I would love to be able to break the cycle of poverty en masse. For too many people, simply being born poor means they will be poor for life.
The part that bothers me, is the more I noodle on this, the only way I see to correct it also involves mass sterilizations. Hey, I’ll pay for your food, clothing, & shelter for life, but in exchange you have to have a vasectomy. I don’t think that’s a great offer. If someone has a better solution, I’m all ears.
74F in the winter. In the summer I usually leave the A/C off and use fans, but if it gets above 90F I’ll let it run for a few hours before bed.
I seriously don’t understand how people farther north of me survive the cold. And I live in Atlanta, so there’s a lot of them.
As a dude who loves Transport Fever 2, you better believe I get this wrong a lot.
I also see ‘meeting’ abbreviated as MTG. Which, is now what I call it when I send texts to my friends to play Magic. “Hey, got time for a MTG MTG?”
The big change was I had the stairs moved.
Without making a huge story of it, my house has pretty darn large pull-under basement that you access by a garage door. But, the space was cut in half by the stairs. One the one side you could mostly squeeze a car in, but the other side was largely wasted space. So I had the stairs moved to the other side of the house. Now I have a pseudo 3-car garage (2 bays to work on project cars, and room to pull a 3rd in behind them in a pinch).
Mildly interesting, those stairs were moved on purpose by the original owner during the design phase. I actually have the original blueprints, the stairs were supposed to be off the kitchen. Makes me wonder if the next owner will move them again. hah.
I have a window view of a cubicle farm.
There’s also a nice skylight. It’s giant, it spans most of the cubicle farm. The kind of thing you’d see in an upscale mall. But of course we can’t have that, so they covered it with a tarp. (To be fair, it is hot here in the southern part of USA. I get the need to somewhat lower the A/C bill).
I had my house renovated to make it more like what I want. The cost was mind boggling. But holy hell, I really like my house now.
I think the government should have a balanced budget.
I’d argue the biggest failure AND success was trying to replace the brake master cylinder on my car when I was in college. I rounded the brake line fittings right off, and ended up breaking the hard metal line as well. Then, drove it to a brake shop (yes, with no brakes), so they could laugh at me, but not only did they fix it, they gave me the friend rate. Likely out of pity, but it was such a nice gesture I remember it to this day.
I learned SO much from that. Biggest was that there’s special brake line wrenches specifically for these fittings. But also a lot about how to fix the unfixable. Turns out, just because you don’t see the solution, doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t been in this exact situation before and had to figure it out. And although it doesn’t come up often (fortunately), I’ve had to replace entire metal brake lines since. Now that I know what I’m doing, it’s gone from ‘impossible’ to ‘can do’. Which I find awesome.
Jesus fucking Christ why didn’t you do this back when the Democrats were in power Bernie? Stop fucking virtue signaling. You could have proposed this 4 years ago and it would have had a good chance of actually passing. And that’s exactly why you waited until now, isn’t it?
It saddens me that Bernie is the least broken politician we have, and he still sucks.
SomethingInGERMAN!!!
Okay, little backstory here. When I was growing up, there was this fighting game called Karnov’s Revenge, and it was the 90s, so the characters said little 2 second phrases that more or less sounded like words. My friends and I were fascinated by it, ended up adding many of those phrases to our vocabulary. One of those characters was a giant German wrestler named Marstorius - and some of his phrases were just incomprehensible. So we ended up just yelling “SomethingInGERMAN” when he would pull of his big wresting move. No, not a translation, no actual German words were injured. And boyo did that stick, still say it to this day.
Driving yes, quite a bit. Especially if you can get out on a racetrack. Was decades after I had left schooling before I realized all that stuff they try to teach you in physics about friction and momentum all actually have real world application for us normies. Would have learned so much more in school if I could have put 2+2 together back then, but I also can’t imagine putting 14 year olds out on a racetrack either.
And even when not racing, just the freedom of being able to hop in the car and drive to another state is just downright liberating. Bored? Well, shit, hop in the car, let’s go have an adventure! (I will admit, at my age, ‘adventure’ is code for ‘ice cream shop’, but it still makes me smile, so fuck it.)
That said, most of us only use our cards for commuting, which is the worst possible experience. It’s no wonder so many folks hate driving, their only experience with cars is the bad one. All of us just sitting in traffic wishing we didn’t have to go to work. I am seriously angry at our world for not pushing much harder for remote working. We proved it worked great during COVID, and yet here we all are back in the office.
Comrade.
My solution was pretty simple. I don’t go out to eat often. If I haven’t had fish in a while, well, hey, now I have an excuse not to cook.
Also mix it up. Try sushi, try a fish fry, try that fancy fish joint.
I believe it’s a combination of what others here are saying. We live in a world of near instant gratification, getting going on something that requires effort without an immediate payout feels too much like work.
FWIW, I find it helps tremendously to schedule a day / time in advance. For example, I spend the whole week looking forward to “Wrenching Wednesday” so I can go play with my cars. And I actually go do it now, which is something I couldn’t always say before.
We’re 4th graders, teacher stepped out for like half an hour. Comes back and we’re all playing instead of doing our classwork, because, duh, we’re like 9. Proceeds to punish the first 10 kids she sees. But then realized that’s not fair, so she lets the class vote on who caused the ‘problem’. I’m the fat kid, so naturally I get picked.
Hmm… I don’t like these new cars with their touchscreens. I’ll just wait a few years for that fad to go away. Said me, around 2007.
No.
But to be clear, somewhere over the last 20 years it seems I’ve also fallen out of the middle class? I bought a new car fresh out of college, and then again about 10 years later. But I look at the price of new cars today, and they’re simply not a purchase I can afford. So, it looks like I’m not going to be buying any new cars anymore, Tesla or otherwise. That feels weird.
Go back in time and buy another 1997 F-150. The thing is an amazing example of do it simple & do it right, and it will last. But, it’s also close to 30 years old, nearly every system on it is showing the tell-tale signs of age. I would love to have an actual new one, it would last me the rest of my days. (On a happy note, I just finished putting a rebuilt motor in mine. So, here’s hoping for another 25+ years).
It saddens me that even if I could afford a new car at today’s prices, I don’t want what they’re making.
At the risk of sounding silly - Instead of focusing on burning the solids, boil the water. Water boils at 100C, at which point the water vapor should separate and leave all the solids behind. Then capture the vapors and condense it back down into clean water. Now, if you later want to incinerate the leftover solids, sure, go for it, fire’s always cool in my book.
I’ll add, simply boiling water is energy intensive. What you are proposing probably won’t work at any scale.