I liked the Speaker for the Dead from the Ender’s Game series. Instead of some guy reading off fluff about how kind they were, how they would be missed etc, they had a position called Speaker for the Dead who would speak there.

Before the funeral event, the Speaker would be like a journalist, studying to learn and understand the person who had just passed. Then the eulogy would be more of a story of the person’s life, what goals they pursued through life, etc. Explain why and who the person was. Felt kind of like the difference between just seeing the grumpy man in Up, and seeing the intro to the movie to see who he was through life and why he was grumpy now.

I wish our funerals were more like that. Let me see and understand the entire life that just ended. Let them have their story one more time.

I think the idea is, most people could build a doghouse with no training, but you need planning and education to plan/build a skyscraper. If you want to write your own app at home, maybe no software planning is really required. Keep nailing in workarounds. But if you want to build a huge system, you need to do a bit more than workarounds. You need a good plan from the start to make it all efficient and in a manner others can contribute to the code base.

That said, I feel like just having workarounds is really common even in large industry settings. Maybe I’m wrong though. I’m more of a home doghouse builder type myself.

If you liked Super Metroid and emulate games, look into Hyper Metroid. Someone modded the game and remade it entirely and it’s great!

As someone buying a color screen boox soon, I think it’s worth a mention that the battery is MUCH worse on boox because it has to run android. Like, the boox may last a day or two vs the Kindle Paperwhite lasting a couple weeks.

It’s not a huge issue if you are home a lot and can charge, but I love the Paperwhite because it feels like it ALWAYS is charged. It just doesn’t have the color screen so I guess I will have both now, one for comics and one for books.

SS takes a % of your pay up to a certain amount. I am not sure the “bend points” so I will give fake numbers. Up to maybe $50k per year, you get a very strong “return” for that contribution. Your SS check will be low, but then again, you didn’t put in much over your life. Now up to like $100k, you will get a larger check. But not double. From there to like $140k, you still get a larger check, but not 40% more than the $100k.

After $140k, you are no longer required to contribute. With the diminishing returns, it would not have increased the SS check much (if at all) anyways.

What the OP picture is suggesting is to continue to make them pay into SS even though they would get little or no return on it. I see why that makes some sense, but since this is technically not a “tax” but a required pension system, I think they would have to rewrite it all to make sure it was fair that way.

If you look into bend points, you will see that the first amount you contribute gets you a significant return later for your SS check, but as you contribute more, the slope of the size of the SS check flattens. After the second bend point, adding more into SS doesn’t get you a much larger check.

The reason the rich wouldn’t want to further contribute then, is because at that point, their contributions are getting a very poor return, and they would feel they could do better on their own. Since it isn’t a tax, they would argue (correctly) that it is a waste of their money compared to investing themselves.

C sucks to write and take care of memory, but it’s nice for super efficient code for use on smart watches. Samsung ditched it (tizen- native apps written in C) in favor of wearOS (java?), and their battery life is now less than half what it was.

Chaotic good alignment upsets my OCD the most