Slevin's journal

[guitarplayer]

everybody has to eat.

I am 70% sure a version of this with mortgage instead of food was in the ERE book, maybe we can send Huberman the book.

[Slevin]

My household has recently inherited 50lbs of cashew pieces, with many more 50lbs possible. If you have any good vegan cashew recipes / uses, please send them my way.

[theanimal]

One of our favorite snacks on the PCT was a concoction called "raw cookie dough" that we learned from Andrew Skurka.

Ingredients
1/2 lb cashews
2 oz of rolled oats
Cinnamon to taste
Salt to taste
1 tsp of vanilla
2.5 oz maple syrup
2.5 oz chocolate chips

Blend everything in a food processor or blender except liquids and chocolate chip until it's very finely chopped, not so much until you make cashew butter. Add in maple syrup and vanilla then blend/mix until it's a sticky consistency. Blend/stir in chocolate chips.

If I'm remembering correctly, we were able to do 5x the quantity of the recipe at a time (that was the max that could fit in our blender). We formed them into 3 oz rounds and considered that one serving. They last a very long time (months) and freeze well. We never got sick of them, eating it day after day. Very much recommended!

[Slevin]

@theanimal sound delicious. Also sounds like one of those very dangerous since I’m not hiking the PCT anytime soon . Definitely gonna be great for snacks on hiking days / backpacking days this upcoming season!

[thef0x]

I've continued to think on that thread re dopamine / environment hacking and structuring that. As a small aside, to try, I went to decaf coffee to see if micro implementations help.. basically anything to reduce noise on the nervous system. To be determined..

I think the changes like "alone in a cabin with books" or "at training camp for a 2 week intensive" or "10 day vipassana retreat" will have obvious impacts compared to micro changes but, as we both agree, that deep learning pursuit has to be sustainable with scheduled, periodized 'intensives'. Maybe the best time spent on strategy is on normal life routines and maximizing that b/c the intensives are so binary in comparison...

Appreciate the back and forth and again, thank you for sharing that paper.

.... that now we have 130lbs of vegetables in the freezer, and buying in bulk from the farmers market often cuts you a 30% - 50% off deal.

Would love to know more about your process here at all stages.

E.g. how do you pick the stand / farm to talk with? Where do you contact them? Do you spend time developing rapport or just go straight for it? Do you pick up at their farm, at the farmers market, early, etc? Have you convinced a farmer who has never done this to do this?

Re storage, that's a ton of produce. What are you storing specifically, how, what are you using it in to cook? How long does it take for your household to eat through those foods?

Wondering how this whole system works. I think you've moved since you wrote this post so wondering if you're still doing it these days as well.

Cheers

[Slevin]

I've continued to think on that thread re dopamine / environment hacking and structuring that. As a small aside, to try, I went to decaf coffee to see if micro implementations help.. basically anything to reduce noise on the nervous system. To be determined..

I think the changes like "alone in a cabin with books" or "at training camp for a 2 week intensive" or "10 day vipassana retreat" will have obvious impacts compared to micro changes but, as we both agree, that deep learning pursuit has to be sustainable with scheduled, periodized 'intensives'. Maybe the best time spent on strategy is on normal life routines and maximizing that b/c the intensives are so binary in comparison...

Appreciate the back and forth and again, thank you for sharing that paper.

I have a whole write-up that I need to do, but over the past year since the move I've moved to sitting on the ground while working (read, ~7 hours / day or so), and thus cycling through mobility poses throughout the day as I get twitchy / need to change positions. Despite this being nearly zero effort, I somehow have more gained hip / lower back mobility in this past year than I got through 3-5 years of active difficult training. I can't rule out path dependent accumulated effects, but its been maddening to watch me slouch into success (in the venkatesh rao sense, not literally... pls don't slouch at these timescales) where my active efforts were less successful. I'm leaning full Okinawa / Katy Bowman right now in the "use your body all the time and make it normal" sense.

Foodstuff also to be addressed a bit later when I have some free time to do a write up.

[Western Red Cedar]

If you have any good vegan cashew recipes / uses, please send them my way.

I don't have our recipe books on hand, but DW makes a killer granola with cashews, dried cranberries and coconut. Cashews also make for the best vegan cheese, so there are probably endless options to put that to use if you master a recipe.

We just tried a killer vegan Bahn Mi this week with Tofu (fried), cashews, pineapple, and fresh herbs. There are lots of good options for stir fries and other dishes in Thai food.

As a vegan, this probably isn't news to you, but large portions of cashews sounds like an ideal problem.

[Ego]

I get cashews every so often. Mrs. Ego loves this vegan alfredo. Fifty pounds is a lot of alfredo.
https://thevegan8.com/vegan-garlic-alfredo-sauce/

[Slevin]

I get cashews every so often. Mrs. Ego loves this vegan alfredo. Fifty pounds is a lot of alfredo.
https://thevegan8.com/vegan-garlic-alfredo-sauce/

Will try this specific version for sure. Cashew Alfredo is like the first thing I made with the cashews, it’s always such a delicious creamy sauce (usually I use sunflower or pumpkin seeds for it due to them being much cheaper).

[quote=Slevin post_id=287971 time=<a href="tel:1712627576">1712627576</a> user_id=4602]
If you have any good vegan cashew recipes / uses, please send them my way.

I don't have our recipe books on hand, but DW makes a killer granola with cashews, dried cranberries and coconut. Cashews also make for the best vegan cheese, so there are probably endless options to put that to use if you master a recipe.

We just tried a killer vegan Bahn Mi this week with Tofu (fried), cashews, pineapple, and fresh herbs. There are lots of good options for stir fries and other dishes in Thai food.

As a vegan, this probably isn't news to you, but large portions of cashews sounds like an ideal problem.
[/quote]

The reason we have so much is from the vegan cheese masters .

We are generally just okay at making vegan cheese since we optimize for simplicity. Whereas making good vegan cheese these days is literally hand making plant milks, curdling them to get plant-based curd analogues, then gathering and pressing a bunch of these (don’t know exact steps), inoculating them with molds, and storing them in a safe temp controlled cellar for weeks. It’s literally just cheese making at this point, and incurs all the same skill walls.

Also, love tofu Bahn Mis. We eat them a lot when we can… unfortunately, it seems like the places that make the best tofu Bahn Mis tend to not be the most popular, at least in places I’ve lived, and so my favorite shops have closed down. Probably not a problem in Asia / Thailand!

Also yes, totally suffering from success .

[Western Red Cedar]

Mastering vegan cheese sounds like a good goal for skillfest!

Have you tried making a vegan pesto with cashews? When we were growing a lot of basil we made it with almonds regularly, and tried it with walnuts as well. Not quite as good as pine nuts, but still did the trick at a much cheaper price.

[Slevin]

Great idea! We usually make pesto with sunflower seeds, as they can be had for <$2 / lb and make quite good pesto. Would recommend. Sunflower seeds are vastly underrated. Basically, pesto just needs fatty nuts / seeds, any type of greens, any type of citrus, basically any oil, garlic, and nooch. Cashews will work well, we just never do it because it's expensive when you don't have a glut. But yeah, obvs a good idea in the current situation! Around these parts, we usually use carrot tops / tree collards / kale / radish greens / literally any green we can get our hands on for the greens. A handful of arugula in there can also be a nice kick.

[Slevin]

I think I'm finally starting to grok the permaculture methodology (at least locally) as a sort of flow like:
1) First you plant the water
2) Then you plant the soil
3) Then you plant the ecology / ecosystem
4) Then you plant the food
5) Your waste / output then flows into zone 2 and zone 3

You need to plant the water in a climate with dry seasons, and this will allow the land around to flourish, keep the soil from drying out too much in the dry season, and can keep you from needing to irrigate in a place that gets sufficiently high amounts of water. The drier the place, the higher the collection area you will need for planting the water, and the more you need to worry about "charging the battery" so to speak.

Planting the soil is all about soil health, and healthy soil (along with enough water) makes healthy and happy plants. This is usually achieved through strategic amounts of early mulching, as well as planting a large number of species that accumulate nutrients, and then using either a chop and drop technique, or leaf litter (the OG and best perennial mulching system), to keep that soil nice and covered and keep contributing to building a nice and rich and healthy humus year after year.

Planting the ecology is all about building up the right sort of plant, insect, and wildlife diversity and population to deal with and control pest breakouts and control the environment to be a healthy and ideal place for the food to be growing. Thinking in layers allows you to build the right types of microclimates to support many diverse types of plants and keep them happy.

Planting and growing the food is the obvious part.

There are obviously more steps here, including harvesting, storage, and consumption of the food, as well as maintenance of the ecosystem; I just haven't completely been able to understand the how and the why yet.

[grundomatic]

Mulch is so critical in drylands. After it rains here, the ground can feel dry to the touch after just a couple hours. Under mulch, I've found soil still damp after a couple days.

[Slevin]

Financial:

NW crossed 900k this month. Massively over simplifying the whole thing and using the average portfolio return of the golden butterfly, this means our money generates about 9*6 = 54k per year, plus our other 34k+ of income per year from investments not on these sheets, means that we passively generate about 90k income per year.

This is obviously more than we need. I’m still planning on working software until 35 or 36 at least (4 more years); and we will continue saving.

Yearly HH income + investment returns is looking like its gonna end up ~320-340k before taxes for the year (the math is a little fuzzy and I switched tracking tools about halfway through). This is obviously an excessive amount of money, and makes me feel like a faker posting around here.

Transportation:

I’d rather live somewhere where we don’t need a car for most things; however, that isn’t currently the case, and one of our vehicles is about to bite the dust. So we recently spent about 12k getting a 2020 Chevy Bolt with <20k miles on it. And I gotta say, WOW. Amazingly better than a gas vehicle. Way fewer parts, less things to break, quieter, and we never have to go wait at the gas stations. People really overblow the charging thing as an issue for normal usage. This one charges overnight from a dryer outlet just fine (charges about 20-25 miles per hour). Unfortunately I measured it against my ebike for around town trips recently, and it still uses about >50x the power of the ebike, despite having the EV distance record on a single charge.

Speaking of which, In my humble opinion Ebikes are the best method of human transportation ever created. They get about 1000 - 4000 mpge, depending on how you ride according to the measurements from the berkeley ebike monitoring study (https://sites.google.com/view/ebikestudy). More importantly though, they are just extremely fun. Extremely low maintenance, a massive range boost for doing errands (now 10+ mile trips are nice and chill), and super pleasant when you have reasonable bike infrastructure around you… which is the complicated part. We are just aiming to live somewhere with good (not great or amazing) bike infrastructure and then find the safest routes to the places we want to go that we can. That and participate in the local city council meetings and advocate for more human / bike infrastructure. Its the sort of place where I think that will play decently.

Training:

Moved back to playing with Kettlebells. They’re the most entertaining weights for me. Working my hands up to the 10000 kb swing challenge (10k in one month) which I’ll start sometime in the next few months. I’ll probably stick with a 24kg because single hand swings are more fun for me. Also loving double kettlebell movements right now. Better than the barbell because the load isn’t connected, and drastically more fun than dumbbells because dumbbell lifting is so droll and linear. Also, kettlebells tend to get you way further with less weights. Nothing but good things to say here.

Social:

Failing; do a lot of stuff with family and some stuff with friends across the greater Bay Area, but severely lacking in friends who live close… Need to figure out places to hang out around here. There’s a cool looking artspace / makerspace that I’m going to check out next week. Its a bit expensive to be a member, but may be worth it at least for a while if it helps me make friends around here. We were also invited to a social club in a smaller town a few towns over, we should probably spend some time hanging out there too. I’ve also found a great hang out space, I’ve been intending on spending more time there.

Food:
Lots of production this season. We eat something from the garden in like 50% of meals right now it seems like, even with a kinda small set of beds at the moment. With 5+ years of slow expansion, I’m sure we will be producing much more veg than we can eat by ourselves, and will have to give a lot away.

Overall goals:
I don’t have long term goals, just feedback and steering methodologies. I see our long term household wants as a fluid object I/we have a relationship with and we influence it and it / life influences us back.

Strategies meta-convo:
Being around in the 2020s in America is a weird time. There seems to have been some inflection point in the past 15 or 20 (or more?) years in many dimensions of life where the default state of things moved from the realm of scarcity to the realm of excess.

I see this everywhere:
There is so much content on Youtube / Netflix / Hulu / etc I could watch TV 24 hours a day for the rest of my life and get further and further behind the amount of content being produced.
There are so many books in my local library I could take a single genre, read 24 hours per day, and the library would fill up with new books of that genre faster than I can keep reading them.
There is an excess of excessively delicious massively calorie dense food available to me at literally all times, within a 5 - 15 minute radius.
We are producing goods at a rate that it is now fashionable to throw your goods out once a year or more in search of a “better, more fashionable” version of the same good that is more “in-style” than the one before, and virtually all goods of a certain age get thrown out and dumped into giant piles of refuse (and likely burned).
In any medium sized city there are now so many humans around you could hang out with 2 or 3 new people per day for the rest of your life and never hang out with the same person twice (and still not know most of the people who live in your city).

Strategies of accumulation and coping mechanisms for “not enough” seem insane and backwards. We need new autoimmune systems and strategies to shed the veritable storm of people/things/content being thrown at us, to let us sit down and appreciate all the amazing things we have and the amazing people that seem boring to us now.

[jacob]

Strategies of accumulation and coping mechanisms for “not enough” seem insane and backwards. We need new autoimmune systems and strategies to shed the veritable storm of people/things/content being thrown at us, to let us sit down and appreciate all the amazing things we have and the amazing people that seem boring to us now.

It depends on what you're looking for.

Computing power, same day delivery of cheap goods, and population are all up. OTOH, customer service is down/gone, places worth visiting are drowning in tourists, good places to live in are priced out of reach for the majority, what used to be nature next door has been paved over with subdivisions to make room for an increasing population, education and healthcare now comes with appreciable risk of going broke, a high school degree is no longer competitive in a global market, and the average life expectancy in the US keeps declining.

The best strategy in terms of personal happiness is to get in on the trends that are rising and not get too attached/remain indifferent to what is increasingly lost.

[chenda]

@Jacob - Your boundless optimism is becoming too much for me

[AxelHeyst]

The best strategy in terms of personal happiness is to get in on the trends that are rising and not get too attached/remain indifferent to what is increasingly lost.

I don't fully understand this perspective. I understand it to the extent that for my personal happiness, detaching a bit from dwelling on the consequences of these negative trends at the global/societal scale is a good idea. No use wringing my hands daily about the downward trend lines. I also understand it from the perspective that if any of these downward trends are in danger of actually totally depleting, or becoming so scarce that it would take an enormous amount of energy for me as an individual to get or maintain access to them, then sure I should start letting go of those things. Maybe that's all you mean, and you and I just have different understandings of what is "going down" vs. "already lost" in terms of what we care about for happiness.

But short of those 'all is actually lost' conditions, in terms of the activities and behaviors that I choose to spend time on as an individual, I don't understand why what the trends are doing should determine what I do (although I certainly ought to keep an eye on them!). As a unit of one person I spend 99% of my time in 'the nature', far from crowds (avoiding crowds in nature even in California requires a trivial amount of skill/experience/planning), I have stellar experiences with customer service at the businesses I choose to patronize, I'm making lifestyle choices so my lifespan is likely to be high, etc.

Isn't the best strategy in terms of personal happiness to accurately determine the sorts of experiences and ways of living that will bring about one's happiness, aka to know oneself very well, and then to make decisions to make that way of life happen, regardless of what's going on out there in Trend-land?

[jacob]

Isn't the best strategy in terms of personal happiness to accurately determine the sorts of experiences and ways of living that will bring about one's happiness, aka to know oneself very well, and then to make decisions to make that way of life happen, regardless of what's going on out there in Trend-land?

"The trend is your friend". You do not exist or get to make your decisions independent of the trend. The trend is the difference between living on easy-mode (tailwind trend) and living on hard-mode (headwind trend). You can certainly make decisions that makes living on hard-mode possible, but it is also more of a struggle relative to easy-mode. That struggle with its frustrations and trade-offs might have a cost of happiness that exceeds the cost of changing the source of your happiness. Something something heterotelic vs homeotelic.

[jennypenny]

NM

[AxelHeyst]

"The trend is your friend". You do not exist or get to make your decisions independent of the trend. The trend is the difference between living on easy-mode (tailwind trend) and living on hard-mode (headwind trend). You can certainly make decisions that makes living on hard-mode possible, but it is also more of a struggle relative to easy-mode. That struggle with its frustrations and trade-offs might have a cost of happiness that exceeds the cost of changing the source of your happiness. Something something heterotelic vs homeotelic.

I'm with you now. ~"The key to happiness is to get on board with trends" is just a statement that tripped me up before doing some unpacking.

As an exercise in my own understanding, the unspoken assumptions/caveats include:
-You well understand what you want (you used the word happiness but that's not necessarily what everyone wants, to be pedantic, so I'd rephrase "you understand the kinds of activities/behaviors that will bring you the things you want in life").
-You understand that activities are delivery mechanisms for desired outcomes, not the desired outcomes in and of themselves.
-You keep an eye on the trends, how the trends are impacting the pos/neg first and second-order effects of your behaviors, and
-You keep an open mind towards alternative behaviors for when the tradeoff inflection point happens, taking into account getting ahead of the curve/skating to where the puck is going to be etc.