Despite hardly posting or commenting, Instagram is the only place I've seen relevant and interesting ads. Like scary good advertising. My wife has had the same experience, she was blown away that the ads are actually relevant where everywhere else, including Facebook which has the same or more info, acts as dumb as you can possibly be. I've heard others say the same. I don't know why they are so much better at ads or literally everyone else sucks so hard that just doing as would be expected appears exceptional. The addendum to this is that in the last few months this fell apart for her account and now it's turned irrelevant.
Understanding what is in the sky and what's around it is a fun skill to have, you can always tell which direction is what, the time of year (in case you forgot) and the time of night, assuming you are looking outside frequently enough to notice the change. You can even tell how much time has past if you are in the same spot and have a point of reference (like in a hot tub facing a tall tree) using your hand to measure. You can use Stellarium on your computer or phone to help see what's up there as well as a planisphere to know exactly what is up today at your lattitude and where it is at what hour.
Studying the constellations and learning the sky is a great way to get a visceral sense of our place in the universe. When you can't tell one patch of sky from another, the brain doesn't need a fancy model for the reality of it, and you can go around with a kind of subconscious "flat sky" in your head. But when you start to piece the constellations together, and it all connects up around you, that's transformative. Space stops being something that's "up there", and becomes a thing that surrounds you. It's a strange sensation when it first hits you, and well worth the time to achieve it.
The fun one to me is realizing how much higher Polaris is in the sky the further north you go. I saw the Big Dipper which guided me to it. Which is actually one of those skills. There are a few constellations that can be used as guides to find other objects along with using your hand to measure angles/distance so you can navigate pretty efficiently.
Yes, it's very trippy and disorienting to see something you know is in the sky at a way different altitude, it almost feels like you are on another planet.
I moved from the US to New Zealand. I spend a lot of time hiking, and it is very unsettling for the sky to be so unfamiliar. Orion is the only constellation I'm good at picking out here, and it is upside down. No Polaris, obviously.
I spent a week in Queenstown during a new moon, and I almost did not come back home. Being able to image the Magellanic clouds was a bucket list item for this Northerner. NZ is definitely top of my list of relocation places.
I can't believe how many mind blowing targets they have access to compared to us, feels like a different world. I wonder if they are as jealous of our side as we are of theirs...I doubt it! Will have to either travel, move, or use remote facilities to image, but that feels like cheating.
I think it's like anything else in that you take for granted what is readily available yet crave what is not. It is definitely a compelling factor in traveling. The sky is really big, and it would take an entire life time to really view everything in one's own hemisphere let alone the other one. I can't wait for the Rubin telescope to complete its first full sky survey. That'll be a really nice VR experience mapped onto a sphere that allows incredible amount of zooming.
Another trippy and disorienting thing is going to a dark sky spot to see a sky filled with stars that you cannot normally see and having to reacquaint yourself to even find the things that are normally easy to find like the Big Dipper.
Hmm, that's good information to have, I had no idea. I just had an MRI appointment that I had completely forgotten about or what it was for I was waiting so long (and obviously not having the issue for anymore). I'll know this for next time and consider it.
As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).
> I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it
To be ultra pedantic, you're paying American import tariffs to the American shipping carrier or American broker not CBP itself.
> refunds for it like Americans supposedly did
No one's getting those refunds, if they do get a portion back and not at the rate at which they increased prices on American consumers.
But more to your point, you can certainly pay American import tariffs on behalf of Americans, but your response is to raise prices on American consumers commensurate to the tariffs you're paying. Your margins are necessarily lower to sell to Americans, so you must raise prices for American consumers.
If your margins were high enough that you can absorb American import tariffs, then you're lucky the market hadn't provided a relevant market substitute.
What I don't think most people realize is that for many consumer goods coming from Canada the Americans are not paying the tariffs, Canadians are paying it instead because USPS is not setup to actually collect tariff payments from their own people and refused to do so. When I buy USPS shipping labels for my business that ships to the US, as a Canadian, I have to pay the fucking US tariff out of my own pocket and I have no way to charge my customer other than jacking the fuck out of my price. I lost so much money last year after the tariffs first went into effect and no one (UPS, USPS, US Gov't) knew what to do, how to charge, how to collect, but eventually after a 1.5months I managed to get CUSMA figured out. This 50% tariff is still the same scenario, I'm expected to pay the tariff on behalf of my American customer, so WTF. Oh and I got no refunds from anyone for that first 1.5months of insane costs as I'm not from the US.
I can ship UPS instead and then push the tariff back where it belongs, but nobody wants to pay 4x for shipping and then get another bill afterwards. US Customers already screamed bloody murder about a total $4 duty fee, which anyone in Canada would kill for on an international purchase.
Who cares? It's probably not better than a TV anyone else can afford and why would a billionaire need a folding tv in one of their 24 room homes?
The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.
I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.
It's 2026, so 20 years ago was 2006, and the biggest one that comes to mind is smartphones. The iPhone wouldn't launch until 2007, but the Blackberry existed, but was just very expensive. Of course it didn't have the same apps as we have today, but that was definitely something for rich people that we now take for granted. GPS navigation was also very different 20 years ago. The rich had $500 Tomtom computers for directions while everyone else was still printing paper maps. Photography was still a high end thing. An iPhone shoots better photos more easily than something from 20 years ago. A giant flat screen TV in 2006 was very much a rich person thing. Now that's like $400 at Costco. Video calling wasn't a thing in 2006 for a variety of reasons, but the equipment being expensive is the main one. These days there's a half dozen apps I can use to talk to someone on the other side of the planet. On yeah, in 2006, calling long distance was still kind of a thing. Translation is another one, Google translate came out in 2006, so just right at the cut off. Before that, a foreign language was just that, foreign. Today, I can whip out my phone and it will overlay my language in my camera view instead of hiring a person. Recording studios took a hit. A million dollar recording studio in 2006 is now a MacBook, some software, and some gear. Making music used to be expensive! Smarthome shit was stupidly expensive in 2006. I think most people still don't have that stuff, but it's much more accessible today vs 20 years ago to be able to tell Siri/Alexa/Google to turn off the lights.
Oh yeah, having a driver was very much a rich person thing in 2006. Now that's just called having an Uber account and it's nothing special. (Although if you have Zoox or Tesla Robotaxi access it still is.)
The access to information out there is stunning. The visuals for the Straight of Hormuz in 2006 would have been far more limited to rich people who actually needed that information. Today there's a dozen vibecoded play-by-play visualizations of the entire conflict.
Plenty of people could afford blackberries in 2006. Having uber is nothing like having a driver. A MacBook replaces about $50k out of a million dollar recording studio. The rest if it still costs pretty much a million dollars.
I’m not even sure what my point is.
Being a billionaire was never really about having stuff. It was and is about having power.
Plenty of rich people, that is. Having Uber is at least something like having a driver. I'm not rich enough to have a driver though so you'll have to tell me how that's not actually like having a driver. As far as a million dollar recording studio goes, the studio itself, the rent on the building, the sound isolation, sure, that's still expensive, but you can send a picture to ChatGPT and as it where to place the microphones where previously that would thake you knowing a sound engineer or $300/hr to be able to ask them how to mic something.
Point is, information wants to be free, and that sounds stupid because the world's changed since, but, like it or not, ChatGPT (et al) is, and has already changed the world. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, all we can do is adapt.
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