Woodworking planes.

You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that’s just on another level.

Here’s the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you’re doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I’ll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I’d still have been gouging the shit out of everything.

Trump is exactly the kind of Karen who would describe anyone disagreeing with him as ‘having a mental health episode.’

It kind of sounds like OP morphed from hobbyist to investor, then lost interest when his investment lost value.

There’s a lot of hobbies that offer a path to professional, and I’ve watched friends go down that path. It’s rarely a good experience - there’s all kind of things you have to do as a professional to make a living that you can blow off as a hobbyist/volunteer. There’s a lot more stress when success or failure is tied to whether you eat or not. You lose a lot of freedom to tell dickheads to fuck off.

Never been into collectibles, myself, but the investment pressure seems insidious. Like, it’s one thing to trade cards among friends because you got doubles of something your buddy’s missing, but buying a rare card because it’s “underpriced” to hold until its price recovers is very different. The money is pressure to change from looking at your collection as good, fun, or complete and to looking at its presumptive cash value. Then you’ve stopped being a collector and started being a businessman.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

You know that people pay taxes on the wealth embodied in their house, every year, right? Not even their equity in the house, but the full value - both the piece they own and the piece the bank still owns. Their primary residence is most of the wealth for most of the middle class, so we already have a wealth tax for everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

I’m sure you’ll understand if the rest of us are skeptical of a guy worth $20M arguing against a wealth tax.

I mean, you’re right that restricted shares are a special problem in assessing “wealth,” but that’s why tax laws are complicated and full of loopholes.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

Colon is part of your large intestine.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

The one time Jesus went HAM, chasing religious leaders around their temple with a whip, and whose temple was it? Zeus? Bacchus? Any of those graven-image, many-gods cults? No - he went after his own Father’s priests for being money-grubbing hypocrites.

I’m guessing that story doesn’t come up often at CPAC or prayer breakfasts.

As someone who follows politics mostly through late night shows and memes, that event was one of very few times I’ve seen journalists push back on the guy. This revelation makes pretty clear that ‘no fact checking’ is a routine demand that media orgs routinely cave to, and I now have a ton of respect for NABJ, which I had never previously heard of.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.

What exactly is your point? Because my point is that undesirable shitholes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars is a more pressing problem, with different solutions, than not being able to find a house in Beverly Hills under $4M.

I think we’re working with different definitions for ‘starter home.’ To me, ‘starter home’ is a real estate agent’s euphemism for ‘undesireable shithole.’ It is a home you expressly do not want to live in long-term. It’s temporary housing to build equity while you’re young, able to sacrifice living standard and comfort, and waiting to earn enough to upgrade to an actually desirable house.

From the goalposts you’re moving, it sounds like you think a starter house is somewhere affordable that you’d be willing to move into today and live indefinitely. And yeah, that’s probably going to be unavailable to most people. Most people don’t get to live in their dream house in an ideal neighborhood. Never have.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/20159-Cohasset-St-UNIT-9-Winnetka-CA-91306/68991194_zpid/ I’m sorry if that doesn’t fit your criteria for a “L.A. home,” but it is a place you can live, in Los Angeles, under $400k.

But that’s my point: some cities do not have any “starter” homes, at all, and defining a “starter home” as just the bottom third of every municipality is misleading bullshit. It implies that you need $1M to buy a home, and you don’t.

I agree that home prices have gotten crazy and unaffordable for many. I just want to have a realistic discussion of what that means so we can work on realistic solutions, and “you need $1M mortgage just to get your foot in the door” doesn’t help.

He promises simple solutions with no sacrifice, essentially just “I’ll fix it.” Certain people love that. Don’t care what the solution is, don’t care that the problem has been simplified beyond recognition, just fix shit.

This smells like bullshit. I mean, if they define “Beverly Hills” as a city, I can see where it might be literally true, but I wouldn’t call even the cheapest house in Beverly Hills, Scarsdale, or Paradise Valley a “starter” home. There’s homes in the LA, New York, and Phoenix metros under $3-400k, if you’re not so choosy about the neighborhood.

I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.

If you start with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and go to SCOTUS deciding that laws requiring the 10 commandments in classrooms are unconstitutional in 1980, then you get almost 350 years.