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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Over a full career, saving 10% of your salary can allow you to live comfortably in retirement with minimal government pensions. Depends on your overall salary of course, but 10% is a good start. 250 euro a month tucked away in an account that only earns a very mediocre 5% per annum would still have you almost 400k after a 40 year career. Obviously investing more and getting a better return could lead to much much more than that. A 400k annuity at retirement age would basically continue to pay 3k a month for well, as long as you need it.


  • Scientific consensus is that we now recognise and diagnose autism better than ever. Previously children that struggled in school would be labelled as troubled or slow or any number of other things. The thing about autism is that like many other things it is a spectrum, and thus previously many people with mild autism would have just cruised through and been thought of as odd or antisocial. Often when really questioned, people like your parents can think of a few people like this from their school days that might now fit the definition of autism spectrum disorder.

    Also, it’s worth noting that human DNA does not and cannot degrade in any manner you suggest and that kind of reasoning has unscientific and innapropriate connotations that might associate you with very disagreeable groups.



  • We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can’t really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we’d need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we’d have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there’s very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.



  • I use Lemmy and moved here in protest of the Reddit API pricing changes, but I’m not entirely opposed to other forms of social media. I’m aware of the privacy implications of a lot of them, and try to manage my use of them accordingly. I have Instagram and Snapchat etc which I have used for years to keep in touch with friends. 90% of my friends use Facebook messagenger to IM and I think that’s pretty standard in Australia. I can’t justify cutting that many people off for privacy reasons. I understand the privacy implications of using these. It’s a balance. Social media can be bad for mental health, but a lack of social connection can be too. You need to find your own balance.


  • I think AR and VR are actually progressing at a reasonable pace, tech like the apple vision pro and the bigscreen beyond are beginning to converge to a comfortable and powerful experience and AR will be better supported by a platform like the vision pro than by any previous major industrial AI offerings like the hololens. I think in the short term people will move to external compute on a puck worn on the waist much like the battery of the vision pro was but with all or most of the compute power.

    I think BEVs will continue to advance, without even considering a major technological breakthrough I expect they will out-range many ICE vehicles very soon. If solid state truly goes commercial scale it will be even sooner.

    Mobile phones I actually think are stagnating. You’re right that there’s more power in them than necessary these days. Batteries get bigger and cameras get better but not much else changes. Interested to see where they go.








  • In the musical wicked which I suppose is canon and happens at the same time, Glenda reveals to Madame Morrible that the wicked witch of the west will probably show herself if her sister (the wicked witch of the east) is in danger. So Morrible summons the tornado to threaten the sister which coincidentally brings along Dorothy. Glenda secretly was good friends with Elphaba (WWotW) so wouldn’t have intentionally gotten her sister killed. There was a lot of politics and propaganda and stuff, but Glenda wasn’t really a villain, just a vain person who found it easier to support an autocracy. Someone who has read the books could probably explains it all, sorry if I’ve ruined your headcanon!