I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.

He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.

This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.

The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).

We'd take devices and lock them up, but in the middle of the night while we were asleep he'd find a way. He'd plan it out during the day. He'd borrow his friends' school Chromebook, hide it in his room, download videos for offline viewing, and then wake up at 1:00 AM and binge watch.

We set up security cameras and would punish him when we caught him, but it didn't matter, because all he wanted was to watch videos, and no punishment mattered. He was going to watch them anyway. We locked devices in a safe, and during the day he'd figure out how to pull up security video and get an idea of the combination, and try every one close to that until he got in.

We considered locking him in his room at night, but rejected it because of safety and bathroom issues. Eventually we had to set up alarms around the house that would wake us up every time he got up. It took years of our sleep and mental health suffering, but we eventually broke him of it. Or he grew out of it. Who knows.

Technology is ubiquitous today. The schools require it. Society demands it. It's like if every house had a heroin dispenser. How would you prevent a junkie from getting their fix?

How do I do that?

Right now the next thing is to build neat stuff in my garage wood shop. One of the next things is going to be traveling in comfort. After that the next thing might be learning to fly a plane. But some day I'm going to be in a nursing home, and I don't want to suffer or be a burden on my family. The only real answer I see that gives me that kind of freedom (freedom from worrying) is to earn money now.

The billion dollar question is unnecessarily short-sighted and hedonistic. It advocates that you sell your future self short by doing what your present self wants. We are ever-changing bags of meat, and what you want in 10 years is almost certainly not going to be what you want now.

> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

So it's a bucket of crabs

A modern horse costs $3000 - $8000. Saffron at the grocery store costs $5 - $20 per gram, but you can get it for wholesale at $1000 - $5000 per pound.

So saffron is about the same affordability now, even though it's more common.

I'm concerned that there are people pushing on the code generation front, the code reviewing front, and the laziness front. Eventually they're going to all meet in the middle, and there will be a significant number of engineers who are using AI to write and review the code, rubber stamp it, and push it into prod, with disasterous results.

That said, I hardly think that foldable is the peak. I'd prefer a rollable phone that I can expand the screen on, with maybe an edge display.

And the price is the real kicker. For the vast majority of the Android population, a phone at a price point about $1000 is just a non-starter.

Once again, proving that Idiocracy (2006) was prophetic, and not just satire.

And that's why on our last trip we had 9 pounds of dog food for our service dog, in cold packs, in our carry-on. "But what if there's a problem with the flight, and we lose our luggage, and we can't get to a pet food store for the whole two weeks?"

Spoiler: The cold packs didn't last, the food spoiled, and we had to go to a pet store.

- Ménage à cinq

- Never Again II

If you're a decent software engineer, living in North Elbonia, making $20,000 / year, that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $100,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

Or you could move to the Silicon Valley and make $400,000 / year and that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $2,000,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

But when you sell your house, move back to North Elbonia, and buy a house there, you've got $1,900,000 banked. I'd take that deal.

I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.

But I'm in new construction. Built in 2015, so I think I'm good on seismics.

I'm in CA, and even though I'm not on top of an active fault, I'm close enough to be impacted. When the big one gets here, if it's big enough to affect me, then everyone else will be affected. I don't have any reason to expect them to stay solvent if a third of the CA population files for benefits.

I've thought about taking the money I pay for earthquake insurance premiums, and instead putting it on polymarket, betting that an earthquake will happen. If it doesn't, then I'm no worse off than I was paying for insurance. If it does, then polymarket just distributes my "winnings".

Convince me to keep my insurance.

> [Googlers live in a] vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt [...] without a clearly articulated reason

At the end of the day, nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason. Not other staff, and certainly not members of the public.

If you were the one fired, would you want HR to announce that you were fired for taking Sundar's special cookies out of the cookie jar labeled "For VIPs ONLY!!!"? That seems like a trifling reason to me, and maybe not justified. But maybe I don't agree with the general population, and maybe that would be held against me in the future.

As the recipient of that information you're welcome to share it. And I haven't seen Justin clearly do so. But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.