I get the most random articles by selecting around the mode (peak) of the distribution. The lowest of the low is all Daily Mail gossip all the time :puke:.
Curiosity is the first step, so you’re doing great.
“Say what you mean” by Oren Jay Sofer changed my life. Learning to actually, well, say what I was trying to say, to be facetious.
It was mind blowing to realise I was actually sending out completely contradictory messages.
NVC by Marshall Rosenberg is also good, but Sofer covers it.
I had, along with most I would say, unconsciously learnt a kind of domination language from the world around me growing up. Always trying to be right, using the aesthetic of logic and creating sides.
Learning to lead with curiosity, to actually listen to the other person was saying and think about it before responding to what they were saying instead of the concurrent Monolog of what I though they were saying was wiiiiiild.
I gained close friends in a way I always craved, I grew and and still growing closer to my partner. I calmed down a LOT, arguing less after realising I neither needed to win nor disagree.
I’m a fanboy, it’s life changing stuff.
Another parallel track was learning to be a more interesting person.
I had sort of relaxed into dyadic life, looking to my partner for entertainment, sort of blaming them when I was unhappy or bored.
Finding stuff to do on my own helped majorly. Hobbies and clubs, finding things I enjoyed others respected outside of work. Building light installations for music festivals in my case.
As sibling mentions, the issue is with overusing the default style. Another pattern could be to use a secondary outlined style, making skip as prominent as the default.
I've given up asking her arbitrary questions - the other day I asked what the weather was like in Sydney. (I live in Australia, so the context is really obvious). She told me what the weather was like at "Sidney's tool shed" - wherever that is.
But I use siri daily for things like:
- Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop")
- Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.
Siri handles this fine on my new phone from the opposite end of the globe. This seems to support my suspicion that they ship increasingly less sophisticated Siris to increasingly older phones. Siri on my 6S Plus before this became almost useless once they switched to on-device processing. It's also much better at identifying objects in photos for searches.
I'm querying siri on a homepod, not a phone. And I just checked - she still answers with a weather report near "Sidney Tools". (Its currently raining and 17 degrees C, if you're wondering.)
I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time.
For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve.
A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection.
Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?
I run into some things like this in Georgia. I wanted to know when the humidity and temperature were low enough to be safe. It's always nice in that part of California, so Siri has no concept of humidity and temperature. It just throws out a general weather report. The weather app at least has graphs for UV index, humidity, and temperature now. I think it must have come by way of Dark Sky.
This isn't just a SV thing, though. I downloaded a well-regarded weather app from a country in Europe that has pretty consistent humidity. The app didn't even show humidity. People have trouble seeing outside their bubble. SV just happens to have outsized influence, for now.
The way my house is set up, I doubt it would be dramatic for me. My hot water is already turned down. It seems like a big project to install a heat exchanger given the space it would need to be in.
All shared expenses are divided based on salary % so expenses are more based on work time than salary
IE,
Expense share = My salary / ( her salary + my salary)
To make this doable, we have a shared account, from which all shared expenses are paid (mortgage, food, holidays, anything that can be construed as shared)
So if one person earns 8000 euros a month and the other 2000, the split is 80/20.
If we need 100 euros in the account, one pays 80, the other 20
That way, when we go for a nice dinner, it's the same value for both of us. It costs us both 1%, or 1h of work etc.
Savings are private but property is in her name, to offset for gender inequality in general life security.
Context:
We're not married, are reasonably young (40/35), have been together a while (8 years, have good conflict resolution skills and plan to have a kid next year.
I get paid dramatically more than her but honestly she works harder than me. I work in tech she works in literature.
We plan to move to phase two soonish, of paying salaries into the join account and getting spending money in our checking accounts.
Having private accounts is useful for making sense of finances, just in terms of I can double check my own spending list without having to run it by her.
I'm into the single pot idea, but need to figure out how to do proper checks and balances incase we separate at some point. There need to be guards in place working against systemic gender equality, but I also don't want to screw myself over.
Having a written agreement about what savings belong to whom is more important when we have joint savings. Things bias towards being in the guys name, so the danger of a simple shared pot verbal agreement is that there is large wiggle room for me to claim everything in a breakup. Hence putting property in her name.
This is very similar to the advice our notary gave us. We opened a joint account, and we collectively agreed to put 75% of our salaries on that joint account. So every time she or I get paid, 75% of it goes on the joint account and 25% remains on our individual - private - accounts.
Anything we buy or pay with the shared account is considered to be 50% hers and 50% mine, regardless of who actually puts more in the account. The logic behind this is that we both make the exact same "effort" in buying those things. So we pay for almost everything with that account: holidays, groceries, utilities, furnitures, ... . If we have extra, we put a bit in a savings account / investment and those also belong to us 50/50.
The benefit of this approach is the it protects both of us. If we decide to have children and that she should work part-time instead of full-time to raise them, she will still have the exact same 50% claim on everything. She will not loose more than I do. We'll just have less money coming in the joint account and will have to adapt our budget accordingly. This is thus a common decision that impacts the both of us equally.
Importantly, our mortgage/rent is also paid off the joint account, so the house belongs to each of us 50-50. I was however able to contribute to a bigger portion of the downpayment for the house. To make things fair, she agreed to sign an "acknowledgement of debt", recognising that she "owes me" half the difference between my contribution to the downpayment and hers. If we stay together, that letter is just a useless paper that sits on a notary desks and we'll never talk about it. If we split, the house will be sold, each of us will get 50% of the proceeds, but I will be able to claim that difference, making things fair.
The remaining 25% on each other private accounts can be used for private expenses. I never have to "justify" buying a video game or an impulsive luxury since it comes out of my private account, I can also go out with friends and not have someone that asks wether that $75 tab at the bar is justified or not. Anything we buy with the private accounts is considered to be 100% belonging to the person who bought it. This account is also used for surprise gifts (birthday, Christmas, ...) since the expenses do not appear in the shared account logs. We agreed that any inheritance will not be split and will remain in our private accounts, so there is no "cheating" there. Also, anything that we had "before" we setup this system remains in our private accounts.
If one of our private accounts becomes "big" and we start seeing some significant asymmetry between those (Eg: I inherent millions and she doesn't, so I could have an amazing life but the join account is frustratingly poor) we have the option of treating some part as regular "income" our of it (Eg: do an automatic payment of $xxx every month). Since this is an income, that amount goes 75% in the joint account and 25% remains in the private account. This increases the amount available on the joint account, so we can afford the cool things we wanted. But the bulk of the money stays in my private account so if we split she won't have any claim to any of it.
Of course, the 75% - 25% split is a decision we took, but you might wanna change percentages according to your situation. Overall we are extremely happy with this arrangement as it brings the financial discussions close to 0 (we had some before).
Ive had a Bahncard 100 (yearly pass for all fast trains in the country) for six years now and while there are problems, its about once a year, working out to about 1% of my train trips.
For air travel, Id guesstimate I get delays about 10-20% of the time.
