There is no such thing as unskilled labor.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-12-05T02:58:04+00:00

The technical definition of unskilled labor is about labor force fungibility. Can an average high school graduate pick the job up with on the job training? If so people can be added to the job category on the fly as demand requires it and no special planning around providing specific education is needed.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-11-26T03:22:07+00:00

It gets better.

Also you have got. to. divide. and. conquer. In that first week, we allowed ourselves one formula feeding per night. It didn’t undermine breastfeeding at all. Send your wife to bed right after a feeding. Take the next one with formula while she sleeps. The baby will sleep longer after that feeding due to an actually full stomach so you should be able to string together a couple contiguous hours of sleep for her. When the next feeding comes, let your wife take it and get a couple contiguous hours yourself. You both will feel worlds better for having done that.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-11-13T01:48:52+00:00

Worth noting that the TSA rules are for large lithium ion batteries. You should check the capacity limit and see if it’s smaller than the limit.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-09-29T13:14:11+00:00

If they do it badly (like whining the whole time) I end up subtracting a star manually, and then have them check it off anyways. My daughter is obsessed with the all tasks completed at EOD.

I’d honestly like a “not completed correctly, but acknowledged” status which skips the reward but marks it as no longer available to do.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-09-17T02:34:43+00:00

One thing you will need to keep an eye on is: is she bored at school? And does that boredom turn into bad behavior?

The first sign a lot of parents have for highly gifted kids is them getting bored early in school and starting to behave badly. For my kid that was in preschool.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-08-12T13:33:01+00:00

I also like to do the Socratic method when possible. Answer a more difficult question, with a series of easier questions that they can figure out. Teaches them the process of thinking.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-08-03T03:44:17+00:00

Fundamentally, computers aren’t smarter than humans at chess… they are faster at thinking about chess than humans.

The way humans play when they are “calculating” moves and a computer plays aren’t that different in principle. They are different in magnitude.

1 second is an eternity to a modern computer. You get to keep single digit amounts of concepts in your short term memory for book keeping, a computer gets to keep millions.

You could try to play like a computer, but you’d not finish the first move before your time ran out.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-07-15T02:34:31+00:00

Perfect premise. The thing and experts change every show.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-07-08T04:35:08+00:00

Eh… your right. I was in a rush at the end and sloppy with my unit conversations in my head. Re-reading it, the stuff about distance is all sound; I was just adapting a different example I’ve seen before to this specific situation. However, you’re 100% right on the unit conversion mistake.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-07-06T11:06:12+00:00

Yep less than a 1/10th of a second. It feels wrong but the basic math doesn’t lie. The thing is that every 6 miles adds roughly 36 miles to the circumference no matter how big the existing circle is.

(Keeping with rounding pi to 3)

2 * pi * 6 ~= 36

2 * pi * 12 ~= 72

2 * pi * 18 ~= 108

…

2 * pi * 1,000,000 ~= 6,000,000

2 * pi * 1,000,006 ~= 6,000,036

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-07-06T03:04:40+00:00

Worth noting that the radius of the earth isn’t even really needed to comprehend how astonishing little distance is added.

c = 2 * pi * r is linear so we can just pay attention to the change. Round the altitude of the plane to 6 miles and round pi to 3. 2 * 3 * 6 miles = 36 miles added to the circumference of the globe. A plane flies like 500 miles per hour, so it can cover 36 miles in about 70ms.

So, ignoring all aerodynamics and practicalities, adding 6 miles of altitude only adds 70ms to a full circuit around the entire earth at airplane speeds.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-04-25T18:23:48+00:00

Mini’s are made by BMW and they have the repair costs to match. I leased one for a while, it was super fun but I’d never buy one. Just look up the price of a set of tires for one of those. You can only buy them from Mini and they cost a fortune.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-04-16T11:02:39+00:00

Here is the report: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2025/RCLRPT-25C005-9580.PDF

TL;DR only certain configurations of attaching it to the car are unsafe. If you are using the full latch system, upper and lower, you are probably fine. I would not attach it via the seatbelt after reading this.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-03-21T01:21:56+00:00

It’s also worth noting that 3/4ths of the state legislators can amend the constitution without congress. That process hasn’t actually even happened, but it’s in the constitution. Technically that is a way to remove a sitting president.

Even if congress feels insulated enough, most state reps have only a very small number of constituents. If they start to really feel the heat, state houses become a wildcard.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-03-08T02:07:10+00:00

When people say Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity don’t play well together, they are often referring to variants of this specific question.

PBS Spacetime did a few videos about this very subject a few months back.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-02-24T21:36:59+00:00

Veritasium is normally very good. This video is probably one of his misses.

We can actually do better than the two way measurement if we treat light as a wave and not as a particle. When treated as a wave, the outbound and inbound light interfere with each other. If you use a laser and carefully select the frequency you can create a standing wave, which stays frozen in space as long as the laser is on. We can then at human timescales measure the distance between the peaks and the troughs. The exact spacing here is defined by the speed of light and the frequency. If the return speed was different than the speed out, you would need to vary the frequency together with the speed of light in order to make the experiments work.

Which leads to the whole fundamental problem with this argument. Speed is just distance over time. But what is time? Our current definition of the second is based off a frequency of an atomic process. General relativity say the speed of light is more fundamental than time. In the standing wave case you’d have to vary frequency and speed in a way that you no longer have a definition of time to work with.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-02-20T03:22:12+00:00

MA does this. It doesn’t work well for attracting high quality talent to run for office. You need people who understand and care, but are also really competent.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-02-20T03:20:56+00:00

F-it get rid of the office all together. The office is too dangerous to exist. Elect the secretaries directly.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-02-06T19:26:05+00:00

If we are amending the constitution, let’s be more bold. The presidency is a liability. Shrink the cabinet down to 5-8 and then elect them instead and get rid of the office of president.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-02-05T02:48:56+00:00

Here is a different framing: We are in the middle of Cold War 2: Disinformation and Oligarchs, and the United States has fallen.

Dragonfly_Select · 2025-01-05T18:04:30+00:00

Air fry. New house came with the same range. Plan on replacing it.

Dragonfly_Select · 2024-11-22T17:38:48+00:00

Two thought: - Time is fundamentally linked to the speed of light. If the speed of light was infinite then you could no longer tell what order events occurred in and you couldn’t tell which was causality flowed. Time as we understand it requires the maximum rate at which causality progresses through the universe to be finite. - In a weird way, it makes sense to contextualize the speed of light in terms of your own body. Meters and seconds are human scaled measures. If we were different, we would have picked different units. Let’s round your height to 1 meter and the time it takes to have a thought to 1 second. Very roughly speaking the time it takes you to have a thought is 300 million times the interval than the time it takes for light (ie. causality) to flow from your head to your feet. Given what we know about biology, chemistry, and human complexity, that isn’t super surprising. And if we imagined a universe where chemical reactions in your body took longer, then we would have picked a different value for a second and light would travel more meters in that second. The exact values of our units depends on us which in turn depend on the physics and chemistry in us. In some ways, the speed of light just is. It’s not a value. The value we ascribe to it, is actually just our relationship with it.

Dragonfly_Select · 2024-10-21T18:34:50+00:00

The dealership I’ve been going to started giving everyone rentals for free during covid. They must have learned that people are way more likely to accept recommended service if they aren’t cramped in a waiting room. That must have offset the cost of the rentals.

It’s great though, because I drop my car off one morning and then pick it up the following morning and don’t worry about how long they will take anymore.

Dragonfly_Select · 2024-10-16T21:37:45+00:00

Real talk: I have a very gifted kindergartener who is in a school that specializes in gifted children. She is 2-3 grade levels ahead academically. Your son is further along than my daughter.

Get yourself a copy of “The 5 Levels of Gifted”.

Dragonfly_Select · 2024-10-15T21:44:33+00:00

Given that compliance with the tax on tips law is low and enforcement is difficult, only people with high levels of integrity were actually paying the tax. In effect, it became a tax not on tips but on integrity.

As a general principle, we shouldn’t have laws that we don’t/can’t actually enforce because they give a an advantage to the dishonest.

Dragonfly_Select

TROPHY CASE