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The heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems. |
Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.
As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.
Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?
This might seem like an easy choice. You take the $10 million and your friends will get $20 million each. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, I don't think humans are wired that way. Happiness is based on the direction your life is heading (better or worse), and what you have compared to what you think you should have.
If you take the genie's $10 million option, over time you will start feeling like the poorest person you know, since everyone else has $20 million apiece. You will wonder what you did in a past life to deserve this shabby treatment from the universe. The ugly truth about humans is that your happiness might be maximized by screwing everyone you know while screwing yourself half as much.
If you buy this premise, it has interesting implications for personal relationships. For example, it means that one way to cheer up an unhappy friend is to put yourself in a bad situation, thus resetting the reference point. The splinter in your finger only makes you unhappy when you're not talking to someone who has a railroad spike through his head.
It’s here. As she notes, when I gave her the tip, it included quite a bit of cursing. She snipped those parts out whilst adapting it for her site. Because Australians never curse.
In the world of entertainment, there are things that make me laugh, there are things that make me cry, and there are the rare things that work on so many different levels, or are so surprising, they simply drop my jaw to the floor and blow my mind.
This cover of Poker Face by Molly Lewis is one of those things.
Molly Lewis, you are a national treasure. It is an honor to occasionally share the stage with you.
Also, I'm now on my way to pick up my brother,
![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
togra, who just dropped a load (he's a trucker!) off in Stockton and he's come to visit me! Very surprising and very cool!We apologise for the inconvenience.
**UPDATE - 2009-11-12 - 12:02pm**
The URL forwarding issue we were experiencing has been resolved, and the URL forwarding service is operational at this time. Again, we apologise for the inconvenience.
The Bradford Pear trees in the front yard are always the last to change color in the fall, which means occasionally I get pictures like this, when all the other trees are bare, there’s frost on the ground and the Pears are saying “hey, fall’s not over yet.” No, it’s not. It’s nice to be reminded, and I’m enjoying it while I can.
Avatar is going to cost about a half billion dollars when production and merchandising is tallied up, which is a huge amount of money. Will the film ever make that money back? At the AMC column this week, I tell you why it (probably) will. If you think I am a mad fool for saying so, let me know in the comments. I thank you in advance for your derision.
- Mood:twitterpated
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- unshelved_comic : Unshelved strip for Thursday, November 12, 2009 [+0]
- scalzifeed : Justine Larbalestier Shares a NaNoWriMo Tip From Me [+0]
- wilwheaton : Molly Lewis is a national treasure [+0]
- xb95_feed : short [+0]
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- scalzifeed : The Last of the Fall Color [+0]
- scalzifeed : Why Avatar (Probably) Won’t Flop [+0]
- sinfestfeed : 2009-11-12: Sinfest [+2]
- dilbertdaily : Comic for November 12, 2009 [+0]
- dictionary_wotd : asseverate: Dictionary.com Word of the Day [+0]
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- userfriendlyrss : LOTD: Squish. Squish squish squish: [+0]
- doonesburyfeed : Thursday, November 12, 2009 [+0]
- snopes_dot_com : Valentin's Appeal [+1]
- zonereyrie : My tweets from the past day... [+0]
- notinvherecomic :
This strip was Not Invented Here on Thursday, November 12, 2009
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