100%, if there were another option with the same build quality (particularly for laptops) I’d love to try something new. Everything else is kinda mediocre in comparison.
(The funniest thing is when folks on some Thinkpad or Dell think their machine has a comparable quality… It really doesn’t. You might not care in much the same way someone might care or not care about Tesla’s historically poor fitment, but there’s a real difference regardless).
One time around 2012 I was buying a laptop for someone who needed a Windows machine. Knowing the poor build quality of various low end options we decided to splurge and get a top of the line Dell model with a nicer magnesium case etc. with a price tag close to $2k. We unboxed it, powered it on, and were greeted by a loud grating noise that went away if you flexed the case.
Returned it immediately been using Apple laptops ever since.
Maybe you could engrave the relative positions of some nearby stars onto a plaque or something like that? Ceramic lasts basically forever, right? Maybe you wouldn’t get “Tuesday, Deceduary 110th 2132” level of precision but you could perhaps get something pretty precise with the right choice of stars?
We know what the positions of those stars were back into the ancient past and forwards into the distant future. We can engrave positions corresponding to any date we like onto such an object. It provides no proof of date.
I’m usually not more than casually interested in this kind of work (both generally biology stuff and specifically weight related stuff) but I found this to be absolutely fascinating.
Briefly, this post appears to lay out compelling evidence that the obesity epidemic has its root in some kind of environmental “contaminant” — something new in the environment in the last 100 years, that became prevalent in the 80s, and follows some physical laws like accumulating in watersheds etc.
However I have no idea if any of it is remotely reasonable, I don’t have the skill to read the linked studies, etc. Anyone here have experience with this blog and can speak to whether I’m going down some weird conspiracy rabbit hole?
Sounds like you’d prefer homeowners to be against public parks; I guess you’d rather folks without their own private property not have access to open spaces?
Even without lawns people will use leaf blowers to blow leaves, off their driveways or xeriscapes or whatever. So we should ban gas powered leaf blowers regardless.
I think he means that everybody should be made to live in apartments or condos, without any sort of garden, patios, etc. Dense urban living for everybody.
I live in a detached house in the suburbs and I don't own a leaf blower, have never watered the grass, cut it about once a month (and thinking of low maintenance ways to get rid of it so I don't have to own a lawn mower). So no, in fact it's not "manicured spotless lawn or literally shove everyone into apartments".
It's possible to have yards without devoting them entirely to a monocultural monocot crop. See, e.g., https://maps.app.goo.gl/95tVKVU8DAZkKTA6A for some lawn layouts that eschew grass entirely.
Quite frankly, I think such housing areas look far, far better than your typical grassy suburbia.
That’s a cynical interpretation. I have about 4000 sqft of garden with only about 25sqft with grass. Trees, plants, flowering plants, succulents - all of them infinitely more beautiful and low maintenance than a lawn.
Having a lawn and having a garden are two different things. You can have a house with property without a giant lawn. Your comment is a disingenuous interpretation of the original poster
I do agree that houses with large lawns and zero food crops are just... wasteful. I rent so I am limited to what I could do, otherwise I would just till my lawn and make almost the entire thing into garden beds.
I dislike seeing those houses that have what amount to prairies and on that grass you see just a few horses or whatever. Such a waste of arable land.
> So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods".
It’s cute for sure but I don’t know if I’d use a novel for children as an accurate portrayal of the median subsistence living experience 150 years ago.
I wouldn't either, but it's meant to show that keiferski's views of 1920 are clearly wrong when a book that came out in 1932 was not laughed off as a wildly unrealistic portrayal of the 1870s.
Here is a glimpse of life in rural Oregon in the 1870s, as recorded in 1932: https://www.loc.gov/resource/wpalh2.29080415/?sp=7 . Her mother carded and dyed the wool herself, to make clothes. Peddlers would come by with bundles to sell, with "fancy shawls, printed goods, silks, and such other luxuries", sometimes sold for as high as $150/bundle. She bought a statue of Dickens from a peddler.
"The menu for a fine dinner would be: Chicken stew with dumplings, mashed potatoes, peach preserves, biscuits, and hominy." Dumplings and cobbler were staples. They had brown sugar and molasses. There was bread and milk, and teas made from local herbs. They had a schoolhouse. Most women wore calico (store-bought) and linsey-wollsey (locally made). Seems they had geese too.
For the big 4th of July event in Corvallis, her mother made 200 gooseberry pies.
Young women enjoyed the magazines Godey's, Peterson's, and the Bazaar.
This seems in decent alignment with the children's story. It does not seem like the spartan life keiferski suggests for some 50 years later.
It's not a personal failing but it's a huge dissonance with the themes in Walden. It's annoying when people hold up Walden as an example of personal independence but ignoring or not knowing the context in which it was written.
(The funniest thing is when folks on some Thinkpad or Dell think their machine has a comparable quality… It really doesn’t. You might not care in much the same way someone might care or not care about Tesla’s historically poor fitment, but there’s a real difference regardless).