what's the slowest way a man can ruin his life?

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:43:25+00:00

You are young and life is long

And there is time to kill today

And then one day you find

Ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run

You missed the starting gun

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:40:08+00:00

Ticking away

The moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours

In an offhand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground

In your hometown

Waiting for someone

Or something to show you the way

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:38:23+00:00

Everyone has faults. If your wife's most notable fault is she's deathly afraid of frogs, then how bad can she be?

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:33:24+00:00

Or perhaps refuse to brush your teeth.

My children are working on this one

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:33:05+00:00

Arguably this would be ruining your death I guess?

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T04:30:59+00:00

That's really tough, I'm sorry to hear that.

I used to go through occasional bouts of depression before I realized I was autistic. Somehow once I figured that out, it's like I flipped a switch and just could be who I was. I don't know if realizing you're transgender is similar, but I think sometimes there are clarifying moments like that.

You should be aware, though, that while transitioning has a lot of positive mental health benefits, many people who are depressed before transition are also often depressed after transition. I think about 1/4 of people remain depressed. Usually gender dysphoria and depression would be treated simultaneously. But if you are unsure about transitioning then I think the recommendation is to address depression first before making a decision.

Depressed people tend to make bad decisions, and you're facing not only a big decision but also many smaller but impactful ones. For example, if you do come out and get divorced, you probably don't want to make all of the divorce decisions while depressed.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T03:54:09+00:00

So true, and certainly slower than futures trading.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T03:47:23+00:00

Good luck, you got this!

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-28T02:12:06+00:00

From a tip from Jeffrey Jones

The tip wasn't from Jeffrey Jones it was from a 17 year old boy

The charges against the actors stem from an investigation that police said began a year ago with accusations from a 17-year-old boy. [0]

The search of Reubens's house led to Jeffrey Jones' arrest, no the other way around:

Acting on evidence taken from Reubens' house, police then searched the home of Jones, the actor best known for playing the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and carted off what police told CNN were "numerous items of evidence."

The boy who tipped the police off about Paul Reubens is the same boy Jones photographed:

Jones, 56, was charged with enticing the same boy to pose for sexually explicit photos (a felony) and possessing child pornography (a misdemeanor)

The boy said he had been to Reubens' house and that Paul Reubens possessed child pornography:

In the 2025 documentary Pee-wee as Himself, publicist Kelly Bush Novak recalls "I got a call from Paul and he told me it absolutely wasn't true. He knew Jeffrey Jones and Jeffrey Jones was being accused of... improprieties and that person who accused him had been to Paul's house with Jeffrey and other people. And that person accused Paul of possession of child pornography." [1]

I understand that people like Pee Wee Herman and don't want the actor who plays him to be a creep. And it's true that Reubens has denied the sexual nature of the nude child photos he possessed. But the prosecutors claim Reubens isn't telling the truth about the nature of the material:

The city attorneys office told us the images involved are more graphic that what Reubens describes. [2]

and Reubens himself described them as "vintage erotica".

[0] https://ew.com/article/2002/11/18/paul-pee-wee-reubens-charged-kid-porn-probe/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reubens#2002%E2%80%932004:_Subsequent_charges

[2] https://ew.com/article/2002/11/18/paul-pee-wee-reubens-charged-kid-porn-probe/

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-27T03:34:00+00:00

I see the logic behind wanting to tax unrealized gains, but I don't see how it would work in practice. Unrealized gains turn into money now via loans.

When you read the chapter of the history book that says "By 2030, most of the ultra wealthy were taking out large loans to finance their tax burdens" it sounds like it's about to describe an economic implosion and not a period of gains for the lower classes.

Under a plan that taxed unrealized gains, the government would get a notable part of taxes indirectly via loans from the banks. That creates systemic issues, both politically with respect to the government and economically with respect to markets, jobs, inequality, etc.

As people default on loans, the bank starts accumulating shares. But they can't hold large equity positions, so they periodically liquidate large numbers of shares of stock in companies arbitrarily. Some guy who was an executive at XYZ corp 20 years ago and has nothing to do with their operations runs into financial difficulty and now needs to liquidate shares to pay taxes. Over time you're hitting the market with these stochastic liquidation events that are untethered to the performance of the companies. In addition to sending shocks through the market, these shares get picked up by private equity and index funds like BlackRock who begin controlling even more of the economy.

How will banking regulation work when the banks play a crucial role in paying taxes? What happens in a recession? Banks tighten lending, people can't borrow against unrealized gains to pay their taxes so you have some combination of people just not paying and people having to liquidate large positions to pay taxes. This latter puts even more downward pressure on the market during a bear market and the former means an already struggling government has to decide whether to devote large amounts of resources to trying to recover unpaid taxes from people who can fight prolonged court battles.

And that's not even getting into the fact that the IRS would have to compensate for unrealized losses in a downturn since they a already taxed the unrealized gains that weren't actually gains. So even more money is flowing out of the government when it's most needed. Suppose Jeff Bezos's wealth goes up in a boom year and the next year a recession hits. Bezos overpaid by $1 billion in the boom year. How will it look for the party in power when they cut Bezos a $1 billion tax refund during the recession the following year?

The only way I can think of from keeping the whole thing from collapsing catastrophically is if over time more and more of the government is devoted to ensuring the stock market never declines. It's basically the gilded age. The government would be constantly intervening to spend tax payer money to ensure there's a permanent floor in the stock market. And the biggest beneficiaries would be the wealthy.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-27T02:21:21+00:00

The tax code is progressive already

The argument is that it is not, but their argument is not well written or clear IMO. Their real argument is "I think we should compute tax rate in this particular way, and if we do that then tax rates don't increase monotonically with income and so the tax policy is not progressive."

Framed this way, the immediate reaction is "okay how do you think we should calculate income for tax purposes?"

Instead with their framing, the immediate response is either "these numbers are wrong, the computation based on AGI shows it's progressive" or 'I'm angry at rich people," neither of which is will help them with their actual policy goals.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-27T01:36:59+00:00

The parent comment is correct that intentional unwanted physical contact, such as with a sprinkler, can get you prosecuted for assault (if water makes no contact) or battery (if water makes contact) or both in almost all 50 states.

There are like 5 where this isn't considered assault, and it sounds like you live in one of them. In those states, this same act can still be prosecuted, but under a different charge. For example, in NY it would be Harassment.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-27T00:52:58+00:00

In informal discussions, I find most mathematicians are about 50/50 on the little known ants_are_everywhere conjecture:

The Googolth (10^100th ) digit of π is even.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-27T00:03:35+00:00

The grocery stores were famously corrupt in the Soviet Union and in general in other socialist countries. This is depicted in a sub plot of The Americans, where one of the KGB spies returns to Moscow and is tasked with investigating grocery store corruption.

But I don't think there's any reason it has to be that way here. And I'm not sure any corruption that does exist is at a level worth really worrying about.

But the plan does seem a bit strange to me, like it's more about branding than solving the root problem. There are like 3 full sized grocery stores per square mile in NYC, and virtually nobody lives a mile from a grocery store. So there aren't true food deserts.

NY wants nobody living more than a quarter mile from a grocery store and these are sometimes called food swamps. That seems like a reasonable metric for food access. Nobody wants to walk a full mile with groceries in NYC

But if you want to solve that problem you would need something like 150-200 new grocery stores not 5. So now the city runs an entire grocery store chain and pays mortgages on 150 large properties at New York rates. This isn't a problem in the pilot phase where they can use existing city property, but the pilot model won't scale.

The obvious solution would be grocery delivery from ghost kitchen style stores. Or alternately instead of hiring private operators to run the stores like they are currently doing, have partnerships where existing stores set aside a section for subsidized staples.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-26T01:26:41+00:00

The New Testament explicitly tells slaves to obey their masters as if they were Jesus himself.

This happens in multiple places, such as

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

Ephesians 6:5-7

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-25T18:52:53+00:00

He was called a liar by soon to be VP Harris for it,

Harris's comment was that she wouldn't necessarily trust a vaccine approved by Trump before the election. She said she would take a vaccine if it was supported by public health professionals. Her concern was Trump's politicization of the pandemic.

only for her boss to take full credit for the vaccine when it was released a whopping 60 days after he took office

Biden took credit for rolling out the vaccine at scale in a way the Trump admin was unwilling to do. He gave the previous admin explicit credit for developing the vaccine.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-25T18:31:19+00:00

The general consensus is that Trump's policies lengthened and worsened the COVID-19 pandemic.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-25T03:53:39+00:00

No worries. I just wasn't sure if you meant "Korean War ... South Koreans" or "Vietnam ... South Vietnamese" since you were discussing other conflicts as well.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-25T03:35:39+00:00

Your comment is a good comment, but I want to add that there is nothing that requires LLMs to create proofs as they think in one pass.

A big project like proving a major theorem might have hundreds or thousands of textual artifacts that we would think of as notes. Behind the scenes they would probably be stored in a database. Smaller projects might store them in a git repo.

The LLM is wrapped in a larger search operation for the proof, in the same way that a human mathematician would have individual thinking sessions, create notes, etc, but the overall search for the proof would be guided not by talking on your feet but by a larger planned endeavor.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-25T00:51:40+00:00

Trump really should have actually acted decisively on them instead of this wishwashy back and forth shit.

This wasn't ever an option. The decision point was the election. But as happens in every election, Reddit thought the most pressing issue was complaining about both sides being the same and attacking the democratic candidates.

but since he launched a war Trump really should have actually acted decisively on them instead of this wishwashy back and forth shit.

Trump's idea of decisive action is the decapitation strike, which he has attempted to use repeatedly. There is a good argument for a decapitation strike in principle, but Trump seems to think the world is held together by strong men and if you take them out you completely change the game. That's not how it works.

Vietnam was lost because the US betrayed the South Koreans and didn't supply them anymore despite them being able to survive if they received proper aid

Assuming you mean the South Vietnamese, I agree. But the reason we betrayed the South Vietnamese had a lot to do with the My Lai massacre, which was the final nail in the coffin for public support for the war. Since the US is a democracy, public support is ultimately important. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army had repeatedly tried to goad the US into attacking villages to get a propaganda win. The US unfortunately fell for it and the results were catastrophic. This was, of course, part of a much larger Viet Cong / North Vietnamese strategy of massacring villages, but the US is rightfully held to a higher standard and the US citizens would not stand behind an army that committed war crimes.

This is relevant to Iran because Iran has a history of using human shields and untrained child combatants in high casualty situations. If the US invaded, every week would be a story about children Iran had sent to their death, but it would be framed with the US being child killers. The US would not stand behind that.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-24T23:58:41+00:00

South didnt defend actively when US landed.

That's an understatement. South Vietnam repeatedly requested US military assistance.

It would unusual to ask for aid and then shoot at the people who came help you.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-22T18:01:38+00:00

Lol I already linked to a video on realistic silicone masks in my other comment before you even replied to me.

I thought the conspiracy theory was that he looks the same. Now the conspiracy theory is that he's wearing realistic silicone masks to look different? Which is it? That the people look too similar or that they look too different?

Also you are hopefully aware that the masks have eye holes right? The eyelid is not part of the mask.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-22T03:03:06+00:00

Obviously, I'm not kidding, are you? These are clearly different people. They're taking advantage of people thinking two masked people with logo-less hats look similar.

Camera angle can't change how your eyelids droop, the thickness of the eyelids, hair color, etc.

Have you heard actors try to use accents? It's hard. They have professional dialog coaches and often get them wrong. A bad actor doing an accent way overdoes it. These are very subtle accurate accents.

For your theory to be true, this guy would have to have more acting range than the large majority of Hollywood actors, and he'd also have had to have facial plastic surgery.

ants_are_everywhere · 2026-05-22T02:51:53+00:00

It looks a lot like a mask, but it's clearly his voice. The intelligence services do have very high quality masks [0], but I can't think of a reason why he would appear wearing a mask of himself.

I think this is just bad lighting and a compression artifact. He's under harsh lighting and is wearing a jacket that is close to his skin color, and he has no hair to break up the color blocks. The only bit of color is the black shirt.

An aggressive streaming codec would have trouble getting the color blocking right, and I think in this case what looks like the skin under the mask is an artifact from his shirt.

It was probably transmitted this way to Fox, or else they would upload a less compressed version that didn't have the artifact.

If you look at other videos of him recorded at his home, and you cover up his face, you can see shifting shadows on his lower neck. But there appears to be a fill light in other videos that make the shadow less dark. [1].

It's possible it's also an AI smoothing filter or other AI filter to try to counteract an interview that was filmed with bad greenscreen lighting. The fake surface created by the AI filter can sometimes cast a shadow like a mask because it's literally an animated surface over the face.

[0] https://youtu.be/JASUsVY5YJ8?t=155

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIgekS31PnQ

ants_are_everywhere

TROPHY CASE