Charles Darwin's writings in 1838 include an amusing list of pros and cons:
CONS OF MARRIAGE
— "Conversation of clever men at clubs
— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.
— to have the expense & anxiety of children
— perhaps quarelling
— Loss of time.
— cannot read in the Evenings
— fatness & idleness
— Anxiety & responsibility
— less money for books
PROS OF MARRIAGE
— "Children — (if it Please God)
— Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,
— object to be beloved & played with.
— better than a dog anyhow.
– Home, & someone to take care of house
— Charms of music & female chit-chat.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. […] Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps"
10 meters of water is one atmosphere, so they're right - 0 on the inside and 1 on the outside is a pressure differential of one atmosphere.
"almost 4000 meters of water" is "almost 400 atmospheres". About 2.7 tons per square inch. I find that that absolutely unimaginable. - I can't find any equivalence that my brain can make sense of.
Well, sea level is at 1 atm already, so an increase to 2 atm isn't immediately catastrophic. However, if you took that tank filled entirely with sea level air and shoved it down 30 feet under the water the same thing would happen. It instantly crumples because its hollow. We're full of water with some air in a couple places. We'd crumple too if we were just a layer of skin over an air sac. But as it stands, the human body can withstand that pressure alright
Pressure equalizes as they descend slowly. It's different from descending 4000m inside an armoured can and have it all released upon you in a split second.
In 2010 I was at my first job out of college and frustrated that iTunes took over such a huge amount of resources on my PC. But I loved the UI look and function and the way it had playlists, and didn't like the other options on the market. So I hired a cheap overseas freelancer to build "Litetunes", which I requested look and function exactly like iTunes but be <2MB file with no installation required that would open quickly just like notepad or calculator. I thought of distributing it but ended up using it just for myself, it worked great.
The saddest part of bank interest is that on top of it lagging inflation, but also gets taxed aggressively making it effectively lag by inflation by an even wider margin! Being a borrower is the way to go, where your interest payments are less than inflation AND you get to deduct each year on your taxes and save keep more real dollars in your bank account than you would otherwise. I just hate debt personally, part of my upbringing. But I wonder if there's some reit or low fee investment vehicle that makes it easy to take advantage of this dynamic while still being able to sleep at night. Any ideas?
Mortgage debt shouldn't prevent you from sleeping at night. You can live inside your investment, and the purchasing power of the money you borrowed just decreases over time. The way you go astray is to take on too much debt (everyone buys way too much house) or to choose exotic loan products that sound cheap today, but aren't. (2008 seemed to kill most of those off.)
As with anything, approach it rationally. Is there a home you want to buy, and can you put 20% down today, and can you afford the monthly payments + property taxes + insurance + random repairs that you'll have to make? If so, it's not a bad investment; after all, you have to live somewhere. As with any investment, there is some risk. Your neighborhood could become bad. The entire house could be supported only by dead termites. But most of the time, the horror scenarios you read about don't happen; you enjoy living there, and sell it some years down the road for well more than you paid into the loan. It's worth considering over pure investment vehicles; you can't live in an ETF, and there are no tax breaks.
> Being a borrower is the way to go, where your interest payments are less than inflation AND you get to deduct each year on your taxes and save keep more real dollars in your bank account than you would otherwise.
With mortgages at over 6% and personal loans at 8-9% (according to my local credit union) I'm not sure if it's that much better and if deductions would offset high interest rates, but it's definitely a nice kickback.
Yes, the dynamics of a 30 years mortgage are what I'm looking for, but turn-key. Because purchasing a property and getting a mortgage is a huge hassle up front and requires tons of work for many years. Compare this to buying a publicly traded security which requires the click of a button to purchase, and retrieving the tax slip each year.
"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it." - Ernest Hemingway, advice to a young writer in 1935 article in Esquire
Some studies show potatoes are the most satiating food, so one theory is eating them makes it more pleasant to stop eating generally and keep calories low (exact opposite of sugar, which makes one crave more food).
"Susanna Holt of the University of Sydney Australia did a research experiment in 1995 to compare the effects of different foods on short-term satiety and appetite levels. She prepared 240 cals portions of 38 different foods...The satiety index score she assigned to the potato was 323. No other food was even close. The second closest food was “ling fish” which scored 225."
https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/
But separately from that, there has been frequent speculation that the outlier potato results in this study were at least partly because of their unappetizing preparation method -- boiled, cooled overnight and then microwaved before serving - which, coincidentally, would've raised their resistant starch levels, which we already suspect increases satiety.
I love Mercury. Their interface is dream, a world apart from TD, Chase, BofA etc. Merucry is online-only so nothing requires a branch, ever. Wires are free and take 1 min to initiate. I don't have more than $1M in the bank but if I wanted FDIC insurance or a large institution guarantee I'd just put the excess somewhere and do 1-2 transfers a year between them.
I am an INTP and this resonates with me, but is mostly an issue in group settings rather than one on one meetings.
In one-on-one first meetings I naturally participate in the back and forth. It's group meetings where I can just listen and absorb information that I come off as disengaged and don't make a good first impression. The strategy I use to mitigate this (suggested by an old boss) is to jump into the conversation very early in the meeting with 1 or 2 comments that I wouldn't have otherwise felt a need to make. It establishes my voice at the table and then I can relax and just process information
That's interesting, in the long run I would say I'm that way too, but it'll be toward the end of the meeting after things have been hashed out I'd contribute my new perspective. Or even worse for first impressions, I'll often I'll listen to a whole meeting, continue forming my thoughts even after the meeting has ended, and then write a well constructed email back to the key people.
I may have figured out a better solution than was possible for anyone during the meeting, but by sending it late people's impressions during the meetings of me may not be the best.
I tend to make good first impressions, I think, because typically (in my experience) nothing too in-depth is being discussed on the first meeting.
It's group meetings where I can just listen
and absorb information that I come off as disengaged
and don't make a good first impression
This is where I struggle sometimes. IMO/IME if it's complicated enough to have a meeting about, then it's probably something that deserves some deeper thought. Blurting and hashing out a solution right then and there is rarely the path to an optimal solution.
But of course, that's not how the world works. Spew out a solution right then and there. That's how you get ahead. Who cares if it's the best solution? You blurted it out first, and that is seen by others as a sign of confidence, and if you are confident then you must know what you're talking about... right?
God, I need to get out of this industry. Maybe all industries.
On a positive note, I do like your mitigation strategy.
I do a watered down version of this and have still seen great results. I try to eat only in a 11-12 hour window each days, which for me means only between 8am-7pm. More energy, less food craving, better sleep.
I started this after reading a book The Circadian Code which describes all the science behind this (written by a real scientist). Having a deep understanding of the mechanism was the boost I need to give this a fair try. The book explains why study participants who ate the same food, but in restricted hours, had better results. A broader discussion of circadian rhythms explains why eating during all waking hours negatively impacts sleep and energy levels.
Whatever works for you is awesome and you should absolutely keep doing it.
However, I have to remind others that there is really no scientific authority worth anything on nutrition. The digestive system is still far too complex to understand systematically, and statistical studies have far too many confounding factors to have true predictive power.
We of course understand some elements based either on particularly strong effects (e.g. that a deficit of vitamin C will lead to scurvy), or on very basic physics (your net weight gain is based on calories eaten vs calories consumed), but that's about it.
Even the CICO model only holds as a principle, or in highly intrusive clinical settings - we don't have any practical way to actually measure how many calories are extracted from food, nor how many calories are being consumed by your activity - especially since for anyone not doing professional sports, the bulk of their calorie consumption comes from internal processes as far as we can tell.
For an example of how little we understand of the digestive system, until maybe 10 or so years ago, no one had thought to look at the role of the gut microbiome in nutrition (beyond extreme cases, such as radiation treatments killing it off entirely). We had known for a long time that there is a significant role of some kind, but no one had taken time to quantify it, nor to look at inter-personal differences that may be attributable to it. Even today we have very little information, beyond some hints now that it plays a huge role in nutrient absorption.
For another example, we have little to no idea how diet is controlled by the brain+gut, such as what causes some people to be perfectly content with salad, others to crave meat and fat, and still others to prefer carbs and other sugars (not to mention extremely specific cravings people sometime have that correlate with actual nutrient deficiencies, leading to extremes such as eating dirt for anemia).
Overall, there is no way to follow the science on nutrition today. You have to experiment with your own body, find something that works, and stick to it.
If you work long hours or have other obligations it's fun to see how far you can take it. I've fasted 24h+ a couple times, and often fast 16-20h if I skip breakfast and then work a 10-12h shift that day. I've never done well eating 3 meals a day and have always drifted towards OMAD style eating naturally.
Me too. Most blog posts have one pretty simple idea that it takes a ton of reading to figure out what it is. I appreciate the time he put into distilling it.
If he were to make it longer some examples might be interesting to read about and drive home the message, he no doubt has examples in his mind, and his readers would no doubt be curious as to what they are
CONS OF MARRIAGE
PROS OF MARRIAGE https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...