No, because I never got into a consistent habit of it and just stopped trying. Either the weather wasn't suitable or the sun was in the wrong position when I had a few minutes to do it or I'd forget. The dermatologist also wanted me to face those surfaces with the plaques/nodules toward the sun, and that was never terribly convenient when I had nodules or plaques on the bottom of my feet or my knees.
There are days where I bask in sunlight and others where I'm mostly in my hidey hole (esp. with the pandemic), so nothing too consistent. My post wasn't too clear about that, but yeah, I had stopped the dermatologist treatments (other than T-Gel shampoo) prior to the Vitamin D thing.
I was a 1099 contractor for several years and couldn't agree more. It drove me nuts when I'd read articles like this, since I had made a conscious choice not to be an employee, for all of the pros and cons that implies.
But vitamin D almost certainly does help with certain conditions. For example, I have psoriasis and can develop awful (painful, itchy, ugly) plaques on my knees and elbows, as well as painful skin nodules on the palmar surfaces of my hands and feet and dandruff. I had seen a dermatologist who prescribed some cream that sort of worked, and she recommended I expose the surfaces to 15 mins of sunlight a day. Those kind of worked, but the plaques and dandruff remained. I started supplementing Vitamin D on my own (my PCP recommended it since I'm slightly deficient), and the plaques disappeared within a few weeks. The nodules only rarely appear when I'm having a stressful time. If I forget to take vitamin D for a few days (or, in the case of the pandemic, when I run out of it and can't get a timely resupply), voila, the plaques reappear. Now that isn't a peer reviewed, double-blind controlled study or anything, but the signal is extremely strong that vit. D supplementation fixes the bulk of my psoriasis symptoms. Skepticism is warranted about all vitamin claims, but my priors for vitamin D are that it may actually be effective even when the peer reviewed research isn't out. My only caution to people is that since it's fat soluble, people should try to determine the right dose before gobbling it down.
I've lived with ADHD for about half of my life. You may or may not have ADHD, but what you're describing sounds pretty similar. Here're a few things I do.
0. Rexamine physical health. In the past two years, I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea and low testosterone (I'm a guy). Having those two treated has been almost miraculous. The ADHD is still very real, but I find I can fight the inattentiveness if I've had a good night's sleep. (And, I guess not coincidentally, a good night's sleep for me is between 6 and 7 hours on a CPAP. I can rarely make it to 8 hours. Again, the ADHD is real.) I've also been examining my diet, my weight, my activity level and other physical changes I can make.
1. Be constructively self-critical and responsible for your actions, but not self-destructive. I shouldn't accept failure from myself due to lack of attentiveness/motivation, but that's not a license to tell myself that I'm an intrinsically, irredeemably bad person. This may be a cliche in SV, but with ADHD or the feelings you're describing, every failure really is a learning opportunity. Your feelings of lack of motivation are not anyone else's fault, but they're not yours either. However, only you can take the initiative to make the situation better.
2. Think through the activities you do where you actually do have quite a bit of clarity and focus. I'm guessing there's something you do that just makes time seem to melt away. See if there's a way to harness what interests you in that activity, and see if you can apply it in a constructive way. I have two: playing RTS games and driving or doing some other fairly monotonous activity that nonetheless requires attention and focus. Playing RTS games has actually helped me develop strategies to remember to do things, and driving long distances suggested to me that if I constrain my environment in certain ways, I can actually be quite productive and attentive.
3. Use some strategies/invent your own.
- I find that writing down checklists is a huge help. It makes the big problems crumble into small manageable bricks. (For checklists, I've started literally putting notes in VS Code in a markdown file, and then using the Markdown Preview Enhanced extension, which shows an interactive, two-way bound rendering on the right pane of my screen.)
- Bootstrap the right mindset every day. I put a few post-it notes around my monitor, bathroom mirror or other places that I'll see to remind me how to deal with life. I put enough up that they'll help me without making me feel overwhelmed. This strategy is also useful for any self-control issues you may have, which usually goes hand-in-hand with a lack of motivation/feeling overwhelmed by big problems. When I make a good decision based on a reminder from the past, it's a fun feeling. These good feelings can form a sort of virtuous cycle where you find yourself being a bit more disciplined than you have been.
- Quit social media. I've entirely cut out Twitter and I only use Facebook Messenger. I don't miss any of it. I visit HN more now, and use the "attentiveness" features in my profile. This may seem drastic, but it's helpful.
- If you can't quit something (YouTube, for instance), use some sort of blocker that will keep you locked out for a time. I edit my /etc/hosts file, although there are more automated tools that can do this kind of thing.
- Read up on tactics people use for things like speed reading or note-taking or other organizational and personal management skills. Then put them into practice. I've started using a RocketBook for note-taking, and it's wonderful. I use a specific note-taking method called the Cornell Method [1], and I find my focus and comprehension when learning big new topics is much higher. Find what works for you, and implement it.
- Trap yourself into pro-productivity habits, not anti-productivity ones. Eliminate any distractions or interactions when you're doing productive work; maximize the number of distractions when you're doing unproductive things (like getting so far into YouTube's recommendation algorithm that you watch a Japanese guy make hard objects out of bread or fingernails - this may or may not have happened to me). I set timers for that stuff and otherwise try to harass myself as much as possible. When I'm working, I set Do Not Disturb mode on anything supporting it, I turn off other notifications (within reason - I'd recommend you still respond to your boss/client, for instance). Look into things like the pomodoro method, where you work for 25 mins and take a 5 minute break, and see if you can increase the productive time.
4. Find something you think you can't do, and then try to do it and don't give up. Steve Jobs once said, "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use." [2] My experience has shown this is quite true. We make our own luck. I've learned that with enough effort, that feeling feeling in the pit of my stomach that coincides with the thought "I don't know how I can tackle this problem" has almost always given way to the feeling of victory when I actually do solve the problem. I haven't had 100% success, of course, but I always frame the lack of success as TODOs to revisit later. I have my current job because I did this, and it's the best job I've ever had with the best team I have ever worked with. Once you do a single thing you thought you couldn't do, your perspective on life does change somewhat.
5. Make change gradually. I didn't take a magic pill and have all problems in my life solved. In fact, I can't do this - I'll be dooming myself to failure. If I try a new exercise regimen or trying to form habits or something like that, I do them one at a time. I find it hard to cope otherwise. My wife is the opposite - she gets motivation from shocking herself into a new routine, but I just can't handle that approach. I set major goals on the order of years, milestones on the order of months, and then individual strategies and tactics on weeks or days.
6. Find the positives of your situation. Unlike most people who have a basic intuition about how to accomplish complex tasks, I have devote my own brainpower to it. However, this has resulted in me developing an almost scientific process for improvement, which most normally motivated/attentive people don't have. There were people I graduated college with who had no issues with ADHD and were far ahead of me in terms of organizational skills and the ability to self-manage. However, through continual work over the years I've surpassed many of them in accomplishments. Career accomplishments are not a measure of a fulfilled life, of course, but making genuine contributions to fellow humans (even if those are fairly small but real) is a good feeling that is hard to overstate.
7. Try to control your emotions without suppressing them or letting them run wild. I find that a lot of the source of my "mental laziness" actually doesn't involve the mind at all, but my emotions. I have to engage the mind to counteract the emotions I experience, and when I do, the strong emotions holding me back (e.g. fear, anger, boredom, despair) are actually not that severe. Putting emotional experiences into words is a simple strategy that can be helpful. Our brains have a sophisticated neocortex which can handle complex reasoning, including linguistic reasoning. Our emotions are thought to be processed and generated by our limbic systems, which are present in most vertebrates and is pre-linguistic (though is very much involved in vocalization of emotional tone, even in non-humans). I've found that the higher functions of our brains can actually put the lower functions in their place when warranted.
8. Use therapy and other resources to help you. Therapists can absolutely help. You will find there are probably treatments that you can do that will help, and many of them do not involve medication. A therapist can be especially helpful at determining the causes of why you feel the way you feel, and may be helpful in developing strategies to overcome these issues. A therapist can also be a shortcut to some of the experimentation I mentioned above. They are often aware of explicit strategies that work for many people, and those might directly help you or might be a good seed that grows into something unique for you. And it's sometimes helpful to be forced to put your thoughts and attitude into words for another human being, who can synthesize it and review it with you.
This list has ballooned from a few planned points, but I hope it helps. You can vanquish this problem. I think you would be surprised at how much you can accomplish by putting forth just a little bit of intentional effort in the right ways.
> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new. The major points of their work, and especially of Piketty's monumental _Capital for the 21st century_ still stand: that capital is a positive feedback loop in a way that labor is not; that mid-20th-century laws that put brakes on this feedback loop have been removed; that a variety of data sources are confirming growing inequality and market capture particularly in the UK and US; and that the only reasonable solution for this is a tax on owned capital (not on income or cap gains) and the political chances of this happening are slim, etc. [emphasis added]
I'm a bit surprised that you included ad hominem accusations of bias and haterism given the adjectives in the first paragraph. :)
But, in seriousness, Piketty's work is pretty poor. The empirical data is now discounted [0], the `r > g` claim was debunked shortly after publication [1]. The fate of the latter claim seems fatal to Piketty's attempts to accurately model the world and prescribe solutions. For instance, capital depreciates as it ages, and can do so dramatically due to obsolescence or damage. Redeploying capital toward new uses is generally quite costly, due to the high inelasticities of capital. Labor is much more elastic to different tasks of production. (I should note that the inelasticity of "human capital" in the modern service-based economy, which is indeed a problem. "Learn to code" is a meme deployed by trolls, but it reflects a real economic reality. The increasing prevalence of human capital and its inelasticities also undercuts Picketty.)
Further, Piketty himself defines capital in such a way (he uses it essentially synonymously with wealth) that his argument is almost tautological, and also fails to account for wealth stored in e.g. real estate (or the works of Picasso, for that matter). Increases in real estate prices (driven almost entirely by well-understood microeconomic structural issues and not by some abstract macro mathematical inequality) account for the amount r exceeds g.
Any usual definition of capital emphasizes that it is a factor of production, not merely wealth. Capital is the fixed "stuff" we use to produce other stuff. It might be a dump truck or an assembly line process or even knowledge of C++. Housing stock almost certainly fails the factor of production test, and thus shouldn't be counted as capital (the status of a Picasso as a factor of production is an exercise left to the reader). (By analogy, labor is also defined as a factor of production, and doesn't include the value of leisure hours or time spent sleeping.) Piketty's book sales might not have been so high had he simply argued that fixed supplies of highly-demanded scarce resources tend to increase over time, and that land in a reurbanizing and NIMBY-ish period is by far the strongest such asset. Henry George said more insightful things about the same subject over a century before Piketty had an economics professorship. (I'm not arguing that George's solutions were great. I'm more enthusiastic about ideas like nuisance-based zoning as opposed to use-based: they seem to achieve the desired effects of stability and low inequality without a ton of extraction. I somehow doubt that Piketty would share this enthusiasm. [2][3])
Ultimately, if these small attacks of death by 1000 cuts on Piketty's work don't convince you (and I would characterize some of the attacks as quite substantial) that it was very flawed and probably just nonsense, then maybe ask yourself if any evidence whatsoever would convince you that Piketty is (broadly speaking) wrong.
So I don't disagree with any of what you've said. I'm glad you brought up decentralization, because that's what I think many people actually want. I can't run a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but I could put panels on my roof. In doing so, I'd be somewhat insured against blackouts, "the crap hitting the fan" or whatever else, as well as not writing a huge check each month to the power company.
Some research[1] indicates that solar panels on most roofs could cover about 40% of the US's current power consumption, although the variance is fairly high (California could cover about 74% of its power demand, while Wyoming could cover only 14%). I think 40% would be a great improvement, particularly if it's fairly efficient and not too expensive; I just think we should be open to using things like nuclear for the other 60%+.
I'll agree that wind turbines' effect on arable land is much, much lower than solar. That being said, there is still some effect. After all, the land is rendered useless during installation and certain types of maintenance (maybe these cycles could be scheduled when the land lies fallow), and there has to be certain infrastructure (roads/paths) for maintenance.
I'm not against using wind where it is particularly efficient (old strip or surface mining areas may be particularly great); I just think it needs to make economic as well as ecological sense. Wasting a bunch of industrial capacity (largely powered by fossil fuels still) to create wind and solar energy that are more expensive and less efficient at scale than, say, nuclear seems like a bad idea.
Solar and wind require a huge geographic footprint to generate significant energy. Because of this constraint, the cost of wind and solar is almost entirely opportunity cost, not the mere accounting cost of producing an extra panel/turbine. The basic problem is twofold: First, as you keep adding solar/wind capacity, you inevitably get diminishing returns from worse wind/sunshine conditions, so additional installation is less productive. (Think about solar panels in valleys or windmills in low-wind areas.) Second, as wind and solar cannibalize land area to provide energy, the price of that land increases substantially as other uses are displaced. For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar. Then the price of its farmland would skyrocket as the country continued to deploy wind & solar. In both cases, solar and wind become much more expensive per deployed panel than simply the cost per panel, which is indeed pretty inexpensive. FWIW, the article attempts to make this point, but it frankly isn't very well written, and so the point is a bit hard to understand.
As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)
This is a good model. Companies have two constraints keeping them in line: if they cease making money, they die (in general, at least); and the law can tweak their behavior toward benevolence.
> If you are reselling the item, then you owe Amazon shipping charges for 2-day shipping.
Not so fast. Amazon would like this to be true, which is why they put that provision in their TOS. The NFL does the same thing when they state in every single broadcast, "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited." Merely expressing a sentence in legalese doesn't create a binding contract.
A decent lawyer in a Common Law jurisdiction (and IANAL/this is not legal advice) could probably argue that such a "no-resale-for-Prime" provision constitutes restraint of trade along with any other similar statutory prohibitions that would render such language unenforceable. (I don't know, but I'm guessing Civil Law jurisdictions have their own such restraints.) Amazon for its part would argue that if it allowed resale, it couldn't offer Prime services at all to anyone. If I were to guess, the real purpose of this provision is to kick people out who might do something like purchase up an entire supply of some particular Prime-eligible item and then immediately resell the entire stock at around the same price but with paid shipping (including a small profit cushion). That kind of behavior actually would ruin the Prime brand/program and itself constitutes a form of market manipulation.
In no way would anyone owe Amazon money for reselling products purchased on Prime. At worst, Amazon could kick a person out of Prime or completely ban them as a customer (and the courts might even frown upon that). Amazon might even try to "collect" money, but unless the resale constituted actual abuse (cf. the scenario above), a strongly worded letter CC'd to the person's lawyer, Congressman and FTC might help Amazon stand down.
Again, IANAL and this is not legal advice. If it were me, I'd try to follow the TOS as a matter of prudence/respect. However, I don't like people thinking that they're under legal obligations that are at best a stretch.
In 1990, A. Clark Wiseman from Gonzaga calculated that if we dug a landfill 100 yards deep and put in all trash generated in the US for the next millennium, it would fit in a square area of land 35 miles on each side (assuming of course levels of consumption and disposal from the time). By point of comparison, replacing all existing energy sources with solar and wind power would require orders of magnitude more acreage. I'm not sure if most New Yorkers have ever seen a place like e.g. Nevada, but I'm not exactly worried about the amount of land needed for landfills.
New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - are still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill.
IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - economic efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.
Yes, of course it depends on the state. CarMax operates in 41 states.[1] Given that some customers are known to cross state lines in order to purchase vehicles, CarMax likely calculates taxes for every state except Alaska and Hawaii. In some states, the tax rules are arcane enough that they depend on the municipality as well.
In certain states, the number of permits to perform state inspections is capped. New entrants who want to perform inspections (which a used car dealer will typically need to do) have to either wait in line indefinitely or buy up an existing permit-holder.
State inspections may improve vehicle safety at the margin. However, when state inspection permits are treated like taxi cab medallions, the cost-benefit comparison becomes a bit skewed.
Apart from CarMax, there are essentially two routes for selling a vehicle. The first is a private sale, which basically involves taking on a temporary, part-time job to have people meet you, test drive your car and then negotiate for the correct price. Craigslist makes this easier, but it's still intense. I'd love to see hard data on the amount of effort involved in private sales, but from anecdotes from friends who have done it, a person can easily invest tens of hours in attempting to get the vehicle sold on the market. That adds up to $1k fairly quickly. Private sale makes the most sense as a hobby. (I'll note that some startups like CarLotz exist that basically have a consignment model for private sales that may work slightly better in certain circumstances.)
The second route is the "trade-in." Most dealers almost never pay cash for the amount of money that they offer for trade-in. It's purely a negotiating tactic meant to make a buyer feel better about a (relatively arbitrary) price on a car ("$14k for a 2015 Ford Focus is kind of high, but we really like that we're getting $4k for our 2007 Pontiac Aztek!"). Whenever you work with a dealer, you're almost always getting fleeced. Again, some people enjoy the process as a sort of game or hobby, but you're likely not making a profit unless you're extremely good at it.
EDIT: I read this over and it sounded a little fanboyish. I want to make clear that I've been gone from CarMax for almost 5 years and I don't own stock or have any other financial stake in their success other than some friends who are still employed there. I just think they're a good company (although I didn't love working in IT).
First, CarMax itself is a great company and they do good work. I'd recommend them to anyone who is either not a good negotiator or who can't afford to invest in the typical car market activities.
As other commenters have mentioned, the two major variables that matter to CarMax are the age and number of miles. CarMax will buy literally any car. For almost any vehicle, CarMax will immediately put it in the auction lane whenever it has more than 100k miles or is over 10 years old. In fact, a lot of their employees ("associates") would make a game of finding an older car with low mileage that they could snap up with CarMax's associate discount.
As the article mentions, CarMax makes on average $2k gross profit per (retail) vehicle. CarMax wants to move inventory quickly, just like any normal retail operation (including its deceased parent company Circuit City). If a vehicle is priced too high, its price will be reduced until it can sell. Thus, CarMax attempts to minimize any unforeseen problems that may occur during the reconditioning process, as these can make the cost (to CarMax) balloon out of control. I honestly wish I could say more about the strategy and analysis that CarMax puts into this. It's truly remarkable to behold.
So, yes, you can sometimes get much more for a vehicle on the open market if (1) you've got a car that's outside the parameters of what CarMax puts on the front lot and (2) you're willing and able to negotiate for a private sale.
You'd be surprised how much "old boy network" stuff is involved in used cars. Calculating taxes is a giant pain (and no one except CarMax has even solved this problem as far as I can tell). Some states have extremely draconian laws, especially those relating to the environment (which are arguably in the public's interest) and those relating to state inspection (which are arguably just a glorified protection racket). Not to mention, having a full lot with reliable used cars is quite capital intensive. And a used car company needs pretty solid knowledge about which cars to actually turn around and which to dump, so they don't actually sell a lemon to retail consumers.
There are days where I bask in sunlight and others where I'm mostly in my hidey hole (esp. with the pandemic), so nothing too consistent. My post wasn't too clear about that, but yeah, I had stopped the dermatologist treatments (other than T-Gel shampoo) prior to the Vitamin D thing.