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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2025

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  • No, I don’t have a bidet. They’re expensive and not very common. But if I had one, I would probably dry my ass with a small amount of toilet paper. Or maybe I’d use a towel, and just have a different one every day. I already change and wash my underpants every day. I assume you’re not soaping your ass every time you shit, so then by your logic your underpants are exposed to a gross ass and are therefore gross themselves every time you shit. So if you find it acceptable to simply change your underpants every day, then changing a little towel every day isn’t much extra burden.

    Obviously it’s possible for me to get by perfectly fine without a bidet right now. But there have been times in my life when I’ve been injured (eg a dislocated shoulder) and reaching back to wipe was kind of difficult. It opened my eyes to the fact that someday I’m going to be elderly and when the day comes, I would much rather have a device for easily cleaning my ass than to be forced to rely on someone else to do it for me. In my opinion every home should have one, just because everybody eventually gets old. I’m certainly not suggesting they be added to public bathrooms.




  • This is why the current political climate is so extremely dangerous. The world has spent so long developing the Global Nash Equilibrium that nobody believes that anybody is in a position to actually follow through on any of the threats they make. Everybody is fully willing to believe that all their opponents are bluffing, and fully willing to call those bluffs. But all the bluffing was part of the Nash Equilibrium, so actually calling those bluffs is destroying the Equilibrium. The only way we can go back to the balance is if the threats become credible again, and that can only happen if people start actually following through on some of their threats for a while. And that would make for an extremely rough decade.







  • Because this is custom contract work and the requirements-gathering phase of custom contract work is complex even when it’s human-to-human. A contractor doing requirements-gathering needs to understand the real-world context to a human level. Maybe “never” was an overstatement, but we’re still nowhere near developing an AI capable of navigating real-world context beyond extremely formalized systems such as road navigation. This isn’t like text generation where it happens in a second and the operation costs nothing more than what it costs to run the computer that does it so if the AI generates stupid text you can just rephrase the request and try again at minimal cost. Miscommunications in trade work result in waste of time and materials. We’re way off.


  • Performing a job like that would require so much context understanding that even if they made a robot capable of physically executing the vast array of required physical tasks, it would still require a human plumber to operate the thing, ie even if it was a matter of simply giving it instructions to carry out, a customer would not have the necessary knowledge to know what exact instructions to give. You’d still need a human with plumbing knowledge to give the proper instructions. We might need FEWER plumbers, but we’ll never need NONE.




  • The only way in which shares can more-or-less translate to real money at their face value is if you use them as collateral on a loan. This is how rich people are rich: they use their shares to take out loans which provide them with spendable money. Money now is always more valuable than money in the future, due to inflation and opportunity cost, so most rich people are almost always in monumental amounts of debt, but because they were able to spend a bunch of money up-front, they’re able to invest in things that bring them even more money to pay the debt off. Example: if you had the money to buy a house and rent it out to tenants, the rent you receive will EASILY cover the mortgage - the trick is getting the collateral to get a mortgage to begin with.

    The only danger is that banks and lenders write in a clause that if your share prices (ie the collateral the loan relies on) drops below a certain value, you are forced to sell the shares off and give them the proceeds, so that they can recoup at least some of the money they lost on your bad collateral before it devalues completely. This could, theoretically, happen to Musk if $TSLA drops below a certain threshold, which is what half the Internet seems to be hoping for.







  • This however highlights the fact that foreign students used to be a source of revenue for the USA. This is wealthy European money that was getting spent in America but now will likely be spent somewhere else.

    This is also denying American Harvard business students the opportunity to establish lucrative connections with European money. You’ve heard of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Poor Harvard students on a full scholarship who plan on setting up their own business someday could have benefitted from being classmates with the future queen of Belgium.

    My point being that even if you fully subscribe to “America first”, this is still a really dumb policy that’s shooting America in the foot. Foreign students studying in America were, by definition, bringing money into America. No longer.