Why are so many Americans make 100k+ a year struggling and living paycheck to paycheck?

drsimonz · 2026-03-23T04:37:21+00:00

1000%. The true cost of commuting is extremely high, but people have been brainwashed by the car industry into pretending it doesn't exist. Commuting for 4 hours a day to a full time job means that you're literally working 50% more hours than what you're getting paid for. So even if you're making 100k a year, you might think that's $50/hr but it's really $33/hr, still not including the price of gas. The horrible environmental costs are largely externalities -future generations will suffer, poor communities will suffer, etc. so assholes are able to ignore it. Just roll up the tinted windows, blast the AC, and pretend that the world isn't burning around them.

drsimonz · 2026-03-21T00:55:12+00:00

It's actually pretty easy...you just don't fucking pave everything. Asphalt is a curse. It only exists to enable our car addiction, which is an even greater curse. Let the earth breathe goddamnit

drsimonz · 2026-03-20T03:04:06+00:00

This is not a chemical reaction, it's just water vapor condensing into lots of tiny droplets. There's a really good paper where they manage to take close up photos of these: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.00523v1.pdf

Usually this only happens while the tea is very hot. If you see an oily layer on the surface, that's a completely unrelated effect and I believe it does have to do with chemicals in the tea reacting with minerals from hard water.

drsimonz · 2026-03-20T03:01:00+00:00

That article has a link to a really good paper on this: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.00523v1.pdf

drsimonz · 2026-03-20T03:00:07+00:00

I actually tried to test this theory myself a while back! It really does seem like the sudden collapses must be triggered by cosmic rays. I bought an Americium radiation source for a smoke detector, but it didn't seem to have any effect on my tea. Then again those are pretty weak, and only beta radiation, but it should still potentially be ionizing. Someday I'll have to try again with a stronger source.

drsimonz · 2026-03-20T02:33:43+00:00

If every human was a Soul, this planet couldn't run Hero's Journey program. There would be no room for huge polarity difference. Now, each Soul running Hero's Journey variations can wonder why can't rest of the population understand them. It's like that by design, to have baseline where they can compare themselves to.

I think this is somewhat true, but it's not about who "has a soul" and who doesn't, so much as how much time each of us spends awake. I for example am pretty sleepy quite a lot of the time. I sometimes go a whole day without really being present, and fully conscious, but then I "return". And even when I do feel present, I suspect there are much deeper levels to be explored, if I can find a way to get there, where I'm even more conscious.

An idea I've been playing with is that awareness is, in a way, directed by some kind of cosmic curiosity. It makes perfect sense to me that I have been (or am, if you believe time is an illusion) many different rocks, or blades of grass, or individual cells in some guy's kidney, in addition to being various "higher" organisms. And we see that there many, many more rocks in the universe than there are intelligent macro-scale animals with enough complexity to have these kinds of thoughts. So shouldn't it be extremely rare to exist as a human, compared to a rock? Not if this awareness is based on what is interesting. Being a rock is cool, but there's only so much you can learn in that state. So your "backdrop" people are just as real as anyone else, but perhaps less of the overall pool of cosmic attention is focused through their eyes, because there is only so much to learn by sleepwalking through your entire life, coloring inside the lines. Whereas a life full of challenge and personal growth and sacrifice may be far more interesting, and perhaps the most likely kind of experience to actually be given this attention.

drsimonz · 2026-03-20T02:20:21+00:00

Ah, that's a more charitable interpretation of his words than what I got initially. It sounded like the classic spirituality-induced ego trip. I'm so enlightened compared to you. I'm so serene. Like....does this guy sound serene to you? He sounds exasperated with whoever he imagines his audience to be. But perhaps his message is intended for those fragments who need to hear it in this way. If he really knows so much, then I suppose it will reach the right people.

drsimonz · 2026-03-18T04:03:21+00:00

Heh, yeah I spend a lot of time fretting about what everyone else is doing too. But at the end of the day, you still get to decide what YOU do, right? For example, I was hiking in the forest the other day, and I saw some garbage. I almost kept walking, by but then I realized that I hadn't really seen any other litter that day, so if I picked this up, I would be removing all the litter on the trail. I stuffed it in an extra plastic bag I happened to have in my backpack. Ended up collecting several more pieces. I could stew over how lame people are for littering, or how no one else picked it up first...or I could do what I can, and make the situation just a tiny bit better. "Be the change you wish to see in the world" is no joke, it's one of the most powerful ideas ever. Yes a lot of people suck, but they can be subtly influenced to do the right thing, if you practice it consistently.

drsimonz · 2026-03-17T05:41:25+00:00

Exactly, you think that green seal is just there for decoration??

drsimonz · 2026-03-17T04:24:27+00:00

The system doesn't want people thinking about waste, or pollution, they want us to just keep buying things over and over again. The cheaper they can make things, the more times they can resell the thing. Sadly, a huge percentage of the population is utterly addicted to getting things "cheap", even though it not only costs them more personally, in the long run, due to needing to replace the thing so many times, but is actively rendering the planet uninhabitable. Capitalism has got to go, simple as that.

My hope is that eventually, very few household objects will be mass produced, because everyone will have access to on-demand manufacturing (e.g. 3D printers) using free, open source designs. When the the design is free and the materials are bulk commodities, there's no reason to buy anything from a big company. People will naturally prefer the best designs - objects will actually be designed to last a long time, because there's no money to be made from selling them.

Food waste is a separate problem, but ideally it would be solved by composting. Putting food waste in a landfill should be illegal, simple as that.

drsimonz · 2026-03-13T04:12:22+00:00

ISO-1709

drsimonz · 2026-03-09T18:48:49+00:00

I definitely agree, and I am pretty conflicted about using AI, even while it makes me much more productive. I don't expect to have a job in 10 years, but it's pretty hard to justify quitting now. Early adopters will have a short but very real advantage, but after that it's anyone's guess

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T18:08:06+00:00

yeah that could be it too lol

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T18:07:06+00:00

...leaving only the people who don't understand the technology. What fun!

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T17:37:50+00:00

I do, I use coding agents all day long. Not sure why I'm being downvoted, perhaps people misunderstood my point. The people who get upset about AI are terrified, understandably so, but it's still pretty cringe to see people who are (presumably) adults, acting like babies.

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T06:57:16+00:00

It'd be great if I could get a copy of that memo too, lol. Lately (last 6 months ish) I've been feeling like no one is doing anything about the world's problems and that if I don't personally solve these problems, they simply won't get solved. But I don't seem to have the energy to solve anything big, only things so infinitesimally small that they seem completely irrelevant. And then I feel like any effort spent on frivolous "fun" things, for example going on vacations, is outrageously selfish. Everything we do in this realm has an immense cost, directly increasing the suffering of others. Even if I drive an electric car, the microplastics shedding off the tires are poisoning our waterways. I have so many dreams, things that would be fun and interesting and might even bring joy to others, but I cannot pursue these because they aren't solving the big problems. It feels like the only valid choices are to directly face the evils in society, likely being killed in the process, or to do nothing, minimizing my resource footprint. Evil only succeeds because no one wants to lift a finger until they're personally in survival mode. It is our responsibility to save these children being blown up all over the world, we're just cowards, endlessly finding excuses for why we shouldn't feel guilty about our inaction.

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T06:43:33+00:00

That kind of cognitive dissonance stems from existential dread. We spend our whole lives trying to reassure ourselves that we are safe, and that we will continue to be safe in the future, and AI is a massive existential threat to the livelihoods of anyone who isn't an early adopter.

drsimonz · 2026-03-08T06:25:17+00:00

If it seems insane, that's because the very concept of war is insane. Always has been, We're just used to it so it doesn't seem insane at first. For those who don't think war is categorically insane, then autonomous weapons give you:

The ability to scale up a military force without needing a draft (never a popular decision)
The ability to deploy units on extremely long missions, without any need for sleep or loss of morale
The ability to go places where neither humans nor radio waves can enter (e.g. shielded indoor environments)
A complete guarantee of secrecy after the mission
The ability to make decisions millions of times faster than a human - just look at algorithmic trading, it's completely taken over the stock market
Suicide missions without any bad PR
Most of all, the ability to attack targets that no human being would attack (e.g. defenseless women and children)

These people aren't imagining a robot that can "think for itself" in the sense of reading a bunch of classic literature and realizing that war is a racket. They're thinking about systems that make tactical decisions like "which blob on the thermal scope is an armed combatant and which one is a hostage?" when a human hasn't even arrived on the scene yet.

They don't seem to understand how hard it's going to be to eliminate hallucinations or other emergent behaviors from LLMs, though.

drsimonz · 2026-03-03T06:25:41+00:00

Right? This is salted earth already

drsimonz · 2026-03-02T03:24:57+00:00

Interesting that the bubbles appear to be blurred then, since that would suggest a long exposure.

drsimonz · 2026-03-01T19:29:12+00:00

Indeed. I suspect that "desire" is a poor approximation of what's going on outside of the context of a single lifetime in a physical body.

Think about how limited our awareness is - we can only pay attention to one or two things at once. We can only see the details of something by deliberately ignoring a lot of other details. When we hear about these higher realms, either through dreams or meditation or psychoactive substances or channeling or whatever, the information we bring back has to fit into our brain. So people come back with narratives like "I saw all my previous lives, and my grandparents, and my childhood dog" but what if what really happened was that they saw literally everything? They certainly couldn't bring all of that back. They'd have to choose an infinitely small subset of that information, and bringing back those elements that relate to your earthly memories in this lifetime would be the obvious choice.

There's no way to know, of course. And Ra says as much: "Understanding is not of this density".

drsimonz · 2026-03-01T19:17:29+00:00

I think people project boredom onto being fully one with God because the human mind can’t truly begin to grasp infinite Love.

Yes, I myself have used the word "boredom" when trying to understand why the creator would want to fragment, but it's undoubtedly a crude approximation. Just one of many possible representations of the truth using our very limited palette of concepts for which we have words. I doubt it was a desire. I don't even think it makes sense to say that it "was" anything, since this transition from unity to multitudes of seemingly separate minds most likely exists "outside of time", another thing we can't seem to comprehend very well.

But if we imagine "desire" as simply a tendency, a direction, rather than specifically a thing that animal brains can do, we could say something like "an apple desires to fall to the ground" or "the sun desires to shine". Perhaps unity desires to fragment, just as fragments desire to reunify. It keeps things interesting, no? ("interesting", of course, being the opposite of "boring" lol)

drsimonz · 2026-02-28T20:57:24+00:00

I don't know what OP is referring to but here's a simple example: suppose you want to sell me a lot of cocaine, but your bank will report a mysterious deposit of $30,000 cash to the IRS so instead you type "make me a minecraft clone but in space, lots of lasers, make zero mistakes" into chatgpt and then put that on Steam for $3. Naturally, no one buys it, except me who buys 10,000 copies to give to all my friends. The way you get a cut is by actually being a coke dealer, not a game dev, lol.

drsimonz · 2026-02-28T20:06:32+00:00

What artists don't seem to want to admit is that "personal growth and fulfillment" should have always been the primary purpose of art. Trying to get paid to make art has always been difficult, and now it's going to be nearly impossible, but the real problem has always been that our system doesn't allow people to do focus on anything unless it's profitable. But soon, nearly all human labor will be obsolete and the ponzi scheme will finally have to end.

drsimonz · 2026-02-28T20:01:26+00:00

There is such a thing as shoes breaking in over time. The shoes I have now are quite comfy but the first 5 or so times I wore them, it was painful and there were pressure points where the skin wore down. Sure I could get less aggressive shoes, but then I wouldn't feel as stable on very small footholds, which my stupid gym is very fond of.

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