Gotta have those small logs, or split logs to get a good fire going

It’s preferable to remove unused wiring.

But as long as they’re in a junction box and it’s accessible, then it’s ok. But once it’s at least safe and you forget about it, eventually someone else will have to spend the time to figure it out. You saving a little time now could be someone’s much larger expense in the future

Confession time: I have a circuit halfway removed when the project got interrupted and now it’s been a couple years. People panic at the sight of bare wires, understandably, but only I know that most of it is removed so it could never be hot. That would fail an inspection and block a home sale. Do NOT do this

Nyt is an interesting case because they do have good quality reporting i might be willing to pay for. Then they post some ultra-conservative sociopathic stuff on their op-ed or opinion page and I want to block their shit.

Washington Post was also under consideration before it got Bezo’d

Huh, I came here to say the opposite. If people were similar to me, a weak paywall is exactly right

I hate the idea of paying per article: I don’t know the value at the time nor do I know whether they’re trustworthy. If something posted here isn’t readable without pay, I’m not reading it.

However I do recognize news sources the I find useful, that are high quality, that are likely to have more well done news, and i do subscribe to a couple

On the other hand I also pay a news aggregator and have no idea how their sources are paid. Do they get a cut per article I read? Is it effectively advertising where they offer teaser articles and hope to sell me a subscription?

Edit: it’s a mix of revenue

Apple News publishers earn revenue through a combination of ad placements and subscription fees, with payment models favoring those who use Apple News Format (ANF) and generate high engagement. Key revenue streams include selling their own ads (100% of revenue), utilizing Apple-sold “backfill” ads (70% revenue), and receiving a portion of Apple News+ subscription revenue based on total time spent reading.

A big difference is 70s car might retain its outer shape. Modern car not only intentionally crumples, but the passenger compartment is much stronger to keep all those sharp metal bits away from the soft squishy people

Yeah, but also not a fair comparison. Whatever the safety status that Cybertruck might be, getting t-boned is always a challenge. No car has a crumple zone on the drivers side door

And have poor performance, handling, ride. Most people really wouldn’t want one

Why would anyone care about poor whites in the mountains? Let them survive in their hovels and shovel coal. They had no organization or other power to affect anyone

While usually I’d encourage looking at rescue dogs maybe this is a scenario to be very careful with that. We got a rescue that had been traumatized and can still be challenging at times. While she’s a real sweetheart, she’s definitely not a starter dog.

I’ll be the anecdotes for that …… spent my whole life with dogs of all sizes and have always been comfortable with them. But the only one that bit was a mini poodle

Then again, as the other guy said, I’ve always paid more attention to dogs that can do damage, vs the mini poodle bit me when I was ignoring it. Of course the most painful part of that was the tetanus shot

I do wonder about that. My ex’s uncle decided that financial and legal issues were insurmountable so he could no longer be here. Obviously I have no idea whether a humane option would have been an option, but his issues were clearly temporary so any opportunity to intervene could have saved a lot of collateral damage. Including, while his family appreciated that they didn’t have to discover him, that cop shouldn’t have either

My brothers and I were competitive growing up, so we all cheered for different football teams and hoped our team would beat our brothers. I liked the Jets because I was impressed by stories of Joe Namath being rebellious

You said “army”, so what about Army? The first local hockey game I took my kids to was a local college vs army.

Realistically there is a lot of sports that are not the majors. Maybe there is a minor league team or a college team you want to cheer for.

Or heck, why does it even have to be local? My kid is big time into soccer and our country’s teams don’t have much history, so he and his teammates cheer for teams from other countries

Sometimes it’s not the wording of the law but the way it’s implemented. Sometimes the law can seem quite egalitarian, but that doesn’t help if the mother is always assumed both the default custodian and less income. Thats no longer as true as it used to be but judges can be old fashioned

I’m quite cynical about it. No matter what is short money, the funding is always for education or fire fighting. It seems more likely they always shuffle around the budget so the shortfall always end up where we’ll vote for it

My experience with a Pi4B has been rock solid and plenty fast for what I’ve tried so far, at low power consumption.

While I had problems in the beginning, it was all from the micro-SD card. People here will recommend staying away but I’ve had no problems since buying an “extreme” card. Well, starting to hit the size limit now - I can no longer kick off multiple concurrent updates because limited free space available on, I think, 16G card. Get bigger

If you’re starting with ha, don’t feel confined to only one.

IMPORTANT: a local area mesh is not just a low powered way of connecting devices but is inherently local-only. Highly recommended

The more common local area meshes include

• Zigbee - open standard, lots of inexpensive sensors
• Z-Wave - devices need to pay for certification but are more standard. I found more smart switches using this in my area
• Thread - the new standard. Same frequency as Zigbee but IPv6 based. Slowly rolling out.

The new Matter/Thread standard has support of the major players (Apple, Google, Amazon) so seems like the way to go for the future, but products are slow to roll out so you can’t count on it yet

Personally I found the strengths of each compelling so quickly added all three of the above to my ha setup. Ha is fine with it so why limit yourself

I follow the principle that devices must work “as expected” for my users, automation adds capabilities but does not replace them. This comes together with a focus on smart switches

• can be used interactively just like any switch
• continue to work as expected even if ha is down
• typically act as routers to strengthen your local area mesh. I have switches acting as routers for Zigbee, zwave, and Thread, so all my local area meshes are solid everywhere
• then I can automate

I still believe it’s a pretty good system that has generally held up well for a couple hundred years.

It’s in tatters right now as all three branches are being run by power hungry sociopaths. Yet The people who run those branches at lower levels are still trying to do their jobs. There are still checks and balances. There is still hope our partly capsized ship will right itself. Authoritarianism required collusion across the heads of all three branches, yet each branch is still partly functioning

That’s frustrating as hell

I imagine a big part of it is lack of infrastructure spendinf.

• Is there a place to stop for whatever reason they’re stopping?
• Are there always at least two tracks to prevent bottlenecks?
• are sidings big enough to fit any train allowed?
• are there sufficient non-grade crossings?

Or are we just letting freight lines continue to milk century old infrastructure without regard to anyone else?

The US doesn’t have a national language, but does have significant communities of many ethnicities. It is well recognized that a second language is beneficial and I have to assume most states require it, although my experience there is limited. However it’s not reasonable to mandate that everyone learn a specific one. You should learn the one specific to your circumstances.

That being said, most people have no reason to actually use the language they learned in school so are never fluent or lose it quickly. It’s a newer thing for schools to offer immersion programs to establish fluency