Followupquestion

I’d say GOAT should be a Council of greats, like the Jedi Council but without the religious extremism and child soldiers. I’d like to nominate a couple for this council:

Wilt Chamberlain- go look up his records

Andre the Giant - his drinking records alone should put him on the Council, but reportedly he was a very nice person as well

Dolph Lundgren - he plays a meathead in Expendables movies, but he’s a legit genius, as well as a literally massive human

Steve Wozniak - he managed to build the PC despite Steve Jobs being a colossal dick

Saint Olga - she took vengeance and raised it to an art form

Yes and no. Basically collapse scenarios fall into buckets. One bucket has all the scenarios with rapid collapse, e.g. nuclear war. The other is slow Collapse, e.g. climate change. The preparation for every scenario relies on broad self-sufficiency, but if you’re looking at climate change, your personal farm might need more water and a way to control soil temperatures. For nuclear war, your whole enterprise needs to be in a bunker away from major targets. Since the exact collapse scenario is unknown so far, the move if you can afford it is a hybrid approach and do both. Excess food is never a bad thing; indeed you can attract workers with a promise of wages and free food to work the farm on the surface while maintaining your non-perishable stockpile and food production in a massive bunker that you only let family members into.

Ultimately, though, you’re still fighting the problem of inevitability. Even if you and your family somehow escape dying from nuclear war, what will your kids do? There will be no doctors, no water sanitation engineers, nobody to rebuild what was. In essence, a billionaire and family might outlive the collapse, but they’ll be either stuck in their Vault or they’ll inherit an uninhabitable planet.

I’ll outright say it. Other than The Prestige and the later Batman movies, Nolan movies have been very disappointing to me. They’re not clever, they’re pretentious. If you ever saw that Netflix movie where the woman dated Keanu Reaves, the part where Keanu asks the chef for a meal the plays with the concept of time is every Christopher Nolan movie in a nutshell. Also, the action sequences in Batman Begins were unnecessarily choppy, and the idea that it was somehow how a bat would see them is just silly.

You know how you know when Newsom’s lying? His lips are moving. He knows Climate Change is an existential threat, but also that he’s rich, so his family won’t face the effects the way the 99% will. The closest he’ll get is his vineyard will use more water, but don’t worry, I’m sure there’s some PUC decision that will keep his water rates artificially low.

California’s current leadership doesn’t really care about climate change, because if they did, the PUC wouldn’t disincentivize rooftop solar through NEM 3.0 and would instead offer tax credits. It’s too bad the common citizens of this state aren’t valued like the profits of Newsom’s friends at PG&E.

Heck, if they really cared, electric vehicles would be progressively subsidized so more working class people could afford them. Instead, workers keep older ICE vehicles longer because they’re paid off (hopefully) and replacements are financially out of reach, even if they’re much cheaper to operate. It’s like housing. A reasonable mortgage payment is much cheaper than rent, but if you are paying rent, you likely don’t have the down payment to get an affordable monthly payment. A house down the street went into escrow the day after listing at $1.7 MM. The nearly identical house next door to them gets $4-5k a month in rent. How is anybody going to have enough money saved up to get their mortgage into a reasonable range, setting aside the $1500 a month for property taxes? The family living next door would need a down payment over $1MM to get even close to their current rent, which is already $50-60k a year! Just their rent is more than the median income for one person, so they likely wouldn’t qualify for a loan that’s exactly the same amount as their current rent even with that staggering down payment.

Four monitors plus the laptop screen. It’s…a lot visually, but my productivity is significantly higher than when I only had two and the laptop screen.

They’re arranged in a square so clockwise from top right:

1. Work entry screen - this is where I’m typing a lot

2. Reading screen - this is the general source of what I’m working on

3. Outlook - I’m fully remote, Outlook is life

4. File folders - I work mainly with two or three folders all day so it just makes sense to have them uncovered

Laptop - Teams!

Of note, I use a ton of keyboard shortcuts and have generally optimized my workflow so I’m not hitting the mouse nearly as often as my coworkers. Having Outlook and Teams each have their own screen means I can keep them open and see what’s coming in while still working on my stuff on other screens. Final thing I’ll say about the arrangement, because you’re probably visualizing this making for a good gaming setup, no it wouldn’t because of how the screens are placed.

No matter what, get yourself a mirror. I don’t like people suddenly appearing by me, and since I’m using noise-cancelling headphones with music/podcasts 40+ hours a week, this keeps me from jumping out of my skin.

The best part is by publishing this far and wide, anybody pushing for “careful consideration” and actual reasoned planning is immediately suspect, which leads to less reasoned decisions, which usually means more mistakes. If a victory is somehow won through violence of action and not careful planning, the support structure isn’t there to maintain the victory, nor are the people who win that victory well-suited to careful planning before the next engagement. The boring stuff is often what wins wars, simple things like plenty of fuel, adequate hygiene facilities, and dry socks can literally mean the difference between a division surrendering or winning a battle.

Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.

I’d love to hear more about the frequency hopping thing. What devices would I need, and how difficult is it to program?

Many jobs in Finance (Accounting Finance, not customer facing like banking) are remote at this point because they’re all done via email, spreadsheets, PDFs and corporate systems, none of which require a physical presence in an office building.

It’s a fantastic podcast and I point people to the one on the V-22 Osprey frequently just because we live near an airport and Ospreys practice touch and gos before getting lunch nearby.

It’s the UK. They long ago traded freedom for the illusion of security and don’t have the ability to forcefully remind the owning class of anything beyond their ability to ignore such inconveniences.

The Battle of Athens is one such occasion. The outcome can’t be considered 100% positive, but what future ever is? I should mention that the Second Amendment exists as the last resort, a sort of “break glass in case of emergency”. That those weapons are also useful in everyday life in a dangerous world is a side effect, but in the end, civilian weapons exist in case a despot/party gains enough power and starts to wield it against the citizenry, as at least one presidential candidate has promised to do if re-elected. It’s incumbent on all of us to vote our conscience, but also to be ready to respond effectively in case voting doesn’t do enough.