99.9% of people have more in common with an illegal immigrant than Elon Musk. Their problems aren't caused by people arriving in small boats, but those arriving in private jets.
When you get on an airplane, take Your backpack off and carry it by hand. You’ve got luggage on your back sticking out 12, 16 inches and you’re swinging it around like a brain dead fool.
The number of people that cluelessly hit people in aisle seats, shove backpacks in the faces of aisle sitters as the wearer turns to to talk to friends or tries to remember their alphabet and how to count while looking for their seat is ridiculous.
Take your backpack off! You’re hitting people.
Wastewater based epidemiology is really freaking cool, and we have covid to thank for moving it from academia to industry/government testing, where the results are actionable.
We are now tracking covid, mpox, the flu, RSV and many other diseases in wastewater. It's very cost-effective community monitoring and can be applied anywhere from the influent of treatment plants to the manhole cover in front of your gym.
Luxury is cheap if you are clever. You can buy a premium 500$ office chair from 10-100$ if you can find one locally used one.
Buying the best value refurbished laptops and computer parts can save so much money. You can buy a refurbished laptop with 512gb SSD storage and 32gb of ram for 250$, the newest MacBook has 128gb SSD storage and 8gb of ram for 1000$. You can literally buy 4x the ram and storage for 1/4 of the price.
I have like 20,000$ worth of furniture but payed like 2,000$ for it. Use Google lens on cheap furniture you see and you'll find some extraordinary value. I once found a 4,500 brass chandelier for 45$ at a habitat for humanity. Make sure to buy it from a store that checks for bed bugs etc.
Knowing how to repair stuff. The value of expensive items are very delicate, a single broken part can make the price plummet. This way you can get an expensive device, or anything, and replace a small or simple part. Did this on a cheap laptop with a broken power button and it works great.
Knowing how to "tune" your tools and stuff. A lot of cheap tools and items can be made much better with some fine tuning. On a saw, re-set and sharpen the teeth, on a knife thin and sharpen the edge, run Linux on old hardware etc. For everything you have, squeeze every last bit of performance out of it.
Carnivorous plants are not as hard to take care of as most people think. Sundews are literally an invasive species in New Zealand, and Venus flytraps are from South Carolina. The reason they seem hard to take care of is because many companies that sell carnivorous plants provide incorrect care instructions or pot them in the wrong type of soil. Most likely as a planned obsolescence scheme to get people to buy more. Learn the proper care instructions, and they're extremely hardy.
Gender and sex are not the same thing. Gender is an emotion experience, sex is a biological categorization based on an individual's role in reproduction. Gender and sex needn't match. Gender can change (mine often does), sex cannot. Just like sex people do not have control over their gender, if someone's gender changes or doesn't match their sex it is not because of a decision they made, it is merely an emotion. So be nice to trans people, they're just people trying to not be uncomfortable living in their own skin.
Spend as much time as you can, with your aging loved ones.
Understad the things you use every day.
Using a phone? understand how computers and operating systems work and how networking works, at least at a basic level.
Brushing your teeth? Learn how to do it correctly. Understand the logic behind it. Do some basic research.
Own a car? learn how to maintain it, understand how it works, understand its limitations.
live in a house? understand how to maintain it, how to repair it, how it works, where your electric box is.
Etc. You don't have to be an expert on everything, but you should have a basic understanding of the things you use every day.
When cleaning your glasses, wipe from the temples towards the nose. That way you're not spreading any nose grease you missed across your lenses.
I just wrote a post about getting your life stuff in order. Its really important
Always remember that this, too, shall pass.
Use zip not tar.gz. I just lost 2GBs of data because the archive was corrupted out of nowhere :')
Only then do I find out that if a zip file id corrupted the damage is only done to one compressed file unlike tar where the damage affects everything after it.
I lost my kitty a couple weeks ago and I'm really sad and miss him so much, but I got 2 new kitties from the shelter and I'm so happy to have them.
Most countries have at least a few dozen countries they can travel to without a visa and visas are easy to obtain anyway, so if you ever want to take a break from the rat race, all you need is a plane ticket to a destination with a favorable exchange rate, and with a thousand dollars of savings you can take a hiatus from working or work on a creative project you're interested in for months or years, depending on your lifestyle.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Its true that in life you need some luck. But luck can be made. You can carve the path and work hard for luck to come.
Well, to be honest, not that I can think of at the moment.
The cake is a lie
If you think someone is a piece of shit just because you perceive their life to be better than yours, and they relate to your friends more than you do, you’re the actual piece of shit.
SCOTT
I kind of wish more people realized how much of everyday computer usage can be simplified with keyboard shortcuts. Take a look around your favorite apps/programs and/or Google for “keyboard shortcuts”, and try to build a habit of using shortcuts for some of the most frequently used commands. It's very liberating as it gives you a feeling of greater control.
For example, in Windows, did you know that if you pin your most used apps on the taskbar, you can access them using Win+1, Win+2, etc.?
In browsers, you can press Ctrl+L for the location bar (URL) and Ctrl+K for the search box. Ctrl+Shift+T will restore your last closed tab if you closed it accidentally.
Menus can be accessed with Alt plus the underlined letter. The File menu is pretty much always Alt+F. Many dialogs have elements with underlined letters too. We should demand this on the Web as well, as it's kind of becoming a lost art with fewer and fewer people knowing about it. It only takes an
accesskeyattribute!
