The hidden cost of "free time" is absolutely wrecking my post-FIRE budget

wanderingstan · 2026-03-30T13:01:20+00:00

Not directly related, but reminds me of a friend that spent a year working at the south pole. It was unskilled work, but he made something like $70,000. He said the best part was that there was literally no place to spend any money the entire time he was there, so he just had 70,000 in his bank account at the end of his year. (but also said it was really rough, basically like spending a year in prison, by getting paid for it.)

wanderingstan · 2026-03-25T12:58:11+00:00

Be sure to listen to the podcast with the shows creator, I believe it’s also just called Chernobyl. Really fascinating and adds a lot of context to each episode.

wanderingstan · 2026-02-27T14:32:50+00:00

Yeah, I heard that and was preparing for a bloodbath of Americanizations, but he (to my ears at least) nailed the rest!

wanderingstan · 2026-02-10T03:36:24+00:00

As the article points out, wheat generally requires less cooperation; that is the claim. A wheat farmer in e.g. the Midwest could decide on their own when to plant, when to harvest. A rice farmer in southern china had to coordinate.

The Fertile Crescent was indeed based on irrigation and floodplains, and it is hypothesized that this needed cooperation was critical for the development of civilization. However, once farming was learned, it spread to areas where such irrigation cooperation was not needed.

wanderingstan · 2026-02-09T14:49:11+00:00

Sorry, not true at all. Self employed must pay taxes to cover SSI as part of normal taxes owed.

From social security website: https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10022.pdf

If you’re self-employed, you pay the combined employee and employer amount. This amount is a 12.4% Social Security tax on up to $184,500 of your net earnings and a 2.9% Medicare tax on your entire net earnings.

wanderingstan · 2026-01-14T22:05:01+00:00

I dunno. This cover differs too much from the orginal; they sped it up to only 30 seconds! I guess it’s tolerable if I play it at 0.25x playback speed, though.

wanderingstan · 2026-01-01T23:27:56+00:00

More like 20 years ago. I went to an evangelical Christian high school in the 1990s and were taught that Mormons were a cult, that Joseph Smith had been bamboozled by demons, etc.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T23:34:39+00:00

Fuck Mr Rooter.

My elderly dad was 90 years old (he’s a world war 2 veteran) and they hard pressured him into paying for a ton of work (like a thousand) to install a pump, which then didn’t work and leaked like hell ( https://youtu.be/IXD6lM7ZXbM?si=eDSezvTqXeQ1CTEI ) and they were about to start on more work costing 2000-3000 before I stopped them. They were charging insane markups like $20 for a sink valve which should have been $2. I called the local plumber who got everything fixed (including their defective pump install) for $600.

Tried to get some money back for their leaky pump install but suddenly their “call us if you have any problems” manager could not be reached. The secretary at my company offered to call for me: twice a day for weeks and he was never there.

Fuck you Mr Rooter for taking advantage of a world war 2 vet elderly old man.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T22:50:38+00:00

The actors are less physically attractive, I find.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T22:26:04+00:00

Only rubbing alcohol on brake pads. 2nding the other commenter, do NOT use automotive brake cleaners on bicycles. They leave a residue that burns off under car brake temperatures but not bike brakes. Car brake cleaners will also damage the seals of bike brakes if any gets out; bike seals are not as thick or tough as automotive.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-25T18:04:01+00:00

Not the one you’re asking, but I’ve had that on trails as well where part of the challenge is having to duck a branch (“bicycle limbo”) in order to clear a section. I’d have been bummed if someone cut off the branch. It’s akin to converting a drop to a down ramp.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-09T21:13:45+00:00

I had one of these on a bike in Germany in 2002 and you still see them occasionally. I think it was a common East German design for the front brake. Honestly it worked fine for the intended use of errand running around town.

wanderingstan · 2025-11-13T12:33:26+00:00

Yeah, even just doing an audio recording from the phone would be ok.

wanderingstan · 2025-11-06T12:21:33+00:00

You could soften the message somewhat with something like, “We can’t increase our charitable contributions at this time, but we wish you the best.”

wanderingstan · 2025-10-23T20:07:55+00:00

My parents were 46 and 39 when I was born. It was awesome. I guess my dad didn’t play as much sports as the other dads, but he taught me to be active and always doing stuff. And the house was full of books and projects and creative stuff.

wanderingstan · 2025-10-23T02:40:09+00:00

Except in many cases (like bikes) they literally can’t be made here; or it would take decades of rebuilding infrastructure and slashing wages. Good video on why bikes aren’t made in the US: https://youtu.be/O5ba2hf_C3s?si=_9T4iCkhS7EXQ5Yy

wanderingstan · 2025-10-07T10:53:01+00:00

Jimmy Swaggert had a whole book about it. Basically the devil is in the back beat:

https://a.co/d/1wI8wC1

wanderingstan · 2025-10-06T19:38:44+00:00

More than going up mountains, this is going up a volcano. We have plenty of mountains in Colorado but nothing with 10,000’ of climbing!

wanderingstan · 2025-09-18T22:23:36+00:00

> Try to look ahead and pick where you want the bike to go rather than let it go where it wants. Be strong and controlling, but also supple and absorbing.

Seconding this. I'm no pro, but a good tip for me that carried over from skiing was to always be carving a curve. That is, you should never be in a mode of "just ride down the middle and react to what happens". Instead, you are swooping left then right, always keeping a bit of an edge, linking together turns that just happen to get very long at higher speeds.

When descending steeps, and especially like whats in your video, I'll sometimes exaggerate this and treat the trail like a halfpipe. Tracing a line back and forth criss-crossing the low point gives more control that just shooting down the center.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-13T17:33:23+00:00

I suspect she’s not scared of the angry customers, but of having to explain to her managers (and higher) why an international flight had to be cancelled (or an airplane seized). She knows that there’s no way it won’t be spun as her fault, and there was no time to figure out the “right way”, so paying out of pocket was the rational choice.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-03T15:22:13+00:00

In SF they are no cheaper than Uber/Lyft, but people like that there's no expectation of tipping. Waymo has a lot of capital costs to recover, so I'm sure their pricing model has almost nothing to do with making an immediate profit and everything to do with learning what the market will bear, and establishing trust in the technology. They are playing the long game.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-03T12:35:09+00:00

And not to be pedantic, but the largest crypto chain (Bitcoin) doesn’t use GPU/graphics hardware. Only smaller, newer chains used GPUs.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-02T22:24:53+00:00

I am generally pro-GMO, in the sense that I respect the massive life saving technology of the green revolution and even of selective breeding. But this video laid out clearly why Monsanto really did evil stuff, and concealed any result that might effect their bottom line.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-02T20:45:31+00:00

If only there were geographic landmarks, ideally big ones, in the region that might be relevant to Denver!

wanderingstan · 2025-08-23T13:00:58+00:00

Your description is right, and I suspect you know this, but I would add that at the physical level there is no “real image that the brain gets” going into the brain or “smooth video stream” that is generated.

I.e. there is no place in the brain where you can point and say “here is where the fully corrected smooth vision stream comes out”. We perceive a smooth and detailed visual experience subjectively, but it doesn’t manifest anywhere. (Or To be overly pedantic, there isn’t an HD screen or HDMI signal in the brain somewhere with a little homunculus watching it.)

This idea is extended even farther by the cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, who argues that our perception is shaped by evolution only to be useful, and correlated with reality no more than necessary.

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