Not the same person but fast food is way faster and cheaper than some place like Chili’s as long as you stick to the more value focused options. I can get a full meal with leftovers for $5-6 bucks usually

It’s also cheaper than a lot of home cooking unless you plan very well, make large batches, and are cool with eating the same leftovers all week.

They buy most power from TVA, the rate city council controls is the fixed rate markup they charge on top. Our power is $0.07/kwh by the time you pay for it.

Deliberately underfunded or mismanaged, maybe. It’s been like this since the 90s at least. But I don’t think they need any intent for a buyout for it to suck. Afaik, there is zero interest from any private buyers for our utilities.

If I had to point to a specific failure, it’s that the rates are set by city council, and raising them is wildly unpopular. Everyone who proposed it loses re-election. We have some of the cheapest power in the world but fat lot of good that does when it’s not on.

Tbf, my city has a publicly owned utility company and it suuuuucks. Literally writing this comment on my phone during a 12 hour power outage during perfect weather.

I’ve played thousands of hours of TM in Linux back to the TMNF days, works great. Honestly Uplay causes more problems than TM itself.

Come on man I don’t like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They’re all varying levels of suck the last few years. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.

My entire subscription feed is hundreds of edutainment channels pretty much. It’s my alternative to the discovery/history/science channel for the modern age (and tbh it’s higher quality too in many cases)

It’s also really really good for learning practical skills like home repairs and automotive maintenance.

Some favorite channels:

Nilered

Styropyro

Practical engineering

Technology Connections

Breaking taps

The thought emporium

I have some bad news

Those people can speak for themselves. I like getting plastered then walking around shirtless in below freezing temps. Makes me feel alive.

Curtains are stupid expensive, I have a big window with curtains that are in dire need of replacing but I’m looking at several thousand dollars for just that one window.

I’m like 90% of the way there although I do have diagnosed ADHD which makes time management and organization difficult but not impossible.

Honestly, it was school that was hard to deal with. I was pretty messed up until I got out of college and got a career job. It’s amazing what a fat paycheck, a good night’s sleep, and not having to worry about differential equations homework does.

You never know what some people used to be like. I know a top tier defense attorney who used to be a heroin addict, and a company VP who was homeless for 3 years.

Longshoreman overtime is ass-backwards though. They clock crazy high OT and do shit like sleep on the clock and they get any shifts outside normal business hours counted as OT. The average pay is well over $100k iirc

They’re also super insular and basically the only way to get a job with them is to be a family member of someone who’s retiring.

I like unions but the ILA is basically a front for the mob. Their leader literally got involved in a ton of RICO charges that didn’t stick because a key witness mysteriously turned up dead in a trunk.

Also part of the reason they’re so insistent on paper records and refusing automation is so they can traffick humans, illegal goods, and steal stuff.

I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.

There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.

They let us use them for all my college math classes.

They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.

I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.

Keepass and syncthing are great combined. Functions fully locally even when I have no access to my home network, and changes get synced between my desktop, laptop, and phone whenever I have WAN access.

You just gotta keep it casual and not creepy. Basic small talk, talk about the lessons, what’s going on in your life, current events, etc.

If they’re receptive to that and you start hitting it off, then you can try to go for a non weird compliment or ask if they want to grab some food after the lesson or something.

As for non weird compliments, avoid physical attributes that can’t be changed and don’t be sexual about it. Nice boobs = not okay. I like your hairstyle = okay.

I have the social awareness of a brick but have managed to go from being like anon in the greentext to actually pretty decent at getting girls.

The biggest part is just putting yourself in situations where single women are present so you can practice your casual conversation skills with them, so anon is halfway there.

As another man in the tiny wrist club, it’s truly heartbreaking to find out that watch that looks so good in pictures looks absurd when you put it on yourself. I really wanted a speedmaster but at least with the metal strap, it’s just too big.

F91W is a truly legendary watch though. It’s what I use 90% of the time although swapping the factory rubber wrist strap with a NATO strap is a worthwhile upgrade. The clasp on the factory strap really likes to break.

I also actually have a Seiko 5 too, very solid budget friendly automatics. Really big modding community too if you want to get into customization.

People want to live in SFHs because cities are currently full of overpriced shoebox apartments with almost no options between that and car dependent suburban sprawl. It’s not for me personally, but townhomes and other mid density developments are perfect for most families and far easier to serve with public transport (see: streetcar suburbs). You can still mix in detached single family housing in urban areas where demand is low enough to make the financials work too.