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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Very slow-burning books, and I almost always lost interest before finishing them. I found The Dark Tower especially tedious. After I couldn’t force myself read it, I got the audiobook version a lnd tried to listen to it three times, but always fell asleep. Ironically, the books I genuinely enjoyed were some of his longest ones: It, and The Stand.

    As Richard Bachman, on the other hand, he wrote loads of entertaining books. It almost seems like in that persona he didn’t give a shit what others thought of his works, and the books ended up eminently readable.








  • Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

    There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.



  • Deciding on the school for my master’s. Had two choices: the no. 1 school in the US at that time, or an up-and-coming pgogram. The top school would have set me back about 200k in debt, but I was virtually guaranteed a job with a starting salary of 150k+, and a career path to the C-suite. The other school would give me a free ride, but it was anyone’s guess where’d I end up. I picked the free ride, and ended with a dead-end job for 40k. That was 20 years ago. Since then, that job gave me the push to leave the US, settle elsewhere, find a wife, start a family, and have an exciting new job with career progression. The choice, when I was deciding, couldn’t have been more clearly defined, and for years I kept thinking what if I picked the top school. Not anymore…









  • "No pain, no gain. "

    As someone who’s been running for over 30 years and working ou for 20, if there is pain, there is injury. When there is injury, you take a break and regress. People may say that muscle pain or stiff muscles are a sign of a good workout, not an injury. However, even with those your risk of injury is much higher, and you’ll eventually hurt yourself. “No pain” should be one of the outcomes of smart exercise, not an admonishment for not working hard enough.