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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • Healthcare costs grow rapidly as you age, and have been outpacing inflation in the US. If your remaining money is only keeping up with inflation over time, you are very likely to fall behind later in life, when job opportunities are more scarce, and less lucrative.

    If you can make changes to live more frugally now, and work a year or two more while your money is growing in the background, you will be much better off long term.

    I have numerous family members that have lived a long time, and eventually faced severe health issues, so I expect that in my future. I will work until my retirement savings are more than I need for my current lifestyle, and then cut back on certain things to do my best to prepare for that eventuality.











  • You do not need to objectively benefit from a positive outcome in order to enjoy it. My local sports team wins at least once per blue moon, and I feel good despite neither profiting from, nor contributing to their successes.

    I can understand if it doesn’t do it for you, but I’ve found a great deal of joy in things that do not materially benefit me. I like it better that way.




  • 1970 was during the cultural revolution. In that year, the world population was 3.68 billion, and the population if China was just shy of 830 million - China had 22% of the world’s population, so if they held (only) 20% of the world’s prisoners, they’d have a lower than average incarceration rate.

    The same is not true for the US today, we have less than 5% of the world’s population today.






  • We used to have good, strong open source tools made out of C (which is a lot like steel - it can only be worked by blue collar computer nerds with muscly brains). Now that steel core is corroding because of the influence of hackers and other white collar computer sorts with their creative problem solving, and unintended uses of memory.

    That new corrosion is called rust, and it eventually appears on every C project that’s left outside, unless someone comes along to brush it off occasionally.