exasperation @ exasperation @lemm.ee

Posts

0

Comments

300

Joined

10 mo. ago

Even the most expensive states are averaged out between cheap suburban and rural areas and the actual expensive cities where the jobs are. $2000/month would be an unbelievable bargain in cities like San Francisco or New York.

$3000 is average in the big cities for infant care in a daycare center, and it drops down to about $2000 for toddlers.

Some places have options for home-based care where a person can get licensed to take care of children in their own home, and the prices are generally about half of that of the center-based care.

One big issue is ratios. If the wage for a child care worker is $30/hour including the cost of paid vacation, health insurance, and you need coverage for 9 hours per day, 5 days a week, while needing to maintain one teacher for every 4 kids, that's $340/week or about $1450/month for labor alone, assuming no overtime and perfect staffing ratios. Throw in food, rent, utilities, insurance, other operational expenses, and it's pretty much impossible to provide care for less than $2000/month per child on the costs side.

If you eat nothing but rabbit or other lean protein your body can essentially starve because it's not getting enough fat and carbohydrates. But eating rabbits in addition to a diet that has fat from other sources makes the entire meal plan balanced enough to where the rabbit is a helpful/important part of the balanced diet.

John Mulaney has a joke about how his parents knew Bill Clinton that way, from all going to undergrad together at Georgetown. Apparently all the women loved being escorted by Bill Clinton, and the men were all jealous.

You described a lot of effort on your end to keep that relationship going. That's what I mean. Relationships require maintenance.

once you've made friends for life, they stick

People drift apart. Actually making the effort to communicate and meet up occasionally is important for maintaining those relationships. If you're not in the place where you're can stay aware of major life changes (marriage, divorce, kids, major career changes, moves between cities, major illness or injury, deaths in family, etc.), were you really "friends for life"?

Even making brunch plans in my 40s requires consulting a calendar. That naturally shrinks the number of close friends in the mix. I'm closer with my friends who live close than the ones who live far, simply out of inertia, that maintaining those relationships takes less effort.

Low maintenance friendships are the best ships 🛳️

I'm no psychoanalyst but it sounds like someone is insecure in their ability to love and be loved and would prefer to guarantee a balanced reciprocity of low effort on both sides.

I've never really liked "children" in the sense of the age group, but I know a bunch of people who have really great, meaningful relationships between adult children and their parents, so I wanted adult children in my late middle ages and retirement ages.

Now, with my own children, I primarily see them as future adults who I get to watch develop into cool people.

People without financial security: "kids are too expensive and I would be exhausted trying to provide for them"

People with financial security: "I'm having a good time, adding a kid to this mix would really require a step back in my lifestyle."

Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.

Is it like the Italian American "shrimp scampi" where it's just the words for shrimp in two different languages? My understanding is that "salami" is just the Italian word for cured sausage.

Also, "pepperoni" is an Italian American word for a spicy salami that contains peppers, so it's just a type.

Cookie is already a slang term for pussy, you can skip that step.

Yeah, cookie monster is blue, but this particular shot has so much dark shadow in that textured fur that it's nearly black in most places.

Industrious eye

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

There's an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it's not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

It's a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it's not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

And I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I think there's probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).

Nothing's been done about it since then.

Research has gone into safer replacements. Many companies have been switching to BPA-free formulas, most notably CVS (notorious for sheer area of thermal paper receipts) that went BPA/BPS free in 2019. Some governments have banned BPA thermal paper, and others, including the EU, have set limits. BPA has been getting phased out because of these studies.

Nothing will be done about it now.

Well no, this organization is lining up to try to replicate the success with getting BPA out of thermal paper by trying to get BPS replaced, too.

Here's a study of Switzerland. Between 2014 and 2019, the incidence of BPA thermal paper went from 81% down to around 50%, and then after the ban it went to around 10%. BPS has seen some backsliding, and has increased from 3.1% to 19.1%. Still, that's a significant reduction in the past decade of papers that use either BPA or BPS.

People are doing the work. There's no reason to sit around and do nothing and complain that others are doing nothing, too.

You don't need a normal distribution or statistical independence. It just requires that any given key combination remain possible.

No matter how unlikely, anything that is possible will eventually happen in an infinite time.

Some infinities are bigger than others, though.

Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven't typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.

Cantor's diagonalization proves it.

Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.