31–40 of 85 posts
Aging has an monstrously high economic cost, and is probably the only area of medicine in which the ratio of that cost to the amount spent on R&D to try to reduce that cost is vanishingly small.
I may be in that demographic, but I prefer to be around young people (I volunteer a lot with youth). Being around nothing but old people all day would make me old and depressed. I prefer to be around the future not the past.
The residents aren't locked in. Volunteering with young people doesn't mean you have to live next door to them (and listen to their music, carousing, etc). Anyway, these places look like a riot! It's like college life without the hassle of exams. And yes they probably even have a "hookup" culture. These could be specialized for all types of interests. Imagine something like a "hacker house" but on a community level..…
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No, "Personal" Responder "flerchin" below, please tell me what employer offers "unlimited PAID vacation"....do you even know what "paid" vacation is? Here is what it is. If you accrue four weeks of vacation and leave the company, they give you a check for four weeks of pay. When I left a job in 2009, I had six weeks accrued. I walked out with a check big enough to buy a car. They HAVE to give you the money when they…
In most, if not all, places with unlimited PTO, the P stands for paid. The rub is that it's not unlimited, by convention. What you have described is a sabbatical policy.
PTO is accrued, is part of the compensation package, and when unused results in a check for those hours of unused PTO at the salary rate in effect when employment terminated.
The "unlimited personal time off" scam is a compensation regression from the previously standard accrued/earned PTO package.
For employees with leverage, the "unlimited time off" can turn out fine if they take advantage of it without harming their role in the company.
But, for such employees, the previous system of accrued/earned PTO is typically advantageous anyways because they will often be able to take time off or "work from home/remotely" while effectively taking time off without depleting their PTO balance, leaving it for payment when employment terminates.
In any case, for the majority of employees, "unlimited time off" is really just a loss of compensation as they don't usually have the leverage and/or diligence to take sufficient time off before termination.
At a past startup, in an attempt to get better terms in an upcoming funding round, the executives got the brilliant idea of switching from a standard PTO policy to "unlimited". They sold it to the employees at an all-hands meeting as a compensation upgrade.
The sales and operations folks celebrated, while us engineers, who had largely taken zero vacation under continuous crunch since starting immediately asked what would happen to our respective unused PTO balances.
Their response? The unused PTO would be zeroed "now that it was unnecessary, since you could take unlimited vacation anyways."
It was a sleazy attempt to erase the unused PTO balance commitments to all employees from the books before raising the next round. At everyone's expense.
We engineers called the executives out on it, and threatened to quit immediately which would force them to cut PTO checks to all of us - and said we'd be in tomorrow to interview and renegotiate our positions if desired.
That forced them to instead freeze our unused PTO balances. We were unable to prevent them from pivoting to the "unlimited time off" plan however, everyone was effectively demoted that week. I did however receive my substantial unused PTO check when I eventually left that sinking ship.
Hopefully that (true story) helps illustrate the difference...
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I would think most peoples ideal is to live in healthy natural commmunities with a diverse age range to get wisdom and tradition from the old and energy and new ideas from the young.
What's so special about tradition? Just because something has been done many times in the past doesn't mean that it's useful, worthwhile, or right.
I wonder how many people think about longevity...for me that is less so about living to 100+ but more about doing as much as I can now to make sure old age is not filled with chronic illness. I’m a “millennial” and already very mindful of lifestyle choices that I hope help maximize my longevity i.e. fasting, low carb, exercise, no drugs, no smoking, less alcohol.
- Saving enough money - Lack of stress - Avoidance of injury - Regular exercise
The rest seems to be tweaking. If you get the above right, then you will probably be fine. I would especially like to warn about taking on too much stress in order to get the money. There is a balance there and it's important to find out where it is for you. Don't go into stress debt! (Note: different people react to stress differently -- listen to your body)
Avoidance of injury is massive. If you get a chronic issue (like pain from joint or bad back or whatever), it can cause you to abandon exercise and when you get older it's a particularly rapid downhill journey from there. When you are younger, it seems like everything will heal. It won't. Be careful. Things come back to haunt you in the end.
Finally, no matter how unpleasant you find exercise, or how difficult it seems to be to do it -- it will be 10x or even 100x worse when you are older. Start as young as possible (i.e. today). If you have quit, then today is the day to start again. You can start again as many times as you want. If you start again every day, then you can never quit ;-) If you maintain regular exercise through your whole life, then when you get older it won't be so hard to continue. If you don't, that rapid slide into decline is almost inevitable. Especially, once you have trouble walking, it's pretty close to the end of the story as far as I can tell.
I wonder how many people think about longevity...for me that is less so about living to 100+ but more about doing as much as I can now to make sure old age is not filled with chronic illness. I’m a “millennial” and already very mindful of lifestyle choices that I hope help maximize my longevity i.e. fasting, low carb, exercise, no drugs, no smoking, less alcohol.
Careful. Don’t optimize for longevity at the expense of not living your life. There’s a balance of course, but we often forget that it’s not about the years in your life but the life in your years. > Early to rise early to bed makes a man healthy wealthy and dead. > James Thurber
Generally the things that help you grow old also help your quality of life.
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What's so special about tradition? Just because something has been done many times in the past doesn't mean that it's useful, worthwhile, or right.
Traditions provide community cohesion. They're an expression of shared values that create emotional bonds so your neighbours don't cheat you and vice versa. They are highly adaptive, because if they weren't, they wouldn't appear in literally every human civilisation, ever. So yes, traditions are typically worthwhile, just not necessarily for their apparent or stated purposes.
... Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational
to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can
explain. ...
But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not
because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It
most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided
those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also
responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
I wonder how many people think about longevity...for me that is less so about living to 100+ but more about doing as much as I can now to make sure old age is not filled with chronic illness. I’m a “millennial” and already very mindful of lifestyle choices that I hope help maximize my longevity i.e. fasting, low carb, exercise, no drugs, no smoking, less alcohol.
I suspect a lot of people feel like they have already outlived their own expectations
But then again, you can't break your Appointment at Samara.
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In most, if not all, places with unlimited PTO, the P stands for paid. The rub is that it's not unlimited, by convention. What you have described is a sabbatical policy.
They're not describing a sabbatical policy, sabbaticals are generally unpaid. PTO is accrued, is part of the compensation package, and when unused results in a check for those hours of unused PTO at the salary rate in effect when employment terminated. The "unlimited personal time off" scam is a compensation regression from the previously standard accrued/earned PTO package. For employees with leverage, the "unlimite…
Meanwhile, in the scam world of "unlimited PTO", I have found it is common for managers to ask that employees delay or reschedule vacation.
Anyway this whole subthread illustrates that many HN readers lack basic financial literacy...they don't even understand their own compensation
Unlimited PTO is just one more way the Suits outsmarted the nerds