Pensions pay (paid?) regardless of how the stock market is doing, and they pay for life. They grow with inflation, and you don't need to know anything about stocks, markets, funds, rebalancing or anything else to benefit. It was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it wasn't mismanaged and raided. Incidentally, today only 1/3 of working Americans have 401ks.
"More civilized age" also mostly meant people working for an extended period of time, e.g. 10-years plus, for a single employer.
And, even if an employer doesn't offer a 401(k) these days, there are generally other tax-advantaged savings mechanisms although they, of course, don't get employer contributions.
Mentos sugar free gum (since I have some handy) has xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose and "sucrose fatty acid esthers"
I seem to recall most xylitol gums also have aspartame, but Mentos is the only one I had handy to check.
Most of them don't have both. Xylitol doesn't really sit right with me though. I would eat xocolate all the time(chocolate that used xylitol as sweetener).
It's used in infant tooth paste as well, but I just can't believe that giving 1 year olds a sugar alcohol every day twice a day has no side effects at all.
Every couple of years we find these magical ingredients that solve all our problems and fix our teeth at the same time and then a few years later we find out that they weren't quite as healthy after all.
I was working with a decoder for the LD-CELP voice compression algorithm. The machine it was running on was compute-bound and the playback stuttered a lot. I dug into the code, then went to the papers describing the algorithm, then went back into the code and modified a piece of it to be better tuned to the data I was processing. In the average case I probably made the code worse, but in my specific case I sped up the thing by 30x. That gave me confidence in a few things:
1) I can figure out issues in other people's implementations.
2) The best solution may not be the best solution for you, and my hunches on optimization might be correct
Yes, in the experiment we had to touch highlighted groups of numbers on the screen during some phases, do simple math on groups of numbers, or read out numbers. One of the harder parts is repeatedly reaching out to touch the screen under G forces, your arms get really tired really fast.
I was a guinea pig for this experiment- they spun us up in the centrifuge, vibrated the chair in a simulation of launch forces, and had us doing reading and manual tasks. There are parts of your brain that nope out at certain frequencies, it's a remarkable feeling.
The centrifuge itself- you get a little nausea as it spins up, and then it feels like forward Gs; an elephant sitting on you or the bottom of a dip in a roller coaster that never stops. Even at higher Gs it's just a continuous crushing that makes it arduous to breathe, but they never spun us civilians up to the point that anything seemed life threatening.
But then on some of the vibration runs (they did a bunch of different frequencies), there was this overwhelming all-focusing urgent need to make it stop. It just felt wrong, and dangerous, and there wasn't room in the head for anything but this worry that something dreadfully wrong was happening. It pushed out any other thoughts.
The target runs (and this was a decade ago so I'm dragging through memory) were mostly just visual effects, though. Everything was bouncing around and you couldn't focus on anything well enough to read; and there was a bit of the worry in my thoughts but not the panic from other frequencies.
Quite interesting! The part about vibration and the feeling of need to make it stop, I wonder if it is the same as human responses to things like panic-inducing infrasound. Thank you!
Nobody talks about ozone because global cooperation led by science and public policy fixed the hole. Come to think of it, maybe we should talk about it more.
I play Walkabout Mini Golf weekly with a group of far-flung friends. The courses are interesting, the physics feel right, and the audio is good enough it feels like we're standing around a course having drinks and goofing off. It saved my pandemic, and has been a great way to keep in touch with folks on a regular basis.
The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.
