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yowzadave commented on A queasy selling of the family heirlooms   commonreader.wustl.edu/a-... · Posted by u/ilamont
jchallis · 6 months ago
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill.

Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:

1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.

2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.

3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.

4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.

This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.

yowzadave · 6 months ago
> 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.

What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?

yowzadave commented on Major quantum computing advance made obsolete by teenager (2018)   quantamagazine.org/teenag... · Posted by u/kwie
ameliaquining · 8 months ago
I agree with you but changing the basic grammatical rules of a language is a difficult coordination problem and you can't just do it by posting that it would be good.
yowzadave · 8 months ago
There's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal . The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.
yowzadave commented on CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems   colton.dev/blog/tailwind-... · Posted by u/coltonv
vijivishali · 8 months ago
I echo this. For all the supposedly bad things it is, Tailwind provides a level of common denominator in a big team still making sure the CSS at the basic level is nice.
yowzadave · 8 months ago
It doesn't even require a big team to be useful—I won't remember how I organized a set of styles a few months from now, and having Tailwind require a minimal set of constraints, and keeping the styles easily editable in the place you use them makes things more maintainable over time.

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yowzadave commented on The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015)   nautil.us/is-this-new-swi... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
foobarbecue · 8 months ago
Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.
yowzadave · 8 months ago
Does this effect taper off as you get further away from the edges of the pool? Wondering if you could eliminate the unfairness by just leaving a few lanes empty on each edge of the pool.
yowzadave commented on More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad   daringfireball.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/dotcoma
karel-3d · 8 months ago
They put U2 album to all iPhone users
yowzadave · 8 months ago
This is worse. The U2 thing was a "gift", albeit an unsolicited one that many people didn't want and were annoyed by. This is just a crappy ad.
yowzadave commented on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic   wave3.social... · Posted by u/nswizzle31
keiferski · 9 months ago
This idea appears every once in awhile, as it’s obviously a major issue in modern life.

The interesting thing though is how the solution is always location-agnostic. By that I mean it’s never really about a specific cafe or restaurant or soccer field, it’s always an app or service that organizes people to show up in various places.

I bring this up because if you look at places that had lively social activities a few decades or a century ago, they were almost always a specific place.

The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week. These are stationary physical locations that don’t require pre-planning, schedules, apps, or anything else.

yowzadave · 9 months ago
I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.
yowzadave commented on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden   thewrap.com/dilbert-scott... · Posted by u/dale_huevo
pjc50 · 10 months ago
> getting sucked into

I've come to believe that infohazards are real.

Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.

Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".

Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".

yowzadave · 10 months ago
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.

u/yowzadave

KarmaCake day1442July 9, 2018View Original