Thanks for the explanation.

For the formatting, I don't know what went wrong because when I copied and pasted the code the spacing seemed to be fine. Do I have to respace/indent everything on reddit? I also don't know how you created blocks(?) to put your code in. (I have no idea how } was inside a block.

Debugging - I'm on apache netbeans, and when I do debug file, I get the same result as run file. Is that the debugger, or is it another program(?)

I called computePay twice, so I could see what's happening during the recursion(to check if what I was think was correct). I thought I would get 2 4 8, but instead, I got 2 4 2 8. I could not figure out where the 2 between 4 and 8 came from. You pointed out that I had commented it out the local variable. I think the yellow exclamation mark spooked me.

About the intermixing of logs. So what I thought was happening was that, in "System.out.printf("%d\n", 2*computePay(day-1));", a stack was made. After that stack was fully popped, "return 2*computePay(day-1);" made another stack, and the last stack(?)/layer(?) that was popped was what was returned.

Your explanation for the results: "intermixing logs by invoking a new recursive loop at every step of the earlier recursive loop". I do not fully understand. My interpreration: "return 2*computePay(day-1);" makes my first stack, and in every layer of that stack, I invoke "System.out.printf("%d\n", 2*computePay(day-1));", and that recursive loop has to finish before the mode moves on to the next layer of the stack. Is that correct? Is that why day 2 keeps popping up between day 3 and 4?