Average Americans don’t care about the sanctions on Cuba. The biggest pro-sanctions constituency is Cuban-Americans living in Florida. That’s why both parties have held the line. No one wants to risk losing Florida in an election.

Loads of Cubans living in Miami would like to have a word!

Lemme steelman your position.

I don’t like AI because it tries too hard to flatter me. It never pushes back! It gives me the sense of paranoia dictators must feel when they’re surrounded by sycophants!

That’s what AI does though. It will lie to make you happy. Its objective function is based on the approval of its human trainers, not based on the truth (which it doesn’t know anything about because no one has time to label the truth value of every piece of information on the entire internet).

Probably just doing it for the money. Not exactly a lot of economic opportunities in Cuba!

Genetics may be expensive but rooting hormone powder is cheap! Also don’t buy fancy grow lights. Shop lights are way cheaper and work just fine!

Yes. This is the way. Never trust your own willpower when you can use a (hopefully simple) device to put yourself into a routine!

I saw another post recently about advice for living with ADHD and a lot of people said “habit formation is impossible.” I didn’t have time to reply at the time and subsequently forgot about it until now. My number one hack for getting around the habit formation problem is setting reminders on my phone! I use them for everything and it always feels satisfying to complete a task and check off the box to finish the reminder!

Stay away from gambling sites. If you’ve got extra money and want to watch it grow, invest in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) with a low/no fee trading account. Stay away from meme stocks as well.

If you do invest, diversify your portfolio. SPY is very exciting but it’s heavily tied up in the AI bubble. Try to more international markets, clean energy, minerals, heavy industry. No matter what happens to the AI companies, we still need energy and resources to build stuff and keep our economy going.

Read about taxable and non taxable trading accounts in your country. Try to use those to avoid having your savings eroded by taxes. You will pay plenty of taxes on your income, so don’t worry about that!

Sure you can have a unique identifier. That’s not the issue. The issue is that anyone can contact you via your phone number! This is not a problem with chat apps where people need permission to add you to their contact list. Why not have a system like that?

Same goes for credit cards. They should need to ask for permission to charge your credit card. Merely knowing your credit card info should not be enough.

Don’t forget the Roman Empire who brutalized peoples all over Northern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Oh what I’m proposing has no foreseeable path to fruition. I’m talking about what we’ve lost on the road to industrialization. We’ve gained a lot as well but endless words have been written about that! Far less has been said about the downsides of industrialization and the movement towards car dependent suburbs.

It also needs to be said that all of what we’ve lost may not be equally irretrievable. Some things could potentially be brought back, especially as our culture continues to evolve. For example, I see the current crises with social media and the loneliness epidemic to be temporary issues (but also symptomatic of our loss of village life and in-person social connection).

I would push back even further and say that the nuclear family (as well as the Prussian school system) is unnatural and even harmful to child development. Raising a child in a village with lots of extended family and friends of all ages promotes much more varied socialization, with a mixture of peers to relate to and older role models to learn from.

Both daycares and schools suffer from the problem of socializing kids into seeing adults as authority figures to be placated and manipulated, rather than leaders to learn from and aspire towards. This also feeds into a cycle of seemingly-unending adolescence, to the point where we now have 30+year olds talking about “adulting” as something they still aim to achieve.

A bunch of those fruits were likely pollinated by domestic honeybees!

Whenever you put any hot, bread-based food into the fridge it’ll get soggy. Gotta wait for it to cool down completely before putting it in the fridge.

This extends even to the trip home from a takeout pizza place. Putting the box in one of those thermal bags is one of the worst things you can do, since it traps all the steam inside. Much better to leave the pizza on the passenger seat with the box ajar (some pizza boxes even have steam vents).

Wild pollinators are nice for us home gardeners but they cannot sustain the high production of commercial produce farming.

If we went to a no-domestic-pollinator system it would dramatically cut food production and jack up food prices.

I’ve always considered everything east of the Berlin Wall to be Eastern Europe and everything west to be Western Europe. I’d never even heard of Central Europe as a distinct idea.

And this is the genesis of my copious notes on things to do, going back decades, which I’m mostly never going to do. Ahhhhhh!

I do end up doing a few things though!

It’s not Canada Post relaxing the strike, it’s CUPW (the postal workers union). The reason they’re doing this (IMO) is that they don’t want to cause a huge mail backlog going into the holiday season. They are afraid of turning the public against them.

The Daily Mash is not mainstream media. It’s satire just like The Onion.

I like the Stargate-lite system in the game Terminus (2000). Unlike Stargate, each gate connects 1 to 1 with another, so there’s no “dialling up” a new destination. In fact, these gates don’t go anywhere unexplored. They only go where we’ve already been (around the solar system).

See, in Terminus the space ships can only fly at realistic speeds (similar to real life rockets) and maneuvering is difficult (with pretty decent Newtonian physics). If you want to travel to other places in the solar system it takes an extremely long time, so the gates make it actually feasible to get around.

This all had the effect of making space feel like the age of railroading. You can get around but you’re limited to where the rails can take you. I don’t know why, but there’s something so romantic about that.

I’m glad that works for you. For others with similar struggles, they treat the tax refund as a windfall and spend it on something they don’t need instead of putting it into their savings.

This is known as the mental accounting bias.