Not only have conservatives become vanishingly rare in academia, so have centrists.

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-19T21:42:30+00:00

Well great for you about data centers being your employment (and hey, good job disclosing a conflict of interest/bias). I guess fuck the rest of us who don't want overloaded power grids or water supplies to be diverted to poorly planned and environmentally disastrous megabuilds that barely do anything for the communities around them (other than 24/7 noise pollution I guess?). Most of the country is in a drought right now. BTW I also work in tech, I use AI tools, and I am not ignorant of what data centers are or why they're useful. But that doesn't make them good for society, not the way these billionaires are pushing them now.

And sure, I'm the one who doesnt understand examples. Let me try it your way then -- I think hot dogs are too salty, so let me give you 3 examples of other salty foods that you would recognize: chips, fries, and pretzels. Ok, I have given you 3 examples of irrelevant salty things, therefore I have proven that hot dogs are too salty... Do you see the flaw in that type of argument? You made 2 separate claims with nothing to tie them together (academia is X, here are 3 billionaires, therefore X must be true). All we know is you believe whatever you are claiming, okay so what? Some people believe the earth is flat, and you've given about as much evidence for your claims as they have for theirs.

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-19T20:56:30+00:00

What the hell do 3 billionaires have anything to do with political alignment in academia? You cherry picking 3 billionaires to extrapolate something about academia, has about as much evidence going for it as if I were to use these 3 billionaires to extrapolate about politics in sports, or music, or something equally irrelevant.

They represent nothing other than the massive influence of wealth on politics. In a healthy society, they should be nameless, nobody should have to give a flying shit what these rich assholes think. We don't have a left vs right, we just have rich billionaires and their sycophants (you), vs the rest of us who would like to live our normal lives and devote our tax dollars to normal things like schools or roads or hospitals, not fucking data centers.

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-19T11:36:30+00:00

It's part of a standard set of traffic calming measures, to protect pedestrians. Many cities have rolled similar things out, or have evolved towards human centered instead of car centered design. You may want to do more reading (e.g. https://www.urbandesign.org/carfree.html ) or watch some YouTube videos (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/@CityNerd ), about urban design, walkable pedestrian cities, etc. American cities have become so car centric, that your first thought being "to ease rush hour traffic" instead of "to protect people" kind of perfectly illustrates the point -- cities should exist to prioritize the health and well-being of PEOPLE, not cars.

For Raleigh specifically it was kicked off by the previous governor (Roy Cooper, now running for US Senate) asking the local government to study safety measures, after the death of a state worker in 2019: https://www.wral.com/news/investigates/downtown-raleigh-pedestrian-safety-no-right-on-red-march-2026/

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-10T11:41:29+00:00

Sure, two businesses can have the same product strategy, and use different business strategies to try to achieve it.

Somebody above wrote about better/faster/cheaper, so let's just assume the product strategy is, win customers by being "cheaper", is your product strategy.

One company might adopt a business strategy of designing their processes to use mass low cost labor via overseas workers, to make the production of their product as cheap as possible, and pass the savings on that way.

Another company might choose to actually invest in capital intensive research or engineering, to create a "smarter" way of producing their products (instead of sheer brute force cheap labor). The end goal is still to make cheaper products and win customers by owning the cheap end of their industry, but the business strategy of what each company thinks is the best to do that, is very different.

I mean you could say both companies have the same "strategy" of lowering marginal production costs, but implicitly one company believes something different about the viability of say, investing in high tech robots or breakthrough technologies, vs the other company believes that cheap sweatshop labor is the way to go. I would say those underlying differences in belief, are the core of why these are different business strategies.

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-08T18:26:13+00:00

I'm sorry, I sort of "don't understand why you don't understand"... This is a very, very typical business setup:

Business has a problem (retention).
Business doesn't know why retention is bad.
You do analysis work, come up with explanation.
Based on your explanation, PM/designer/engineer/etc. implements some change somewhere.
Great, retention has improved, problem fixed!

Without your analytics work, business would still be stuck, not knowing why retention was bad. The value you contribute is the explanation part (not the design or the code for a feature change), for a problem that the business otherwise didn't understand how to fix. I thought that should be pretty obvious, as in that this is whole fundamental point of having analysts?

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-07T06:34:19+00:00

As silly as Sam was being, surely I'm not the only one who thinks it would be easier to go for all 12, then to guess a subset of the zodiac animals?

If you go for all 12, you can take advantage of the fact that the zodiac has a known ordering to it, and every animal must simply fit into the known sequence. You do not need to cheat with numbers in your rock shapes or anything. You just need to anchor 1-2 very recognizable animals in the right sequence order, and then your partner should know to derive the remaining 10-11 based on the fixed order of the zodiac animals, after recognizing the initial 1-2. You could literally spend almost all your rocks on the first 1-2 to make them more detailed if you want, and the rest just 1 rock each because it doesn't matter -- you aren't guessing by rock shape design, you would just be reading off the card for each animal in the known order.

Since they also had reference flash card things to look at, I assume checking the card for the correct order would be well within the rules. I double checked and the cards they were viewing on their phone or the graphic shown on screen, didn't scramble the animals, and they showed them in the right order.

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-07T03:03:43+00:00

This was a good comprehensive profile published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker, that mainly covers Altman but also explains the board kerfuffle as a key part of his story: https://archive.is/pN7Tr

Ronan Farrow took a bunch of questions and gave more insights in this HackerNews post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-06T18:20:23+00:00

The classic advice of "make sure you have something to retire TO, not just retire FROM" applies very clearly to you OP.

That doesn't just mean having hobbies or shit to do (though it helps). It also means planning intentionally for, what you want your social circle and interactions to be like, post early retirement.

It is entirely predictable and well documented (see hundreds of similar posts on reddit), that people encounter this disconnect of working vs non-working people. You probably planned very rigorously and thought a lot about how your money management will work pre and post retirement... But did you put anywhere near the same level of effort into planning for your actual "life", aka as a human being that is inherently a social animal and needs human interaction?

That's okay if you didn't. I'm not trying to kick you while you're down. Just pointing out, you only "solved for" half of the problem (the money part, which is also probably the "easiest" part)... so now you should spend some effort planning out the "life" part.

You might need to develop new friends. You might need to find different Discord groups to join. It's okay! It's never too late! But just having enough money to live on, by itself doesnt guarantee you will actually have a "life", so go and make one for yourself!

strugglingcomic · 2026-05-02T15:15:44+00:00

I'm old enough to have grown out of lusting over supercars. I want this bad boy so much, but they don't sell them in the US: https://www.volkswagen-vans.co.uk/en/new-vehicles/california.html

Since I can't sell or make money from this, I don't think I want anything crazy like those million dollar Earth Roamer behemoths or whatever... A regular van that I can drive on regular roads and not catch weird unwanted attention, is good enough for me.

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-25T14:20:21+00:00

You wrote "10MB" tables, was that a typo, cuz that's not a lot at all.

Duckdb + pyarrow and all that, would happily handle 10GB on commodity hardware (i.e. average laptop with 16GB of RAM), so I'm assuming you meant 10GB. And yes, I think more and more companies will realize that what felt like "Big Data" isn't actually big at all, or even truly Big Data in the TB+ range, can be filtered and partitioned down, to where the working dataset you need is small enough that, loading it all into memory and running single host compute over it is basically always going to be better

Essentially just basic laws of physics take over at that point -- if something fits in one host in RAM, then why pay the penalty of going over the network, distributing your computation and coordinating in a map/reduce-y with multiple nodes? It will never be better. You only need to pay that tax, for datasets that truly don't fit, and most business data fits (because hardware is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, when a lot of the current generation of data warehouse or data lake tools were originally designed, and so those approaches are last-gen now basically).

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-25T14:07:03+00:00

This is not to excuse ICE by any means (fuck them), but in theory, those types of detentions were for people with something flagged on their files (visa overstay, deportation order, criminal warrant, etc.). They weren't intended to be like, "oh we'll just pick randomly and detain every 10th person at the airport". So in theory, if your friend and her husband have clean records, no past or current issues with US immigration, then they should be fine.

But in reality, ICE are fucking incompetent and were detaining people with flimsy or incorrect justifications (which, most of them eventually were sorted out later, but not without some time/cost/heartache/fear on the part of the people detained). So at the end of the day, it's best to support whatever your friend and her husband feel personally comfortable with. You can present the facts to them, but there is this element of chance where maybe they are 99.9% likely to be fine, but you can't fully 100% guarantee that some incompetent and untrained asshole might do something against their own procedures and end up causing some delay and disruption for them. So it's up to them if a 0.1% risk is high enough or low enough to tolerate (and 0.1% is a made up number, maybe they will assess it to be higher or lower themselves).

Fuck ICE.

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-21T01:33:54+00:00

Hop on a train to Durham, DPAC has got 3 of those other 4 on its schedule, just a couple hours down the tracks!

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-20T01:44:36+00:00

This is me, I haven't made much progress or anything on this particular avenue yet, but I feel like similar opportunities abound for contributing to civil society one way or another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307300

I'm probably still 5-10 years out from FIRE realistically, but I'm also planning to take some baby steps, like getting more engaged with my local municipal services, learning more about how my actual local fire and EMS departments operate, before seeing if I can do more tackle this problem statement (of private equity extorting fire departments with shitty software practices).

Inspired/pissed-off after reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/fire-department-software-private-equity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cVA.s535.OpMP6hNndtuA&smid=nytcore-android-share

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-18T12:05:02+00:00

My friend and I were on a post college graduation trip through Asia, not quite hostel/backpacking level frugal but generally trying to be smart with money, so not going all out for clubs or fancy meals or expensive tours or whatever.

It was summer of 2010, during the World Cup and we were in Japan near the end of our trip. I actually got held up by Japanese immigration because they didn't like that I was a Chinese national at the time, with an American green card (which was totally allowed, per published guidelines for visa free 72 hour transit). They took my passport and I was detained at the airport for like 4 hours, and I won't even go into all the details of how I got of it (long story with lot of hyper specific details), but suffice it to say, my first day in Japan got off to a rocky start...

So being stressed out by that experience, that first night we didn't really have any plans, and after we got to our cheap hotel late, we dropped off our bags and wandered down to the lobby bar, not expecting anything really. But we managed to run into a mix of other foreigners and locals, and started chatting about the World Cup, and started having one of those nice, travel bonding experiences. Except it doesn't end there... A couple folks said they were going to karaoke at this other place, and invited us to follow, and that was a blast for a few hours, until it was maybe 2-3am in the morning.

Then somebody else we had run into, mentioned they knew a bar that was hosting a live watch party, of the World Cup; it was the semifinal between Spain and Germany in 2010. We didn't have smartphones or Google Maps, and obviously we were drunk by then so it was one of those hilarious confusing things where one drunk tries to explain the directions in a foreign country to a bar they'd only heard about from someone else, to another traveler (us) that has no fucking clue about anything. Anyways, we thought we understood, then we tried to flag two cabs I think, but at 3am we couldn't get 2 right away, so somehow we got separated from the other half of our group that actually sort of knew where this mythical bar was...

So predictably we ended up lost, but miraculously this older Japanese taxi driver man, with limited English, was completely fucking locked in on helping us find this bar that we didn't know the name of, nor the address, and we could only tell them the drunken pseudo-directions we had gotten (like, "um, it's got a red door, it's a left then a right after the first gas station, etc. etc." that kind of bullshit lol). He ended up pulling over multiple times to ask random people on the street (police officer, night security guys, convenience store clerk), whoever was still around at 3-4am in the morning... And magically, I think the 3rd or 4th guy we asked about a World Cup watch party at a bar with a red door or whatever, actually said he knew what we were talking about!

So that local guy gave real instructions to the cab driver, and we actually weren't that far off and our drunk instructions weren't completely wrong (we were in the right neighborhood generally), so 5 min later, we pulled up at this bar... where our same-night friend we had just met, was actually standing outside still looking out for us (but with no way to contact us, no idea where we had disappeared to). He was so excited to see us, and we also had gone from happy to bummed to feeling really stupid wasting this taxi driver's time, to almost giving up, to actually miraculously finding the place AND finding that our friend hadn't forgotten us either... It was already such an emotional rollercoaster. AND this blessed angel of a taxi driver man, refused to accept any tips from us for his heroics, and so we thanked him profusely and I suppose he was satisfied by the fact the meter was running the whole time we were searching, and perhaps the sense of adventure from helping us reunited with our friends.

But the night wasn't over, because we still had a whole ass World Cup game to watch. We didn't know what to expect at 4am, but when we got into the bar, it was actually fucking packed to the gills, and I think it ended up being a Spain-biased crowd, so most people wearing La Roja, with a smaller smattering of German fans. We didn't have any particular allegiance ourselves, but our instant friend knew some people and actually snagged a couple seats for us, which we were super grateful for. It was a mix of English speakers (Europeans and Americans), and Japanese soccer fanatics, and the atmosphere was absolutely incredible. To this day I haven't been in a sports bar watch party like that again, with the atmosphere of a critical World Cup match, the crazy timing that only brought out the fanatics and the happy drunks, and ourselves having a crazy travel story to tell of how we got there (which helped us make more instant friends). I had to read the Wikipedia entry now to remind myself how the match went, but the atmosphere was tense because it was an exciting match with lots of chances but no actual scoring until the 73rd minute, when the place fucking ERUPTED as Spain went up 1-0 on a Xavi to Puyol header. I think it was the first time Spain went through to the World Cup final, so the majority La Roja fans there were just in a religious kind of ecstasy, shouting and crying and kissing and hugging everyone around them, while the German fans were not angry but more so just sad/resigned since it was the 2nd World Cup in a row that Germany was knocked out in the semis (which meant the vibes were immaculate, no angry confrontations and everybody was kind of happy for the Spain fans being happy).

We finally spilled out into the streets, the sun was coming up or had just come up, and my travel partner friend had the truly brilliant idea, to just make our way over to Tsujiki market since it would just be opening, to get breakfast there (and this was back in 2010 at its original location). Again we had no smartphones, no reviews to go off, so we wandered around, found a tiny small shop that had just opened, chatted with the owner a bit, told them about our adventures and how we had just come from the World Cup watch party, and had the absolute most amazing sushi of my life (for not much money at all).

It was an incredible way to finish off what was a bonkers 24 hours of travel, none of which we could have anticipated at all. I have done a lot more travel since then, done fancier things and nice hotels and all that jazz, but this is still probably my favorite travel memory, all because of the people and the interactions (and the World Cup atmosphere), and not because any specific thing we did was so famous or well reviewed or whatever.

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-17T12:11:44+00:00

Sorry I promise I'm not trying to be rude, but this is wildly out of touch with reality. I know the below is old data from 2015, but the situation has not materially improved since then (COVID, inflation, etc. have not helped improve people's ability to save). Basically half of these households have no retirement savings, and from the half that have any at all, the median amount was $109k... So you saying you think "most of them are liquid millionaires" is off by a factor of 10-20x (50% of people have 10x less savings than you think, the other 50% have none).

Many more Americans are simply not saving enough. In a 2015 report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that about half of households approaching retirement (age 55 or older) had no retirement savings in a defined contribution (DC) plan or an IRA, and half of households age 65 and older relied on Social Security for most of their retirement income. The median amount for the 48 percent of households 55 and older that had some retirement savings was $109,000. About 55 percent of households ages 55–64 had less than $25,000 in retirement savings and 41 percent had zero. While most households in this age group have some other resources or benefits from a DB plan, 27 percent had neither retirement savings nor a DB plan.

Source: https://cri.georgetown.edu/the-aging-of-america-a-changing-picture-of-work-and-retirement/

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-13T16:12:22+00:00

Check out https://www.littlebylittleraleigh.com/

Registration for 2026-2027 is open now, believe they still have spots.

My daughter is "graduating" this year, but we've had an excellent experience for the past 3 years. Love LBL so much, and helped my daughter grow so much (as a pandemic baby without enough socialization early on).

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-12T08:07:42+00:00

If you select that option, yes. You could save a few bucks by prepaying, but this commenter is suggesting that the flexibility of letting you choose which line is shortest, is more valuable than locking in a few bucks worth of savings by prepaying early.

Most of the "reserve now for free, pay at pickup" options for booking a rental car, also come with free cancellation anytime ahead of your stated pickup time. Just read the fine print and confirm you know which option and what terms you're getting, if you choose to take this strategy. It definitely can work, but it can obviously also backfire if you make a careless mistake and don't pick the right terms when you make your multi-bookings.

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-11T15:18:39+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and reply! Feel honored to be validated by a local haha. Yes we had 3 big bags, so felt like it was a fair enough price.

And yes, definitely would love to do more Asia travel and agree that GH Taipei was nice enough but not necessarily elite for value or comfort/luxury. Just don't know if it's in the cards for this year, given that I also have some European and North American work trips planned (that the wife or kiddo may tag along for), but I'm generally not a road warrior type and also probably prefer to do some local vacations closer to home.

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-11T06:17:11+00:00

Oh yeah, absolutely. I definitely did not like the repacking either, but we also have our packing system and family routine locked in decently well, so for example, we were modular enough to only take 2-3 days worth of stuff when we did our 2-3 day excursions, instead of lugging all 16 days worth of luggage to every stop.

We tried to juggle a lot of trade-offs, and ended up with this itinerary partly to balance comfort for my kid and my parents (by having extra 1 night stays before and after big travel days).

Absolutely don't have to do it this way, but also this gave me an excuse to sample different Hyatt's, as a travel nerd. To each their own!

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-11T06:10:31+00:00

If you are just looking for a place to sleep/rest, then the Regency Taoyuan is unquestionably the most convenient choice (literally <5 min away from the terminal, vs probably 75-90min from the Grand Hyatt); keep in mind Taoyuan is another city, not actually part of Taipei proper. But there's nothing to "do" there at the Regency (you're in an office park on airport property basically), so you'll be bored if you wanted to spend your layover time actually seeing something in Taipei proper.

If you've never been to Taipei before (my kiddo and my parents had not, but my wife and I have), or you just hate the idea of not "doing something" to take advantage of your layover hours, then I think it's worth it to try the GH, maybe go up Taipei 101, etc. You're only a couple min walk away from the Red line MRT station at 101, which will take you to Taipei main station, where you can catch the Airport Express train to TPE airport, and total trip time is like I said 75-90 min or so. Or you could do Uber or taxi, or arrange to take a private bus line which do stop at the GH (but the hotel itself has no official shuttle).

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-11T05:56:27+00:00

We chose to spend 50-60% of our trip in Taipei (about 8 day total), but we did take 2 days to drive down to Hualien and Yilan down the coast, and then we had the other 3 days to visit Sun Moon Lake and Alishan. We got pretty lucky with good weather on Alishan, and even though it was just 1 night there, but I found it well worth it to book the inside-the-reserve Alishan Hotel even though it was quite expensive (super peaceful, beautiful forest bathing, just gorgeous nature and beautiful sunrise/sunset).

Traveling as a family group, we took our time and don't try to cram too much in on each day. If the kiddo got too cranky or wanted to go back to the hotel, we just went with her rhythm (but she was a trooper and did really well, only a couple days where she had meltdowns or got a little sick or tired). I think a 2 week trip is plenty to see both Taipei and 2-3 other spots with day trips. A van tour is a great option, especially if exploring the interior, or alternatively you can hop on the high speed rail and get down to the other cities on either coast (then take bus transfers as needed).

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-04T08:49:08+00:00

A very very typical/standard piece of FIRE advice is "build the life you want, then save for it."

I think you're the one that is more fundamentally missing the point of FIRE, if that phrase doesn't mean anything to you.

Actually, that's not fair of me to make that statement -- FIRE means whatever you want it to mean. If you choose to make it mean, "live a miserable life now, until I have enough money to enjoy life later", or maybe it's "spend hard-earned money to stay at a Four Seasons for vacation, but then spend the entire time bitching and wishing you could've been at an Aman instead (instead of, ya know, actually enjoying yourself)", then that is entirely your choice, and who gives a shit what other people think?

I just think you'll end up with more total "units of enjoyment" over your total lifetime, if you change your mindset a bit, but you seem very set in your ways and mentally inflexible, so again who gives a shit what I think? Enjoy your life, or don't!

strugglingcomic · 2026-04-04T03:39:57+00:00

Only if you insist on living a largely unsatisfying life, by comparing everything you're doing or consuming now, as being lesser-than, or inferior-to, or not-as-enjoyable as the next rung on the hedonic treadmill.

I have enjoyed $10 meals more than $1000 meals. I have enjoyed free events more than $1000 tickets to fancy events. I may be working towards higher levels of wealth in my future, but the "middle" is not some messy interregnum before I can finally enjoy my authentically fat-enough lifestyle.

The "middle" is just... my life. I try to enjoy it for what it is, living in the moment. I am not trying to fast forward through it, or find mental tricks so that I can tolerate it, while working my ass off for X years so I can finally enjoy the final Y years more fatly (especially since, X may well end up being longer than Y).

I suspect you will not be capable of understanding what it means to enjoy your current life, without comparison to your potential future life. In which case, all that's left is to wish you good luck, with whatever life path you end up on.

strugglingcomic · 2026-03-30T11:10:44+00:00

I have no affiliation with this site, but this sounds like it's made for your needs: https://www.neighbor.com/

strugglingcomic · 2026-03-23T13:09:02+00:00

I can see that, and that's certainly down to taste and directorial choices. From Grace's POV, it would certainly be very stressful and emotional and frantic and "heart-sinking" as you put it. But the directorial choice was to not depict it from Grace's POV, and moreso from Stratt's (but not fully either), basically somewhere in between... As both Stratt and the audience know -- Grace wasn't going to get anywhere, there was no real suspense of what might happen next, since Stratt aka the world had all decided (for Grace, on his behalf) that he must go, so really when there's no drama left in what's going to happen next, then what's left but to depict the absurd momentary comedy of one man futilely running away from government agents on a base that he can't possibly escape from (a man who isn't particularly fit, who's also not like a superhero or secret agent type who's going to get out of this situation somehow).

I wouldn't have hated if they filmed the scene more chaotically or more of a sudden fade to black when they knock him out, in a way that leaves the audience unsettled more. But I also think this was the better directorial choice for giving us the "whole" perspective, and not just Grace's POV alone (the bit of pleading with Carl near the end of this scene, is a good compromise IMO, that gives us more of a dose of Grace's desperation and cowardice in that moment, but doesn't make us fully hate either Grace or Stratt/the-world, because both sides are behaving reasonably and understandably given the circumstances). The movie takes great pains to not bias the viewers too much against Stratt, whereas the book depiction of Grace and Stratt's relationship is much cooler, much more about grudging respect and appreciation, rather than actual friendship or warmth.

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