semaphoricwave - Tumblr blog

semaphoricwave · 2 days

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semaphoricwave · 2 days

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semaphoricwave · 2 days

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best brownies in the known universe (at least, according to my grandma)

some year and a half ago when i was getting ready to move out i combed through all the family recipes that lay lost to time and one of the ones that i found was my grandmas brownie recipe. idk where she got it from (nor can i ask cause she has dementia) and its a printed out email she sent to my mom in june 2000. but by george these the best brownies i have ever tasted. would she be pleased that i am sharing this recipe with my vast following? absolutely.

YOU WILL NEED:

5 tablespoons butter (unsalted) 1 ounce unsweetened baking chocolate (or as much as your heart desires) 2/3 cup unsweetened good cocoa powder 1 cup sugar (white) (superfine preferred, normal works fine) 1 cup sifted white flour (can use gluten free) 1/2 teaspoon baking powder as much cinnamon as your heart desires (your heart needs to desire at least some cinnamon. its essential to the recipe) 3 egg whites 1 egg splash of vanilla extract (again, non negotiable step!)

preheat your oven to 325 degrees. grease a square baking pan (9x9 preferably).

in a small saucepan over medium heat melt the butter and baking chocolate. while that is melting, sift together the flour, baking powder and cinnamon into a small bowl. once the butter and chocolate is done melting add the cocoa powder and cook it together for 1 minute. add in the sugar and stir. it will get very thick. this is correct.

set that aside to cool. while thats cooling take a large bowl and put in your egg whites, egg and vanilla. beat it up with preferably a whisk but you can use a fork if youre fresh out of whisks. once the chocolate is cool enough to not scramble your eggs dump it in the eggs and mix it together. add the flour in gradually and keep mixing until its smooth and happy.

spread into your greased baking pan. put it in the oven for EXACLTLY 18 MINUTES. very crucial step. they will come out slightly under done. that is what we want. as they cool they will continue to cook in the pan. we dont want them to get hard and sad. they are not good when they are hard and sad. do not overbake them. you will be sad.

slice them up and as the official last step on the original recipe says: EAT ENJOY AND MAKE MORE! (theyre very good with mint chocolate chip ice cream)

#must create these

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semaphoricwave · 2 days

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bees?

#thirty three cent per bee??

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semaphoricwave · 2 days

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bitches just want us all to be perfectly perisex more than anything

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semaphoricwave · 2 days

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thinking about all of the palestinian mothers who have been suffering miscarriages due to malnourishment and lack of access to prenatal care, all of the palestinian mothers that have had to watch their sons be taken to modern day concentration camps, all of the palestinian mothers who’ve seen their kids die as they run for water or an empty promise of a care package, all of the palestinian mothers who have had to throw birthday parties in the middle of rubble to give their kids one normal day in a war, all of the palestinian mothers ALWAYS. but especially today. 🤍

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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You should be staring into my pretty brown eyes.

#soon...

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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ally beardsley, the patron saint of narrative nat 20s, begging brennan lee mulligan to undo the divine intervention roll they just succeeded on

- 2024 (colorised)

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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The experience of being singled out by a teacher as unexceptional since day one. Trying something new and getting endlessly questioned about the why, the how. For months, going to class and giving up on doing well because it's not like this teacher ever cared about you anyway. Being berated in front of your whole class for your slipping grades and not knowing what to do about it.

And then the flip. In the middle of the year apparently something you did was impressive. Your teacher is friendly with you in a way they never were, and your sudden success was all a part of their plan, their method. "This is what I was trying to tell you, and you finally got it!".

You convince yourself of that too, grudgingly. It all worked out. That teacher really did know best after all. All that stuff at the beginning of the year, all that stuff for the two years before that, that was fine. It was all part of the plan. The humiliation and the stress and the nights spent wondering "What am I not getting about this?", were all necessary.

It's time for teacher evaluations. All fives.

#i forgot he gave him all fives.#porter you asshole!!

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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the thing is they really do let you hit because you're goofy.

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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Palestinian activists get their message across on Londons iconic Tower Bridge landmark- one of the cities most historic buildings. We need a ceasefire now.

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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semaphoricwave · 4 days

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Easy question: Outcome with $10mil with 5% for 30 years. Answer is roughly $43,000,000. That's an increase of $33 million. That's if you don't spend any of it (I think most people could find things to spend $1 million on, even if not much more than that. Friends or family members' mortgages, for example), and don't spend any of the compound, but even inside that, we can see that you will have more money than you know what to do with.

Trickier question: outcome with 0 at beginning, +$300,000/year, with 5% for 30 years. I brute forced it (look at my excel sheets they're awful).

I added 300000x1.05^30+300000x1.05^29+...+300000 to get the answer (there's probably a more elegant solution; fuck elegance).

Just shy of $20,000,000. And $20,000,000 is a smaller number than $43,000,000. The crossover point is somewhere between 90 years and 100 years, assuming single year compounding steps. After that, Scenario 1 makes more money than Scenario 2. So within your lifetime and mine, it's essentially always better to take Scenario 2 than Scenario 1 in terms of how much money it makes you. Unless Scenario 1 involves some sort of inherited artefact, 2 gives more.

That said.

If we are looking purely at Which Number Bigger, then yes, scenario 2 wins easily. But the question is not which number bigger. The question is, if you had the choice, which would you prefer?

I couldn't find any hard data (the '70% of lottery winners go bankrupt' claim seems to have spun out of nothing and not the NEFE as is usually claimed), but it certainly seems that the chances of blowing all one's money when it is handed to you daily is harder than blowing it as a lump sum. If you were suggesting to the average person which they should take and all you were allowed to say was '1' or '2,' you may well be better off telling them to choose 1.

But analysing it, what do each let you do? In Scenario 1, within three years, you could solve pretty much any financial problem in your life or the lives of the people you love with 1k/day. You can get that ball rolling within a few months, even. But if it gives you more money than sense, it doesn't give you loads more money than sense.

Compare with scenario 2, you definitely have more money than sense. It's not just that money rises quicker than sense, too much money is detrimental to sense. With $10,000,000, you could buy a helicopter. Do you need one? Unequivocally, no you don't. But you suddenly have access to all these other, stupider, higher-level purchases that you didn't have access to beforehand. Which I think is dangerous.

Do I trust myself with $10,000,000? Maybe. I would choose $10,000,000, and then put it all locked up in rules so all I get is half the compound, whatever that is in a year. Summoning enough sense to do that before I go off the rails, when I knew in advance to do that, wouldn't be hard. But I, and it appears you, already know what the smart thing to do with that money is. We trust ourselves, and we are relatively sure that bet will pay off. Great.

Temptation is still a worry. Especially for people who aren't as money aware. And it's worth pointing out that if you know people are going to make demands of your newfound wealth (I wouldn't tell anybody; I know not to tell anybody. Can we say the same about everybody else?), or if you're a kid, maybe it is the smarter move to take the $1,000 a day.

The difference between $43,000,000 and $20,000,000, to me, is not so great that I see any reason to despair for the financial literacy of the public. Yes, Bigger Number Bigger. But Smaller Number Safer. There are other aspects to this scenario than the size of the number: the person choosing is what matters. If everybody had the financial plans in place to deal with the money properly, scenario 2 would inherently be better for most people. But 1 is just safer.

This is the outcome of not being taught financial literacy better in schools, yes, but the outcome is not proof that people do not understand. Anybody could add up and say, "well, if I save ~$333,333 a year, I'm going to end up with $10 million in thirty years. Why would I wait thirty years to get what I could get right now?" Not being able to do that would not be a failure of financial literacy, it would be a failure of addition and multiplication. I think when you wonder, "is everybody stupid, or do I just not get it," it's worth considering that maybe you've missed something.

The fact that, despite the fact that it is worth less, people are choosing it, could well be a sign that people are accounting (hah) for their blindspots: "I don't know how to manage this area of risk, so I will choose safety."

That's what insurance is for, even. To know that things can go wrong (unsecured accounts, theft from trusted people, fraud, even run-of-the-mill bad decisions), even if the specifics are unknown, and to plan around that. Millions of dollars is quite the thing to gamble with, and I think that for most people, their instinct would be to go for the goose that keeps on laying. What practical reason do they have not to?

Explain your reasoning plzzz

#long post #mathematics! yay #original tags:#1) take the one time payment 2) invest most of it 3) earn MORE than $1000 a day for the rest of your life #getting annual returns over 3.65% would not be hard #My tags again: the core of this is just that 'would not be hard' is stated from Brett's perspective and that not everybody is Brett.#my spreadsheeting is the excel equivalent of pugs. that thing can't breathe #if you wanted to change the interest rate you would need to start from scratch. but it only has to work for that rate so it's fine!

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semaphoricwave · 5 days

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