I couldn’t imagine putting in the effort to even try to be attractive and build a connection with someone else, much less in a way that I’d have to hide from my wife and kids.

I handle it just fine now, but I did lay some groundwork before kids to make sure my life was going to continue to be easy even with the added responsibility of parenting:

• Insignificant commute. I can leave my house and be at my desk at the office in about 10 minutes, even during rush hour, because the bike lanes still flow efficiently.
• Small home. I don’t want to fuck around with house maintenance or even cleaning up around the house any more than is absolutely necessary, so I don’t have excess rooms in the house and don’t have big spaces. I also don’t fuck with yard work so I have only a small patio with a few planters for a modest garden.
• Flexible career that I actually like. I have a decent chunk of work to do in any given week, but most of it can be done on my own schedule, so that I can start my day late or end my day early as needed, so long as I can find the time elsewhere to fill in as needed. This did take some work to find a career that I like and that actually complements my strengths (several complete resets in my 20’s and 30’s, including going to law school as an older student), and then advancing in that field long enough to where I just have credibility to get things done without other people supervising me. I do work more than 50 hours per week fairly regularly, but I largely do it on my terms.
• Money. My wife and I both earn more than average, and we were already rich before we had kids. That gave the flexibility to do things like take unpaid leave for each kid being born, paying for childcare when they were young, grabbing takeout on days when time is tight, etc.
• Social support network. We have some family nearby, and they can help in a pinch (and we in turn help them as necessary). Our neighborhood social group is amazing, with a lot of other parents and similarly aged kids who can provide the social and emotional support for navigating the very real challenges of parenting. We don’t feel like we’re doing things alone, and we have a village. Many of these relationships predate parenting, too, so in a sense we knew that we had that ecosystem of friends and family to continue to grow with (even if we wouldn’t have been able to predict in advance exactly which friendships would thrive and which would wither after kids, we had the baseline to be able to be flexible with that).

There were tradeoffs, to be sure. We were older than average when we had kids, and that might translate into lower energy levels for each stage of childhood, and may eventually mean that we get to enjoy less overlapping time as adults. We live in a small place so we do need to basically leave the house regularly so that our kids don’t get bored, and that’s more of a challenge in the winter when outdoor spaces aren’t all that pleasant. During COVID, while working 100% remotely, being close to the office wasn’t all that much of a perk.

And we got lucky on other things. Our children are healthy and (mostly) well behaved, so we don’t have to worry as much about a lot of things other parents have to deal with. We also really get along with our own parents, so there aren’t challenging dynamics with the grandparents/in laws.

even single

It’s worth pointing out that coupling up often buys more leisure time, at least before kids. Many household tasks benefit from volume where doubling the output doesn’t actually double the work to be done (cooking, laundry) or where combining households basically consolidates two tasks into one (bills, cleaning, home maintenance).

I didn’t have all that much free time when I was single, but those dual income/no kids years were glorious.

I’m not sure that was true in 1990 in the United States. In the old analog networks, the central offices could route calls locally among phone numbers that shared the same central office, which was basically any number that had the same first 3 digits of the 7 digit number under the North American Numbering Plan. At least for the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, in the 80’s, the neighborhood pizza places had the same central office code as my home phone number.

It wasn’t until the rise of digital switching that the phone number itself got decoupled from the actual network topography, and things like number portability became possible. But in the analog systems they wanted to minimize switching where possible, so “local” calls weren’t all equally local.

Dan Flashes Mcdonalds is a very aggressive store. I mean, you walk by a store and you see 50 guys who look just like me fighting over very complicated shirts, you go in. Yes, you do. You go in.

physically uncomfortable

such an unnatural position

Have you considered that he’s been standing with his shoulders rotated forward for most of his life, and that his feeble body falls right into this position, rather than a neutral position where he’d have to expend strength standing up straight with a strong looking torso?

The current difference in apparent gravity between the equator and the poles is about 0.3%.

I think the centrifugal effect squares with angular velocity (plus the bulge of the earth would make the distance from the center of gravity ever so slightly larger), so maybe doubling the rotation speed would bring it up to 1.2%.

So maybe a measureable effect but probably not enough to actually overcome the biological limits on size/mass/weight.

That’s great. What’s your typical week look like for runs?

I recently set a powerlifting total of 1100 lbs (499 kg, just shy of 500 kg) between squat, bench, deadlift. In September, I decided to de-emphasize the powerlifting main lifts (dropping to 2 sessions per week) and just try to maintain those the best I could while I pursued other goals:

• Get under 200 lbs (90.7 kg) in body weight
• Do 10 pull ups in a single unbroken set
• Run 5k in under 25 minutes
• Olympic lifting total (Clean and Jerk, Snatch) of at least 300 lbs/135 kg

Now, 2 months in, I’ve made some slight progress:

• No perceptible loss of strength on powerlifting, but I’ve cut my weight from 215 lbs to 210 lbs.
• Pull ups are up from 4 to 7 in the last 6 weeks. Probably not a strength/endurance improvement but just a consequence of getting slightly lighter in weight.
• Ran 2.5 miles in 25 minutes, a very slight improvement from being able to run 2 miles in 20 minutes
• Learning the fundamental movements on snatch, refining some bad habits on clean and jerk. Haven’t tested 1RM yet but have gotten comfortable with the basic movements by snatching 95 lbs (43 kg) and cleaning and jerking 135 lbs (60 kg).

Later this winter I might try to focus in a bit more on one of these specific goals, but it’s nice to try to be a bit more well rounded instead of just lifting for strength.

Is he…your son?

I’d argue that the type of people who make those investment decisions often don’t put the proper weight on “destroy the planet” risk when calculating their expected value.

I don’t understand any dog barks

That’s obviously false. Any dog owner knows when their dog is begging for help getting something out of reach or being let in/out of a gate, which barks mean “hey someone’s at the door” or “squirrel” and which yelps mean pain. Beyond that, growls and body language can communicate quite a bit, too.

The big players in AI aren’t highly leveraged

It’s not traditional leverage but the recent deals being announced where the AI companies are raising money from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, AMD, Oracle, etc. and paying it back in stock or purchase commitments have a certain circular bootstrappy notion to them. The formulas for the valuations rely on feedback loops that are less stable and might create runaway feedback conditions at the slightest hiccup.

In any highly capital intensive business, you always run the risk that the thing you build is worth less than the cost it took to build it. And when that happens, collapses can happen pretty quickly, as everyone invested in these companies rushes towards the offramp.

I can think of a few catalysts that could trigger that initial realization that the thing made isn’t actually worth the cost to build it:

• A new model comes out from a competitor that was cheaper to build and almost as good. (Deepseek reminded everyone that this might happen.)
• New money stops coming in and the companies building things have to tighten their belts. This could be driven by a failure to monetize as much as previously modeled, so that the value of the company itself is questioned.
• Some kind of legal flaw threatens the entire foundation of some expensive models.
• Some kind of technical flaw causes one company’s flagship model to lose the race against other companies.
• Some key personnel are incapacitated in a way that robs the company of its momentum (this almost happened with the board of directors revolt at OpenAI).
• Something else I haven’t thought of.

But once a hiccup happens, something built on so many self-reinforcing loops is less resilient against the unknown, the chaos of the real world.

It’s a moonshot in that it has a very tiny likelihood of attracting alien intelligence that is such a game changer that it brings an unfathomable amount of wealth to our planet.

You just mixed being strong with being fat.

Strong people can look fat. Powerlifters, strongmen, shot putters, football linemen, and other athletes where really high strength are important tend to carry a lot of body fat, too.

Fat doesn’t mean strong, but very strong very often means “fat” looking.

There’s definitely something to this popular neighborhoods theory.

As an anecdote from my dense urban area, there’s a stretch of a few residential blocks that have become the most popular spot within walking distance of my home, and it’s largely due to the trick or treating “geography” of the area: horizontal density of lots of participating homes per block, wide sidewalks, single lane roads with lots of stop signs and crosswalks (inconvenient for through traffic).

The blocks with major stroads get avoided for pedestrian safety reasons, and the blocks with big apartment buildings or commercial storefronts get avoided because there’s not a lot of trick or treating available.

So it creates hot spots, which feed back onto themselves as the residents of those hot blocks lean more heavily into decorations and candy and costumes the next year.

And what I’m describing is kinda a micro sized distribution of this phenomenon, where the hotspots are only maybe a 2x2 grid of city blocks, next to completely dead zones of 2x2 city blocks. I imagine in a suburban area that clustering effect can intensify, especially if everyone is driving.

Like the Key & Peele sketch where they’re in a party that don’t stop and can’t escape, even through suicide.

It’s even funny the way the parent comment described it: a girl town right next to the normal town.

Canned green beans are great. I don’t care how many fancy meals I eat, there’s always gonna be a place for that nostalgic flavor.

And canned corn is basically my preferred method of adding corn to soups.