Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.

Taco Bell was a cynical invention by Alexander Graham Bell to sell more Bell peppers.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?

Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.

Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.

They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.

As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.

So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.

Here’s a write up of the collaboration

When I learned how to drive, manual transmissions were higher performance and better fuel efficiency: side by side comparisons of the exact same model of car would show better 0-60 and quarter mile times, while having slightly better EPA fuel efficiency ratings, for the manual transmission.

At some point, though, the sheer number of gears in an automatic transmission surpassed those in the typical manual gearbox, and the average automatic today has 6 gears, up to 9 in some Mercedes and 10 in certain Ford and GM models. So they could start selecting gear ratios for better fuel efficiency, without “wasting” a valuable gear slot. There was a generation of Corvettes that was notorious for having a 6th gear that was worthless for actual performance but helped the car sneak by with a better highway fuel mileage rating.

And the automatics became much faster at shifting gears, with even the ultra high performance supercars shifting to paddle shifters where the driver could still control the gear, but with the shifting mechanism automated. Ferrari’s paddle shifter models started outperforming the traditional stick shift models in the early 2000’s, if I remember correctly. As those gear shifting technologies migrated over to regular automatics, the performance gap shrunk and then ended up going the other way.

At this point there’s not enough reason for a true manual stickshift transmission. It’s no longer faster or more economic, so it’s just a pure fun. Which is fine, but does make it hard to actually design one for any given model of car.

Gauging with pasta: angel hair, thin spaghetti, spaghetti, thick spaghetti, bucatini, penne, rigatoni, all the way up through big-ass cannelloni.

Most starches gelatinize between 60°C to 80°C. Including rice, which has starches that gelatinize between 59°C and 72°C.

Not sure where you’re getting the idea that rice needs to cook above 100°C, which is just plainly inconsistent with how most cultures have cooked rice for thousands of years.

Most rice noodles are formed from pre-gelatinized starches, too, in order to form the dough necessary for forming into noodle shapes to begin with. So those just need to be hydrated, and perhaps heated for personal taste preferences.

The phone only draws a charge while you’re watching ads, so you’ll need to watch an hour per day to recharge.

That’s literally what the headline is. “Deadnaming” is a term for referring to transgender people by their previous names, rather than their current names.

Yeah I remember seeing some stupid post somewhere about this guy saying “can you believe this man is only 45” and everyone in the comments saying “um yes that is what 45 year olds look like.”

Is this a thing people do? When I was in my 20’s I did the opposite, jerking off before dates so that I’d last longer later on.

That’s not part of this comparison. The comparison in this article and the metric it covers is for people who are renting versus buying in 2024. The renter in 2024 can rent from a landlord who purchased in 2010, and is borrowing at 2020 interest rates. But a buyer today is buying at 2024 prices and 2024 interest rates.

Two things: first, landlords aren’t entitled to a profit, and second, landlord input costs might be completely different from an owner resident.

On the first point, if the landlord’s costs are $2000/month, and the market rent for that unit is $1900/month, the landlord would rather lose $100/month on a lease than lose $2000/month on a vacant property.

On the second, it might be that the landlord bought the place when it was much cheaper, or has a much lower interest rate than what is available today. So if the landlord’s costs are $2000/month for a property that would now cost $4000/month at today’s purchase prices and interest rates, but can rent for $3000/month at a profit to himself.

Similarly, some volume landlords can spread certain costs around and not pay nearly as much as an owner resident. It might cost $1200 to hire a plumber to do a 6-hour job, but it also might cost $150 to simply have a plumber on the payroll to do that job, if you’ve got enough steady work that it’s cheaper to have him around.

Mountain Dew was originally invented as a moonshine mixer, so that’s just returning to its roots.

I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.