121–130 of 164 posts
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While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?
Personally, RVs kind of miss the point of tooling around nature if one can wimp out and retreat to a house-on-wheels
Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, when you were too old to work the farm or prove the theorem (sorry, cognitive decline is a well-documented thing, and tends to coincide with physical decline[1]), you would "retire" to a productive life in less-demanding pursuits: caretaking of the grandkids, woodworking, food preservation, writing, etc. It's important to maintain ho…
If somebody is as illiterate as I am: metformin is type II diabetes medicine.
Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, when you were too old to work the farm or prove the theorem (sorry, cognitive decline is a well-documented thing, and tends to coincide with physical decline[1]), you would "retire" to a productive life in less-demanding pursuits: caretaking of the grandkids, woodworking, food preservation, writing, etc. It's important to maintain ho…
> Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Not really. The idea of old people who could no longer work effectively but still had many years of their life ahead of them is not a recent invention. The notion of an old age pension -- whether paid by a company or a government -- that "everyone" got is relatively new. But that doesn't mean "retirement" is new. It was just paid for by individua…
What on earth? To think the entirety of women of any age group in 1880 did not work is very "not even wrong" territory. They worked all kinds of jobs, inside and outside the home, from a very young age to old age. Many industries employed more women than men.
Flip to page 208 if you want a table.
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/women/...
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If somebody is as illiterate as I am: metformin is type II diabetes medicine.
It has also been withdrawn from the market.
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> low-efficiency vehicles Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.
> Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad. That's circular reasoning; carrying zillions of kilos around with you is the part that's inefficient.
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I'm in my late 20's and I notice my mental energy/sharpness being slightly lower compared to what they were at my peak age of 22. I learned to compensate for this with some behavioral and biochemical kludges, but the reality of the trend is pretty obvious at this point. Ten years ago I picked up biology and recently added to it ageing research as a hobby, we'll see if it pays off eventually. In mice ... many things o…
I'm 47, and I don't feel that much decline, and in some ways I'm far more productive. I'm more targeted, experience makes me wiser than I was in my 20s, and the only thing I really notice is that I definitely have 'on' days where I'm pretty good, and 'off' days (more often than not) where I'm just kind of cloudy in comparison. I don't remember these on/off days in my 20s, however, I wasn't paying attention at all, in…
I am quite surprised at the amount of negativity surrounding this piece. Yes, it's sort of clickbait-y. You don't need to feel like you're about to wither and die because you just turned 44. Yes, it's deeply anecdotal. Lots of older people are incredibly successful in their fields. That 65-year old engineer you know is great! But frankly, it doesn't matter who you are, or what you do: you will begin to get worse at i…
But in the end, the ability of one person on the backdrop of the planet and the universe where it reside is minuscule. I've felt content to just marvel at the surrounding, satisfying my own curiosity, and the world has never been a greater place for that. So much knowledge available over just a click, and so much more to come from talented researchers all over the globe. This is how I will feel peace - when my inevitable decline arrives.
Being an observer is also a lot of fun. I love writing rng based simulations for the same reason.
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Why hasn't EV tech hit the RV world? How many batteries could one of those Greyhound bus size RV's, or smaller ones, hold? Maybe it has and I'm ignorant. I get that corporate shipping industries would benefit but a lot of delivery vans are the same platform as an RV. I think a Ford F350 is the size of those 25 ft uhaul rentals - about same size as a decent sized RV. RV's typically park somewhere for days, campgrounds…
Cybertruck can tow a fairly large Airstream.
That's really the biggest issue with electric towing right now. To get a reasonable range while towing a travel trailer, the EV needs four times the battery capacity, maybe more. This is a pretty big capital investment, and then you're toting around an extra few thousand pounds even when not towing.
We will get there eventually, but I expect that tow vehicles will be amongst the last personal vehicles to be successfully electrified.
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> low-efficiency vehicles Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.
The greenhouse effect doesn’t care about why the CO2 was made. A portable house and essentials weighing probably 5kg can go on your back.
For every choice you make, I guarantee someone can point out how you could have been more environmentally friendly. Let's not go down that path.
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Retirement seems like a pretty unimaginative goal. See the Japanese concept of "Ikigai" (ie, raison d-etre or reason to get out of bed in the morning). I don't plan to retire, though I may shift the balance towards my non-economically-oriented interests after putting my children through college.
I think of retirement along the same lines. I plan to remain productive, some of which may be economically oriented, but I simply won't be worrying about the outcome or having someone with power over me telling me how and when I am allowed to do it.