Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude
Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?
Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude
Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?
Same but also because I haven’t felt the desire to get taco bell without having been drinking first.
No sorry this is gastro-entomology.
What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I’m having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you’re saying.
Or are you just speaking about cash reserves?
Yes. Cash reserves are like unused RAM to me: I have it, so I might as well put it to work. If it turns out I need it somewhere else, I can always go rearrange things to make that possible.
Realistically, I think I’m rich because my wife and I both have strong ability to command high salaries, switch jobs, etc., even in a pretty severe downturn. The main things that might tank the value of that expected future cash flow are disability or death, and we at least insure against those.
We also only need one of our two incomes to support our lifestyle, so we have a certain resilience that just comes from having that buffer. At our current ages, we also already have substantial retirement savings, so we have some resilience there, too.
What’s your relationship or philosophy with money?
A life-changing shift to my approach has been to worry about absolute amounts rather than percentages. Saving $10 on a $20 item feels great but ultimately is the same thing as saving $10 on a $500 item (which feels like nothing).
I grew up lower middle class: never had to worry about not having a roof over my head, but there were times we were somewhat food insecure, and spending money on leisure/entertainment or anything unnecessary for survival was a foreign concept until I got to high school and some my parents’ career moves paid off and put us in upper middle class. It took them a good 10+ years before they could relax a little bit and feel secure with their money, though, and that was as much driven by the fact that their kids were adults who had moved out.
So life has been about deciding which of my parents’ frugal attitudes and approaches to money to keep and which to discard.
Things I decided not to adopt:
Things I kept:
Things I had to learn on my own:
I’ve also made a shitload of mistakes, some of them pretty costly, especially back in my 20’s:
I’m rich now, most of it from luck (especially timing), much of it from personal relationships (good family, good marriage, good friends), some of it from actual effort (good grades from a good law school), and some of it from conscious decisions to steer towards my strengths and away from my weaknesses (lazy but smart, prototypical “gifted” slacker with undiagnosed ADHD).
It took a while to get here, though, and I was financially insecure well into my 30’s. Sorta figured shit out then, and then married someone who complements me pretty well on these things, and covers my blind spots.
For the extra brave ones: how much savings do you have, and what are you planning to do with them?
I have some savings, and it’s an emergency fund. It’s representing 1-2 months of typical spending, that could be stretched to 3-4 months if I needed to stop the frivolous spending. But I have credit beyond that, and less liquid assets I’d be able to tap into if I were facing a longer term issue.
But I’m not saving for any particular thing other than retirement. If things accumulate and grow, great. I’ll make a judgment call on when to retire based on how I feel and how much I have and what I want to do. I anticipate my wife and I will probably want to retire in our early 60’s, based on our anticipated career trajectories and the ages of our children.
I read that half of Americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $1,000 expense.
Without borrowing or selling property, yeah. Not a lot of people have that much liquid cash laying around.
But I wouldn’t assume that this would be some kind of economic devastation. Our whole system revolves around easy credit.
If the unexpected expense is something that can be paid for on a credit card, that 20% interest isn’t exactly ideal but for many people it can be a simple task of buying now and paying it off over 2 or 3 months. For them, $1000 isn’t a lifestyle changing expense.
For others, $1000 might be devastating. It might be the difference between making rent or not, and ultimately lead to eviction and maybe even homelessness.
So liquidity is a different question from financial health or resilience, even if they’re somewhat correlated. There are other metrics out there more directly measuring financial stability or vulnerability.
In that case, you have a few options:
If you paint a black cow black, and it gets bit less, that would sort of give it away wouldnt it?
They already did sorta do that. One of the three groups was painted black on black, albeit with stripes. Those were bitten as much as the unpainted black cows.
To take it to the furthest conclusion I’d paint them entirely in black, and entirely in white (in case there’s something different between the white and black paint besides the color).
How do they know the paint didn’t do it?
There were 3 groups of black cows: an unpainted control group, a black stripe group painted with black stripes (not very visible because the cows were already black), and a black and white painted group. The control group had similar results to the black stripe group, which suggests that the black paint alone didn’t do anything.
So further research could be to compare to an all black painted group and an all white painted group, with no unpainted fur, as well. If it’s the pattern, then one would expect the totally painted cattle of either paint color would see similar results as unpainted.
Yeah, a lot of cultures love spice, but Mexico is the only one I’m aware of that loves spicy candy specifically.
Mexico?
Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.
One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.
For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.
But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?
And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.
So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.