For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

Cubes are the worst of both worlds. You have the noise of open plan, but the lack of visibility of other people like offices

The common refrain of how we’re doomed by climate change and the fact we can’t fix it, so nothing matters anyway has their fingerprints all over it

Legal eagle has a video spelling out which laws are broken. Note that there are specific laws against paying people to vote

Use a throwaway email, drop it as soon as the promotion is over

His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers

His parents were employees, not business owners.

Amazon: people like books; people like next day delivery of stuff; people and companies like making stuff and running stuff in Amazon web services

Minecraft: Marcus Persson owned the game studio (and wrote quite a bit of the game) that made Minecraft, lots of people like it, Microsoft was willing to buy it for billions

Kiran Mazumdan-Shaw made beer, people like beer. They then used beer making processes to make biotech medicines - people like being alive and will pay a lot to stay alive, or even just a bit healthier

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk’s family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software “zip2” which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk’s money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX’s incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion’s drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster

Having listened to ‘good bad billionaire’ for several episodes the formula is

1. Create or inherit a company
2. Do good at it
3. Float it on the stock exchange
4. Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

1. Make an insanely popular game
2. Sell it to Microsoft

Or

1. Be the child of someone who did one of the above

Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis

For safety.

When you back in you have good visibility on your way in - you see in and behind the spot you’re taking as you drive past it to line up

When you leave you have excellent visibility ahead as it’s on front of

Also the car is easier to steer into the spot in reverse

I guess some people are really bad drivers

Leave the spot just the opposite way to which you entered the spot. Then try again.

Ideal: exactly centered between whatever defines the spot (lines, cars, kerbs)

Ideal’: close to a kerb and far from the neighboring car/line

That’s “parent” not “adult”

I with no kids at home have excellent sleep

Teens are the ones (after new mothers) who suffer the most, with natural sleep cycles starting around midnight or in the early morning and wake times in the late morning or early afternoon, but school schedules that force them to be active at school from 9am

My sister got told off regularly for reading after lights out

As adults my mother told me that after they found books for me I liked they pretended to never notice the light leaking through my doona, they were just happy to see I was reading

It’s not like the US manufacturers anything anymore, and Hollywood has forgotten how to make movies

It’s like you don’t even try to export your culture anymore, when I was a kid everyone watched Sesame Street, now all the kids in all the English speaking world are watching Bluey

Yeah public transport is ideal for most transport cases and should be funded by cities to the level to allow it to provide that

But still some cases call for individual transport and my preference on that is taxis over Uber and the like as taxis have a duty to pick up anyone who can pay which the newer companies don’t

I hope that self driving taxis include accessible ones, I expect there will still need to be a class of staffed cars to help people who need assistance - eg those who can’t lift their bag into our out of the vehicle, those who need assistance to put on a seat belt

The Flynn effect makes that a time sensitive achievement

Is that a deliberately 3d image pair?

They seem 3d with the cross eye technique

I’m seeing cats planning how to get off those sticks so they can knock the baked goods to the floor