Analog Enjoyer

My grandma used to say, “I can smell rain coming”. Can people “smell rain” before it starts?

I think for all the focus on AI people are really sleeping on space. You'll feel the singularity when they have the moon base operating, processing lithium-rich asteroids the size of Ohio. This will come to pass in your lifetime

Boomers started accumulating a lot of stuff over the past 25 years because they had a lot of money (being in the peak earning years) and things became way cheaper When boomers were young, things were expensive & a person could genuinely live well by abstaining from buying stuff

It's amazing how Mass Affluence creeps into our lives over time. As the OP pointed out, this will probably become the norm soon. You'll be derided as low class for having only one dishwasher. This will also lead to complaining about how expensive it is to remodel a kitchen!

If someone (who is not rich or accomplished) thinks they are too good to bring a sandwich for lunch, you CANNOT help or mentor them until that personality issue is addressed. As a practical matter you just move on to someone else, it's not really possible to address it outside of a custodial or semi-custodial "total shock" environment like boot camp or prison.

Is it better to have fewer cabinets and two dishwashers instead? Had to think this one through when building. At first, it seems exorbitantly decadent. But cabinetry is expensive, too, and you never need to unload. We went with only one because if one breaks, your system fails.

On the academia is full of Marxists debate: it’s illustrative to look at Mellon, the largest source of academic humanities funding by orders of magnitude. Projects tagged w/ Marxism in their grant database? 0 Gender studies? 46 Black studies? 25 Social Justice? 42 Latinx? 451

What's the downside of AI discovering all the math that can possibly be discovered? Math doesn't exist as a jobs program for IMO gold medalists.

I knew an orchestra member who had a go to rant about how much he hated John Williams for degrading orchestra/ classical music. “We had to play one of these stupid concerts and do you know how many times we rehearsed it? Once.”

A simple theory: people didn't move towards experiences over luxury status goods because they got more enlightened; the shift happened because of Instagram, which turned ephemeral experiences into durable status signals

It’s not always a good thing to “find your people” Movie criticism is a classic case in point. In the past, you watched a trailer, watched “wow, this sucks”, and that was it. You went on with your day. Now you go online and find a critical mass of other people who also all hate it and you hype each other up. Your opinion is now much more deeply held because now you’re not just an individual hater, but part of a tribe of haters. The hate has become your identity now. The emotional reaction has transformed into something new Worse, you can convert other people to the cause. People who had never even seen the trailer, but who are aligned with the basic sentiment. The hate spreads like a contagion Everything works like this today. Reddit is full of this type of person. There’s a community on there for people with “retrospective jealousy” - a feeling engendered by some behavior of your girlfriend or husband before you even knew them. This feeling isn’t new; but in the past, you experienced it as an individual, and that was it. It had no larger significance. But now you can externalize the feeling, and by doing so change it into something new and something much darker

Never mind about the Rolex… had no idea buying one was like buying a Ferrari, where you have to beg, jump though hoops and then buy products you don’t want to get the one you do want! 😂 thought it would be fun to own, but would much prefer to just order something on a website (like a Tesla!) and be done with it. These retail and reseller channels make things far too time consuming Is there a nice watch I can just… order?

I converted my husband to counter butter and he'll never go back, I feel like I rescued him Cold butter devotees are just salty because their bread is torn up