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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • A lot of exercises you can do in the gym you can also do at home with a pair of dumbbells or even just your body weight.

    The benefits of the gym for me is having an air conditioned environment, with machines that can guide my exercises and help enforce proper form, a good space to meetup with personal trainers, opportunities for group classes, and somewhere where there’s people around in case anything goes wrong in one of my exercises.

    Not all gyms are the same too. There are climbing gyms, kickboxing gyms, mma gyms, gyms with pools, gyms with basketball and volleyball courts, gyms with tennis, squash, and badminton courts, etc. A lot of those you can’t do from home.






  • Debt and ledgers.

    Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.


  • For some reason it’s become commonplace to think that barter is what preceded and/or would replace cash if we ever lost cash.

    Anthropologist David Graeber has written a more compelling account of history with examples in a variety of societies showing that debt and ledgers are what came before cash and I’m thinking a system based off of them would probably be strong contender for a future without cash.


  • Unless this thing runs on fossil fuels, I don’t think it’s really going to have a big impact on climate change.

    I guess there’s an argument that this is taking away engineering hours from projects that might have more practical uses in addressing climate change but I’d counter that sometimes engineers need a break from their usual work to avoid burning out from tedious incremental tasks and rigid processes. A bit of time and space for experimentation can be helpful, reinvigorating, and can lead to future discoveries and inventions if done right.







  • It wasn’t always so one sided. Jane Jacobs wrote about the power and effect of local community surveillance over the streets in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When we zone for and build mixed use streets with enough density and points of interest to ensure foot traffic at all points in the day from a variety of ordinary people, with a healthy percentage of them being established locals, then it’s much easier for good samaritans to notice when something goes wrong (like a kidnapping attempt) and intervene. Privacy used to be a lot easier to achieve too when you needed it.








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