Good Eats radicalized me too. Not for plex but for cooking.

Zoo membership is clutch with toddlers. 100% worth it. Same with the Children’s museum.

If Republican voters could read, they’d be very upset.

Where we are now sure seems to be the direct result of people not getting their asses kicked for being pieces of shit.

Too many people accepted intolerance and bigotry being spread without natural consequences which let the bigots and bullies think they had the right to do it, and in the process, it convinced everyone else that the bullies were the majority.

Accidentally

Yeah if my wife’s family wasn’t here and unwilling to move, I would be somewhere less hostile and more functional too.

To run a heater or ac, you need a significant generator. I have been looking at battery systems and to run an existing residential ac, its like 10k and you need two inverters. Where I am, the power failures have been minimal and manageable (30 minute intervals every couple months) The exception was Hurricane Beryl and we were out of power for 3 days. I intermittently ran a generator for our fridge and the neighbors to charge stuff but even running a window unit was not an option on our 5000w generator. It burned maybe 2 gallons of gas?

Running an electric central air heater is also essentially out of the question. With a gas heater, you just need to run the fan and not heat the elements.

Despite the health risks, that is why we still use. Gas water heaters, gas furnaces, gas dryers, and a gas stove in our house. I want the fallback of running stuff without power. The grid is also shitty to the point (in some areas) that it fried my uncles induction stove, fridge, and ovens even living in a major city.

That also wouldn’t have helped during the winter storm in Austin because the gas supply basically froze and lost pressure so those folks were really hurting.

I think the big built in generators run 15k plus and run off natural gas. I did learn that they also require a maintenance subscription (because of course they do) and thats like 2k a year iirc.

Check your homeowners insurance cost and property taxes before you start talking about how cheap houses are in Texas. It can run $18k/year in insurance and another 10k in property taxes for a $400k house… If you put 80k down on a $400k house, the mortgage is roughly $2100/month in principle and interest, plus another $933ish per month for Property taxes($5000/year), insurance($5000/year), and hoa fees($1200/year). Your housing cost is ~$3k/month. Property taxes go up every year on top of that. They are limited to a 10%/year increase but historically, that translates to basically a guaranteed 10%/year increase, especially in the last 10 years. Insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last 10 years as well.

Welp, you have me soundly beat. My longest is 85 hrs and 6 minutes.

Weather Underground is just a distributed/crowd sourced weather app now full of individual weather stations. I love it both in function and name.

Sedgwick is a seriously shitty company. I’m disappointed it didn’t also include their consumer side. Those bastards cost me $5k because they denied my claim when ATT drilled a fat fiber conduit through my main sewer line.

The containerized strikes Ukraine has done from inside russia have been particularly scary. They basically setup manufacturing cells in country, built the drones, drove to the launch sites, and launched with no one noticing. The U.S. has minimal counters to those types of attacks assuming you don’t catch them in advance. There have been reports for years about drones entering sensitive restricted airspace and just kind of flying around until the operators decide to leave.

When you start getting into ballistic missile defence and the larger one way drones, you realize that a proper coastal defence or even hvt defence on the homefront is woefully inadequate. I won’t say we need to spend more on that stuff because to do it properly would be in the high trillions. I will say we should be able to develop and field that tech in reasonable numbers given our current military spending. Buuuuuuuut, the best way to avoid needing that is to not be a country that everyone hates…

The U.S. military really needs a wakeup call about drones but I think when that happens, its gonna be real bad news for wherever it came from or the scapegoat for it. To be clear, even in light of this, I don’t want to see people killed, on either side of this but the preparation that the U.S. military has for a drone war is woefully inadequate.

Look at the action taken against Iran, that’s a biiiiiiig deal too. Short of a nuke, there isn’t a much more exotic strike package than what was used against them.

I loathe newly purchased towels, they always feel like they don’t dry well for a while. I typically wash/swap every 4 or so days. We also “strip” our towells with a deep clean like every couple months.

Strictly speaking here, something that could be fully repaired by the actual tools I have without just swapping for new purchased replacement parts would probably be one of my guitars. I could essentially make every piece of them from scratch if needed except maybe the pots, caps, and truss rod. I could probably repair the truss rod but making one from scratch would be tricky. If I had an acoustic guitar, that would be an easy answer.

It might not turn out well, but I could make it playable again.

I could repair anything on my bike, and kayak. I might be able to rebuild my snes on a component level.

If you allow replacement parts, almost anything can be repaired of you are willing to spend enough on it.

Hank hill has your back.

Currently playing Hot Wheels TURBO Racing (1999) on the N64 (Analogue 3d). It’s a good little arcade racer and has been fun to hop back into it.

Fun fact: eyeballs and testicles are some of the most sensitive parts of the human anatomy to radio frequency heating damage because they are mostly liquid, close to the surface of the body, and have small blood vessels so they don’t get much blood flow (meaning they heat up easily and don’t lose heat quickly)

The more you know

My understanding is that they either don’t meet us safety regulations both for crash testing and ev systems safety or they have not gone through the relevant regulatory steps to get those certificationa. The tarrifs certainly come into play as well though.

Why would you say that is? Not doubting you on that but it mostly seems like they are market priced as premium products. I.E. a Rivian is priced basically like a normal mid to high end suv. A base level model 3 is in line with a mid level camry iirc.