All construction companies now need aerodynamics engineers because of climate change.

Recently a small coastal cabin with 4 people inside was blown out to sea.

So just like the Tacoma Narrows bridge, where we realized aerodynamics became a first order priority once a bridge becomes large enough, we now have to prioritize the aerodynamics of even small buildings in windy areas.

This will only get worse as storms get stronger due to the increased energy because of climate change.

We will also have to look at existing buildings to secure them.

We might even have to build wind-breakers around some buildings, similar to wave breakers. Especially around buildings with historical significance that we want to preserve as is.

We will also gradually have to take into account the other nearby buildings and landscape. To avoid wind-tunnel effect down streets that can then make buildings unsafe. If you engineer a building in the open and its safe, but then build a street of buildings next to said building, then the wind-tunnel effect could make the original building unsafe. And vice versa.

We also have to reengineer lamp posts, powerlines, bus stops, cell towers, radio towers, billboards, fences, garages, basically anything “we’ve done like this for decades and it has been good enough”.

We also have to rethink our tree and forestry regulations. Norway generally have decent distance between powerlines and trees due to constant cutting along powerlines. But we have seen huge amounts of productive forest being destroyed by wind. During a storm in November 2021 over 7 million trees were toppled over by wind. To forestry people that’s around 1.7 million cubic meters of forest. Enough to build nearly 50 000 Norwegian homes. We really have to start computer-modeling forests for vulnerability to wind so that we can take preventive steps where feasible. For all we know a few well-placed wind breaks could have saved half the affected forest area during that storm. We also have to pay attention to not cause forests to become vulnerable by for example creating wind-tunnel effect with buildings at the edge of forests.

In summary, construction companies will need an aerodynamics engineer now, even if they build things that previously didn’t require any aerodynamics considerations. Wind has changed in strength enough that “We’ve always been fine doing it like this” is not a valid argument anymore. You can not use that excuse for a scaffold, cabin, boat house, outhouse, hen house, dog house, lamp post, fence post, power pole, lightning rod, radio tower, cell tower, satellite dish, snow fence, veranda, garage, garage door, mailbox, window, stove pipe, garden bench, playground installations, trampoline, bicycle-rack, road barrier, railroad crossing, billboards, fire-escapes, or anything else. And if you build an entire street of buildings or a mountain cabin then you especially need an aerodynamics engineer. You should even have an aerodynamics engineer if you build roads and ditches and whatnot, doesn’t have to be a full-time position. A quick glance from an aerodynamics engineer might make certain roads a bit less prone to roll semi trailers and buses. Which is nice for liability reasons. If you approach the ones you’re building the road for and say “we can make the road 15% less prone to roll vehicles for this amount and 20% for this amount because this is a very windy area with predominant winds straight across the road”, it will likely play out a lot better even if they say no, compared to if they then have to later reengineer the road because its impassable a quarter of the time.

Do I actually expect construction companies to take aerodynamics and wind into account? No. Do I expect laws and regulations to be changed to take aerodynamics and wind into account? No. Not until the ones who say “We’ve always done it like this and been fine” have all died and there’s only “I saw my neighbors house/fence/garage/roof/boat house/veranda/etc get blown away, I don’t want to build something that might fly back to me and kill or maim me and my loved ones”.

“It is not THAT the wind is blowing that is the problem, it is WHAT the wind is blowing that is the problem”. – It is also about HOW the wind is blowing, that’s the study of aerodynamics. Its the HOW that leads to the WHAT. Whenever you see the aftermath of a hurricane in the United States of America you see a lot of buildings that didn’t get any damages. That’s partly because of how the building was engineered and assembled, but also because of the aerodynamic properties of all the other buildings. The more you plan out buildings for wind resistance as a whole system of buildings and landscape, the less money you need to spend making each individual building stronger.

What is the literature version of a visual illusion?

There is this very interesting and powerful visual illusion, where even after seeing the truth it still fools the mind. It is known as the checker shadow illusion.

But I recently came across what appears to a sentence that with zero changes, changes its complete meaning depending on which audio accompanies it. It is a simple tattooed sentence that translated from Norwegian to English says “I believe in people who burn”. “To burn” when said about someone in Norwegian is most often used to mean that the person is really motivated, focused, driven, etc, when it comes to something specific or in general.

Yet the instagram story I saw this on had the sound muted as I clicked on it, as the spotify playlist randomly picked a metal song playing in my background, so this sentence became to mean more sinister version of “I believe in people who burn” and so cue the obligatory Norwegians and their metal-head church-burning witch-burning joke here. But then when I saw the same story again with the actual calm pleasant fuzzy music, it went right back to mean the kind fuzzy version of what it says. Which is “I believe in driven/motivated people”. But then if I put on metal again, it again appears to mean the less fuzzy version of it all, even though I know the calm fuzzy version is the correct one.

Its like with the checker shadow illusion, seeing reality doesn’t stop us seeing it has changed relative meaning when the context is changed. But unlike a double entendre it only has one meaning in each different context.

MAYBE I’m the first to point out this literature version of a visual illusion concept. I sure hope not, but it’d be nice to know what its actually called if I’m not first to spot this.

Things like the old morse code “Don’t, wait for me” vs “Don’t wait for me” contains actual changes in the grammatical content, but this on the other hand is the exact same sentence with no changes whatsoever (its a tattoo after all), yet audio context completely changes its meaning. It’d probably also change context based on clothing and whether or not you see that tattoo in a church or at a huge concert of fast-paced music. I wonder how much it’d change based on the people around the person with that tattoo. Could Marilyn Manson take a selfie with a person with that tattoo without the tattoo going away from the fuzzy meaning? Endless questions!

I think I can think of another example, asking “how much do I owe you?” to the waiter or cashier calmly and politely compared to going “HOW MUCH DO I OWE YOU?” like you’re playing for ten thousand fans at a stadium. If the cashier don’t call the cops after the latter, then smiling well with an attractive face and correctly timed polite mannerisms and asking in the first way the second time will still mean the same thing, won’t it? And that meaning is a genuine “how much do I owe because I intend to pay and be on my way politely?”.

Come to think of it, isn’t this just what celebrities do? They do outrageous things and always just turn the cillusion (celebrity illusion) back to normal before the people in white coats throw them in a padded cell. Or? Is public celebrity life really just summed up like a checker shadow illusion version of literature based on delivering behavior in wildly different audio and/or visual contexts to make walking up the red carpet normal one day and absurd the next on an endless repeat? One day’s “I just woke up and came here to this award show” can mean wildly different things if you are normally dressed compared to if you are dressed in what can only be described as a burger. Come to think of it, when you see some celebrities after many years of them trying to be the dark grey checker square, and you then see them be NORMAL then THAT feels absurd (Marilyn Manson walking around in normal clothes and no makeup for example).

Who the heck knows? Would love to hear if someone can think of a specific one for their language since I don’t think this Norwegian example translates extremely well. A sentence that has a very specific singular meaning in one context, and a different very specific singular meaning in another context.

The lessons of Amundsen and Scott in space exploration and colonization.

During the trip to the south pole, Amundsen used clothing perfected by arctic people (the Inuit), as well as a means of traveling perfected by them (dogs, with ice-glazed runners perfected by the Inuit by warming water in mouth and applying it with a skin). Amundsen had at most 500% safety margin in supplies, and as he got back closer and closer to home base it shrank to 30%. Scott never approached 30% safety margin.

So, imagine if there were a people who were perfectly suited to survival on Mars or Ceres, what would they do? What would they have? What would they wear?

I doubt they would have what is imagined by the movie “The Martian”, and I doubt they would travel with a rover. Scott himself showed us what happens if just one tiny piece of that machine fails.

I think that for human beings to do proper space exploration, and exploitation of space resources, we need to really think new. We need to think more like Amundsen than Scott. Like using String-Shooter mining to gather the lunar regolith needed to make base structures for example by 3D printing. And even if we COULD make fusion power, we’re probably most wise if we rely on some solar panels and some sand storage for permanent bases. Less advanced than making batteries in-situ. I would not want to try to maintain a fusion power plant on the moon when we barely could on Earth. I can’t even order a single bolt on the moon without it costing its own weight in gold in shipping from Earth, so I’d need to be able to make everything myself. Preferably with a late 18th century lathe.

Scott could not even bring two machines to the south pole, because of failures. How the heck would you bring a machine across a moon? We really need a brand new avenue of space-technology research. How do we most easily PULL an oxygen and water recycler across the surface with a man? How do we design a space-suit knowing it will be within a stones throw of a wheeled sleigh that has the oxygen and water recycling unit on it? How do we design a space-suit to be less high-tech, only having the movements we need for a low tech environment? How do we design a lunar base if we think absolutely low tech like Amundsen? When you watch the series “For All Mankind” where they DO imagine a lunar base, I can only close my eyes and think of home because they have SO much stuff there that I’d never pay to send to the moon in place of something more useful. There is for example not a SINGLE furnace visible in any episode, not a single anvil, not a single metal mine at all, and yet if you have a low-tech enough system you CAN make copies of it if you bring a single mold to make sand molds from.

So, if you are a company working in designing and testing space stuff, think less like Scott and more like Amundsen. And if you can’t figure out a simpler way, just put out a small prize for it, you’ll get a hundred ideas and maybe five will have some merit that could be tried in small scale.

Future Human Modification Classification.

Humans who modify themselves are classified as “transhuman” not as in transgender, but the Latin prefix trans-, meaning beyond. Beyond human. These humans will upload their brain to computers, they will modify themselves with biotechnology, and they will modify themselves with cybernetics. How will we ever be able to classify ourselves in this new world?

Imagine a 3-dimensional matrix where XYZ coordinates go such:

• 0,0,0 are not modified
• 1,0,0 are entirely uploaded copy (1) brains in a computer,
• 0,1,0 are entirely cybernetic,
• 0,0,1 are entirely biotechnological,
• 1,1,0 are uploaded copies with entirely cybernetic bodies and brains,
• 1,0,1 are uploaded copies with biotechnological bodies and brains,
• 0,1,1 are entirely cybernetic in one respect and entirely biotechnological in another (fex one being entirely modified organic organs plus brain with cybernetic skeleton and muscles and skin),
• 1,1,1 being uploaded copies in the previous type of body and brain.

Of course there can be partials, if you’re only a little bit modified then you’re not going to be entirely on the 1 on this 3-dimensional coordinate system.

(1) All uploads of brains are just copies of the original. Either you kill the original or you keep it alive, either way you copied the information, not transferred it. When you move information from one harddrive to another, you read the information on harddrive A, and write the same information on harddrive B, then you either rewrite junk over harddrive A’s original information, or you don’t do that and keep the original information on harddrive A. Sure you can do it in some way that convinces the copy he’s the original, and many will probably do that and be happy with it. But others will keep their original alive, and be happy knowing it didn’t actually upload the original anywhere. Many more might copy themselves and only have the copy wake up if the original dies, to avenge themselves in a way. And to inherit what one does not trust to others to have.

One wonders what we might consider a level 2 on said matrix. A copy upload of a 1,1,1 might be a 2,1,1? Then a 2,2,2 when it lives in an entirely modified version of its original’s 1,1,1 body. And then a 0,1,1 who modifies himself again a thousand years after the first time, with completely new technology, might then be a 0,1,2 or 0,2,1 or 0,2,2. And then what’s a 3? The 1,0,0 who copies his brain three times might have the third copy be a 3,0,0, and so on. Would “Master Chief” from the Halo series be a 0,1,0? Would Cortana be an artificially created mind close to a 1,0,0 in his suit computer? Would Master Chief then be a 1,1,0 with a partial cybernetic exoskeleton when he wears his suit? Would Master Chief wearing his suit with Cortana in its computer, make Master Chief a 1,1,1 transhuman?

Addendum due to some questions:

I would drop the word “entirely” , because well, “entirely” relative to what? What would being partially uploaded mean, or being entirely biotechnological?

Entirely means you’re better at everything.

Partially uploaded would mean the computer the mind copy is running on, have to run at less than real time to perform all the calculations of its original brain. 2,0,0 would then be a copy that was read from the first 1,0,0 copy, and then written on the memory banks of a computer twice as fast (and twice as good in every other respect).

Entirely 0,1,0 biotechnological would run twice as fast, dive twice as deep, jump twice as high, be twice as good at chess and handle twice as much G forces. etc. We partially have some forms of transhumans even in this category, some have gotten gene-therapies, some have gotten organ transplants that were younger than themselves, some have gotten new corneas, some have gotten entirely newly grown arteries, some have gotten pig valves to replace their own that never worked properly to begin with naturally, almost everyone have gotten dozens of vaccines to have improved immune response, etc.

Entirely 0,0,1 cybernetic would also run twice as fast, dive twice as deep, jump twice as high, be twice as good at chess and handle twice as much G forces, etc. Except it would be done differently. And partial less than 1 cybernetic people already exists, people with prosthetics, wheelchairs, reading glasses, hearing implants, pacemakers, titanium hips, scuba-gear, jet-fighter G-suits, oxygen supply when climbing Mount Everest, shoes when running on sharp rocks, gloves when working wood to not get splinters, eye-protection, hearing protection that even have improved microphone sensitivity to voices but filter out noise, bicycles (that’s technically like an exoskeleton suit, you can go more than twice as fast then with your own muscles), etc.

Like would a 54,0,0 a 10,0,0 and a 3,0,0 really be that different to each other to occupy radically different typological values? I don’t think so.

the 54,0,0 would need to play back what he says to the 3,0,0 transhuman (via digital ones and zeros) at 1/18th the normal speed for the 54,0,0. 54,0,0 might even be capable of thinking thoughts that physically can’t fit in the memory banks of 3,0,0.

And a 0,54,0 vs 0,3,0 would be the same, a 54 might be able to consider 18 times more alternatives at once than a 3, and the 3 would be able to consider 8 times as many views at once as a triple zero human. I’d say most human beings can’t even understand Einstein or Hawking, and they’re technically all triple zeros (I mean I can’t do quantum physics calculations either). So this will definitely be a problem with people entirely different digits.

I thought; how will people be able to find each other on tinder or even find a town to live where people talk at their own speed? Imagine how hard it will be to visit somewhere if you not only have to talk their language but talk at their speed, and be able to pull their 8 times stronger doors (so their 2 times stronger children can’t run into the street). And imagine finding someone you like only to find out that person’s muscles and bones are 18 times as strong, and that they only talked slow because they’re 18 times your lethal level drunk and end up accidentally breaking you in half in their 18 times stronger bed.

Boggles the mind doesn’t it? 😀 Snu-snu joke goes here.

The cultural aspect is a big thing, one culture might not want to accept someone of too different “transdigitery” classification, but I think its going to mostly filter out by itself. People will move to where like-minded (like-numbered) are. If only because that’s where the best modders are, and the to-them most attractive people.

PS: a 0,0,0 would technically be an ultra-traditionalist. Since anyone who has clothing, a vaccine, a camera that remembers their past experiences, is technically not a triple zero. Clothing are a cybernetic/technological modification, a vaccine is a biotechnological modification, and photographs are sort of like having access to a dumb limited copy of your brain that only tells you experiences you thought to copy.

Scrooginess, the new lazy.

We are innately lazy. But lazy is such a loaded term. Lets say “Scrooginess” instead to mean the type of laziness I describe; We spend calories like Scrooge McDuck spends money. He will spend it when he needs to, but he won’t spend it when he does not need to. And he will only spend the exact amount needed, not a cent more. And that is how we spend calories. It is so deeply engrained in us that we frequently die from obesity in a world where food is abundant and cheap. We will spend calories to reproduce, and signal our health to potential mates, but all our skills and all our activities besides that tend to be very prone to scrooginess.

Our activity level is not higher even though we have lots more calories available. Which is weird, after all when you have more money, you spend more money. Its not like if you win the lottery, you’ll spend only the amount of money as you did before winning. Meanwhile, in calorie terms, that is precisely what we do. I call this scrooginess-bias.

Let me explain. Every cognitive bias we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Can basically be summed up as “a way to make a decision with fewer calories than doing it correctly”. That’s how our brain works, it makes calorie shortcuts to every decision we make. Its actually possible that people with problems making decisions, have partially broken calorie-shortcut mechanisms, so they lack some of the biases that make us immediately decide something so as to save calories.

A small sidestep that is good to know when discussing scrooginess in general; The definition of skill vs intelligence:

Skilled people have spent a lot of calories to establish neurological pathways for said task (lets say chess, or a branch of mathematics). The chess experts will already have lots of chess situations (especially early game ones) locked in the brain’s neuron patterns. They can effectively consciously and unconsciously remember calories they spent in the past. Having the ability to call upon partially or fully pre-made decisions (we walk because of this, you don’t have to figure it out again every morning, but if you have a stroke you might have to work it out again and re-learn that skill, among other skills).

And intelligence is just your total sum of skills. Note that being able to walk is a skill, as is hearing, talking, seeing (did you know your vision is actually upsidedown but the brain learns to convert it the right way up?) etc. So this definition of intelligence allows us to rank all living things (and artificial things) on the same intelligence scale.

We COULD go skiing, rollerblading, lasertagging, tennis playing, dancing, jogging, swimming, trampoline jumping, base jumping, rope skipping, football playing, basketball playing, dart playing, pool playing, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting and planting some tomatoes all in one day with the amount of calories we have cheaply available.

But we don’t.

We COULD learn braille, sign language, spanish, portugese, russian, mandarin, welsh, german, italian, advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, city planning, behavioral economics, tango, waltz, breakdancing, guitar, piano, drums, herdy gerdy, trombone, unicycle, slackline, juggling, walking on hands, parkour, freeclimbing, woodworking, welding, flying, kayaking, scuba diving, fly fishing, alpine skiing, painting in all its forms, composing music, filming, editing movies, stone sculpting, pottery, blacksmithing, greenhouse farming, permaculture farming, food preservation, advanced food making, writing, mechanical maintenance, sailing, massaging, singing, sewing, shoemaking, fabric dyeing, stone masonry, brick making and jewelry making.

But chances are we might only do a little bit of some of this. Mostly the ones that don’t cost too many calories, and mostly the ones where we could meet a sexual partner. And then most of the time we sit in the sofa. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone learn advanced mathematics for fun, even though the mathematicians who do it professionally generally find the whole thing pretty emotionally rewarding.

With all these calories and activities available, why is there ever a stationary moment for our mind and body?

If you never had that innate “scrooginess” that keep everyone from spending calories, then the reward would be more delicious cake, pizza, burger, french fries, pancakes, bacon sandwiches, licorice, buns, stir fry, soup, lobster, steak, roast and lightly fried fish fillets. Without becoming fat from it. AND a richer life from all the extra stuff we would be doing with all those calories!

Sharks’ resting activity is to swim. If you made a shark intelligent enough to ask it why it bothers to swim, it would not understand your question. Sure it might say its because it would suffocate if it stopped swimming, but it would also ask you why you bother sitting on the sofa doing absolutely nothing. It would say “doing nothing gains you nothing, gets you nowhere”. But to us, whenever you do anything that uses extra calories, you are met with lots of people who try to “save” you from wasting calories, by going “why do you bother?” or “why don’t you do it this way? This is way easier” or “you shouldn’t bother thinking about that, its not your job to solve that/do that”. And you’ll meet these sentiments even if you’re struggling through university to eventually help cure cancer, “why bother? they’ll probably also do it without you I’m sure” they might say.

Those movies called “Cars” are only realistic in one regard, most of them sit around with full fuel tanks watching other cars drive around a track. Remember that petrol to those cars is basically their hamburgers and milkshakes. If the “Cars” movies were made by an intelligent shark species then there would be no spectators. All racing would involve tens of thousands of cars. Because all the spectators would want to race themselves instead of spectating.

Even though it was nice to have Scrooginess when food was scarce and we needed that extra bit of fat to make it through winter, maybe we can all agree that slightly less of it would be nice now. We’d all have richer lives, slimmer figures and more good food. We would probably be a bit smarter, a bit better at our job, a bit better at our hobbies, a bit more forward thinking, a bit more wise, a bit more patient, a bit less prone to make mistakes, have slightly fewer accidents, have more fun, have more interesting thoughts and ideas, more interesting conversations and discussions, be slightly more kind and be slightly less gullible. We might even have a little bit of empathy, but I wouldn’t stop swimming waiting for that.

Postscript: This is a rewritten version of a reddit comment I made in response to the question: “What are some flaws with vertebrate biology (or even Earth animal biology in general) that you wouldn’t want to repeat when designing artificial organisms from scratch?” – If I could have my pick then I’d have a quicker reaction time to abundance of food. So that if any species suddenly have an abundance of food year over year, then scrooginess immediately goes down.

Science-ignorance worse than Hitler?

In World War 2 the US had 405 399 deaths. 72 491 missing.

The US has currently over 600 000 deaths from covid. At the time Trump was kicked out of office it was 400 000 with over 3000 average daily deaths.

Conclusion: US citizens electing politician(s) who don’t understand science is more dangerous for Americans than Nazi Germany was.

This has made me realize that at the next election in Norway I will be looking at the candidate resumés for scientific literacy first, and policy second. I’d rather have someone who disagrees with my political views in office, than someone who don’t understand science.

West Edmonton Hyper-Mansion

West Edmonton Mall Hyper-Mansion – Now for sale due to covid.

Imagine waking up in one of your 355 superior or executive suites, then going over to one of your walk-in closets. 31 of which contain men’s wear, 51 contain ladies wear and 26 contain shoes. Each closet is helpfully categorized such that you don’t mix up your Louis Vuitton with your children’s Crocs. 17 of your walk-in closets contain children’s clothing. Don’t forget to pick up your glasses from one of the 7 walk-ins with glasses and shades. Then its time for accessories and jewelry from any of 25 walk-in closets.
Then you can stroll to any of a dozen or so barbers, hair dressers and nail salons. After you have had your particulars arranged you can head to any of a dozen cafes for a cup of coffee or a smoothie. Maybe stop by one of the half dozen bakeries where servants already made fresh baked goods for you. Your mansion contains a cannabis storage, a wine and spirits cellar, vaping accouterments room, tobacco storage and even a postbox complete with post-office servants who will deliver mail to you and send things in the mail for you. You can also have your teeth fixed after yesterday’s drunken fisticuffs in on-site dentist offices. Of course only after getting some aspirin from the walk-in medication-cabinet complete with pharmacists to answer any questions you might have.
You can boast to your rich friends that you have something not even they have, a Lego-room, and you can Build-A-Bear and they can’t. You also have on-site access to your own ATMs and financial services.
You have your very own casino, virtual reality entertainment, zipline, mini-golf and ice-rink. Don’t forget about your roller coaster and other rides. You have a 5-acre glass-ceiling room with pools, hot tubs and assorted water-slides.
You even have a gun room with enough weaponry to arm a small stadium of Gravy Seals.
Remember to throw some bowling-balls in your bowling-alley to boot. You can possibly use bowling balls to help you in your mirror maze.
When you get really high you can chill for a bit whilst playing bingo. When the munchies set in you can get any of over 25 restaurants and fast food joints to make you enough food for a small african nation.
Remember that when your phone battery go flat you can just pick up another phone at your “Apple” named walk-in closet which is filled to the brim with Apple products.
And last but not least, you have huge aquariums with Green Sea Turtles, Nurse Sharks, African Penguins and California Sea Lions. And more.

The West Edmonton Mansion is so big and contains so much things you need your 25 000 square feet of conference rooms to explain to the world that you have achieved more meaning of life than anyone else.

You can be confident that you always have something to do to distract yourself from the fact that you are slowly dying of aging processes because we have not yet developed the techniques to add some genes, remove some genes, add some cells, remove some cells, and remove some surplus connections in the extracellular protein matrix. But fear not, you can use all your surrounding parking lots to store and drive hypercars with gearboxes that change gears one millisecond quicker than last year’s version. Anything to distract yourself from the fact that your gravestone will read “here lies a person who COULD have developed engineered eternal youth because he was rich enough and lived at the right time, what a scatterbrained idiot”.

Disclaimer: Precise amount of walk-in closets may vary depending on terms and conditions agreed upon at time of purchase of property. This is also not a real advert because its a mall, its just funny to me that the hyper-Mansions of today are approaching the features that you’d find in smaller malls.

Further information may be found on this website. If you happen to be a newly retired billionaire and need to compensate for your empty existence you can make an offer. If you do not mind potential carriers of a deadly virus also roaming in your Mansion, you can live in this mansion for the cost of only one suite.

Buy my book.

The real price of a dollar.

When you spend 100 dollars or whatever your local currency is, you may think “hey 100 dollars for that product isn’t a bad deal!”. But I am going to tell you that a 100 dollar price-tag does not mean the product costs you 100 dollars.

Let me explain. To get 100 dollars in your pocket, you had to earn more than 100 dollars and then pay income tax on it. Lets say you have 33% total income tax, then you actually had to earn 150 dollars to get 100 dollars in your pocket. So when you merrily see something that costs 100 dollars and think “hey that’s a good deal!” then you should keep in mind that its actually 150 dollars.

Furthermore, people always quote the saying “time is money”, but I’d like to reverse that and say “Money is TIME”. Meaning, to make 150 dollars to end up with a net 100 dollars in your pocket, you had to work a certain amount of time. Lets say your income is 25 dollars an hour, then you had to work 6 hours to have the opportunity to earn 150 dollars to get 100 dollars in your pocket that you can spend on “that good deal”.

But that is not all. To have the opportunity to work for 6 hours, you had to have a roof over your head, food in your belly, heating, clothing, transportation, hygiene products, etc.

So lets say you work 7.5 hours a day (a Norwegian workday), 25 dollars an hour, 52 weeks a year (so paid holidays and such included, as Norwegians get). Then you earn 48 750 dollars, which for simplicity we can round to 50 000 because lets say you make a little bit extra on the side. Then you pay 33% taxes, and lets assume another 33% of your income is spent on housing, food, amenities, etc. This leaves you with about 17 000 dollars. Over twelve months that’s 1 416 dollars each month in pocket-money.

This means, when you buy a product that costs 100 dollars, what you’re actually saying is “I’m gonna trade over 2 days of my life, for this product”. Because each year you can buy about 170 items which each costs 100 dollars, so that’s one item about every two days.

Furthermore, if you buy something for 10 dollars, that’s about five hours of your life. What are the chances that what you’re buying will be five hours of enjoyment?

However, if we imagine that by some miracle you manage to save the entire 17 000 dollar sum of pocket-money and buy stocks for it, then you can expect between 4% and 8% return each year. which is 680 to 1 360 dollars, which is 2 to 4 weeks. If you then save the same amount of money for 10 years, with 6% average interest on interest, you end up with about 224 000 dollars saved up. Which is 13 years of pocket-money saved up in 10 years. If you keep going, you will end up with 1 000 000 dollars in 26 years, which is 58.8 years of pocket-money in 26 years.

So then you might think “hey with 17 000 spare cash each year, I can actually borrow quite a bit for a nice house!”. WRONG. You can borrow 270 000 dollars if you want to pay 17 000 a year for 26 years. Assuming 4% interest (that’s the US national average for 30 year fixed interest mortgages). So you can save 1 000 000 dollars in 26 years, or you can borrow 270 000 dollars in 26 years. Even if you are more pessimistic (or safer in investment risk) and assume 4% interest on savings as well as 4% on mortgage, then its still 750 000 dollars saved in 26 years, versus 270 000 dollars of debt paid down.

Even at only 4% interest on your savings, it would only take you 13 years to save up 270 000 and then buy the house in cash. HALF THE TIME compared to borrowing the money.

THIS is how the poor is kept poor. A culture that encourages debt. Credit cards, buy now pay later, three months free subscription, zero money down phones and cars, etc. Made doubly worse by planned obsolescence. Because you buy a new car every ten years (or even just a slightly newer used car), new phone every few years, new computer twice a decade, etc. And you often take on debt especially when you buy the car, and you might once in a while buy a phone on a subscription basis and a computer on a payment plan etc.

I believe the global economy is hurting from the amount of debt floating around. I could sell you a house in cash every 13 years, in this example, or I could let you borrow money to buy the house today and only sell you a house every 26 years. By culturally forcing debt on everyone, we are hurting our future prosperity. Because if I sell you something today chances are high you incur debt on that exchange, so it’ll be TWICE AS LONG until next time I can get your business.

We were originally in the mode of spending what we had in cash, most of the time. So you sold a 270 000 dollar house to someone (or its equivalent in other products) every 13 years. THEN some crafty pieces of shit decided to double dip in their generation, and offer to sell the same 270 000 worth of stuff TWICE in 13 years, with the second purchase being covered by credit. Then ever since we’ve been on the second type of operating mode, where we can only sell 270 000 worth of product to someone every 26 years in this example.

And because economists want endless growth they have therefore pushed for allowing people to incur more and more debt, because no generation of economists want to be the generation that takes the short-term hit of moving over to the cash mode from the debt mode.

Don’t encourage your kids to borrow money.

Have you noticed this new social taboo?

Recently I have noticed that people fear above all else to make a comment that the other party can not immediately answer.

The amount of different conversation topics used to be quite limited 100 years ago, because everyone had access to limited media and even more limited time to consume media. So it was difficult to even come up with a conversation topic that was not already a topic both parties were well-versed in.

Now however, we have seemingly endless new topics of conversation just from science that was published this year, and no one but the people who red those obscure papers have any idea what you’re talking about.

Which means, instead of topics of conversation becoming more complex over time as we get more scientific knowledge as a civilization to base conversations on, we have instead begun to make simpler conversations in a day to day basis. We no longer talk about that new flying machine breaking the sound barrier, we talk about that stupid comment made by XYZ on twitter. Instead of talking about things which require some response along the lines of “hm, I dunno yet, let me get back to you in a few weeks with my standpoint on that topic”, we talk about things where we immediately all bark out a response like “haha”, “lol” or “wtf”.

Even if you are an expert on some obscure scientific field, you hesitate to talk about it to anyone but those you know for certain will not be intellectually challenged by your question or comment.

It has come to the point where it is difficult for me to look at most social interactions as more than dogs barking. We seem to have three types of barks (topics of conversation):

• “Ain’t this funny here let me show you” and the other party goes “yes” (ie bark).
• “Ain’t this fucked up here let me show you” and the other party goes “yes” (ie bark).
• “Here’s something that happened to me or someone else a time ago, acknowledge it” and the other party goes “yes” (ie bark).

Sometimes the latter is followed up by “lets repeat that some time, lets have another event like that”.

But basically, we shy away from important and worthwhile conversation topics, in favor of “fair weather topics” which require no brainpower to respond to immediately. Its as if the instant response of the internet, make us condition ourselves against topics that add a couple seconds to that response time.

And I think that is a dangerous road to continue down. Because if education does not teach people to respond to questions and views they can’t immediately respond to, then idiocracy is next.

If we let this taboo proliferate, we can forget about all the cures we wish happens in our lifetime (dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, etc). Because the new people in those fields won’t be able to get a straight answer from the old guard, and politicians won’t be able to answer simple questions from scientists, and thus funding does not happen and older experts don’t convey their expertise and half the people alive today (or even more) die from these things. Needlessly.

The Insulation Hypothesis

I want to put to “Paper” a hypothesis of mine. The more you insulate yourself from modern media, the more original ideas you can have. Even still 99/100 ideas will already exist, but my hypothesis is that if you drown yourself in media today, you’ll just go beyond 999/1000 ideas being already thought of.

I just had to put this on paper, because I think people in certain areas can recognize that they produce more the more they insulate themselves from other media (social media and feedback from others and movies, music, games, etc). I bet even engineers have more unique ideas if they insulate themselves from how it is already done, to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

There is no real way to test this scientifically, but I think it will help certain people if they keep an eye on how much time they spend getting “told no” by getting feedback via seeing how people already have done things. And this place is for the creme of intellectuals. Half the stuff here has never been put to paper anywhere else (the exception is the rejuvenation I talk about, which is reiteration of the rejuvenation scientists’ views).