possibilities that can take a bite out of your retirement savings.

When your money runs out you won’t be kicked out on the streets, thankfully. But a medicaid facility in the US can be nearly as dangerous for the elderly.