Even if we assume your opinion/conclusion is true, the fault for that lies with the government and society at large, or maybe just capitalism in general. It is not an individual issue when so many people live in areas that have been designed (often for corrupt/malicious reasons) around individual vehicle use.

I’d say that for individuals the risk is real and we should all try to be prepared for emergencies the best we can. Access to a vehicle is a prerequisite for having an income for many folks though. Other options don’t exist, and non-ownership vehicle options are typically more expensive (taxi/uber/lyft) or drag another person into the arrangement.

Not again!

Damn you…

✊ Netanyanuuuu!!!

The clankers will never sway me from my em dashes, my oxford commas, and my semicolons; they are my precious.

TV / VCR repair was an entire career! I learned that while watching those very same CRT TVs.

And as a bonus, I developed a deep hatred of advertising!

This would hit a lot harder for me if I didn’t spend the last decade watching a disturbing fraction of the population not just vote for, but vocally support and make a part of their personality, one of the worst people on the planet. (edit: you know, the “greater of two evils.”)

I’m in the US, of course.

I bet it’s some of what you said, and maybe some of the well-known “buy experiences, not things” saying.

I’m not suggesting that saying is wrong, but I think people can mechanically go through the process of acquiring fancy-looking experiences because that is what you’re SUPPOSED to do, just like people can collect fancy-looking posessions on auto pilot because that’s what it means to be a successful person.

The last thing you said about people who claim they are “traveling” and not “vacationing” just REEKS of a hollow charade trying to prove that they are part of the upper crust of society.

The catch in all this is that we all have our own individualized needs, and a big part of the self-care work we need to do is figuring out what those things are. Like traveling and having fun vacations is awesome, but for most of us it’s not going to be some instant key to life fulfillment. In my case, have always loved nature in general and aquatic life in particular. Some of my best vacation memories are swimming in little pockets of the ocean that looked like giant aquariums full of colorful fish and corals. But that’s a rare occurrence and I will also never want to live somewhere tropical. Solution? I built a nice koi pond in my little back yard (in addition to all the other pets my family has). And in addition to the whole “caring for and interacting with water critters” angle, I got to do a lot of learning about chemistry and biology that are nowhere near my professional field, and I got to do a lot of DIYing, and I got a lot of exercise and fresh air out of it too! It helped much more than just my brain.

Your first point is so huge IMO. If you can’t enjoy being at your own home then trying to have some kind of fulfilling life is going to be a steeper uphill battle than it already was.

Look at it like the Buddhists and stoics. Thinking your happiness is out there waiting on some beach, or in some fancy car or McMansion, is only going to perpetuate your suffering in the actual real now.

Or put another way, if you decide to find happiness and fulfillment in your home and your local community, and it works, then THEY can’t stop you. Whoever that is in your case.

I think it’s less about genuinely caring at this point and more about it being a home-grown meme. Plus it’s perfectly designed to be popular around here because it directly involves individuals and you don’t have to lean on Star Trek, Linux, or even beans for it to get attention. Those three things are good, but people like variety.

My windows “partition” for work is just a single VM image that sits on one of my two Linux-formatted drives.

Yeah, temperature is weird like that.

I’m an American, but one with an education and an appreciation for the one true system, SI, which is pretty close to metric.

Meters and kilograms make total sense to me, even if I’m conditioned to think in feet and pounds. But temperatures in Celsius just don’t click. I have to consciously try to remember some equivalent Fahrenheit values to get a feel for it.

If you told me the barometric pressure in Pascals I’d literally understand that more quickly, since I deal with pressure measurements and settings at work.

“Religious denominations”

Uh huh. We totally believe you don’t mean Christian denominations, and if you were still in the leopards’ in-group you’d be using this same language to defend our muslims, jews, atheists, and even wiccans in uniform.

Fuck this guy yesterday and fuck him today too.

Iirc it was indeed designed to be terrible back in the day to protect bits on machines by camming out.

I have impact-driven thousands of screws into wood in my back yard in the past 18 months. Over 1,000 of them were 6" (15cm) big guys, along with tons of 2.5" (~6cm) and 3.5" (9cm).

Every last one was Torx / hexalobular / 6-point. When I bought hardware that came with free phillips head screws, I threw that shit away and used my own.

The “feature” that philips head brings to the table makes it worse for just about every use case other than “I own exactly one screwdriver and never want to get another one.”

Torx doesn’t HAVE to be the alternative. There are many good screw designs out there. It’s just that where I live, that’s the non-philips choice that dominates the market. Every store has a variety of choices for torx-driven construction screws.

Ah yes, the workplace version of “it’s not cheating if they put it in the game!”

In my mind it is not the age of the technology, but its owner or lack thereof.

In the year of our lord 2026, it’s more like they TELL us to save water while standing in that shower making constant eye contact with the camera with water running down their face. And just before their message ends you see a cloud zip past a window behind them because they’re on a private jet while recording it.

If we’re talking about boomers on mainstream social media sites, if it’s not AI slop then it will just be human-run scams or thinly veiled advertising. It should all be treated as garbage starting out.

Then it’s not that big of a step to realize that they are better off not spending their days plugged into the firehose of bullshit and brain manipulation.

We finally have the Centers for Delicious Chicken?

🏆

I made you a trophy for the most dogwhistles in a single comment today.

That is wild.

Well there’s another sensor to add to my wish list!

Although, we have a lot of HVAC flow into the bedroom so maybe the difference wouldn’t be huge.