3d scanner that generates a 3d printing file that automatically creates one in your friends’ inboxes. It’s just plastic for now but they’re working on adding new materials and artificial scents to really capture the whole experience.

A million (bleep)ing diamonds!

From a Tumblr post that has been reposted a few times (in fact, my link is to the earliest repost I could find, as I think the original is long gone):

The sun is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to a true Eldritch Abomination. Hear me out here-

• Older than recorded history; was here longer than any of us and will be here long after we leave. Has a finite beginning and end but is still incomprehensibly ancient
• Burns itself into your vision instantly and can blind you if you look for too long
• Further prolonged exposure can cause cancerous growths
• Non-humanoid shape floating through space; colossal flaming tentacles angrily lash out on occasion
• Sort of just appeared one day and is now surrounded by the corpses of its stillborn children
• People used to sacrifice other people to appease it
• Pretty sure it screams at us sometimes

Is this a thing people do? When I was in my 20’s I did the opposite, jerking off before dates so that I’d last longer later on.

I’m a man and I’ve never been catcalled, but I can believe women who overwhelmingly say it’s a common experience.

A non-black person saying they’ve never been followed around a convenience store, or dealt with adultification (the phenomenon where racial bias leads people to treat black children more as adults, including things like the first row in this comic assuming a young black woman is holding her own daughter).

We all live our own experiences, so trying to deny that something happens based on not having experienced it yourself is just being obtuse.

A survey of medical students in 2016 found the same trends in actual beliefs, long after the data disproved the theory.

This RPG’s rules are bullshit!

Are you under the impression that families are going to the grocery store every day and trying to eat everything within 48 hours of picking it up from the store? No, people are buying the week’s worth of stuff and might not be getting to actually cooking it until 6 days later.

Buy a week’s worth of food, with each perishable item in quantities small enough to go into a few meals per week, out of the 21 meals you’ll be eating that week.

Fresh vegetables and fruit last a week or two. Fresh meat lasts a week. Eggs last a few weeks. Most dairy products last a week or two.

Make meals out of a combination of fresh ingredients, dry goods (pasta, rice, beans, breads), canned/preserved foods/sauces/condiments, frozen foods. With basically one perishable feature ingredient per dinner, it doesn’t take that much planning to feed yourself for maybe 10-25% as much as it costs from takeout or restaurants. Even if your food waste is double as a single person, that’s still 20-50% the cost.

Yeah, a lot of popular webcomics seem to try to mine personal experiences (especially around introversion or social awkwardness) for relatability: Sarah’s Scribbles, Pizzacake, etc.

To the person he exercises leverage over, who makes money on each sale made, and pays his wages/commissions? Isn’t that obvious? He agrees to sell some stuff, in exchange for money that comes from the sale.

Producing value gives leverage. A salesman who brings in lots of revenue and profit can negotiate a pretty high commission, because controlling that level of revenue/profit represents some leverage.

You keep calling it a “die off” because you’re being visually tricked by the misleading population pyramid. Use the actuarial tables instead.

Among 65 year old men, the probability of surviving to 75 is 76%. The probability of surviving to 85 is 39%. The probability of surviving to 95 is 5.9%.

For women, the odds are 84%, 52%, and 12% of getting to 75/85/95, respectively.

Yes, these are higher death rates than at younger ages. But nowhere near what the shape of the population pyramid suggests, where the 85 age cohort is about 1/4 as large as the 65, which misleadingly suggests a probability of 25% of living 20 more years, when the real number is closer to 45%.

That’s the baby boom moving up the chart.

Yes, exactly my point. The boomer generation itself made the population pyramid look different at every stage of its life, which is why the 1980 chart looks so different from the 2023 chart. When you introduce a cohort that has its own slope from birth statistics, the shape of the drop off at 60 is confounded by the preexisting shape of the slope before they entered old age.

So the appropriate method of isolating the variable that shows what you call a “die off” would be to just pull up the actuarial tables that show what percentage of 60, 61, 62 year olds, etc., die that year. Not to compare how many of those there are as a percent of overall population.

You don’t think that 1980 chart has a very different shape? The current chart is almost flat from 20-60, while the 1980 chart is actually pyramid shaped, with the steepness is only slightly sharper past 60. And matches the steepness of the range from 25-50. Nobody talks about a 25-year-old die off.

You’re better off charting the actuarial tables to convey the data you’re trying to talk about (death rates), rather than relying on a stat that is influenced by birth rates and death rates in an opaque way.

That population pyramid is a bit misleading because the baby boom coincides with the ages with the steepest declines. In part, there were significantly fewer people born in 1939 compared to 1959, so you’d expect way more 65 year olds than 85 year olds in 2024.

Yes, the death rate is higher among older people, but the life expectancy of a 60 year old man is still another 20 years.

This reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. Eventually the boy cries wolf too many times, townspeople stop listening to the boy, and stop responding to the cries.

The way we tell it, though, is that the boy is falsely crying wolf each time. And the townspeople eventually learn their lesson and stop responding.

One hypothetical that I always think about is what if the boy is correct each time, and there really is a wolf every time? Well, I think the townspeople would eventually grow numb to the cries and stop responding anyway, and kinda leave the boy to fend for himself because they’re sick of helping him. We’d see the same result even if the boy did nothing wrong.

I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.

“I got into barefoot running but mainly for the savings”

Same with asparagus.

I told the magic mirror a thousand times, I never wanted to meet a girl in person! I just wanted a corpse. You can’t disappoint a corpse! I hate you magic mirror!