That’s basically what Arlington National Cemetery is. The union government seized the land of Robert E. Lee, and planning for if they couldn’t keep it after the war, decided to turn it into a cemetery to basically make it useless as a farm/estate. Lee’s heirs eventually sued and won the land back, but didn’t have much use for it, so they sold it back to the government.
BUT I don’t tear down people for choosing that life, urban living isn’t for everyone.
My contempt for small town and rural America comes from living in it for about 5 years, and then regularly visiting it for another 3 or 4 years. I’m glad I live in a walkable city now. But I don’t really criticize people for living that rural life, except in defense to someone else attacking my own lifestyle.
When this song came out, I remembered joking with my Army friends (many of whom are from rural areas, and definitely shared the experiences of getting stationed in rural areas) that it’s weird the song! didn’t include stuff like “find decent sushi” or “attend an NFL game” or “order pizza after midnight.” Or if I’m feeling particularly mean spirited, I’d throw in “find a six figure job” or “hold hands with a white woman in public.”
Realistically, though, something like 60% of Americans live in suburban America: close enough to a major city that they can go in for events, but far enough that they can feel that they’re isolated from crime or whatever. Nobody actually likes rural living, but some residents of suburban America likes romanticizing rural ideals while still living in an environment that gets the benefit of the economic engine of a nearby city, and the density to support a variety of restaurants and stores and activities. There’s an entire subculture of people who own $80,000 trucks and $3,000 guns, who have $200k+ jobs in the city but say their heart is in the country or whatever.
Stop arguing semantics. We’re done here.
Compare to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.
Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you’re basically not having a conversation at all.
Your comment was confusing because you don’t seem to understand what is or isn’t part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.
It’s a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.
I’m raising kids in a walkable neighborhood.
At this point, my biggest concern is still that they’d get hit by a car. At their current young ages (under 5), they’re just not good about understanding where danger comes from when crossing the street or a driveway/alley entrance. Even later in life, I’m wondering how old they’ll have to be before I’m comfortable with them riding their bikes on city streets.
At some point, I expect it to pay off (they’ll be able to go to hang out with friends and bring themselves to school long before they turn 16). I’m just hoping I’ll be able to stay in a walkable neighborhood when they’re at those life stages, so that they can take advantage of the good stuff that this neighborhood has to offer.
I still say “y’all.”
Y’all means all.
I’d argue the opposite.
Because you can use metal utensils on stainless, that means that an ultra thin fish spatula is an option when you’re cooking something delicate. Silicone or wooden utensils tend to be too thick and clumsy for working with anything delicate.
From what I read the cleanup is just warm water, soap, soft cloth.
What’s stopping you from using just warm water, soap, and soft cloth on every other type of pan? If the answer is that it doesn’t do a good enough job cleaning those things, then you’ll want a pan that can stand up to more aggressive cleaners/scrubbers.
To me, the obvious answer is stainless steel. There are cheap ones and expensive ones, and everything in between. The more expensive ones tend to be constructed with more even surfaces, with better heat transfer (things like an aluminum or copper core), and more durable to regular or even careless use. But even the cheap ones are great.
Stainless advantages over traditional Teflon-based nonstick:
Stainless advantages over ceramic non-stick:
Stainless advantages over cast iron:
Stainless advantages over carbon steel (including carbon steel woks):
Don’t get me wrong: I literally own every single type of cookware listed here, and I cook on all of them for different purposes. But the stainless is my workhorse, the default I use on weeknights, because it’s easy and mindless and I literally can’t mess it up.
EDIT: Wow, can’t believe I forgot to actually list the disadvantages of stainless. Main disadvantages:
I can’t seem to shake the feeling that child care is in an economic death spiral right now.
If a child care facility follows NAEYC standards by having 2 teachers for 8 infants, there’s no way around the fact that the revenue per child needs to cover 1/4 of the cost of a teacher’s salary after all other expenses (rent, insurance, utilities, administrative overhead, supplies). If the costs attributable to that class is at $4000/month, and the teacher salaries (including taxes, insurance, retirement, PTO, paid holidays, etc.) are $4000/month, that’s a total of $12k/month to split between 8 infants: $1500/month at minimum, or $2000/month for a minimal buffer/reserve against emergencies, vacancies, etc.
Meanwhile, the actual workers can’t even afford to pay for that child care on their own salaries taking home $3000/month (cost to employer $4000/month), so they end up exiting the career when they have kids of their own, or their child care facility gives up a revenue spot as a perk for retaining workers (requiring a higher charge for all the other kids attending).
If the economics are unsustainable for the parents and for the workers, how can this industry avoid turning into a luxury service only for the rich?
I guess it’s a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was “worth it.” The second part, though, I don’t think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there’s plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.
High cost of living cities are previewing a problem that seems to be spreading everywhere: The cost of providing child care is getting far too expensive for working parents, while wages of the actual child care workers are insufficient to actually keep people in that career.
I don’t think of it as “destruction” so much as “consumption.” And there’s no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.
Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.
Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.
Moreover, even with a very generous definition of “destruction,” the comparison should still be made to what would’ve been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn’t made the sauce, what would’ve happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?
In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.
Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20’s, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30’s. Now in my 40’s, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it’s easy to enforce a “fun first” atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.
That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you’re trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).
The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters’ basketball game.
I’m slightly annoyed at my kid’s new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn’t participating (with other half classes signed up), I’ve gotta get childcare coverage.
Can’t wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.
Why can’t we just wirelessly transmit the power, maybe have it hit a collection device that can harness about 4 kwh/m^2/day
the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths
This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).
And maybe I’m jaded because I’m a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don’t think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that’s a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don’t know.
My kids are still young, so some of my list might not work for OP’s 8 year old, but if it’s an all ages discussion, I’ve got a few, some of which might translate to more ages.
Free stuff when weather is nice (relatively speaking, in this unusually hot summer):
Free stuff when weather isn’t as nice:
Low cost activities:
Higher cost activities:
I’m probably missing a bunch. But that’s what I can think of right now.
OP, how about you? You mentioned you’ve already got some things going on, maybe we can compare notes.
You’re right that a big part of it is social/cultural expectations of the people around those parents. If Bluey is normalizing what it means to be an involved dad for millennial dads of kids born between 2015 and 2025, we’ll start to see critical mass of that kind of expectation.
In my social circle (millennial professionals living in big cities in the East Coast), it seems the knowing how to cook well and owning a dog are really important for the dating scene, and seem to set a certain baseline expectation for what unpaid household work one is able to do alone or with a significant other. And, if we’re getting married later than previous generations (marrying between 30-35 to people we knew for 2+ years), and engaged in active family planning (that is, birth control), there’s an opportunity to show during the dating years how career and household responsibilities interplay, before the couples actually choose to have children together.
And it feeds back onto itself. I personally don’t really run into the issue of diaper changing stations in women restrooms but not men’s restrooms (where I live in DC, most restrooms are single stall unisex, with one or two diaper changing stations that are also in unisex stalls). There’s a pretty healthy representation of other solo dads at the playground, or at daycare pickup/dropoff, etc. It’s not 50/50, but it’s closer than in some other cities I’ve lived in, or the stories I hear from family and friends elsewhere.
So we’re moving there. Our generation just has to continue to model the behavior for those that come after (especially our own children).
It’s Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it’s revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.
I wonder how the built-in Google and Apple IMEs compare.