The ginormous geniuses I've met don't seem to consider themselves intellectuals, geniuses, or whatnot. I've started pointing out that I'm a genius after recognizing that genius is a matter of technique, and so geniuses can be made: we can turn roughly 100% of the population into geniuses by proper training, with strikingly little effort. As such, one of my future political plans is to tweak the education system to normalize geniuses, bringing the baseline up to something most people believe is an inherent force of genetic superbrainism. Maybe then people will stop pestering me or, worse, trying to hire me with the justification that I'm smart and they want smart people on their team; they have smart people, if they would just act like an intelligent species.

Now, having understood that the only thing that ever stood in the way of my dreams was myself, I must go learn to draw. I realize now that I can't draw because I've never put in the exact same effort that career artists and famous painters put into the subject, and so never learned to draw; it's not that I can't, but that I simply decided not to. That changes now.

A... ah. No, not the one. Not the one, no talk, not the one. The one who will be, but not the one who is; so, not the one.

A core dump is two projects: find out what's wrong, fix it. You cannot estimate how long it will take to fix a problem until you know what the problem is.

How are you an expert when you consider a core dump to be a reasonable place someone would try to estimate bugfix time from? You can't estimate until you can plan the work, until you can draw a work breakdown structure and show what must be done. Even projects are chartered with a big budget and time estimate based on "this is 3x bigger than something else, so it takes 3x longer and is 3x as expensive", and then broken down into work that all comes together and says "okay, it's only going to be 2.1x as expensive and take 2.3x as long". That initial budget estimate? It comes from a dozen or five dozen or hundreds of prior projects, all with varying times, so you can say, "Stuff of this size and complexity has a low-water mark of like 5, a high-water mark of like 11, and tends to take more like 7.2" and decide how important the project is and thus if you want to budget for more like 5 or more like 11--and the same goes for the broken down work.

You can't even estimate what a bugfix is from a core dump. Someone brings you a core dump and says, "I need a bug fixed." They may as well bring you a blueprint and say, "I need a house built." Until you open the damn blue print up and see if you have a 1200sqft row home or a 4500 sqft Victorian, you have no fucking clue what you're doing, and can't tell them how long it's going to take. Once you unroll the damn thing, you can give them a ballpark estimate by glancing at the paper once; take a few hours to study the blueprints and work out what work actually needs to be done, and you can give them a better estimate.

Doing it right.

This is a cultural thing. Asian cultures are strongly hierarchical: you always agree with the guy above you. Never argue. You need to either read the cues or break them of that.

Then the people you are working with are stupid.

Get Rita Mulcahy's PM Crash Course (the green book) or RMC Project's CAPM Exam Prep, and the PMBOK 5th edition. Give a read through. Then you'll understand.

A good project manager uses historical data and the expert judgment of the project team to estimate the complexity of the project and determine the time required to perform the work. This is done in many ways: projects are compared to similar projects and scaled to size for a ball-park figure; projects are broken down into work packages, themselves broken down into activities and tasks, all of which the project team estimates the complexity and time required for, accounting for how long it took them to do similar things; time variance from historical data and current contexts are accounted for, providing a low, most-likely, and high mark (2 weeks in the best case scenario; most likely, based on prior work and known information, 3.5 weeks; some disaster scenarios bring in a 9 week estimate--that kind of lag HAS happened).

The more work is done, the more accurate estimates for budget and time become. Agile projects deliver in phases, iterations, and increments, and so can estimate work later in the project based on risk events earlier in the project--opportunities that cut time and can be exploited to cut more time, threats that cost time and may further cost additional time. In this way, "Historical Information" even includes work performance information for the parts of the project already completed.

It's all probabilities.

Because I can't switch to another electric supplier. I did (I switched to a 100% solar-wind-hydro-geothermal supplier, meaning they need to ensure there's at least enough of said power produced to cover all of their customers), but the main utility continues to charge me for just having electricity.

Basically, the utility company for my area supplies everyone with electricity and gas. There is only one utility company. For every unit of electricity or gas, they charge you a few pennies of transport fee. On top of the transport fee, they also charge you $30 "customer fee". So if you use 0 gas and 0 electricity, you pay $30; if you use 10 gas and 200 electricity, you pay $8 + $11 + $30, plus either the main utility's commodity gas and electricity costs OR your electricity and gas suppliers's commodity gas and electricity cost.

It costs $30/mo to have an account with the local utility.

The "incentives" actually make solar panels expensive. If you get a $2000 subsidy for $3000 solar panels, retailers will start raising prices to $5000. You still get $3000 solar panels, but you have a perception of getting a good deal by getting $2000 back. This is why JC Penny has sales all the time: they tried for 10 years to drop the practice of marking $20 items up to $100 and running constant $80 sales, and they lost a shitton of business; switched back to showing sales off inflated prices, and they regained a shitton of business EVEN WHEN ITEMS WERE MORE EXPENSIVE UNDER THE SALE MODEL.

As for power wholesale versus retail, they should calculate your bill by net power units. If you provide 1000kWh and consume 1000kWh, they shouldn't charge you 1000x 12c and pay you 1000x 8c. You already pay about $60/mo for infrastructure ($30 of customer fees, plus infrastructure usage fees).

Take a look at the audiobook for Moonwalking with Einstein. It's uh. There's a line about Bill Clinton copulating with a basketball; that may be a little out of bounds. By necessity, the author makes some touchy references to things.

It's an amusing book, but also a valuable summary of a huge body of knowledge that boils down to one important fact: the human mind, with all its variation, has fixed capabilities. Every person can, through application of effort, develop an incredible memory, mental mathematics skills, great expertise with musical instruments, a solid understanding of engineering, and so forth; in short, every human being is a ready-made genius. The mind is a tool which itself requires skill to use.

Old and new memory techniques, mental math strategies, and study techniques allow us to maximize the use of our mind. Textbook study profits greatly from the SQ3R study method (all modern methods are effectively SQ3R with different names); mnemonics enhance any formal and informal study; anyone who learns mental math through soroban and anzan methods will quickly become a human calculator. Ericsson's research into expertise tells us that a person learns rapidly when they analyze their difficulties and flaws as matters of inappropriate technique, focus on improving those weaknesses, and practice in a way which targets such skills while giving constant and immediate feedback--in short, knowing exactly when we're doing it wrong and why it's wrong gives us the ability to correct and rapidly improve our abilities. It only takes application of technique.

Humans are different. Our experiences shape us; sometimes, brain damage or genetic and biological imperatives shape us. Women think differently than men; asians have different cultural interests than europeans; but we all have the ability to deliberately bestow upon ourselves any skill we wish. Normal humans can even emulate strange humans: synesthesia can be simulated, and this simulation can be leveraged to improve memory; distinct personalities can be created inside the mind by force of will, and a writer or actor can shape coherent, independent characters and complex interactions from these imaginary individuals; artists train themselves to dull the left prefrontal cortex, making themselves capable of the amazing feats of brain damaged savants. Anything one human can do, another can do.

I use a Kindle, and have noticed the same. If I want to read text books, I need physical books; for stream data (fantasy novels), I use Kindle.

The location information is visual. The space on the book, the depth into the book, and so forth. It's also serial: cross-referencing involves flipping back to the physical space in which the book should have the correct information, and then recognizing if the information you find is older or newer, and correcting position.

Well he could have been experiencing severe suicidal depression due to his asshole friends not recognizing his psychiatric burn-out, and turned to marijuana as a coping mechanism. I've done similar, but without involving any drugs;sleep for 18 hours a day isolates me from the world better than psychotropics.

Yeah, I know. Marijuana in vogue, alcohol falling out of favor.

Their argument is that you take like 1/20 the amount of alcohol needed to kill you (20 beers = death) versus 1/1000 the amount of THC needed to kill you (1000 joints = death), therefor alcohol is worse for you than marijuana. That's a very unscientific approach.

It's part of the propaganda movement to ban alcohol for anyone under the age of 25.