I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
Seriously. Craisins = great. Raisins = bullshit bad wasted grape. Redeemable if they’re Raisinets or yogurt covered raisins. (I actually don’t hate raisins, but all of the other options are better by a mile.)
I don’t think the mom and pops are really the problem (in fact, this is I think one of the few viable ways for regular people to actually get ahead) but all of the things surrounding housing. One can get place renting for $2k, but can’t get approved for that mortgage amount even with tons of history showing it’s paid. Corporations owning massive amounts of property are also a much bigger problem. Appealing to an individual (mom and pop) is generally a lot easier than to try to appeal to a corp in which you’re just Lessee #4949857 who’s spreadsheet tells them to squeeze you for more money because.
Past that, I’d also argue renters need much more support when it comes to their rights because quite a lot of the things that people are posting here as anecdotes to why their landlords are shitty are already illegal, it’s just extremely difficult to get anything done about it. I’d suggest also that there was some regulatory body (if one doesn’t exist already) responsible for certifying housing/landlords because then at least shit would get fixed once a year.
My only half-decent experience renting was a blue-collar mom and pop who leveraged their own home to buy a second home to rent, that they rented significantly under market value. If anything, we should be trying to setup more systems that allow this outcome (they fucked me on the deposit though, but that’s the part about renter’s rights.)
But things like chicken thighs ($1.39 / lbs at Costco vs $1.49 / lbs at the local grocery store)…I don’t think it’s worth the price.
2 things:
The chicken you get at Costco is probably a better quality, and generally you get more actual chicken per pound. Google "air chilled vs water chilled."
Get the things there that make sense for you. We like calrose rice in this house for a lot of stuff, go through quite a lot of it. At costco, the gigantic bag is like $20 compared to a tiny little bag that is $10-$12 at the cheapest regular grocer.
Combine those factors and I think it’s worth it. I have things that are “costco items.” Bulk spices, rice and some grains, dog food and treats, chicken, paper towel and TP, plastic wrap, hot dogs, pretty much any cheese, laundry soap, frozen convenience foods (dino nuggets, kirkland pizza, eggos, etc) and even some produce. Anyway, I go maybe once a month, and I’ve done the math many times over and it more than pays for itself. I wish I lived closer, because there are some things that I would buy more frequently that are way cheaper usually - milk, eggs, salad mix, fruit, etc.
But yeah, this is a 6 person house, with 3 adults and two teenagers.
Oh, last thing. Buying quite a lot of things at Costco is basically like buying an extended warranty or insurance. If you’re going to buy a TV, for example, and Costco sells something that’s close, buy that one. The OEM is going to offer a 1 year warranty, Costco will take that return for much longer.
EVs are still going to be the wrong answer to the problem. Sure, more efficient than combustable, but still vastly less efficient than good public transport systems, walkable/bikeable cities, etc. If Elon really wanted to save the planet, he’d be building bullet trains.
Dude, this is the thing that depresses the hell out of me. When I was kid there were skating rinks, arcades, malls, etc. Granted, those things cost money as well, but most of us could make a $5 last all day.
I had a hard enough time just clicking this link and remaining optimistic that this project wouldn’t be embarrassing and uh, this just killed that feeling. Toss it in the video game movie pile along with Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed…
oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.
Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?
JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn’t feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went “never mind all that” to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.
Yeah, I think as long as we can count on some level of society, we have a shot at longer term preservation. Like, computers will continue to get faster, and mediums will continue to get upgraded and transferred and so forth, and we’re kind of already at a point where nothing recorded today needs to be “lost” with some careful planning. There are obvious holes in this, but it’s increasingly less likely to be a problem that the storage medium is the issue (again, caveating that we’re not talking about rebuilding society after a catastrophe or something) and more a problem with what the dependency of reading the data to be saved is, whether it’s transferred on storage formats that maintain data integrity, etc.
Like, we can do redundant backups and so forth, but what if the things we’re backing up are server dependent? Or even simpler shit like Flash games. I really hope that more people writing software especially think about how to keep it usable for a long time.
The version of this I always think of is the one in which you’re playing a video game and get stuck. And unlike today, where you might spend an hour before you give up and lookup a walkthrough, in the 90’s when you got stuck, you just… stayed stuck. Like, “well, I guess I’m going to spend the next week or two on the Water Temple running into every wall and bombing everything until hopefully something opens.” Oh and it turns out the solution is something you tried within the first 15 minutes but didn’t get quite right.
I swear I probably spent like 2 solid weeks after school just running into walls in the Water Temple because I couldn’t figure it out. And I used to 100% like everything I played. You’d find out every secret, every cheat, and spend hours. Especially once things like GTA came out, just hours and hours of doing functionally nothing. Fuck even games I didn’t really even like I was an expert in. These days, I’m lucky to get a few hours a week on a game, and I rarely finish anything that’s not exactly the type of game I’m extremely into, and 100% is a thing that basically never happens anymore.