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whinenot

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Even if it's a wash dollar wise, staying employed often means you get healthcare and retirement benefits AND the career progression that ideally comes with long term stable employment. Trying to hop back on the treadmill after a 5-10 year absence often has a huge opportunity cost on your lifetime earnings.

Enrique Iglesias was called out by Howard Stern for crappy vocals in his concert 23 years ago (good lord!).[0] Enrique explained that they overdubbed some of his songs so much in concert that you couldn't tell he was deliberately singing off key, that is until someone gave Howard Stern a copy of the mic feed.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98UWTDFaEYo

You must be new here. Many companies keep ex-C-levels nominally employed as 'consultants' so their stock can vest (which is typically the bulk of their compensation) and avoid any expensive/public lawsuits. It's paying them off to quietly go away without spending any cash.

We tell them to build. There are planet scale transformations underway and we need another incarnation of the WPA to help mitigate the impacts.

For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?

What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.

How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!

The list goes on and on.

It's harder to reverse-engineer an unconscious process

Aside from some basic life support systems, don't almost all movements start with conscious effort? Whether you are deliberate about the exercise or not, you practice and practice until you develop 'muscle memory' where it becomes unconscious: walking, dribbling a basketball, holding a G chord on a guitar, etc.

There are so many tipping points and cascading effects at work that I doubt we have any real understanding of everything that is happening at the macroscopic level, nor even if we did could we battle everything everywhere all at once. I suspect whole swaths of humanity are in for perilous times ahead as the speed of the variances will outpace our collective ability to adapt. As the wizened Tool once sang[0], "Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay".

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CehYA3omb5o

I once had a wasp hiding near my center console start stinging my arm as soon as put my arm down as I started driving. Fortunately, I was still in my residential neighborhood so I was able to pull over and jump out of the car without causing an accident but it's easy to imagine the poorer consequences had I been a little further in my journey.

The typical American's biggest monthly expense is housing. Owning a house drastically reduces your monthly expenses. If you're young, out of work or on a fixed income, minimizing that expense can have an enormous impact on your quality of life and the choices available to you.

The generational wealth kicks in when your heirs can assume your mortgage free lifestyle, generate monthly income from it, borrow against it, or sell an asset that has likely appreciated in value (sometimes greatly) since it was purchased ages ago.

Because the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a non-white person or community that was starting to become prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them. At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of the most blatant examples include:

- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]

- Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2]

- Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [1]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [2]https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-lea... [3]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach...