insert nurgas here

Vaporizing THC, hot tub/rock band/cuddling seemed like, and were, a great, relaxing way to spend my Friday night. But the slack seems to have spilled over and destroyed my Saturday productivity :(. I've been lying around reading Less Wrong etc, when I had lots of home organization I wanted to get done. Feeling tired and unmotivated...well, I guess tired captures all of it.

Oh well, time to go run a work errand, that's productive at least.

great article, via Less Wrong:

The yelling isn't just disproportionate to the behavior, it has nothing to do with the behavior. She's angry about other things, but she's yelling about the milk.

The kid has learned nothing about good and bad behavior. In fact, they've learned that "bad behaviors" merit only calm discussion, while things that annoy Mom or Dad are met with wrath.

Watch your kid: are they more terrified of your reaction when they are caught in a lie, or when they accidentally knock over a glass?

The natural thing to do would be to yell about bad behavior ("did you push that boy on the playground?!?!") and be calmly annoyed when they spill milk. But.

But that doesn't happen, because the parent isn't being honest.

Had no idea until just now that an unusual house Heinlein designed w/ his wife, and built himself, was to be found in Scotts Valley. It's the round one on this Google Map. Here are pictures of the house.

If you feel like giving away some money, The Heinlein Society has a program to re-introduce RAH's juveniles to public libraries. Seems like a good idea to me - I know I was influenced by reading him growing up.

Well, not really, but apparently his popularization of the concept prevented the inventor of the modern waterbed from getting a patent! Le Wik:

A form of waterbed was invented in the early 1800s by the Scottish physician Neil Arnott...Dr. William Hooper of Portsmouth, England, patented a waterbed in 1883. He devised it to relieve bed sore pains in his patients. Unable to contain the water and control its temperature, his invention was a market failure.

The modern waterbed was created by Charles Hall in 1968, while he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California. Fellow SFSU students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes also contributed to the concept. Hall originally wanted to make an innovative chair. His first prototype was a vinyl bag with 300 pounds (136 kg) of cornstarch, but the result was uncomfortable. He next attempted to fill it with Jell-O, but this too was a failure.[citation needed] Ultimately, he abandoned working on a chair, and settled on perfecting a bed. However, because a waterbed is described in the novels Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Hall was unable to obtain a patent on his creation.

• 18:55 Guess who is the new model for Splat!'s "Pink Fetish" hair color packaging?!? www.splathaircolor.com/kits.html #
• 20:41 @indigothirdeye - LOL "Free Used Area Rugs!" is the new "Free Porn!" #
• 20:45 I was considering getting a new phone, but this old Jedi dude convinced me that "The Droid is not what I'm looking for." #badjoke #
• 22:22 @MetaGrrrl Thank you! Luckily, the pink path is very forgiving. :) #
• 22:34 I just snapped this pic, snpp.me/2cn check it out! #snappme #
• 23:03 @Clintus - Ha! This one is rawking just for you: snpp.me/2co #
• 04:01 had an awesome time at the abraxasdragon.com fundraiser. Damn, there are some sexy people shining their lights with amazing vibrations. #

Recently in a Q&A Mark Shuttleworth was asked the following questions:

12:31 <@akgraner> QUESTION how important is having a diverse group of contributors (women & minority folks) to solving Bug #1?
12:31 <+sabdfl> not especially, but it makes the project more interesting
12:31 <+sabdfl> next
….
12:57 <@jcastro> FOLLOW-UP QUESTION – did you just say that primarily white dudes are able to address the solving of Bug #1? Women & minorities just make it more interesting? Please clarify.
12:58 <+sabdfl> MarkDude, if you think i can’t see a baited trap from this close, you’re mistaken
12:59 <+sabdfl> i said that having diversity in the project is a wonderful goal. but it’s no more a requirement to fix bug #1 than it is a requirement to do most other things. fundamentalism is something i despise, and that goes for overdone activism too.

Current Music: System of a Down - Hollywood

• 12:53 @jonjanego If any of my friends wanted to pony up $19M to induce bygones into being bygones, I'd consider that pretty friendly :) #
• 18:50 @sfoak If you're not using them, what's your size? I can always use another pair :&gt; #
• 18:52 @robey Lousy inconsiderate dead people =z #
• 19:03 @csoghoian Think positive! When you need to worry, they usually skip the postcards. #

and Build Thine Own.

Meta that world.

Welcome thyself to Space.

Take a Knee in the privacy
of Thine Shrine
and
Praise Thine Gifts
He
gave you.

What started as a Vision
I started,
mine Brethren
will Finish
without me.

From Sperm to Spam King to Spamtec to Spaceship;
know your place
and
Play Your Part (Sweet Jones).

Money on the Dresser,
drive a Spaceship 7XL (Not yet invented) utilizing an Alcubierre drive (559-STC Mark V Model) with Roor-inspired chambers of Greatness Spacetime Compressor.

I'm heading back to vegas for the first time since god knows when. Having both jeff shulman and phil ivey at the final table was too good to pass up. Look for me in the crowd holding up a banner: "I NAMED MY KID AFTER PHIL IVEY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SIGN."

• 21:11 Anyone else find twitter @replying to be too public & kinda stressful - but replying to an update on Facebook is not? #
• 21:17 Maybe I'm just @tweet-shy. (Like "pee-shy" but without the urinal.) #
• 22:13 I just found out the World Series is over. Congratulations to all the sporting athletes! #

• 05:03 RT @oxbloodruffin: Reading: "Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Show Just How Much It Knows About you" (twitthis.com/np428s) #
• 08:41 @google Why did many Twitter users beat Google to tweeting this? twitpic.com/odcko #
• 16:11 ln-s.net/4X9l - "Christ Died For OUR PRICES!" == the best use of home printing EVER. Beats out counterfeiting & pr0n. #
• 16:25 Making this a good time to ask — WTF did safeway sell me? twitpic.com/of4qj #
• 23:02 @sdmx How awful. Send pics. #
• 23:03 @LostTokens Puppies. It'll totally be puppies. #

Marc Andreesen's thoughts on dual-class stock structures like the NYT and (more recently) Google, where some shareholders have control, and others just share in the profits.

I was hoping to stay home while Shannon went to India for IVF, sending my "contribution" as a frozen specimen. But she has argued convincingly[1] that the risk of bipolar issues is too high (which is totally reasonable - it wasn't a problem in Panama, but that's no guarantee it wont' be this time), so I'm going to come along.

I'm kinda sad, b/c I am very unexcited about going to India, and I was looking forward to having some "bachelor time". But I will try to get over it and focus on the positive aspects - getting to see a country I've never seen, "honeymoon time" (that's what I call vacations w/ Shannon but not Tovar, we'll leave him w/ Shannon's parents), isolation at a convenient time to work a lot on the seasteading book (when other people are gone for the holidays, etc.)

If anyone knows interesting people in Hyderabad, or has advice about what to see there, let me know. It will be approx Dec 15th - Dec 31st. Oh, I think we get to stop in Bangkog or Singapore, and I've been wanting to see Singapore for awhile now, so that makes the trip more exciting. Maybe I can visit carlcoryell? And there are surely interesting people who I could network with there related to seasteading...

[1] Random language/thinking note: I originally wrote this as "she has decided", but it just sat wrong with me as disempowering language, putting the whole weight of the decision on her, when really it was a consensus decision, although based mainly on her perspective. This may seem like a trivial point, but the difference in perspective between "someone else decided and I have to go along" and "someone else convinced me this was the right decision" is far from trivial. It's actually quite an important part of living a happy and effective life, in my opinion.

Just to get by, try to stay high
it's a good life, end of discussion
and the hours like sand, holes in my hand
I'm a good soul
Martyr me

...
Case of my crime: a lack of my time
it's a roadblock, needed catharsis
Patience is spent
A virtue I sent to the basement far from me
The less that I spend on the mess that I'm in could be used towards something of value
The time on my side isn't anything I've ever needed, can't you see?

• 17:19 The phone at my post office has been ringing for 22 minutes. They're open. But I'm starting to doubt their commitment to my satisfaction. #

Minnie's - I loved Minnie's!  They had lazer shows and delicious food stuff and had a tradition of saying the old Seattle creed, "Always remember to tip your barista."

Taco Bell & Jack in the Box - WTF happened to our fast (and 24 hour, I might add) food?

Club Lagoon- I think I was the only one who liked it tho, it had a jet ski and a boat! in the bar

The old chacha - The new cha cha doesn't have a stage downstairs and less seating.  IT's like the sad retarded twin of it's predecessor.

I have no idea why I'm writing this, just felt compelled.

-G

Current Music: Static X - 40 Ways

Peter Thiel: "I was super-tracked, a competitive chess player in high schoo. It was in a way one of the things that was good that computers got better than people at chess, because it helped me realize that maybe it wasn't the best use of my time." (paraphrased).

I was just saying something like this to Shannon about poker last night. The game has progress enormously with the arrival of the internet (not just online poker, but training sites, videos, hand sharing, etc.) during a period when I have been focused on other things and have not advanced my skills in the same way. I feel sad about this because I find poker to be sexy and cool in an emotional sense, and I am very attracted to tournaments and competition.

Yet intellectually, I think poker is a horrible waste of time where talented people employ their considerable on a non-value-generating zero-sum competition. Fine for a hobby (if replacing time you would otherwise spend consuming rather than producing), but destructive to the world as a job. So the fact that I'm falling further and further behind the curve of expertise, which discourages me from playing, is in most ways a good thing.

Just to make this post include more things I agree with while offending even more people's professions, Peter continues:

"My pet peeve of where to many smart people go is physics in our society. And that's I think a symptom of the fact that people can excel at a very early age at things like music or chess or math or physics. And I think that the competitive thing then ends up tracking people towards those fields rather than fields where it takes longer to build up the skill set but much bigger contributions could be made. And so if we could get all the super string theorists to work on anti-aging or AI - they get to choose one or the other - I think we'd make incredible progress"

Heh. I started out in math as an undergrad, and then decided that it was mostly intellectual masturbation and that I wanted to actually build things rather than doing research that might occasionally throw off something useful. So I can sympathize.

• 11:28 ln-s.net/4WJ_ - evidence room PC used in alleged kpr0n distro safely booked into evidence, where it can never .. ohwait. #recursion #
• 15:09 Have realized that when AIM for OSX & Adium say "Negotiating" & "Finalizing connection" it's code for "Save any important wo- HAHA too late" #
• 16:07 RT @khakiconvict: RT @disgrasian: “Anti-Miscegenation” Justice of the Peace Resigns url4.eu/h4Np #
• 16:16 @FBIPressOffice "illegally" may be redundant when describing a border incursion on a kinda-sorta-maybe-stolen airplane. #
• 16:19 @FBIPressOffice Unless, of course, it was that dashing desperado Colton Harris-Moore, illegal 2daMAX. *dreamy-eyed sigh* #

Or at least, a Methuselatarian.

I just told a 25-year old they shouldn't buy an annuity b/c:

Annuities have a small number of advantages:

1) They are tax-advantaged, like many forms of insurance.
2) They guarantee you a lifetime income after retirement. By pooling the risk of dying at various ages after retirement, they reduce your risk of running out of money after retirement.

As far as I know, that's basically it. For your situation (1) doesn't apply because you are taking it out of a 401k, and (2) has a couple problems - a) it isn't very useful for people who are really young (you are far from worrying about exactly how long your retirement will be, and you can always buy an annuity when you are 50), b) annuities have serious problems if we get decent rejuvenation technology. Even small improvements will extend lifespans enough to break the statistical models of annuity issuers, and thus they will have to renege or go bankrupt. I think there is a substantial chance that lifespans will be extended enough by the time you are 65 that annuities will be fucked.