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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1253 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 15, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Call around to find an optometrist who is willing to give you the pupillary distance as well as the prescription, then buy the glasses online through Zenni. Alternatively, if you only have the prescription, you can use a reversed or expired credit card to measure your pupillary distance at their website by taking a picture of your face with the card on your forehead. If you order during Black Friday, it is very cheap.

Get the maximum blue light protection possible. It will help you sleep and reduce eye strain and headaches. Get some clip-on sunglasses, too.

Two is one and one is none. Get three pairs. Nothing sucks more than not being able to find your glasses when you absolutely need to go out the door.

Get sturdy plastic glasses with as few moving parts as possible. Thin wire-frame glasses break way too often. They should look like this, not like this.

Frames vary widely in price for no apparent reason. I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart. Get the cheap ones.

Two is one and one is none. Get three pairs. Nothing sucks more than not being able to find your glasses when you absolutely need to go out the door.

I can't agree with this. Having a tinted pair is often worth it (see my other post), but three pairs is way too much. Also, it's not hard to keep track of your glasses so you shouldn't ever be in the situation where you can't find them.

Maybe you just have better executive function than I do? All I can tell you is that three pairs have really saved my ass when one pair was long-term lost (later found between the bed and the wall), the second pair I was using was short-term lost (left in the bathroom) and I really had to go out the door to get to work.

Besides, each pair was only $30 (again, Zenni + Black Friday), so why not.

It sounds like maybe the problem is not having a place you consistently put them? If my glasses aren't on my face (or in my hands), they are in one of exactly two places: the nightstand next to my bed (while I sleep), or the bathroom vanity (while I shower). Consequently, losing my glasses just isn't a thing that happens in my life.

I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart.

That’s not that bad. In France, they have a system where it’s obligatory for the employer to provide glasses insurance(1) . Then once a year the giddy employee can choose glasses with frames worth 600 dollars(2) “for free”.

(1) This costs him frequently around 100 dollars/month or more. There's some other random nonsense included in the insurance. A full set of glasses costs only like 50 dollars.

(2) They look exactly the same as frames worth 25 dollars. There’s a lot of ads for glasses in France.

My mom got a free amount of money towards glasses through Medicare, and it was use it or lose it, so she ended up getting glasses worth several hundred dollars for no reason right as the money was about to expire. She was pretty happy about it, too.

From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexander:

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless).

I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!

This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country.

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