Sounds painful with a high possibility of breaking bones then drowning while conscious. I’d recommend an inert gas that’s not CO2 and readily available, like nitrogen or something (CO2 buildup in the blood is what gives the sensation of suffocation). If you’re worried about people finding you and a mess, get an enema and stay a bit dehydrated first, and also ensure your body’s found within the first 2-3 days if possible (the first thing your corpse does is shit itself, and rot sets in pretty quickly).

This of course presumes you’re making the decision to end yourself while of sound mind, not in some panic, feeling trapped or completely hopeless. There’s usually a way out that’s not as permanent and can lead to future positive interactions that make continued living worth the pain. That said, I’ll never judge someone whose pain outweighs their will to live.

37 is my favorite, because 3x7x37=777 (three sevens), and I think that’s neat.

They all have that same weird mouthfeel after you’re done where you swear part of it is still on the roof of your mouth or between your teeth but you can’t seem to reach it or get rid of it, feels pretty gross.

If everything but your pupils were invisible, and your pupils were 90% invisible, it’d probably be fine. Most humans can comfortably see with 10% of the light.

Windows 10 has had that for a few years now too, it was just less visible and a little clunkier.

I’ve always preferred IBM’s Plex Mono, specifically the Nerd Fonts version.

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

I think a high score might mean fibrillation depending on the runner, so please be choosy with your scare victim.

Yep, that’s emergence, where the models of simple systems, interacting en masse, generate complexity/‘chaos’ more easily predicted by different models within that set of parameters/scale. Basically, it’s like modeling the behavior of fractals from their appearance instead of the underlying ruleset, because what the rules generate is unexpected to our human brains, so we need to make new rules that allow us to more easily predict things, even if those rules aren’t as perfect as the ruleset itself.

I hope we get there soon with RISC-V.

I prefer defying whatever gods exist by living in darkness and cold. Sunlight causes skin damage, I’d prefer getting by with vitamin D supplements.

My wife is my ex-girlfriend, but we’re still dating. She gets mildly amused when I point this out, but she might just be humoring me.

As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:

I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.

The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that’s true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world’s gold reserves (today it’s a little over 25%).

The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries’). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn’t sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.

This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping “New Economic Policy” on August 15, 1971, stating:

““We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.””

To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.

So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US “temporarily” suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn’t mean: it wasn’t the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn’t really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn’t the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.

It also really doesn’t have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn’t really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.

Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).

" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"

I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists’ opinions on intelligent design.

It’s not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of “dark triad” traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That’s a hard problem to solve.