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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The key to eating healthy is to find healthy foods that are reasonably inexpensive that you can eat as is, or cook simply and quickly with minimal chance of ruining it.

    For drinks, water first and foremost, with maybe milk/juice occasionally.

    For breakfast, toast/bagel and fruit, or maybe a granola, yogurt, and frozen berry parfait

    For lunch, something like pretzels, mixed nuts/raisins (the hidden gem in any healthy diet), cheese and an apple/grapes.

    Both of these meals are quick, healthy and require no cooking. The trick is dinner.

    What I recommend is having a three piece meal, a carb so your not hungry, and then a vegetables and a protein for nutrition, all cooked separately.

    For carb, pasta is fine, rice is better, but best would be an ancient grain like quinoa or farro, which nutritionally blow them out of the water.

    For veggies, sweet potatoes and sauted spinach are nutrition kings, but anything is good.

    Finally, steer clear of red meat for the most part for your protein. Beans, chicken, turkey and wild caught fish are your friends.

    An absolutely killer meal is something like quinoa (boiled), sweet potato (sliced and boiled or baked whole), spinach (sautéd first), and turkey (sautéd second)

    Nutritional, filling, two pots, one pan, about 20 minutes total, and the only thing you need to watch is the pan, and spinach/turkey don’t burn fast anyway.

    But the most important thing is what you don’t buy. Most people, including me, have poor impulse control when we’re hungry. So go shopping full, and then don’t buy yourself anything unhealthy, because you will eat it later.





  • But you need to understand, they feel the same way about you.

    When you ignore them and never engage on every topic (Edited for clarity), they think you are giving them the silent treatment, which is also associated with children

    Give you the mature ones you can learn from, you say. Have you engaged those people? People will be more likely to teach you if they like you, and they’ll be more likely to like you if you talk to them.

    I’m not saying you’re wrong that it shouldn’t be this way, and I am agreeing with you that a position of like lab/rad tech with less colleagues might be more fitting to your personality.

    But I am saying expecting people to care about you, understand you and treat you well, while you make no effort to do the same, is completely naive and hypocritical.


  • You say small talk is “irrelevant” to your job, but since you lost that job for not doing it, and it sounds like not for the first time, it is, by definition, extremely relevant.

    “I felt they weren’t listening to me.” That is how, by your own admission, you made them feel for 8 weeks. To turn your question around, why should they listen to you?

    I understand how you feel. I never understood natural small talk in school, and like you I was ostracized for it.

    But the difference is I recognized how important it was to have allies in any environment, and the only way you get them is via socializing.

    So I tried, I suffered, I learned and I got better. And that I did that again, and again, and again.

    Have you made that effort? You already said you haven’t.

    But this episode clearly hurt you, and it’s happened in the past, so don’t you think it’s time to learn?

    Einstein once said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

    Have you accepted that if you don’t change, these things will happen, again and again, for the rest of your life? If not, you are insane.

    You say they are thin skinned, but to a few external observers, this long post also feels that way. Either don’t change and accept the known consequences of your actions without complaint, or adapt.

    Of course it’s difficult. But people do difficult things every day. Think of it as a challenge. In addition to asking “do we give sodium bicarbonate by metabolic acidosis or alkalosis?”, also ask “so, have any plans for the weekend?”. And remember both answers, and ask them how whatever they talked about on Monday.

    These conversations don’t have to take long, but just engaging for a minute or two will drastically change people’s perceptions of you. Which, considering those people can fire you, is extremely relevant.

    Ultimately, your complaint is they don’t care about you. But you admit to not caring about them or their problems either, so I don’t understand why you’d expect a different outcome.


  • Thankfully there’s now an easy way to maximize your return/risk ratio: Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

    Before ETFs you had two options: choose individual stocks and risk choosing wrong, or pay a financial consultant outrageous fees to do it for you.

    ETFs allows you to track the market, which over time only goes up, minimizing your risk. They also (usually) charge very low fees, which increases your returns.

    If you are interested in US equities, VOO, which tracks the S&P 500, has a gross expense ratio (ie how much you pay them) of .03%. Considering how 20 years ago you might have paid a financial advisor 3%, it’s literally 100th of the cost. QQQM, which tracks the NASDAQ has a GER of .15%, is also good.

    As an Italian, you might also be interested in an EWI, which tracks Italian stock performance, and has actually done pretty well the last year. However it has GER of .50%, so you’ll be paying a bit more. I’m not sure if you have access to different products there, so might be something to look in to. European stocks have done pretty well of late, so you may also want to look into ETFs for other countries (DAX for Germany, EWP for Spain, EWQ for France, etc). Finally you may want to consider emerging markets, like EMXC for China.

    Again you may have access to different products, I’m not sure how that works, but basically any ETF which tracks a developed or high growth emerging market country would be good to add to your portfolio, and you should prioritize those with low GER to maximize your returns.

    Lastly, I would STRONGLY encourage you to not even look into things like options, futures, shorting etc. Your focus as a retail investor should be to maximize your return to risk ratio.

    If the market dips 10%, and you’ve put in 10k, it’s sad to see 1k “go away” but if you wait a few more days/weeks/months and just not sell and realize that loss, it has literally always bounces back (unlike an individual company), and you suffer no negative effects.

    But futures, options and shorts, while potentially more rewarding, have outcomes where you can get really fucked, have to pay everything you have and more, and be left with nothing. It’s just not worth it IMO.











  • Did you read the article? Relevant section below:

    “Let’s be clear, Palantir wasn’t brought in for customer service. It was brought in to do what it does best: manage, shape, and secure vast streams of data—quietly. According to Eaton’s own release, Palantir’s role would include: AI-driven oversight of connected infrastructures Automated analysis of large datasets And—most critically—“secure erasure of digital footprints”

    The Digital Janitor:also known as forensic sanitization, it was now being embedded into Eaton-managed hardware connected directly to voting systems. Palantir didn’t change the votes. It helped ensure you’d never prove it if someone else did.




  • Nothing by itself. But if it can encourage other senators to filibuster, and more importantly, to organize to filibuster together , the impact could be paralyzing.

    To take an obvious example, for half a century, from say 1910 to 1964-5, there were more than enough votes in the US senate to enact civil rights legislation, as southerners only made up 22 or so of the 96-100 senators then (no Hawaii or Alaska for part of that).

    But that legislation never happened. And the reason why it didn’t was that southern senators were able to filibuster so effectively that the legislation could never be brought to the floor, or to force its withdrawal if it got there.

    It’s not that the votes on that specific bill weren’t there. It’s just that under the leadership of Sen Richard Russel of Georgia (who the “Russel Senate Office Building” is named after), the southern senators understood the way to block legislation was to filibuster not just the bill in question, but any law that was about to lapse that was so important economically that senators couldn’t afford to let that happen.

    So they organized, filibustered key bills, set up “watches” where at least one senator had to be on the floor to defeat any quorum calls (which ends a filibuster, as you do not actually have to be talking to filibuster a bill), and filibustered not just votes on key bills, but even votes on motions to bring those bills out of committee to the floor.

    Moreover, since these filibusters weren’t on the bill itself, it was easy for an individual senator to say they were against another bill, or another motion, and make it seem like an unrelated objection, when it was really all part of a comprehensive strategy.

    Eventually, the impending economic doom created enough pressure to get any civil rights bill withdrawn in order to let those other bills pass, which was the southerners asking price.

    Obviously, the democrats now aren’t doing that. But they could. And by generating headlines by filibustering, he encourages other senators to do so, if only for popularity.