I also want to add something. The new pressure cookers, stovetop or electric, are much less risky than the old school version with the rocker switch. Those could get clogged with food and they had no backup relief mechanism, as far as I know, anyway.
The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.
I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.
I have both a stovetop cooker (Zwilling) and an electric (Instant Pot). The stovetop gets hotter faster, so it cooks a lot faster too. The trade off is I can't leave home while it's cooking.
The electric lets me set and forget and come back to a hot meal hours later.
I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
People who don't take $1M net worth and use it to secure their simple needs somewhere that they can live cheaply (providing attention rather than financial capital to their dependents) are ironically the reason why $1M net worth isn't anywhere near financial independence. Such people provide an outsize contribution to the bidding-up of costs, because instead of thinking, "This is probably it, I better be careful," they're pushing for the next rung on the ladder and willing to "invest" at high prices, with the expectation of a return.
> Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply.
All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy.
[1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
If you have dependents that are children, I feel there is a moral consideration. If you have earned $1M and then take the family to live who-knows-where slowly drawing on that $1M.. will your children be able to replicate your success? Will they be able to earn their own $1M? Or will leading this new life significantly impair their prospects?
To me this is the most critical problem with the "move somewhere crazy cheap" plan. I feel a parent owes their children at least somewhat similar opportunities as they themselves had. If you got to work as "high flying white collar tech worker", but the only option your children have is "subsistence fisherman", you have wronged them.
I think there is room for arguing children raised in the high flying city have been robbed of something as well. Can’t have it all and one is not objectively better than the other if you look at the full picture.
Certainly room for such discussion. However if the parent waits to first save a large sum before moving there (instead of moving there straight out of high school), their revealed preferences suggest even they do not feel the tiny village is great for young people.
I think there's a large middle ground between relocating somewhere undesirable (or to a developing country) just to stretch your money as far possible vs "keeping up with the Joneses".
Even if your goal is financial independence, it's reasonable to not drastically decrease your existing standard of living just so you can retire _now_.
I meant basic financial independence. It gives you the option to live like someone who has the median wage forever, but without having to work. If you work, it's a bonus on top of the $40k you receive annually.
Whatever happens, perhaps AI replacing all cognitive work, you know you'll be fine. Maybe not able to live lavishly, but much better than needing to have a job you hate in order to survive.
You've hit the escape velocity. Worst case scenario (I'm simplifying) is that your NW stagnates, best case scenario is that your NW will continue to grow quickly. That's much better than the worst case scenario being that your unemployed with a zero NW.
I'm a little skeptical that any actual wiring from this project is still in use to this day. Conditions are hard on this kind of infrastructure. Alaska has been pushing to modernize telecom infrastructure heavily for the last two decades, and now LEO, GEO, microwave, and fiber are delivering services to pretty much everywhere. On the other hand, I've seen a free public telephone in the middle of a village that has dial-tone, presumably even in the middle of winter at temperatures past -40. I can absolutely believe that if there is a pair of wires that get the job done, they could still be in use for something like that.
20 years ago I stumbled across an abandoned telegraph line that was used to connect Seward to Anchorage. There were poles with intact glass insulators in some places. It wasn't far off the highway, and I encountered someone else at the time who told me it was an unofficial trail used by locals. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone took the insulators for whatever reason in the meantime.
The section I originally posted photos of is indeed in disrepair, but I came across a different section right at the northern end of the Tok Cutoff that is pristine: https://ibb.co/album/Z20r3Z (mile marker in photo)
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
Beautiful quote I strongly relate to. When I was 16, I had a sudden realisation one day that no one knows what anything of this actually is. That was a profoundly defining moment of who I am and the deepest and most beautiful thought my limited mind managed to grasp. It made me become in awe of the universe, inspired me to learn and has been a pillar I could lean on during difficult times. I cherish that thought every day.
Wanna say that this is a much better argument for learning than productivity or "becoming a more interesting person". Sometimes it is simply a way to keep the mind pointed outward
If you think of the world as the activity of people and nations, I can understand that reaction.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
that is beautiful, its something i believe as well but never seen it written so eloquenty. when everythings gone to hell and your backed into a corner, learning something interesting is always there for you.
“The Once and Future King” is an odd book. I read it recently - as an adult - and I’m not sure I ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It has a lot of ‘childishness’, especially in the first 2/3, of a kind I’ve never really liked in it. Perhaps the kind _adults_ think kids enjoy. But it’s also full of stuff like this at unexpected moments. Wonder at the world; consideration of others; the burden of leadership.
I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
There's a good article on White and the book in the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy". It made me appreciate that this set of stories is more than just a book for children. I haven't actually read it but the entry for "White, T H" made me bump it up the list of books in my queue.
Some of my favorite books are ones I didn't really "like", but which influenced me deeply. The ones that go at the very top of the list are those that achieve both things. But that's very rare.
Knowing a lot used to be attractive too, before the septic cavalcade of reddit reduced us to wordcels and the 'actually' meme. The continued pursuit of knowledge for me has been a much more private matter in this last decade of the unravelling academic institutions I once called home.
It's all about context. Everybody likes someone who has well informed answers to questions they ask. Nobody likes someone who frequently injects answers to questions nobody asked. Knowing a lot is attractive, but being a know-it-all is unattractive. The wisdom to know the difference between the two is a different kind of skill than knowing a lot of things.
I worked for a small, local ISP in the mid 2000s. I don't think I made any stupid mistakes on my part, but I had plenty of coworkers who did. To be fair, people were often actively hostile to security concerns back then. It's not much better now, but at least not everything gets a public IP by default.
It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.
My concern is that even if it would temporarily alleviate the local drought conditions for some areas, it wouldn't reverse the long term trends towards hotter, drier conditions.
I have a family member that works in the field, and it's pretty crazy how little attention we pay to weather extremes. Not only do we not plan on dry years, we also don't plant on wet years.
We tend to make very optimistic views of weather cycles, then plan for best. Where he works in California, a large portion of the total rainfall occurs during El Niño cycles, which means once a decade or so, they'll get a year or two with several times the rainfall of the other years in the rest of decade. They take the average of the whole decade, and plan that as the baseline. This means that under normal weather cycles, they expect most years to be far wetter than data shows they will be, and the remaining years are treated as extreme rainfall, despite it being regular and predictable.
On top of that, they only have ~200 years of data, but most of the data points only cover half that time. They use the newer data to create their models, because it has more data points, despite knowing the whether was much worse in some of the earlier data, with extremes like a hurricane that hit San Diego in 1858 and the worst-ever-recorded flood in 1862.
The only way to handle weather extremes is to design around future expected variations when building infrastructure. Whether we tried to use all of humanities resources to change course, or there were no anthropogenic effects at all on the climate, the glaciers would be melting and lakes would be drying up. There's nothing we can do to control these weather extremes in any meaningful way, but we are pretty good at figuring out what extremes to expect.
To put in in perspective, in the Late Pleistocene era, glaciers covered almost the entire US/Canada boarder and all of the great lakes, but California, Nevada, and Utah had their own great lakes. At the other extreme, before that ice age started, there was liquid ocean at the North Pole. This cycle occurs over hundreds of thousands of years, so infrastructure for any given lifetime needn't be planned around it. At the other end, we also have weather cycles that occur multiple times within the design life of any given piece of infrastructure, and we should design for those.
I wonder about failure modes and fault identification. I've heard stories of things like screws or brackets wearing through the insulation and causing an intermittent fault that defies diagnosis. One of those things I think about when I am procrastinating.
The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.
I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.
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