Tips for a Better Life: “As usual, Vitalik ahead of the curve.”

Coal money can not replace the loss of drinking water

When the next drought comes, from where will we source replacement water for what has disappeared into the void beneath our catchments, $100 million or not?

 

“As usual, Vitalik ahead of the curve.”

On December 6 I revisited Celebrating the Crazy Ones.

 

Here’s a song from good mate Paul Numi’s Chimera album (my September 11 blog) – ‘A Square Peg’ – which celebrates Misfits (Paul NumiChimera - A Square Peg)

 

“This crisis won’t change us

It might reveal at last who we truly are”

 

The album has 100,000 views and is No. 1 in Chicago!!!!!

 

Here’s to the Misfits!

Gorillas at San Diego zoo diagnosed with COVID-19

Three among the band of critically endangered western lowland gorillas at the wildlife park have shown symptoms of the respiratory virus, such as coughing.

 

 The Australasian Virology Society in action.

 

Inside Germany's abattoirs: the human cost of cheap meat

Eastern European migrants have long staffed slaughterhouses with poor pay and gruelling hours. A new law wants to change that

For more than 20 years, Raya had scraped by, earning the equivalent of €200 a month at a hospital in Sofia, ­Bulgaria. But in September 2019, the 48-year-old widow risked everything to move west. She did it for her daughter. “I wanted to give her the chance to realise her dreams,” Raya says, anxiously rolling cigarettes, her hands mottled by red scars. “Desperation forced me to Germany.” 

Her initial attempts were humiliating. First, Raya (not her real name), was swindled by fake recruiters. They disappeared after she paid a deposit. Next, she was unwittingly hired by an eastern European mafia ring to work in a vegetable warehouse near Munich, where she was quickly arrested and deported. Then, in December 2019, while scrolling through Facebook, Raya found “the Müllers”, two Macedonians based in Germany. They recruited workers for companies like Besselmann, subcontractors to major European meat producers such as Vion and Tönnies. One post showed workers in hair nets and rubber gloves, working with large cuts of meat. Wages, Raya was told, were €1,600-€1,900 a month. 

She quickly headed to Rheda-Wiedenbrück — a north-west German town of white-washed, ­half-timbered buildings. Recruited by the Müllers and now employed by Besselmann, she started working at the largest abattoir in Germany, the Tönnies logo of a smiling bull, cow and pig twirling overhead.

The first hint something was wrong was her shabby hostel, arranged by Besselmann, where she was charged €300 a month for a bed in a shared room. Her pay cheques, also from Besselmann, were the next blow: the first two came to just €496 apiece, and she could not understand why. Nor did she have time to try: she was put to work 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for three months straight. 

On some days, Raya says, she wasn’t given gloves and her fingers went numb handling frozen meat. On others, she lifted so many 30kg boxes she could not feel her swollen wrists. She never called a doctor. The foreman, she says, yelled and threw boxes at workers to move them faster and threatened to fire anyone who took a sick day. “When I was arrested previously, in Munich, I discovered I’d been the victim of a mafia,” she says. “This felt the same, only worse — because this is actually legal.” Raya kept working, depressed and in pain, until July, when a coronavirus outbreak infected 1,500 Tönnies workers and forced the entire municipality into lockdown. More than 7,000 workers — including Raya, who never knew whether she tested positive — endured weeks of strict quarantine.

 This felt the same [as being a victim of the mafia], only worse — because this is actually legal ‘Raya’, an abattoir worker

Tips for a Better Life

Jason Kottke   

On his blog, Conor Barnes shared an eclectic list of 100 Tips For A Better Life. I’m less keen on these sorts of lists than I used to be because they’re often written for people who already have pretty good lives and it’s too easy to imagine that a list advocating the opposite of each tip would also lead to a better life. To be fair, Barnes’ list acknowledges the difficulty with generalized advice:

31. The best advice is personal and comes from somebody who knows you well. Take broad-spectrum advice like this as needed, but the best way to get help is to ask honest friends who love you.

That said, here are some of the list items that resonated with me in some way.

3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.

I recently upgraded my mattress from a cheap memory foam one I’d been using for almost 7 years to a hybrid mattress that was probably 3X the cost but is so comfortable and better for my back.

13. When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.

I’ve been doing this over the past year with mixed results. Google has become a terrible way to find good recipes, even with this trick. My version of this is googling “kenji {name of dish}” — works great.

27. Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.

My motivation is sometimes very low when it comes to working on this here website. But my discipline is off the charts, so it gets done 99 days out of 100, even in a pandemic. (I am still unclear whether this is healthy for me or not…)

46. Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.

48. Keep your identity small. “I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.

Oh, this used to be me: “I’m this sort of person.” Turns out, not so much.

56. Sometimes unsolvable questions like “what is my purpose?” and “why should I exist?” lose their force upon lifestyle fixes. In other words, seeing friends regularly and getting enough sleep can go a long way to solving existentialism.

75. Don’t complain about your partner to coworkers or online. The benefits are negligible and the cost is destroying a bit of your soul.

Interpreting “partner” broadly here, I completely agree with this one. If they are truly a partner (romantic, business, parenting), complaining is counterproductive. Instead, talk to others about how those relationships can be repaired, strengthened, or, if necessary, brought to an appropriate end.

88. Remember that many people suffer invisibly, and some of the worst suffering is shame. Not everybody can make their pain legible.

91. Human mood and well-being are heavily influenced by simple things: Exercise, good sleep, light, being in nature. It’s cheap to experiment with these.

This is good advice, but some of these things actually aren’t “cheap” for some people.

100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.

Oof, this ended on a flat note. Many bad things seem to happen dramatically because we don’t notice the results of small bad decisions accumulating over time that lead to sudden outcomes. Like Hemingway said about how bankruptcy happens: gradually, then suddenly. Lung cancer doesn’t happen suddenly; it’s the 40 years of cigarettes. California’s wildfires are the inevitable result of 250 years of climate change & poor forestry management techniques. Miami and other coastal cities are being slowly claimed by the ocean — they will reach breaking points in the near future. Even the results of something like earthquakes or hurricanes can be traced to insufficient investment in safety measures, policy, etc.

The pandemic seemed to come out of nowhere, but experts in epidemiology & infectious diseases had been warning about a pandemic just like this one for years and even decades. The erosion of public trust in government, the politicization of healthcare, the deemphasis of public health, and the Republican death cult (which is its own slow-developing disaster now reaching a crisis) controlling key aspects of federal, state, and local government made the pandemic impossible to contain in America. (This is true of most acute crises in the United States. Where you find people suffering, there are probably decades or even centuries of public policy to blame.)

Bad news happens slowly and unnoticed all the time. You don’t have to look any further for evidence of this than how numb we are to the fact that thousands of Americans are dying every single day from a disease that we know how to control. So, endeavour to keep track of the bad things to avoid an inaccurate and unrealistically optimistic view of the world — it helps in making a list of injustices to pay attention to and work against.

Alex redux: why do experiments make people uneasy?

Cocanha.

Sperm markets in Covid times, and disintermediation (NYT).  Recommended.  But a 1400 chess rating is nothing to boast about!

Angry people are more vulnerable to misinformation — Serenity Now!