Friday
Gaashk
3mo ago
Orthodox Pascha aligns with Easter this year. No discount items in stores, but I got Holy Friday off. My daughter had half of last week and all of next week off, since this district is still proud of their Spanish Catholic heritage.
The Orthodox churches flip the Matins and Vespers services, so that Thursday evening is the Holy Friday service, and Friday evening is a funeral, Lamentations. Holy Saturday morning, we are already throwing bay leaves of victory, and focusing on the Descent into Hades icon. "Let all mortal flesh keep silence" replaces the Cherubic Hymn.
I had hoped to bring my 5 year old to Pascha, and she wanted to, but it's been snowing all day, we're up a twisty mountain road, and I'm not up to driving back at 3 am, or staying until sunrise. We've got a fire going, and baked tsoureki together today.
PyotrVerkhovensky
3mo ago
Our Good Friday service is intentionally unsettling. More than most Protestant churches, we lean into iconography and ritual; and at no time more so than during Holy Week.
The service is conducted in darkness; no lights are on in the sanctuary. All crosses in the sanctuary are covered in a black veil. The priests and clergy wear only black.
The clergy process silently; holding aloft the Bible and a shrouded cross. The service begins with a reading from of the Passion from the Gospel of John. The congregation participates: we are the voice of the crowd shouting "crucify him!" and "we have no king but Caesar!".
There is a time of contemplation, where we meditate on the cross. We echo a frame that is more common during Christmas. "O come let us adore him". Yet now we aren't adoring God made flesh; but rather that flesh broken on an instrument of torture. Adore it. For that is what our sin has caused, and what we deserve for our sin.
The music team sings "Ye who think of sin but lightly nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate.". My nine year old quietly sobs beside me. There is no shame in doing so. In the our same row a seminary student with an intricate "Pro Rege" tattoo is weeping as well.
The music ends. A quiet Lords' Prayer is recited, then the clergy recess in silence and darkness. The service is ended. Now must we wait. Easter is coming, but a day of entombed darkness must be endured before the glorious resurrection.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
-
In year 1992, Dorothy dies at age 85. She has no descendants, so her only potential heirs are her two brothers, Yale and Zangwill. The probate judge appoints Zangwill's son John as administrator. Harold, a friend of the family for the past thirty years, submits a family tree to the probate judge and testifies to his personal knowledge that Yale, having been born eleven years before Dorothy, died six years ago at age 90, so Zangwill is Dorothy's only heir. Zangwill renounces his interest in Dorothy's estate in favor of John, so John gets the entire estate. The largest portion of the estate is a piece of real property in New York City, worth 280 k$.
-
John renovates the property. By year 2018, its value has skyrocketed to 2.3 M$, and he decides to sell it. Whoops! A title search reveals that Yale actually died, not six years before Dorothy at age 90, but one year after Dorothy at the unlikely age of 97. This means that Yale should have gotten half of the estate back in 1992. John sues Yale's ultimate heir—a trust set up by Yale's now-dead brother-in-law, presumably for the benefit of the brother-in-law's children—to confirm that John has obtained full ownership of the building through the doctrine of adverse possession. The trust counterclaims, alleging that in 1992 (1) Harold committed fraud by giving false testimony and (2) John breached his fiduciary duty as administrator by failing to conduct a diligent search for heirs (compare the hiring of a professional genealogist in this other case), so adverse possession does not apply.
-
The trial judge rules in John's favor, and the appeals panel and the supreme court affirm.* There is no evidence that Harold did anything but make an honest mistake. And Harold was a disinterested witness who provided both sworn testimony and a family tree, as required by state law, so it was not unreasonable for John to rely on Harold's mistaken facts. John has been in possession of the building for more than twenty years, so he easily meets the ten-year requirement of adverse possession under state law.
-
One justice on the supreme court dissents. He thinks that Harold's unresearched testimony and family tree do not count as the "diligent search" for heirs that the law requires of an estate administrator (and for which the law permits three years of time), and therefore John's reliance on those mistaken facts counts as a breach of fiduciary duy. But the other six justices disagree with this view.
*New York's courts confusingly are named (from lowest to highest) "supreme, appeals, appeals", rather than the "trial, appeals, supreme" pattern that is more familiar. I have translated the New York terminology to regular terminology.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Despair, but hope!
I’ll start with despair. My work situation has been bad. We’ve been dead and so I’ve been dead. I took the service tech position expecting 45hrs a week and daring for 50, and have wound up struggling to hit 35 while riding the clock like a rented mule. The driving remains insane; I’m on pace for 60K miles this year, and oh yeah we’re into week six of a fleetwide maintenance freeze so I haven’t changed the oil (but have added oil out of my personal stash) in 15K miles in my company truck. Our phones were shut off for 8 days, allegedly a coordination issue with the new people who’ve bought us out. I hope (and, cynical as I am, expect) that they’ll make payroll on Friday. I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting. If I’m one of the top techs in the company while barely doing anything and usually failing to hit 40hrs a week, what are the rest doing? I literally cannot afford to continue working this job. Upon telling my (divorced) parents about the job situation, both have offered a rent free place to stay and get back on my feet. I’m glad to have that option, but oof that hurts and I’d have to get rid of my cats (I…uhh…kind of like the little fuckers, and I don’t want to move if I don’t have to.). I’m on the verge of applying to a local box factory. It’ll suck, but if it’s as advertised there’s lots of overtime available.
Let’s move on and give a cheers to hope! I had a round one interview with a trucking company today for a position as a dispatcher and it went well. This lead has been months in the making, but I think we might finally be getting somewhere. The local guy (who I’ve known for years from my time as a bartender and would be my direct supervisor) clearly wants to hire me. He played it cool, sat on my application, and allegedly of the ~80 applications received mine was one of two his boss forwarded his way (better to let it be his boss’ idea to hire me). The way he tells it, I’ve got it in the bag, but of course I’m going to do my best in terms of interview prep and so on. I’m actually interested in the job (Trucking dispatch seems like a logical path forward from all but running a third party food delivery company.), and while I anticipate a learning curve I am confident that I can learn the job and do well. The local guy tells me that he’s dead convinced that I’m the guy for this job and spent more time trying to sell me on the job than interrogating me on my past experience. We’re more than in the right place in terms of compensation. I’m not going to count chickens until I make it and sign an offer letter, but holy shit I’m excited and this might really be my path into something better and a company that I can grow into.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I would argue that it depends. Taken literally, you could not distinguish a hospital aiming to save a fixed fraction of cancer patients and one who tries to save as many of them as possible, given other constraints. An advocate of (C) should default to the fixed fraction model, because it avoids having to ascribe intent to people (which might not even be directly tied to direct financial incentives of individual actors) and the alternative requires a lot of assumptions on what fraction of cancer patients can be saved at a given tech level.
And it is clear that this leads to wrong predictions about what would happen if the hospital got some new tech which saved an additional ten percent. (C) would predict that the survival rate would not increase, because the fixed rate is the goal. Perhaps the doctors all stop working Friday afternoon to compensate, instead, people preferring free time to work is a well supported finding.
My (B) like model of the hospital can take into account the fundamental motivations of people who work in health care as well as the outcomes and direct incentives of the actors. It is much more complex and relies on a lot of assumptions, but I would argue that it is likely to outperform (C) models.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I'm an FFXIV player. I only get my geopolitical analysis from horny anime girls and gay bunny boys.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Since it's Holy Week this week, it might be worth visiting a service if it's feasible -- Friday evening (Lamentations), Saturday Morning (Descent into Hell), and Saturday night (Pascha) are all highlights, but next Sunday is also very Paschal and lovely.
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
We had a death in the family recently. It will be a simple funeral - a viewing, a cremation, and a burial of her ashes. I chuckled a bit when the funeral home asked us for a DVD for the photo slideshow during the ceremony. It got me thinking - how is AI technology and AR/VR going to change the future of the funeral industry?
Imagine that an AI avatar was trained on voice recordings, videos, photos, and text of the deceased. You visit the cemetery with your family and you all don the VR goggles, stepping into the living room of grandma's house. She's tending to the garden and her avatar ad-libs about her tomatoes and the recent weather. Just as you remembered from a few years ago before she had to go into the nursing home.
If you've seen the incredible improvements in image and video generation in the last 2-3 years, as well as the improvements in text-to-speech (see a previous Friday Fun thread post that I shared) you'll probably agree with me that this is something we'll see in our lifetime. Yes, we'll have a period of uncanny valley, but when it's fully ironed out, there will be a convincing digital copy of ourselves floating in the ether.
Everyone spends some time chatting with grandma then she excuses herself to take the cookies out of the oven. You decide it's about time to grab lunch with the family and say goodbye for now.
The funeral home charges you for the disposable insert in the VR goggles that soaks up your tears.
No_one
3mo ago
Book subthread
(I hope nobody minds but until there's a script that automatically posts a book subthread I'm just gonna go and do it on every future friday thread)
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4mo ago
Is this Friday Fun?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
How about some more immigration news? Just today the Supreme Court of the United States issued a per curiam opinion in Trump v. J. G. G., et al. This is the case about the two planes of individuals deported under the Alien Enemies Act. The ruling is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the court rules that the Plaintiffs can't sue under the Administrative Procedure Act and instead must file habeas petitions to get relief. On the other hand the court also rules that determinations of whether the AEA applies to an individual are subject to judicial review and individuals have to be given an opportunity to seek that review:
More specifically, in this context, AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.
The decision is technically 5-4 because Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Barrett would have left the TRO in place and allowed Plaintiffs to proceed under the APA rather than requiring habeas. All 9 agree that judicial review is available and that prospective deportees under the AEA must have the opportunity to seek it, the disagreement is about how. Whether detainees will be able to practically use that opportunity remains to be seen. Steve Vladeck, as always, has a good write up.
On thing missing in the court's ruling, though, is any mention of the ~270 individuals already deported under the act. Certainly without the kind of review the court orders today. The courts decision implies this was a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights but does not actually say anything directly about them. Can they file habeas petitions in the United States to be returned? If the government can get you out of the country is that it? There is some precedent (arising from the Guantanamo Bay detainees) that people held in a foreign country on behalf of the United States can still pursue relief in US courts. Maybe that will end up being the remedy.
We can also return to Abrego Garcia v. Noem. I made a post about it last week and quite a lot has happened since then, including today. Last Friday the judge in that case ordered:
1. Plaintiff's Motion (ECF No. 6), construed as one for preliminary injunctive relief, is GRANTED;
2. Defendants are hereby ORDERED to facilitate and effectuate the return of Plaintiff Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7, 2025;
The judge issued her opinion supporting the order on Sunday. The government appealed and a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's request for a stay. The circuit court's opinion pretty directly raises some of the concerns I mentioned in my post:
More importantly, the Government cannot be permitted to ignore the Fifth Amendment, deny due process of law, and remove anyone it wants, simply because it claims the victims of its lawlessness are members of a gang. Nor can the Government be permitted to disclaim any ability to return those it has wrongfully removed by citing their physical presence in a foreign jurisdiction. This is a slippery -- and dangerous -- constitutional slope. If due process is of no moment, what is stopping the Government from removing and refusing to return a lawful permanent resident or even a natural born citizen?
The government then appealed to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roberts granted an administrative stay.
The cases are not exactly the same. The Venezuelans in the J.G.G. case were at least arguably deported pursuant to a lawful authority. Even the government concedes Abrego Garcia's deportation was entirely unlawful. Still, it would be a surprise for there to be relief for the Venezuelan's deported (arguably) in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights but not for Abrego Garcia who certainly was.
These proceedings do little to assuage my concerns with the system. If you are a US citizen and get kidnapped to a prison in El Salvador and the remedy is "hire a US lawyer to file a habeas petition for you" that seems not great! Pretty bad!
If the US government actually abides by SCOTUS' order that means mass deportation via the AEA is likely dead. You're talking about individual cases in front of an Article 3 judge with all the appeals that entails for every individual you want to deport.
gakles
4mo ago
I had a little party this Friday and woke up to find that someone had stepped on my macbook. I'm partially to blame for this, I shouldn't have left it on the ground (albeit in a room that was supposed to be locked, under my bed) and I don't think anyone will fess up, most likely because they won't remember doing so. Regardless, the tiny 5 millimeter indent on the edge of the case by the webcam managed to strike some sort of achilles heel and almost the entire screen is now non-functional, save a small sliver at the top. This allows me to screen mirror to my ipad (and is how I'm writing this post).
I spent all of yesterday trying to find a place that could fix the screen and found out that nobody in a 1-hour radius has the apple approved replacement for my screen in stock (Small college town in bumfuck nowhere). The nearest Apple store says the screen will be $500, with a $100 labor charge. The compounding issue to all of this is that I don't have a car, and ubers to the medium sized city (an hour away) are like $80 for a one way trip. This means that going to the Apple store adds $160 to anything they do. In fact, it's even worse than this, because they only do overnight repairs, meaning I would have to go to the city, drop off the computer, and then come back the next day to pick it up. The other option is the local computer repair shop, which is only 10 minutes away by bike. However, they are charging an $600 for the screen, and I'm not sure how much for the labor.
Right now, I'll probably go with the ~$700 local process, because it saves me time and is cheaper overall. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
4mo ago
It's Friday and spring turning into summer soon. Grandads turning 92 today and it's quite fun.
Which brings me to Kanye West. I recently went through his album graduation and it's the single best piece of hip hop I've heard, I dislike rap music in general but he's quite good.
Also likely to get drunk tonight. What is the liquor of choice for mottizens? Here are some things I enjoy though I rarely drink
- Sparkling Wine
- Shoju, the sparkling flavorful Korean thing
- Irish Cream, I usually make it at home, thought about adding fruit to it
In other news, Zvi recently wrote a piece praising the new gemini models, my friend who Co works with me works at a well run startup and he got fed up when all the paid llms he used couldn't generate decent python code, he tried gemini and it failed just as hard. I really like Zvi but I do feel that there's a little unwarranted hype behind models.
Every other month I hear smart successful people tell me that the new model will change the world and make devs obsolete, yet they still struggle with a lot of stuff.
And you believed them when they said this is about specifically about Tariffs and definitely not because of volatility in the stock market or because this Friday is the new quarter?
This is "optics" pure and simple.
Dr. Self_made_human, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb LLM
[Context: I'm a doctor from India who has recently begun his career in psychiatry in the UK]
I’m an anxious person. Not, I think, in the sense of possessing an intrinsically neurotic personality – medicine tends to select for a certain baseline conscientiousness often intertwined with neuroticism, and if anything, I suspect I worry less than circumstance often warrants. Rather, I’m anxious because I have accumulated a portfolio of concrete reasons to be anxious. Some are brute facts about the present, others probabilistic spectres looming over the future. I’m sure there exist individuals of stoic temperament who can contemplate the 50% likelihood of their profession evaporating under the silicon gaze of automation within five years, or entertain a 20% personal probability of doom from AI x-risk, without breaking a sweat. I confess, I am not one of them.
All said and done, I think I handle my concerns well. Sure, I'm depressed, but that has very little to do with any of the above, beyond a pervasive dissatisfaction with life in the UK, when compared to where I want to be. It's still an immense achievement, I beat competition ratios that had ballooned to 9:1 (0.7 when I first began preparing), I make far more money (a cure for many ailments), and I have an employment contract that insulates me to some degree from the risk of being out on my ass. The UK isn't ideal, but I still think it beats India (stiff competition, isn't it?).
It was on a Friday afternoon, adrift in the unusual calm following a week where my elderly psychiatric patients had behaved like absolute lambs, leaving me with precious little actual work to do, that I decided to grapple with an important question: what is the implicit rate at which I, self_made_human, CT1 in Psychiatry, am willing to exchange my finite time under the sun for money?
We’ve all heard the Bill Gates anecdote – spotting a hundred-dollar bill, the time taken to bend over costs more in passive income than the note itself. True, perhaps, yet I suspect he’d still pocket it. Habits forged in the crucible of becoming the world’s richest man, especially the habit of not refusing practically free money, likely die hard. My own history with this calculation was less auspicious. Years ago, as a junior doctor in India making a pittance, an online calculator spat out a figure suggesting my time was worth a pitiful $3 an hour, based on my willingness to pay to skip queues or take taxis. While grimly appropriate then (and about how much I was being paid to show up to work), I knew my price had inflated since landing in the UK. The NHS, for all its faults, pays better than that. But how much better? How much did I truly value my time now? Uncertain, I turned to an interlocutor I’d recently found surprisingly insightful: Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.
The AI responded not with answers, but with questions, probing and precise. My current salary? Hours worked (contracted vs. actual)? The minimum rate for sacrificing a weekend to the locum gods? The pain threshold – the hourly sum that would make me grind myself down to the bone? How did I spend my precious free time (arguing with internet strangers featured prominently, naturally)? And, crucially, how did I feel at the end of a typical week?
On that last point, asked to rate my state on the familiar 1-to-10 scale – a reductive system, yes, but far from meaningless – the answer was a stark ‘3’. Drained. Listless yet restless. This wasn't burnout from overwork; paradoxically, my current placement was the quietest I’d known. Two, maybe five hours of actual work on a typical day, often spent typing notes or sitting through meetings. The rest was downtime, theoretically for study or portfolio work (aided significantly by a recent dextroamphetamine prescription), but often bleeding into the same web-browsing I’d do at home. No, the ‘3’ stemmed from elsewhere, for [REDACTED] reasons. While almost everything about my current situation is a clear upgrade from what came before, I have to reconcile it with the dissonance of hating the day-to-day reality of this specific job. A living nightmare gilded with objective fortune.
My initial answers on monetary thresholds reflected this internal state. A locum shift in psych? Minimum £40/h gross to pique interest. The hellscape of A&E? £100/h might just about tempt me to endure it. And the breaking point? North of £200/h, I confessed, would have me work until physical or mental collapse intervened.
Then came the reality check. Curious about actual locum rates, I asked a colleague. "About £40-45 an hour," he confirmed, before delivering the coup de grâce: "...but that’s gross. After tax, NI, maybe student loan... you’re looking at barely £21 an hour net." Abysmal. Roughly my standard hourly rate, maybe less considering the commute. Why trade precious recovery time for zero effective gain? The tales of £70-£100/hr junior locums felt like ancient history, replaced by rate caps, cartel action in places like London, and an oversupply of doctors grateful just to have a training number.
This financial non-incentive threw my feelings into sharper relief. The guilt started gnawing. Here I was, feeling miserable in a job that was, objectively, vastly better paid and less demanding than my time in India, or the relentless decades my father, a surgeon, had put in. His story – a penniless refugee fleeing genocide, building a life, a practice, a small hospital, ensuring his sons became doctors – weighed heavily. He's in his 60s now, recently diagnosed with AF, still back to working punishing hours less than a week after diagnosis. My desire to make him proud was immense, matched only by the desperate wish that he could finally stop, rest, enjoy the security he’d fought so hard to build. How could I feel so drained, so entitled to 'take it easy', when he was still hustling? Was my current 'sloth', my reluctance to grab even poorly paid extra work, a luxury I couldn't afford, a future regret in the making?
The AI’s questions pushed further, probing my actual finances beyond the initial £50k estimate. Digging into bank statements and payslips revealed a more complex, and ultimately more reassuring, picture. Recent Scottish pay uplifts and back pay meant my average net monthly income was significantly higher than initially expected. Combined with my relatively frugal lifestyle (less deliberate austerity, more inertia), I was saving over 50% of my income almost effortlessly. This was immense fortune, sheer luck of timing and circumstance.*
It still hit me. The sheer misery. Guilt about earning as much as my father with 10% the effort. Yet more guilt stemming from the fact that I turned up my nose at locum rates that would have had people killing to grab them, when my own financial situation seemed precarious. A mere £500 for 24 hours of work? That's more than many doctors in India make in a month.
I broke down. I'm not sure if I managed to hide this from my colleague, I don't think I succeeded, but he was either oblivious or too awkward to say anything. I needed to call my dad, to tell him I love him, that now I understand what he's been through for my sake.
I did that. Work had no pressing hold on me. I caught him at the end of his office hours, surgeries dealt with, a few patients still hovering around in the hope of discussing changes or seeking follow-up. I haven't been the best son, and I call far less than I ought to, so he evidently expected something unusual. I laid it all out, between sobbing breaths. How much he meant to me, how hard I aspired to make him proud. It felt good, if you're the kind to bottle up your feelings towards your parents, then don't. They grow old and they die, that impression of invincibility and invulnerability is an illusion. You can hope that your love and respect were evident from your actions, but you can never be sure. Even typing this still makes me seize up.
He handled it well. He made time to talk to me, and instead of mere emotional reassurance (not that it's not important), he did his best to tell me why things might not be as dire as I feared. They're arguments that would fit easily into this forum, and are ones I've heard before. I'm not cutting my dad slack because he's a typical Indian doctor approaching retirement, not steeped in the same informational milieu as us, dear reader, yet he did make a good case. And, as he told me, if things all went to shit, then all of us would be in the shit together. Misery loves company. (I think you can see where I get some of my streak of black humor)
All of these arguments were priced in, but it did help. I can only aspire towards perfect rationality and equipoise, I'm a flawed system trying to emulate a better one in my own head. I pinned him on the crux of my concern: There are good reasons that I'm afraid of being unemployed and forced to limp back home, to India, the one place that'll probably have me if I'm not eligible for gainful employment elsewhere. Would I be okay, would I survive? I demanded answers.
His answer bowled me over. It's not a sum that would raise eyebrows, and might be anemic for financially prudent First Worlders by the time they're reaching retirement. Yet for India? Assuming that money didn't go out of fashion, it was enough, he told me (and I confirmed), most of our assets could be liquidated to support the four of us comfortably for decades. Not a lavish lifestyle, but one that wouldn't pinch. That's what he'd aimed for, he told me. He never tried to keep up with the Joneses, not when worse surgeons drove flashier cars, keeping us well below the ceiling that his financial prudence could allow. I hadn't carpooled to school because we couldn't afford better, it was because my dad thought the money was better spent elsewhere. Not squandered, but saved for a rainy day. And oh brother (or sister), I expect some heavy rain.
The relief was instantaneous, visceral. A crushing weight lifted. The fear of absolute financial ruin, of failing to provide for my family or myself, receded dramatically. But relief’s shadow was immediate and sharp: guilt, intensified. Understanding the sheer scale of that safety net brought home the staggering scale of my father’s lifetime of toil and sacrifice. My 'hardships' felt utterly trivial in comparison. Maybe, if I'm a lucky man, I will have a son who thinks of me the way I look up to my dad. That would be a big ask, I'd need to go from the sum I currently have to something approaching billionaire status to have ensured the same leap ahead in social and financial status. Not happening, but I think I'm on track to make more than I spend.**
So many considerations and sacrifices my parents had to make for me are ones I don't even need to consider. I don't have to pickup spilled chillies under the baking sun to flip for a profit. I don't have to grave-rob a cemetery (don't ask). Even in a world that sees modest change, compared to transformational potential, I don't see myself needing to save for my kid's college. We're already waking up to the fact that, with AI only a few generations ahead of GPT-4, that the whole thing is being reduced to a credentialist farce. Soon it might eliminate the need for those credentials.
With this full context – the demanding-yet-light job leaving me drained, the dismal net locum rates, my surprisingly high current income and savings, the existential anxieties buffered by an extremely strong family safety net, and the complex weight of gratitude and guilt towards my father – the initial question about my time/money exchange rate could finally be answered coherently.
Chasing an extra £50k net over 5 years would mean sacrificing ~10 hours of vital recovery time every week for 5 years, likely worsening my mental health and risking burnout severe enough to derail my entire career progression, all for a net hourly rate barely matching my current one. That £50k, while a significant boost to my personal savings, would be a marginal addition to the overall family safety net. The cost-benefit analysis was stark.***
The journey, facilitated by Gemini’s persistent questioning, hadn't just yielded a number. It had forced me to confront the tangled interplay of my financial reality, my psychological state, my family history, and my future fears. It revealed that my initial reluctance to trade time for money wasn't laziness or ingratitude, but a rational response to my specific circumstances.
(Well, I'm probably still lazy, but I'm not lacking in gratitude)
Prioritizing my well-being, ensuring sustainable progress through training, wasn't 'sloth'; it was the most sensible investment I could make. The greatest luxury wasn't avoiding work, but having the financial security – earned through my own savings and my father’s incredible sacrifice – to choose not to sacrifice my well-being for diminishing returns. The anxiety remains, perhaps, but the path forward feels clearer, paved not with frantic accumulation, but with protected time and sustainable effort. I'll make more money every year, and my dad's lifelong efforts to enforce a habit of frugality means I can't begin to spend it faster than it comes in. I can do my time, get my credentials while they mean something, take risks, and hope for the best while preparing for the worst.
They say the saddest day in your life is the one the one where your parents picked you up as a child, groaned at the effort, and never did so again. While they can't do it literally without throwing their backs, my parents are still carrying me today. Maybe yours are too. Call them. ****
If you've made it this far, then I'm happy to disclose that I've finally made a Substack. USSRI is now open to all comers. This counts as the inaugural post.
*I've recently talked to people concerned about AI sycophancy. Do yourself a favor and consider switching to Gemini 2.5. It noted the aberrant spike in my income, and raised all kinds of alarms about potential tax errors. I'm happy to say that there were benign explanations, but it didn't let things lie without explanation.
**India is still a very risky place to be in a time of automation-induced unemployment. It's a service economy, and many of the services it provides, like Sams with suspicious accents, or code-monkeys for TCS, are things that could be replaced today. The word is getting out. The outcome won't be pretty. Yet the probabilities are disjunctive, P(I'm laid off and India burns) is still significantly lower than P(I'm laid off), even if the two are likely related. There are also competing concerns that mean that make financial forecasting fraught. Will automation cause a manufacturing boom and impose strong deflationary pressures that make consumer goods cheaper, faster than salaries are depressed? Will the world embrace UBI?
***Note that a consistent extra ten hours of locum work a week is approaching pipe-dream status. There are simply too many doctors desperate for any job.
****That was a good way to end the body of the essay. That being said, I am immensely impressed by Gemini's capabilities and its emotional tact. It asked good questions, gave good answers, handled my rambling tear-streaked inputs with grace. I can see the thoughts in its LLM head, or at least the ones that it's been trained to output. I grimly chuckled when I could see it cogitating over the same considerations I'd have when seeing a human patient with a real problem, but an unproductive response. I made sure to thank it too, not that I think that actually matters. I'm afraid, that of all the people who've argued with me in an effort to dispel my concerns about the future, the entity that managed to actually help me discharge all that pent-up angst was a chatbot (and my dad, of course). The irony isn't lost on me, but when psychiatrists are obsolete, at least their replacements will be very good at the job.
@Throwaway05 , since I promised to ping you
In a tangent of a reply over the in the Culture War thread I pointed out that in the States, the poor don't fund opera on behalf of the rich in any significant way, (because the poor don't really pay net taxes) and opera funding here, unlike in Europe, doesn't significantly come from the government. There's now a pretty even split between ticket revenue and philanthropy, so a better rephrase of the relationship I was critiquing is that the very, very rich pick up half the tab for middle and upper-middle class Americans to go see opera. I also added that as a Conservative, for me, this philanthropy is a double-edged sword. It keeps live opera going in America. But also, there is a predicable set of politics that tend to accompany MFA holders, who are put in charge of awarding grants and commissions to MFA holders, so MFA holders are writing operas for MFA holders, and as a result opera becomes even less of a popular living art form, and as a living art form gets trapped in an artistic ghetto. I noted that whatever friends and acquaintances I've successfully evangelized have taken an interest in exposure to famous pieces from the past, and not anything from an opera written by a living composer. I'd mentioned Puccini's Nessun Dorma aria from Turandot, and Donizetti's Cheti Cheti/Aspetta duet from Don Pasquale, as examples of beautiful & melodic, or comedically-fun & melodic examples that today's audiences still love, but would be seen as gauche by the MFA holders awarding grants and commissions.
@VoxelVexillologist asked if I could provide links to pieces like the latter as entry points for someone new to opera, and @KingOfTheBailey seconded and asked for a top-level post. The Friday fun thread seems a good place. Here was my reply to Voxel:
I'll start with the two pieces already mentioned.
A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.
In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!
This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.
Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.
This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.
There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).
And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.
Stellula
4mo ago
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
I don't know what your wife or children or the general situation is like. Does she have a space she can go to and read a book or do something quietly? Do you? When do you have time to write on a message board?
On work-days my wife shares child care duties with her mother, and I sometimes drop in after work to take the kid out of depressed-couchbound-woman-land to hit the playground. When the child is in Kindergarten, my wife has half the day free to do as she please. And then she has pretty much the entire weekend off - seriously. Sometimes she does some light household work, but mostly she just cooks and then nothing. - , and from Friday evening to Sunday sleepytime it's dad time for as long as the kid is awake. She's pretty much like your older daughter: demanding of attention, always has her mind set on an activity or topic of conversation and tolerates no deviation from that, and can get very angry if she doesn't get her way. I guess that's how she keeps busy during weekdays, when everyone around her is trying as hard as they can to stare at their phones and forget their physical existence. On the weekends I make it very clear that it's dad-time. She gets attention all day long, no distractions, but she needs to play by Dad rules, which means no sweets, no screens, no screaming, being outdoors whenever possible and we get some chores done during the day. It works. We both have a good time, get things done, and for all that she gets to talk my ears off about volcanoes and the TV shows she watches with her mother and whatever imaginary game ruleset she just invented for the umptenth time in a day, but she has to do so while we get groceries, clean up the living room, or take a walk to check on what flowers are growing this time of the year, and sometimes those activities even break through and grab her attention and the topic of conversation shifts to what we're doing.
I have time to post on messageboards either after getting her to sleep, at which point I should be sleeping myself, or during work-days. Such as now.
I'll readily grant that our situations are not comparable. My observation is simply this: Trying to run and hide from the child to stare at a screen instead makes people miserable. Maybe alter the structure of your days or week to make a little room for yourself? Get your husband to take the kids for a while?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
If they're light and fun, that's what Fridays are for.
If they're personal, they probably fit into the Wellness Wednesday thread broadly construed.
If they're neither fun nor personal, then such a thread would probably devolve into low-effort driveby rageposting of "thing I saw on the internet pissed me off" and "fuck my stupid outgroup" level stuff that would rapidly enshittify the forum.
I believe what you are looking for is the 2013 indie game Proteus. There is no extrinsic goal or gamification at all, and the entire point of the game is to wander around a large procedurally generated world with strange fauna and sights to see. It's a world made solely so the player can explore it.
I share your sentiments about this by the way - I find that many open worlds have so many gamified elements and nudge you in the right direction so much that it barely even feels free anymore. Sure, you can deviate from the main quest markers if you want to have some fun, but you always know you're going to be returning to the main story, and the world is generally such a content desert that it barely gives incentive to explore. Sure, you can circumvent the quest markers and skip major sections of the story, but you'd only do that on a first playthrough if you want to have a significantly worse experience and miss most of the properly fleshed-out content in the game. This was my exact issue with Breath of the Wild - it felt very gamified and on-rails, and the open world not only seemed irrelevant but was also fairly unrewarding. And don't even get me started on the goddamn weapon durability system.
Games like Proteus are also empty. But games that are explicitly all about exploration and vibes get away with liminality and emptiness better than stuff that tries to meld it with a plot and a combat system and collectibles does. The latter frames itself in a goal-driven way which leads you to approach its open world in the same manner, the former does not. This is why "gamifying" open worlds barely ever works.
Game subthread.
Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4mo ago
I slightly regret mentioning it now, because as you are about to see it makes me very shirty. I had to do a ridiculous amount of heavy lifting because of it, because every woman I know owns a hundred curios and sculptures and pots that weigh twice their body weight scattered haphazardly around their backyards. Just kidding, I am happy to bitch about this and I was happy to help, because my friends were out of their minds with worry (two of them even called me in tears asking for help) but it was a frustrating waste of effort I could have put towards my primary hobby, avoiding other people.
See, Cyclone Alfred hit South East Queensland two weeks ago, and while I know internationally the news barely covered it, if you were listening to the local news the week preceding it, it was the end of days. And the media weren't alone in their teeth gnashing - the state government and most local governments were very excited to deal with a catastrophe whether it was coming or not, and people who worked for the bureau of meteorology were guaranteeing it would be a disaster on the radio. Meanwhile social media was about ten percent bogans (Aussie word for rednecks) saying things like "don't cyclones usually follow a week plus of rain, don’t they need that kind of weather to build up?" and "if it's only category 2 now won't that mean it will be category 1 once it hits land and starts to dissipate?" and "of course it's a good idea to stock up and make sure you and your house are secure, but this cyclone doesn't look like it warrants things like the fistfight over toilet paper I watched two ladies engage in earlier today" (or maybe 9% that and 1% actual bogans screaming that it was made up entirely) and ninety percent conniptions at these fucking bogans telling people not to panic.
The Monday prior to Alfred making landfall it was claimed it was a category 4 cyclone - the second most powerful type - that would hit within days, with reminders attached that cyclone Tracy was a category 5 and it destroyed Darwin in 74. As a consequence, on Tuesday there was no packaged water or toilet paper (Australians are still obsessed with hoarding toilet paper) in any shops and there were 5 hour long queues for sandbags in some areas. However the cyclone was downgraded to category 2 and was now expected to hit Thursday morning.
By Wednesday the ports were closed and a lot of trucking operations were placed on hold, so there was nothing in the shops at all - no fresh produce, no meat, no milk bread or eggs - if you hadn't stocked up you were living off tinned spaghetti (all the baked beans and braised steak were gone), creamed corn and jerky.
Thursday morning the state was basically shut down. Schools were closed, public transport was shut off and people were told to avoid driving if possible. About one in four supermarkets stayed open - the rest closed - and hospitals started sending people home if it wasn't medically necessary to keep them admitted. The cyclone wouldn't hit until Friday now, the reports said, but due to the warm water it was now passing over it could potentially turn into a category 3 cyclone, so whatever prep you did you better make sure it's good! (Some suggestions Facebook offered preppers were things like put any extra sandbags you have on your roof to hold it in place, or grab your wheelie bin, give it a wash, and then take it into the bathroom and fill it with water - then you have extra water! Various mayors then had to put out statements begging people not to do anything like that.)
Friday hits and now Alfred has been pushed back to Saturday, and by Friday afternoon it has been downgraded to a category 1 - but it is really slow, so it might be even worse because it will just hang around fucking shit up! The only supermarket within walking distance of my place that is still open has to shut at 2:30 in the afternoon because they don't have any stock. A reporter is made to look foolish after doing a report on flooding next to a flooded area that turns out to be a large puddle when a car drives through it. She still assumes the moral high ground on the issue though, somehow.
Saturday felt like we were back in the covid lockdown. The streets were completely empty and service stations were open, but nothing else. Alfred finally made landfall but aside from lost power and minor flooding in places, Brisbane was pretty much unscathed. Having heard that it caused flooding and power outages on the Gold Coast (The city just south of Brisbane) I travelled down to help clean up the school my Saturday market is held at, but it hadn't been touched either. I ended up just helping some friends who live down that way whose house had flooded.
In the end Alfred was closer to a wet fart than a cyclone for many in South East Queensland, but the establishment were really really hoping it would be a disaster closer to the 2011 floods if not cyclone Tracy. In their eagerness they generated a preposterous amount of stress and unrest, and due to the aforementioned tempered rebelliousness there wasn't a way to dial it back. Anyone who tried was instantly declared a bogan who wants to watch the world burn, even if they just helped you unnecessarily move bunch of stupid shit you shouldn't own. Even after it was over people were getting torn to shreds in Facebook community pages and reddit if they complained about the over hyping - the fact that some places were hit was used to suggest panic was a sensible response. Nobody is demanding consequences yet, but the amount of grumbling going on is off the charts.
Tldr: It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia S07E06 The Storm of the Century but with Aussie accents.
Fake edit: this is the motte so I know where this is going - no I'm not saying nobody should have bothered doing anything and this whole thing thing was a conspiracy to drive up woolworths stock price or something. It is always sensible to secure your belongings and to stock up on essentials in a storm. And its path was unpredictable, and even if the cyclone itself doesn't hit you, the flooding that follows it follows a completely different pattern. But panic never helps and the way the media hyped it was flagrantly irresponsible. In a sane world they would be flogged, but in this one I assume they all got promotions. And while some of the local governments handled it well (Logan city's mayor was a welcome beacon of common sense in a sea of insanity), many others ran about like beheaded chickens. That 5 hour wait for sandbags? That was because the complicated system they had set up to fill sandbags broke down constantly and was just shitty when it did work. The worst part though? They had to keep using it that day because they didn't have any shovels.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
4mo ago
I saw her comment a few weeks ago too about laundromats. Haven't seen what she writes on CW stuff since I've been inactive internet usage.
My favorite threads are Friday ones besides the CW.
This is almost exactly the Good Friday liturgy in my Catholic parish. Though we all come forward to line up and personally adore the cross how we see fit, typically touching it, offering a prayer, and making the sign of the cross.
More options
Context Copy link