thirtyfold8625

My recollection is that the comment I replied to was “You’d be lucky to keep a job for 30 years to manage to save enough and not die in poverty!” or something similar.

It seems that there is at least one system that is intended to keep people alive even if they didn’t work much.

Because of low wages and interrupted work history, some workers earn modest incomes during their careers. Many of these workers will reach retirement with small private retirement accounts and notional accounts. To ensure that pension reform does not adversely affect these people, the new pension system guarantees an adequate old-age income for all Swedes.

For a single retiree, the guaranteed pension is about $9,000 per year. A married couple, meanwhile, receives about $16,000. This means-tested benefit is phased out according to the income available from the notional account and the private account. The means-testing rules that govern the guaranteed pension are relatively generous, to the extent that about 40 percent of workers are projected to receive at least some income from the safety net program.

I think they aren’t quite the same: “buy 1 get 1 free” means that you only get a discount if you remove at least 2 units of inventory from the store. If I wanted to encourage people to clear out shelves in order to make space for new inventory (like an entirely new product or the same product but with more distant expiration dates), I might be inclined to use “buy 1 get 1 free” (or something like “buy 3 get 1 free”) rather than just reducing the base price: if someone only gets the discount if they help me clear the shelves it might make our incentives more aligned. A “buy 1 get 1 free” deal might also make it easier to reinterpret statistics: being able to say “we sold 100 units at a price of $2 for each unit (but there was a buy 1 get 1 free deal)” might be more useful than being able to say “we sold 100 units at a price of $1 for each unit”. Also, information about who took advantage of the deal and who didn’t might be interesting (based on what was bought at the same time or tracked with a “loyalty program”), but a constant discount doesn’t make that information available since it applies to everyone equally.

In a way, this has already happened with 401(k) plans. In general, making each person’s retirement income more easily measured is likely a good thing, since it will probably encourage people to behave in a more prosocial way. https://www.heritage.org/social-security/report/pension-reform-sweden-lessons-american-policymakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s

I disagree. Inflation affects property (which probably refers to every tangible thing you will interact with other than the currency that is inflating). If the amount of money you need to give up in order to acquire an object increased due to time passing, that is “inflation”. That means that when inflation happens, every person who has at least 1 dollar bill suffers (since they won’t be able to trade it for as much stuff as they could before). A person who is significantly wealthier than someone else probably won’t have a significantly larger amount of money. Elon Musk surely doesn’t have 1 billion $1 bills stored in a basement: they probably have a large amount of money in their wallet and in a bank account, but I would be surprised if less than 90% of their net worth was derived from owning property. A “billionaire” might have 100 times as much “money” as the typical person, but they probably don’t have 10,000 or 100,000 times as much: https://breznikar.com/articles/how-much-cash-on-hand-do-billionaires-have/1781 https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/average-net-worth-by-age This means that when there is inflation, a poor person’s net worth will likely decline more than that of a rich person, since it’s likely that a large amount of a poor person’s net worth will be in the form of cash when compared to a rich person (and the net worth of a rich person will probably increase, since it’s likely that the value of their property will increase more than the amount they lose from the value of their money going down). People who are older are usually wealthier than young people, and people who are wealthier probably derive a larger percentage of their net worth from owning property than someone who is less wealthy, so when inflation happens, the net worth of young people probably decreases more when compared to older people.

Some things that can offset the impact of inflation are having debt and/or income that increases when inflation happens. I intentionally mentioned that property is tangible, but income and an obligation to pay someone using money seem less tangible. If you only own a $100 bill in your pocket, but you have a debt of $100 and your household income is $80,610 each year, if prices double but your income doubles too, that means that your net worth would not really change (you still have $100 and owe $100), but it would be easier to pay your debt (since it would become a smaller proportion of your income). If your income increases faster than inflation does (which is technically a typical situation), that means that you are in a better position as time passes! Moreover, old people typically have less (earned) income and debt than younger people, so in some ways young people have an advantage over old people.

In general, getting more (earned) income and debt is probably the way to overtake someone older than you. Getting a job providing something that old people pay for (like gambling or medical services) is probably an even better way.

The face reminded me of the style of the face pictures for Psycho Patrol R. I doubt that any one picture is exactly the same, but the style is similar enough to remind me. https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1907590/ss_97de425d644d8a91b36a76e87a82ad9b647c95bc.600x338.jpg https://store.steampowered.com/app/1907590/Psycho_Patrol_R/

I recognize “Uni” the cat from https://youtube.com/@Unicouniuni3

I think that this video gave me the best insight into how China works nowadays, and I suspect things weren’t entirely dissimilar in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1TeeIG6Uaw I also looked into things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People’s_Congress and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party after starting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China and it seems that things are pretty complicated. For example: Due to the temporary nature of the plenary sessions, most of NPC’s power is delegated to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), which consists of about 170 legislators and meets in continuous bi-monthly sessions, when its parent NPC is not in session.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

The default browser for any operating system that isn’t created by Microsoft or Google is probably suitable for most people.

https://www.comicagile.net/comic/conways-law/

https://www.comicagile.net/?s=conway's+law&post_type=comic

It is surely good to occasionally test whether unforeseen events will cause disruption. Do you know how often such a test is performed?

For example, nuclear weapons systems are tested occasionally, and seeing a failure is probably important information.

Giving moderators practice with moderating will probably improve their performance when they are actually needed.

There has been some confusion about this question: https://www.thewisedrive.com/turn-signals-in-dedicated-turn-lanes/ https://www.thewisedrive.com/yes-you-have-to-use-your-turn-signal/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/12/26/watch-live-trooper-steve-explains-whether-you-need-to-use-turn-signals-in-turn-only-lanes/

I think the idea of a “direct course” is useful:

No person shall turn a vehicle at an intersection unless the vehicle is in proper position upon the roadway as required in RSA 265:42, or turn a vehicle to enter a private road or driveway, or otherwise turn a vehicle from a direct course or move right or left upon a roadway unless and until such movement can be made with reasonable safety. No person shall so turn any vehicle without giving an appropriate signal in the manner hereinafter provided.

I do pay extra attention to giving a signal when I intend to make a U-turn rather than a typical left turn.

When I swear, I tend to use “fuck” or “bitch”, and maybe “shit”

In my experience, I find it difficult to change what communication network I use to talk to each friend of mine. This has been especially difficult for networks that don’t use a phone number to identify people. For a few relationships, we are beginning to shift to a new network (in part due to following advice and the fact that we’re passionate about security), but most relationships get “stuck” on whatever network we first used to communicate.

So far, my solution has been to do a complete hard reset: I told people that I’m changing my phone number and that my contact information is available from my website (which is just a static page hosted for free using a public Git forge website) and that I’m not sharing my phone number with anyone who knows what my legal address is (since if they really need to get in contact with me, they can just show up or send me mail, and if they have any technological problem, I’d give them an old laptop I have and help them set it up and/or let them use my WiFi to bootstrap getting their own internet connection). After I did that, everyone who actually talks to me regularly set up their phones so that they can contact me using networks I actually pay attention to. I believe part of the reason this was effective is that I usually wouldn’t communicate using SMS or the public switched telephone network even if someone tried to contact me using them and would instead wait to talk to people until we met in person at regularly scheduled events, and it’s well known that depending on the public switched telephone network makes me uncomfortable. Also, I am much more communicative using the networks that I’m comfortable with, and when I point that out to people, they agree.

Hopefully the “hard reset” method works for switching between Internet-based networks rather than only from the public switched telephone network, but I haven’t tried that yet.

In general, to transition people from using one network to another, I would describe how to contact you using a profile for an internet service you’re comfortable using (for me it was a static website, but it could be anything that has high uptime and can be updated (like the “About” field for an Mbin profile or a LinkedIn profile)), and then give that profile provenance (like by linking to it from an “About” section or changing your display name to be a URL for your “contact me” profile), and then tell people that you’re not going to send messages using networks that you don’t like using. That means that people who actually want to contact you will still be able to figure out how to do so, even if it’s been a long time since you stopped using the old communication network.

In the future, I’ll avoid sharing any contact information directly, and instead I’ll share the URL for my static website (which is essentially just my name (so it’s unlikely anyone will forget about it)) and help anyone that’s actually interested in talking to me set things up. This means I avoid advertising networks that I don’t actually want to use, so even if a new relationship still gets “stuck” on a particular communication network, it will be one that I’m comfortable with using instead of one that I’m not comfortable with using, and people will know how to get in contact with me in case something changes.

This is true. However, if a service uses a “recovery question” at all, and doesn’t allow me to use a physical security key, it means they don’t really care about security. Moreover, it probably means that they will want me to answer a “recovery question” while talking on the phone or visiting somewhere in person, and I would probably prefer to not appear to be different to other people in a situation like that.

I refuse to answer, since “what is the first country you traveled to” is a recovery question used by at least one online service I’ve used, and I don’t want to risk letting someone else have a better chance at guessing the answer I used.

For comparison: comments about other licenses are available at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html