Usury was indeed the term that immediately came to mind.

I would agree, but it’s not my life, not my money. You can’t really go around telling people they fucked up every time you see it.

Most of the math I do at work is related to compound interest. Of all the math I believe the general public should understand, the concept of how paying interest to others is a total screw would get my top vote.

I have a co-worker who took out a car loan last week at, wait for it, FIFTY THREE PERCENT INTEREST! No concept of what that was costing her. She could only see, “I can afford the monthly payment.”

(1 + r)^n and its friend 1/(1 + r)^n have been the two most important concepts in work and personal life that I’ve ever learned and applied.

I know several of those. One I don’t see listed is stuff made here. If you’re a fan of backyard scientist, you’re gonna love stuff made here.

Smarter everyday is really a special one. The way that guy involves his kids and his own boyish excitement when he finally gets an experiment right is downright heartwarming. Then there was the whole episode checking in on physics girl. He had no particular incentive to do that. He just really seems to care.

I just took a charter flight that didn’t involve going through TSA or the airport terminal.

Whatever happened on the flight itself was irrelevant as the sheer pleasure of getting on a plane without the standard anal probe far outweighed all other aspects of the journey.

I personally pronounce it fahrenheit

You’ve definitely got no shortage of choices out there.

I was up in the other Portland last week (Maine) and they’ve also got a ton of good options.

That city name must inspire people or something.

When I used to teach European students, they would invariably go out and buy the cheapest crap they could find like cases of pabst genuine draft and then complain how bad the American beer is.

I think the British equivalent would be if I bought a bottle of frosty jack and used it to declare all British cider to be shitty.

You gotta spend some money to get good American beer. Pretty much all the nationally brewed stuff is shit. There’s a lot of local stuff that’s actually good.

I’m not sure how European beer culture works, but one of the reasons to drink shitty American beer water is that you can drink it all day without dying.

One more useless fact: I long thought that adjuncts in shitty American beer like corn and rice were strictly cost cutting measures. There’s definitely some truth to that. But the origins apparently go back to nineteenth century brewers being unable to achieve a clear lager with the barley that was available in America. When they used the barley exclusively, they kept getting a cloudy product.

In my fifties and still have that dream, but it’s worse.

I went to boarding school, so my dreams involve fifty something year old me having to go back to live in the dorm with a bunch of kids.

I, for one, would rather have milk from a bear.

I had a student some thirty years ago whose name was Oh Yu Suk.

It was difficult for me to maintain when I first saw it.

I lived in Korea for a while where they also do the ten thousand thing. I got used to it for numbers up to about ten million, but then would get quickly lost.

Since everybody was making a couple million won a month, knowing numbers that big was necessary.

Well I did just read an article yesterday where some European billionaire was complaining that Europeans don’t have the “ambition” that Americans do, so they waste their lives by working fewer hours and spending time in social situations.

Clearly, the Italian builders guild only allows for a two hour work week, so no jobs ever get completed.

I love that there’s a reference to the Tom Hanks classic Mazes and Monsters in there.

Funny thing about the eighties. I was absolutely forbidden from playing dungeons and dragons but was totally allowed to play wizardry, Ultima, and bards tale.

Explain that parental logic.

I do feel I missed out. Never did get to play the real deal.

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I had a 55 inch TV that I bought in 2005 right before flat screens became common. Thing was so heavy it was on wheels.

When it finally died, I used it as a TV stand for my TV.

COVID forced me to stay in my house for an extended period of time. I never ventured back out. Businesses are certainly not incentivizing me to do so.

As a result, I’ve watched my bank account grow at a rate it never has. In a nearly identical upward trend on the graph so have grown my depression and loneliness.

The outside world has become hostile in addition to expensive.

I’m glad I’m old and this is not my whole life ahead of me stage.

Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I’m going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.