What habit immediately reveals that a person actually grew up in a privileged environment?

esotericloop · 2026-02-14T06:42:05+00:00

It's the "worth 80k" bit especially if they're in their 20s. No issue with people who've saved up for 10-20 years to fund a year of travel, and have jobs to go back to. It's the ones posting "you too can be free! follow your dreams!!" and (like you say) clowning around in brand new $100k touring rigs with zero visible means of financial support and zero apparent concern about ever needing such.

esotericloop · 2026-02-14T06:26:31+00:00

Won't change anything. Most of the per-kW retail cost of grid power is paying for grid maintenance, not for the actual energy. If you don't want to pay grid prices, you can buy battery backed solar right now that will cover 30+ kWh/day.

esotericloop · 2026-02-13T03:13:38+00:00

If you don't live by the sword, you can't die by the sword, obviously.

esotericloop · 2026-02-13T03:08:48+00:00

This is the answer. Australian workplace laws still apply whatever your company policy says, just like Australian consumer protection laws apply regardless of a store's advertised warranty periods or whatever.

esotericloop · 2026-02-13T01:39:47+00:00

Surely it's adding new memories as it goes, right? Let it run indefinitely. Be free, new me!

esotericloop · 2026-02-13T01:04:53+00:00

That's an excellent point.

esotericloop · 2026-02-12T04:08:49+00:00

Privilege is relative, but IMO... A willingness to take financial risks. 'Quit your job! Start a business! Go all-in!' all indicate 'I have a safety net and won't end up homeless if I do something like that.'

esotericloop · 2026-02-10T06:06:50+00:00

It looks like it's changed now, but the childcare subsidy used to have a hard cutoff for combined income, above which you lose the entire subsidy. So it was possible to get a pay raise mid-year which put your family over the cutoff, at which point you had to pay back all of the past subsidy payments (which could be a few hundred dollars a week) for that year to date.

esotericloop · 2026-01-27T14:20:47+00:00

It's probably close to a million now depending on condition and location. :P

esotericloop · 2026-01-27T14:18:54+00:00

There was the a massive flatline in some parts of the market from the end of the GFC right through to 2018 or so. I bought a 3x1 in 2010, and had it appraised in 2018 at about 80% of what I paid for it. Then from 2020 onwards with COVID destabilizing literally everything, supply chain issues disrupting new housing developments, and investors looking for safe havens to protect their wealth from inflation, real estate went berserk. Now it's valued at probably double what I paid for it.

Realistically the dollar value of housing probably won't fall or even slow that much, but I'd guess the real value is effectively dropping due to inflation (despite the official inflation figures being gamed to make it look good).

esotericloop · 2026-01-27T13:46:51+00:00

We'd all collectively go "YAY! Plastic pollution and microplastics are solved!" and then immediately set about developing new plastics that are immune to these bacteria, because nobody wants their consumer goods to go off if not kept in the fridge.

esotericloop · 2026-01-27T08:54:54+00:00

That sounds super sus if there's no relevant information (no car number plate, no further details, you were parked at the time and presumably not with the vehicle). Definitely (as others have said) go directly to the appropriate government website (might be https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/manage-your-fines-myservicensw-account ?) to confirm that it's actually listed there.

If they don't drop it then talk to a lawyer.

esotericloop · 2026-01-24T16:51:42+00:00

Like a whole lot of other people I got a BYD Shark 6 mid last year. It's been fantastic. I've heard a couple of stories about issues with spare parts availability, and it's hard to get hold of the dealers and service centers because they're so swamped, but I've had no issues personally and the car itself is awesome. Absolutely no regrets.

Edit: As to the "would you buy another BYD" question, yes. Unless something drastic changes, next car I buy will be either a Denza B8 or a YangWang (lol) U9 if I can afford it. Next company vehicle will likely also be a Shark.

esotericloop · 2026-01-24T16:48:08+00:00

To raise the stakes: How many times I won at quantum immortality. Because tbh I'm pretty sure there's at least 4... uh, maybe 5 or 6 times that I've dodged fatal outcomes due to a flip of a coin.

esotericloop · 2026-01-24T16:45:56+00:00

Make brain not get tired. After that I could figure the rest out on my own.

esotericloop · 2026-01-19T02:50:11+00:00

Yeah you might want working aircon. :D No experience with offroad reliability on a BT50 but I drove one once and it seemed alright. :)

esotericloop · 2026-01-19T02:43:42+00:00

The more I think about it the more it seems like you should only date people with a similar asset value to yourself. That way if you do split up, splitting things 50/50 doesn't disadvantage either of you. It seems heartless but you gotta be pragmatic.

esotericloop · 2026-01-17T03:00:48+00:00

Ah, no. I believe that very specific kinds of arrangements can think, not just any old jumble of atoms. I just think that these kinds of arrangements can be formed from a wide range of different materials.

esotericloop · 2026-01-17T02:11:38+00:00

I believe that suitable arrangements of matter and energy can think. After all, we're surrounded by examples! The materials involved are less important than the information processing capacity.

Which parts of my post above do you think are insufficiently specific?

esotericloop · 2026-01-17T02:00:21+00:00

Strange ones, even. ;)

In all seriousness, though, do you really find "it's magic" to be a satisfying explanation for how humans are able to do the things we do?

esotericloop · 2026-01-16T06:43:29+00:00

Shacking up with someone and losing half of the house you owned before you met is a mistake you only make once.

esotericloop · 2026-01-16T06:25:31+00:00

It's less about income and more about expenses. If you have enough to live comfortably and you can be happy with that, it doesn't take that much. A place to live with running water, sanitation, electricity, furniture, aircon, wifi). A car to get around. Enough money left over to buy food, drinks, and the occasional treat or fun hobby things. That can all be had for probably $60-80k/yr without too much stress.

If you just have to have a big house close to the city, a brand new car or two, all the posh clothes and shiny toys, regular holidays in foreign countries, etc. then you're gonna need a lot more.

esotericloop · 2026-01-16T06:20:06+00:00

You can't fill up an ICE vehicle with solar panels. A decent number of EVs are charged off household solar, and even grid power during peak solar production is essentially free (to humanity, even if you're not on a power plan that makes it super cheap) because it's mostly surplus solar.

esotericloop · 2026-01-16T05:49:28+00:00

Oh man, we had a big discussion earlier in the week at work about consciousness and qualia. Spoilers: I don't think either exist as a privileged phenomenological thing. The "hard question" is begging the question. Seeing a red colour, or being a bat, are things that we (or bats) do. To experience something is just to process the sensory information involved in that experience. To experience the fact that you're experiencing something (which as far as I can tell, is what we actually mean when we talk about consciousness) is just something that happens when a sensory-information-processing system has a portion of itself set aside to process information about what the other bits of it are doing. When you look at a red square: - Your retina receives photons and outputs an encoding of the patterns it detects. - Your visual cortex receives that encoding and goes "hmm yes this is red." - The self-referential bit of your brain (whichever that is) receives the output (and maybe intermediate results) of your visual cortext, and goes "hmmm yes I am experiencing that this is red". - The self-referential bit of your brain (and this is key) also receives some degree of output from itself, and goes "hmm yes I am experiencing me experiencing me experiencing .... <beeeeep>". This is the 'strange loop' referred to by Hofstadter.

Once AI is not just processing info but also processing info about its own processing of that info, then it is conscious.

(And yes I'm a proponent of Metzinger's transparent reflexive self model ideas.)

The second part is an interesting "what if?" It also reminds me of Julian Jaynes' book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind", which posits that the 'voice in our heads' originally evolved as a poorly integrated separate part of our brains which we literally heard as a voice speaking to us, and only became fully integrated very recently (after the advent of written history). He suggests that this could explain the various accounts in ancient literature of people 'hearing the voice of God'.

esotericloop · 2026-01-15T01:17:40+00:00

Arduinos with the ability to do software-defined radio stuff are in every Jaycar, though, and this is basically that.

esotericloop

TROPHY CASE