India is one of the last places I’d like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren’t very friendly, especially towards women.

One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It’s a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.

Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don’t really see much of either of those anymore though.

My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.

I didn’t realize he wasn’t trying to sell his game, so I guess we need a different analogy.

Ok, imagine you and your brother are making a website where friends can post about their lives and keep up with each other during and after college. You’re pretty open with your project and then one day the one weird guy in your friend group launches your project without consulting you. The project takes off and makes billions of dollars. You sue the weirdo and he gives you some money, but you’re still pissed about it. Did you get Zucked?

Ok, so imagine that you’re hungry and you come across a sandwich shop that has your favorite sandwich for $15, but the shop next door has the exact same sandwich for free. Which sandwich are you gonna eat?

No, wait, that’s not important. Most people are gonna eat the free sandwich, so even if you eat the $15 sandwich, you’re statistically irrelevant.

Yeah, maybe some people that weren’t hungry are gonna get a free sandwich, but the people who were hungry are also getting free sandwiches, which means that the guy trying to make a living selling $15 sandwiches is gonna have to close shop unless he starts lacing his sandwiches with cocaine.

Goldeneye - the squeezing scene

Anaconda - regurgitated people

Congo - when they throw his brain

Mercury Rising - “Mother, Simon is home”

Peewee Herman - Large Marge

The truly harrowing experience I had as a kid was the Alien Encounter ride at Disney Orlando. I was 8 and it was a field trip so the peer pressure was high. Nightmares for weeks after that. I still remember it breathing on me in the pitch dark.

It sounds like your situation is similar to mine. My father is a sociopathic narcissist and I didn’t realize it until I was 30 when he effectively disowned me. It hurts to be rejected by a parent to such a degree and I was pretty depressed for a while, but it helps to know that he suffers from a mental illness. Knowing this also helped me to disown him, in turn. He was always toxic and harmful and I find now that I am happier without him in my life.

I do often wonder in what ways my life may have been better had I had a supportive father, but it’s much more productive to look forward than to lament over what could have been.

I hope that you are able to move past your father’s negative influence and be better off for it. Some men are just miserable people.

Psh, goats aren’t real

I’m so sorry

Oh, man, LotR is the exception to the rule. I can definitely still enjoy a 12 hour journey to Mordor.

Mine certainly is.

If you want to compare your attention span to what it once was, try watching older media. The wife and I were watching the walking dead and I was getting bored and that’s only 10 years old. Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey without any distractions. It’s torture.

So, instead of “not collecting intelligence” it should read “unable to collect intelligence” or maybe even “collecting inconsequential intelligence”

Volvo has really improved their styling in recent years, IMHO. We bought an XC40 last year and so far we love it.

Black Licorice

My mother likes black licorice and so my sister and I grew up eating and enjoying it every Easter. Turns out most people hate the stuff.

I listened to a couple of his seminars on narcissism and thought, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about!” But the more I listened to him, especially his more recent stuff, the more I realized he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.

I guess he just had a handle on narcissism from his own personal experience as one.

I am not operating under any such premise, but I am tired of arguing. It avails us not to continue this discussion.

How many people would you estimate use the internet? I’m paying $100 per month per person on my household. If you multiply $100 per month times the number of people who use the internet, I’m sure you have enough for servers, infrastructure, programmers, and plenty left over for content creators.

Sally and I work for the same company. The company pays both of us. The customer pays the company. If the customer already pays the company, should they have to pay Sally extra for her involvement?

I’m not saying Google shouldn’t get paid. I’m saying that there are standard Internet services that are used widely enough that they could be bundled with what we already pay. We pay enough already to have those basic services included.

So we pay the ISP, the ISP pays the service provider, and the service provider pays the content creator. We pay enough to the ISPs that we shouldn’t have to pay extra for these basic services.

Oh? So my understanding of how Google profits off user data is incorrect? My belief that the ISPs are profit-driven entities is inaccurate?

If the harvest and sale of user data had been made illegal in 1993 would Google have progressed the way it did? Would they be forced to charge a fee for their email and video hosting services? Would that have incentivized them to maybe make a deal with the ISPs to be included with the monthly payments we already make?

What if local government owned and maintained all the existing internet infrastructure? Would we have been able to choose which ISP we preferred all these years rather than essentially having to pick between coax or satellite? Would ISPs then have been incentivized to pick up additional services like email, video, and image hosting in order to gain more customers?

Are we experiencing the best possible version of the internet, or could it be better?

We already pay. Every month. I pay $85/mo to access the Internet from home and an additional $90/mo to access it from my phone. Add on my streaming bills and I’m paying roughly $2400/yr already. So yeah, YouTube should be free. Gmail should be free. No ads, no privacy violations, just included in what I’m already paying.

This used to be standard back with AOL and EarthLink. Your email was just included.

Getting older means losing mobility, dexterity, and mental acuity. It’s not a question of if you will need assistance, it’s a question of when you will need it. Most retirees go on living independently for as long as possible until an event. Sometimes they set the kitchen on fire, sometimes they get in the car and get lost, and most often they fall and break a hip. Once they hit this event it changes their life dramatically.

The best case scenario is that you will have enough money to afford 24/7 care after your event. Idk what the current rates are, but 10 years ago it was $25/hr for CNAs and $50/hr for RNs. This means that the cost to have a CNA care for you around the clock was over $200,000/yr. This doesn’t include the additional costs of food, shelter, utilities, insurance. I’m sure that things haven’t gotten any cheaper.

The best case scenario is that your $1M nut grows enough to cover all your expenses before you die. Every other scenario means you will run out of money. So it’s really a question of how long you intend to live.

My scenario focuses solely on interest income for simplicity’s sake. There are other investments one can make to increase your gain, but such investments are more volatile. You could end up doing quite well and increasing your nut, or you could invest in the wrong stock and lose a large chunk of it.

I also left out other considerations for simplicity’s sake like the fact that most retirees are couples and past the age of 65 the odds that one of you will require significant medical treatment increases every year. Some elderly couples are getting divorced so as to only bankrupt one of them when this happens.

Life is messy and $1M will only work in the best case scenario. It’s just not realistic. By allowing people to think that $1M is enough, you’re actually leading them into ruin. We need to be aware that retirement is becoming a dicey proposition and we should be taking steps to ensure that the elderly will be provided for in the coming decades, especially since a large number of millennials won’t have children to make sure they are properly cared for.

Source: I worked in the elder care industry in Florida for a decade. I saw what happens when people run out of money.