jfindleyderegt.bsky.social
Itinerant. Physicist. Flâneur.
be like a glacier - move slowly, but relentlessly
198 posts
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98 following
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🎶 can't have one 🎶 without the...other! 🎶
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Haha, always gotta wait for the punchline I guess. Still pretty grim though!
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Don't remember it but man that's kind of dark
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Corollary: in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, they have a large surface area of roof that deals with a large volume of rainfall. It leaks. This is a simple fact of life. So they have large planters on good sets of wheels, and when a leak is called in they will wheel one of these planters underneath it.
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Ultimately buckets are not a good way to live. If you set up enough buckets in your life you will end up going mad from the cognitive load of dealing with them all.
But a good bucket is an excellent way to buy some time, and smooth out the crunch periods.
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You didn't actually fix the leak! And the leak is not guaranteed to stay the same rate, or perhaps the bucket will be jostled and no longer catch the leak, or whatever other entropic fuckery will come along and ruin the situation. The bucket is, in fact, increasing the complexity of the situation.
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One can even envision a "bucket" where the surface area is large enough proportional to the leak rate, that evaporation from the bucket exceeds the leak rate, and the bucket is now an "infinity-day bucket".
But even this infinite bucket is still a temporary solution.
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We all have things in our lives that require attention, and often we can't - or don't - give that attention. Putting a bucket in place gives us some breathing room. Those buckets come in different sizes, and it's ok to switch out one bucket for another, rather than going from bucket to solution!
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That's the parable. I always feel like I need to end it with something more pithy, but simply terminating it as soon as the useful lesson has been expressed has a jarring effect that makes people think more about it.
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But then friday comes, and the more senior person says they need a new bucket. The more junior asks why? And the more senior responds "well, you can come in over the weekend if you like, but I won't. This is a one-day bucket, and it's been good enough so far, but now we need a three-day bucket".
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There are two people tasked with fixing a leak. Repairing the cause of the leak will take time, so they test the leak rate, and then place a bucket under it that is sufficiently big that it will only need to be emptied once a day. They arrive in the morning, empty the bucket, and go about their day.
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My last time seeing them, at the 9:30 sometime in '11 - the pit was vicious and after taking a beating I spent the night back at the bar holding cold beers against a developing black eye. Coming up at punk shows the pit was a place of love as well as violence, and this was a real wakeup call.
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I keep running into these little remnants of that old life, and simultaneously lamenting the loss of innocence involved in growing from that point, and being absolutely fucking astounded that I ever thought that shit was ok in the first place.
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My own politics evolved through a weird leftist/libertarian mishmash when I was younger, and as a Virginian I had a lot of lost cause shit around me growing up. Particularly the Gettysburg trilogy on Glorious Burden saw very heavy rotation in my life about twenty years ago
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The surface of Venus is a lethal crushing inferno BUT about 50km up in the atmosphere you have:
* Earth-like temperatures
* 1 Bar pressure
* sunlight for power
Aerostats filled with breathable air would float! We could live in cloud cities and even go *outside* wearing little more than scuba gear!
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The smallest room in a five bed-two bath situation that had been partitioned off from the upper floor of the vicar's house in a smallish uni town.
£55/week in 2003.
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😅 sovereign citizens are so f'ing stupid
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I will say, at the time I got this advice, I wasn't ready to hear it, and I thought the advice-giver was being glib, and I was probably looking for that magic third way if I'm being truly honest with myself. But hard to face up to all that, in hindsight.
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Fully agree with you. I tell myself that magic third options don't exist; and then whenever one does present itself, I'm always pleasantly surprised! But more often than not it's just a case of buckling down and doing the hard thing.
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Best piece of advice I ever got was "quit being an asshole and just do it". Like both of those rolled up into one.