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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I should be more precise.

    I think we will still have charlatans even if we solve all societal problems because people are fundamentally not built to reason, and they will always be vulnerable to those who prey on the ignorant for power.

    Thus, we need to build society as if people are stupid to prevent the worst abuses of power.


  • I disagree.

    Our intelligence was not evolved for too much thinking. Most of our brain is wired towards feeling, and for the overwhelming majority of human existence, our feelings were well suited for small, cooperative, communal existence as small tribes/bands/clans. We don’t “think” for most of the decisions we make in our day to day lives, nor do we try to learn from all the possible sources.

    IMO religion is “needed” in order to shortcut our feeling brain to help make us make the correct collectivist decision. It’s like writing software on shitty firmware and limited hardware so that it can still function in modern society.


  • I do think it is an effective hedge against increased cost of living in your particular area, and swapping that out for other risks such as natural disaster, long term climate and political disaster, and increases in interest or insurance costs, but I don’t think most people see it that way from a financial perspective.

    From a market average perspective, your earnings in the market will far outweigh normal increases in rental cost in the long term. Property tax, insurance, and cost of home maintenance are also going to increase as cost of living increases.

    I do 100% agree there is a psychological benefit to home ownership that might even extend to the foundation of American middle-class democratic values.


  • I’m not sure if this is something that’s helpful, but I do want to give the advice that real estate really isn’t the best way to build wealth If you are very disciplined. Renting can be an even better way of building wealth.

    If you treat housing a service you pay for, buying a house has a higher overall cost if you include mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs, and etc. Remember, mortgage is the least you’ll pay, while rent is the most you’ll pay.

    Imagine if your mortgage was 2k/mo, taxes, insurance, and home maintenance is another 500/mo, you can almost certainly find a house to rent for under that cost (let’s say 2k/mo for example) unless you live in one of the exceptionally cheap places in the US where the price-to-rent ratio is low <15.

    Now also consider how you most likely needed a 20% down, and most of your payment goes towards interest initially for a mortgage.

    The tricky part is having the financial discipline to put away that extra 500/mo into investments. Mortgage FORCES you to save into an appreciating asset, most people will just blow that extra 500/mo onto other items. It sounds like you already are by maxing out your 401k, and I would also looking into maxing Roth IRA if you can. Home ownership isn’t the only path towards wealth, though it is a means by which many people (conscious or not) force themselves into “saving”.




  • No, unless you are leveraging evaporative cooling, that amount of circulation isn’t going to get you much.

    Just get a real geothermal hvac system if you have the opportunity. Incredibly efficient.

    Back of the napkin conversion: 20btu/sqft recommended cooling capacity. 1btu = 252 calories (small)

    A 60k btu cooling needs

    15120000 gram degrees C of water. Assuming you have perfect heat exchanger on both ends, that’s 15120 liters-degrees circulated per hour.

    Pumping that much water alone is going to be quite a bit of energy.

    Then you have the problem of heat exchanger. There are lots of sizing mostly based on the deltaT temperature difference.

    Realistically, without some agent evaporating and recondensing, you’ll have a massive water to air heat exchanger that’s not practical at all.

    If you want to do more research yourself, heat exchanger sizing can be found in mechanical engineering and chemical engineering handbooks.




  • This was more or less a reflection of my personal experience.

    When I was in school, we were taught how to do research. It involves going to Libraries and looking for primary secondary and tertiary sources via the Dewey decimal system. We were taught how to use almanacs and even had an almanac competition on how fast someone can find information.

    Public institutions such as the Library system in the United States, were our “temple” of knowledge. Public support for Libraries was historically VERY high.

    However, since the popularization of search engines, it has radically reshaped our expectations of finding information. We expect to find it at our fingertip, in less than 200ms, at the cost of quality and gatekeeping institutions that filtered out a lot of junk knowledge.

    I was able to find a few articles talking about this: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279

    I especially love the quote, “Conflation of information retrieval with knowledge”