The dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about. Sometimes, stuff equals capability. This is especially true with tools, renovation supplies, and hobby supplies. That old drain snake in the garage? $350 plumber call. Rarely used winter gear in a closet? No $$$ rental on the occasional ski vacation. Sewing machine and supplies? Now you can alter or repair your clothes.

It can also be resiliency. All those extra Christmas candles? Great for a power outage during hurricane season. Buying, preserving, and storing summer produce can save money later in the year. A deep pantry can be a critical safety net for some people with job insecurity.

Of course, there’s still a lot of crap we can get rid of, like old hand-me-downs and things we’ll never use.

It’s really a balancing act between the cost of maintaining capability and the cost of paying for outside services. For me, I basically add an entire room to my house for $150 a month, and still get to keep the ability to do the things I love and have some resiliency in my life.

Sadly, that’s the intersection of I-75/85 and I-20, right in the middle of downtown ATL. Here’s a more recent picture showing some more context.

Also, here’s an article talking about the history of I-20 being built through Atlanta: https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/divided-by-design/atlanta-ga/

I’ve been migrating to sync from Dropbox after hearing too many reports of Dropbox scanning user content for things they deem objectionable. I like the end to end encryption, but I have found the mobile experience on iOS to be lacking. It seems to have trouble integrating with Files and uploading files directly via the iOS share menu. Annoying but not a dealbreaker.

So true! Whisker stress is a real thing.

Nuclear tech is still tech, even if it’s not something that we’ll personally encounter.

PDA- yes, plenty of Palm devices over the years. Pretty sure I had an IBM WorkPad 30x, a Zire 71, and a Tungsten T3. They were great devices, absolutely fantastic for the time period.

DVD recorder- yes, both for the TV and DVD burner drives in PCs.

Web TV- not me, but we did get a setup for my grandparents back in the day. What an absolutely terrible way to browse the internet.

3D tv- never saw the need personally.

Raspberry pi- oh yes, been playing with them since they came out.

Internet Radio Player- no, never did. By the time this made sense I was fully invested in the iPod world and had hoarded enough music to not make it worthwhile.

I generally listen to a pretty big variety of music, but over the past few years I’ve really been liking jazz and big band music from the 1930s and 1940s. So much so that I made an internet radio station of public domain music from that era so I could listen to it like it was a radio broadcast then.

http://1930sradio.com:8000/WJAZ.m3u

I miss the niche trade subs, like r/electricians, r/construction, and r/machinists. Tons of great content on their subs that just isn’t here on Lemmy since most people on those subs don’t skew as techy as most Lemmy users.

Still not worth supporting Reddit though.

It may make the economy less efficient on paper, but that doesn’t take in to account the external costs of trade. In return for cheap products, we gave up a strong manufacturing career base and replaced it with low quality service industry jobs which pay less overall. It’s one of the factors that’s led to wage stagnation, which is WAY more damaging than more costly products.

That’s not even to mention the environmental costs of shipping. The literal tons of heavy fuel oil that are burned to get the bananas from Farmer Fred are now causing sea level rise and changing weather patterns, which makes both Bob and Fred lose in the end.

This is some great news. De-industrialization has created a skills gap in the trades that is going to take a generation or more to overcome. So many industries are utterly dependent on skilled people that have many years of experience, and those people are aging out of the workforce too rapidly to be replaced.

The culture shift in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s which treated “blue collar” as something for young adults to try to avoid is partially responsible, but without the demand for those jobs there was no push to fix that.

Lol. Carrot is always on point.

Lemmy reminds me a lot of the way the internet used to be- smaller, independent communities with more real engagement and less of a content firehose. With so many instances, if you want something, you have to seek it out or start it yourself- with the added benefit of federation keeping everyone connected.

I’m really optimistic that this will get critical mass. I think the concept of federation is great, and I like to think we’re at the forefront of a whole new phase of online community.