I'm not sure that this mental line of defence would necessarily hold, us humans are easily manipulated by things that we know to be extremely simple agents that are definitely trying to manipulate us all the time: babies, puppies, kittens, etc. 

This still holds true a significant amount of the time even if we pre-warn ourselves against the pending manipulation - there is a recurrent meme of, eg, dads in families not ostensibly not wanting a pet, only to relent when presented with one.

This implies your timelines for any large impact from AI would span multiple future generations, is that correct?

Relatively small behavioural changes on your end may address some of the causes of these frustrations. It sounds like you might be overstocked with things of relatively low long-term utility, which is why it's hard to immediately pass them on. Have you scanned your spending patterns for hyperbolic discounting, for example?

Comics are a great example - if you have the willpower to hold off until you can but a TPB, they're cheaper, more economic, more durable, take up less storage space, and are much easier to pass on or pass around than individual comics. If you have friends who also enjoy comics, it's easier to pass around books of them than individual issues, and you can probably read a broader range. Alternately, if you find a way to read comics online or through an app, you can enjoy getting stories as they come out but through digital distribution instead of dead trees. If you're not collecting dead tree stories for long-term value, and don't re-read, then that may be a positive trade-off for you.

You're correct in that throwing things away is one of the least useful things you can do with them. Each low-utility spare object is probably not worth a huge effort in disposing of appropriately individually, so why trap yourself into that situation by virtue of your own lifestyle choices?

Do you have municipal recycling facilities or charities that you could donate things to?

For the entrepreneur - I'd pay some marginally low cost to have comics delivered from MrMind's house to mine once they're done with them :-)

Today's SMBC will drag a smile out of many people here if thy haven't read it already.

Whoah. That gets many points. What an excellent layout! We need to know what boots are for it to translate, but that's a lot closer to an ideal solution than I've worked through.

Edit - I thought the diagram looked familiar!

In your situation, in Australia, it's mostly about forward planning. Do you have any foreknowledge of likely changes in your health or family situation?

The insurance market in Australia has historically been pretty poor in terms of transparency and easy comparisons. I'm sure you've found the various compare-policy tools online. I'm assuming you don't want to piggyback on a family policy.

Are you looking for more data, or a list of considerations for insurance planning? If it's the latter, try browsing around insurance industry planner websites for their policy documents. I can probably get some friends in the industry to email me more comprehensive things if you want to work of their approaches.

Thanks! I've been playing around with it for a week or so but can't elegantly find a way to do it that meets my arbitrary standards of elegance and cool design :-)

Becomes easier when using non-circular shapes for Venn-ing, but my efforts look a little hacky.

Reminiscing over one of my favourite passages from Anathem, I've been enjoying looking through visual, wordless proofs of late. The low-hanging fruit is mostly classical geomety, but a few examples of logical proofs have popped up as well.

This got me wondering if it's possible to communicate the fundamental idea of Bayes' Theorem in an entirely visual format, without written language or symbols needing translation. I'd welcome thoughts from anyone else on this.

In any particular geographical or topical area?