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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About one billion dollars.

    But yeah, like the other commenter said: $10m puts you WELL outside of working class. That’s enough to retire on anywhere on the world, and with a high degree of luxury outside of a handful of the most expensive cities. That money, invested by anybody with half a brain, will make enough money per year than many extremely skilled professions make. We’re talking doctor salary without doing any actual work. They’re not buying senators wholesale like billionaires, but their house rep probably knows them by name.


  • Rule of thumb for a retirement portfolio is to withdraw 4% per year. 4% of $1M is $40k. People survive on 40k/year, but you’d be considered pretty low income in most areas.

    Big point being that in the US we have many cost of living expenses that the UK does not (or rather, you get it via your taxes)




  • Yeah, let’s not fool ourselves. Civilization is difficult. There are no simple answers to getting millions of people to coexist. The answers that sound simple are usually just sweeping the difficult parts under the rug.

    That said: humans are historically really good at solving complex problems. We have the capacity to address these things despite their difficulty. The problem is, like the OP says, a lot of people with tons of money and power would prefer that our aggregate problem-solving capability is directed towards complex problems that give THEM more wealth and power, rather than lifting up those with little.






  • Watching Paradox Interactive transition from AA into a AAA studio has been painful. They fill a niche that nobody else is really paying attention to, but they’ve become so entrenched that the games are really starting to feel like reskins of each other, and while I wouldn’t call their DLC strategy predatory, they feel just a hair below that point.

    “Historical strategy simulator” is a pretty tough genre to attack as an indie dev, though.


  • The USA is huge. IDK what country you’re from, but I’ll use France as a point of comparison because it’s large and the capital isn’t really in the center.

    Bayonne->Paris is about the farthest you can be from the capital while still living in mainland France. That’s 770 km.

    This is shorter than the distance from Washington DC->Atlanta, which is in one of the original 13 colonies. It’s pretty close to the distance from DC->Indianapolis, but that’s still within the 1776 USA borders (albeit, an unorganized territory of the 13 colonies).

    Add in the Louisiana purchase and various conquests westward, and a Californian visiting DC can be like visiting Paris from Kuwait.

    It’s reasonably common for USians to visit their state capital at some point in our lives, but visiting DC is definitely an upper-middle class vacation unless you happen to live in a nearby state already.








  • But those are just words for “a group of a special size”

    Some eastern languages have totally different counting words depending on WHAT you’re counting. One set of number-words for flat things, another set for long things, another set for printed/bound things, another set for things with handles…


  • Some salts being “saltier” is mostly not true.

    If used as a garnish, course or flaky salts take longer to dissolve into your saliva, so the salt flavor isn’t as profound. But if it’s cooked into the dish, there’s no difference. Everything is already dissolved, so equal masses of salt produce equal results.

    There’s a little to be said for “mineral salts” where there are trace elements besides NaCl. But that path leads into pseudoscience pretty quickly.