The amount of money you save (and invest) isn’t accurately depicted with this though. Living expenses don’t necessarily grow with take home, if you keep lifestyle creep to a minimum.

So what this means is that if you make $100k and save $10k/year, if you start making $200k you can save the same $10k/year, plus the entire additional $100k after taxes (let’s just say that’s $50k+). So you doubled your salary but your savings went up 6x+.

Not sure why you’re saying Python forces everything to be object oriented…?

Wouldn’t 25 year olds still be in school for their doctorates though?

Yes, I think that’s the point — they skew the numbers upwards.

I particularly like the truck/engine correction.

But “included” doesn’t mean free. You still paid for it.

If you don’t want to sail the high seas, and you don’t want to pay, the library is a great, free option.

Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.

They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.

What kind of cutlery are you dropping that requires refinishing your floor?

Diesel engine, Fischer-Tropsch, Homeopathy.

Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you’re in.

Well, sorta — but it’s no effort at all because my timekeeping device (phone) does this automatically.

For me, the time of day is internalized in a way that I think is hard to switch. Same as how I was raised with imperial units — even though I prefer (and use professionally) metric, the intuition can be a little harder to get. But to each their own of course :)

I prefer the current way — I can be in another state or another country and I know that 7am is a good time for breakfast, around noon is a good time for lunch, and so forth. (If you don’t change latitude sure, just go outside to figure this out, but it’s complicated if it’s overcast, or the latitude isn’t what you’re used to, or…)

Time has a number of meanings — UTC is great for machines, local time is (IMHO) a good concept for humans.

It could grip it by the husk.

Well yes, but so is Canada, which has a higher HDI than the US.

Parent was asking why Mexico is excluded from the list while Canada is not.

By “don’t have incentive” I’m just referring to an on-paper incentive from an HDI ranking.

Canada has roughly the same HDI ranking as the US, whereas Mexico is somewhat lower. So from the “looking for a better life” perspective, Canadians don’t have an incentive to move to the US (other way around actually, from HDI).

Just a guess though.

Add to that photo editing (as much as GIMP is great…). I would guess DAW and video editing would fall under that category, too…and good luck finding many AAA open source games.

Open to discussion, but since 2008, the Democrats have won every election where the leadership didn’t “put their finger on the scale” in the primaries/picking the candidate. Obama, Obama; Clinton arguably shouldn’t have been the nominee and Sanders should have; Biden was (?) properly primaries; Harris was picked — obvious pick, but still, not primaried.

Or the other reason, that the US is too sexist to elect a woman. It’s depressing either way of course.

The Democrats, in hindsight, fucked up with the economy and/or the messaging.

Did inflation happen because of the groundwork that Trump laid down in his term (not to mention global pandemic)? Sure — but did inflation get really bad under Biden? Yes, absolutely. That doesn’t make it his fault, but it makes it a problem that the Democrats probably needed to address more aggressively, an all-out attack on rising cost of living.

At the start of the pandemic, for me to carry $100 of normal weekly groceries home from the supermarket was a real challenge, but I could do it. Now, I carry $100 no problem, with a toddler on my shoulders. The money doesn’t really matter to me, but from what I’ve been reading, it really mattered to a lot of voters. Again: I think his will be worse under Trump (if it does get better, it’ll be due to some shady tax rebates to supermarkets or big ag or something, IMHO).

So while the Dems are talking about first time home credits and whatnot, Vance is out there lying about the price of eggs — but it’s a lie that “feels” right to a lot of people, and anecdotally, has some truth to it in that inflation/cost of living increase is real. Nevermind that the R policy is…what, exactly? But they say they’ll fix it, and they point out that Dems are currently in power, and that’s enough for a lot of people.

If the minimum wage was a comfortable living wage — like it should be, in my and many other folks’ opinion — then it wouldn’t matter. One person’s excess isn’t a problem, unless it’s at the expense of someone else (which, you know, is kinda the case…).

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

Step one: join local bike coalition.

Step two: become a single-iseue voter and only vote for their endorsements.

Only half joking here.

It’s not perfect in my city, but it is getting better, which is awesome to see — in the past 7 or so years that I’ve lived here it has gotten way way better. The pandemic helped a ton (slow streets implemented in a really great way among other things).