Seltzer water 99% of the time. Ski otherwise!

1. For the first few years of my career after college which has a pretty generous 401k company matching scheme I put the maximum amount possible into my retirement accounts and lived well within my means to build up a nest egg. Now that I am married I have dialed back my investments so we can afford to live a little bit nicer with the knowledge that we have a really great start in our retirement accounts.

2. My wife and I moved in together two years before getting married. This made living substantially cheaper for both of us and made us positive that we wanted to live together and could tolerate each other prior to tying the knot :).

3. I got a vasectomy mid-last year. My wife and I both agreed long before marriage that we only want to adopt. Adoption is obviously very expensive, but now we have the peace of mind of knowing we have full control over when we start to invest in that process to expand our family. No “accidents” can happen which is very liberating.

To add on to this explanation, the food industry in the US is chock full of fake marketing terms that are designed to get more eco-conscious consumers to fall into their trap. This is a problem across large swathes of the food industry, but one of the most egregious is chicken.

• “No antibiotics” is supposed to mean the chicken was never given antibiotics (shocker, I know). There is no regular methodology for verifying this label is accurate outside of random sampling of poultry at slaughter.
• “No hormones” is a completely useless label you’ll see used all the time. Hormones are not allowed in the production of chickens for slaughter in the US.
• “Cage free” is another tricky one. Chickens are almost never kept in cages when raised for slaughter. Hens are frequently kept in cages for egg-laying purposes. If you see this on chicken breast packaging it probably doesn’t mean anything.
• “Free-range” means the chicken had some kind of access to “outside.” There are no standards for how much “outside” space is required or what that “outside” space has to look like.

So unfortunately a bit more legwork is required to make sure product labeling statements are actually worth something. That’s a problem in the US, but the opposite side of the coin is problematic too (like how many people now attribute “GMO” as meaning “toxic”).

Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It’s effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending “thoughts and prayers” every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.

“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” ― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” ― Captain Jean-Luc Picard

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” — Marcus Aurelius

One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.

The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.

The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.

So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.

Tabletop games, writing, doing little engineering problems at home, and recently I got into bookbinding to restore old crumbling paperbacks!

Haven’t watched the video, but as someone who works in industry in the US I think the consumer side of a metric switch is the lowest barrier to entry. A much bigger hurdle is the fact that almost all of our raw industrial inputs are built on the imperial system. Need to buy raw plate or bar stock to have something built? It’s sized in imperial. And if you want to source metric you’re either going to have to pay more for it or look outside the US. And after that raw stock is purchased and you send it to a machine shop that machine shop is almost certainly using exclusively imperial tooling and measurement equipment. You can do the fake metric thing that some companies do where you dual dimension all of your drawings, but those companies will usually still design to imperial so their parts can be fabricated in the US.

I’m absolutely not opposed to a switch to metric. I still perform most of my calculations in metric and then convert to imperial just for ease and because that’s how I was taught in school. But it’s certainly much more difficult than just deciding one day that we’re all going to switch.

Planning and running my homebrew ttrpg campaign. I’ve sunk nearly three years into fleshing out my setting from plate tectonics to modern geopolitics!

This is one of the most commonly touted engineering myths that simply doesn’t hold up to even a brief analysis. The first glaring problem is the inherent survivorship bias behind claiming Roman concrete was objectively better than modern concrete. As other users have already mentioned, modern concrete is actually very strong and exceeds the strength of Roman concrete when such strength is required, but where it really has an advantage is in its consistency.

If every concrete structure built in Rome was still standing and in good shape to this day, engineers would be salivating over the special blend and would be doing whatever they could to get their hands on it or replicate it. But we don’t see that. We see the Roman concrete structures that have survived the test of time (so far), not the myriad structures that have not. Today’s concrete on the contrary is deliberately consistent in chemistry, meaning even if it typically isn’t designed to last hundreds of years, you can say with a great deal of confidence that it will last at least X years, and all of it will likely exhibit similar wear and strength degradation behaviors over that same duration.

There are other factors at play too:

1. Romans didn’t use steel reinforcing re-bar, instead opting for massive lump sums of concrete to build structures. These massive piles are better against wear and porosity-related degradation, especially due to the self-healing properties of the Roman concrete blend due to volcanic ash helping to stop crack propagation.
2. Our modern concrete structures are much, much larger in many cases and/or are under significantly higher loads. Take roads for example—no Roman road was ever under the continued duress of having hundreds of 18 wheelers a day rumble over them.
3. Our modern concrete structures do things that would have been considered witchcraft to a Roman civil engineer. Consider the width of unsupported spans on modern concrete bridges compared to the tightly packed archways of Roman aqueducts.

None of this is to detract from Roman ingenuity, but to make the claim that Roman concrete was objectively better than what we have today is farcical.

Probably To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 were my two favorites from my high school years.

This Old Tony, Abom, Tested (mostly just One Day Builds by Adam Savage), Wirtual, Isaac Arthur, CityNerd, Intelligence Squared debates, FloridaMan Diplomacy, Abom79

This is how I want to go out. A burial fit for a king indeed.