WxFisch

Honestly I’d leave it empty and cap the gap with pavers or similar. What it sounds like you are describing is how you build a smokeless fire pit and you’d want to avoid interrupting the airflow in that case.

One of the risks around monetizing hobbies is that while you may enjoy that hobby now, doing it to make more adds level of stress and responsibility that can quickly make it into another job that you no longer love. Places like Etsy are competitive and reward consistency in listing and sales, so to have any real success you can’t really list just one or two items and wait for them to sell. You’ll drop far down in search rankings and suddenly your store dies because Etsy stops sending people to it.

This isn’t to say don’t try, but be aware it isn’t as easy as “hobby but get paid for it”.

I have this on my list of things to do. I have the romex, just need to grab a couple breakers to add the circuits and do the work. I know it won’t be hard, and will be well worth it, but getting started is hard when it’s out of sight and only annoying when I need them.

Minor thing, but added a piece of OSB to the bottom of the foam lid to our energy box in the attic access (basically a wood tunnel through the insulation that has a 1" piece of polystyrene insulation board on top). It was built with weather stripping to help air seal it, but the hunk of foam isn’t nearly heavy enough to really sit on the stripping. I’ve been meaning to do it for like 6 months and finally cut the scrape of OSB I had, glued it down and added some small handles. Should make it a lot easier to move out of the way, seal better, and be more durable.

I’ll have to do a post with some pictures from a few weeks ago when I installed our EVSE soon.

I tried a few and settled on Arctic on iOS. It’s got a great interface that gets out of your way but is still feature rich including swipe actions on posts and comments and a solid push notification system, and the developer is super responsive to feedback, pushing new TestFlight builds consistently with both features and bug fixes. It’s not perfect (there’s a stubborn bug that jumps posts that pops up on and off throughout builds) but it’s the closest in feel to Apollo for me.

I’m not vegan or even vegetarian, not try to cut back diary generally. We have used Planet Oat oatmilk creamer for the last couple years and really like it. It is certified vegan for those that look for that. It has the right consistency to replace normal dairy creamers pretty well and tastes good. There’s a variety of flavors if you go for that as well.

Yeah, we almost always owe a tiny bit (usually less than $100, often less than $50) to the state. I don’t really understand how I can get so close but still miss it every year but overpay federal taxes when it’s all based on the same W-4 I give to my employer.

The school districts get part of our local income taxes which is separate from what municipalities get (technically municipalities run wholly on property taxes, and the schools get a portion of that plus a portion of local income taxes that are split with the county. It’s convoluted IMO). It depends on where you are employed and where you live, since your employer remits taxes to the municipality you work in and that municipality remits taxes to school districts based on where each employee lives (at least that’s how I understand it, it all is mostly transparent other than needing to include various location codes on forms for your employer and for your local tax return).

I can’t agree with this enough, though I think part of the problem is that it isn’t what’s easy to complete your W-4 accurately, there is an entire worksheet to use if you file jointly that is sorta difficult to do well, especially if both people make fairly different amounts. If you just choose the basic withholding it’s very likely the bigger breadwinner isn’t withholding enough and you’ll end up owing about what the comic shows (at least that is my experience, as well as some friends).

I think the real problem in the US is that everyone is left to do their tax paperwork from scratch every year when the IRS could send you a personalized return prefilled that you then claim the deductions and credits you’re due and account for any descrpenices (which sure, is what your W-2 is supposed to be, but it isn’t really that, you still need to use the worksheets on the 1040 or pay someone/some software to do it for you; a prefilled 1040 would be a way better system).

It also doesn’t account for the huge variations in state taxes. Many states have income taxes, some are reciprocal with nearby states and others aren’t, the deductions and credits and even what is taxable is all different. The whole thing is a mess. Then lord help you if you live in a state with local income taxes or one where your local taxes are different than school taxes(like PA) and the whole thing is a half day exercise in frustration to complete and you’re still left wondering if you did it right.

Honestly, the majority of key points to talk about can be found online from respectable sources (for example, this article from Johns Hopkins, though there are many others). There is a better than even chance he has shady looked up the “Is this normal” stuff himself if he has normal internet access.

From a social standpoint it’s going to be different for everyone, teenage years are hard and kids are often cruel. I’d advise to just be there for him on this front, but don’t be pushy. He is going to be moody, lash out sometimes, and act differently. That is all normal. He is going to want to push boundaries and get in trouble (rather do things that will get him in trouble, most folks don’t actually want to get in trouble). Give him safe room to explore who he is and to try new things without letting him fall down too hard.

Lastly, you say there are no trusted male figures in your life, but that doesn’t have to be family. Good friends can also fill that space. I have to imagine there is some guy in your life that could have heart to heart, even just with you to then talk to your son. It’s worth trying to broaden your expectation of what a trusted male figure is perhaps.

Yeah, I grew up in that era as well, and was one of the kids in middle school funneled into a GT class. I enjoyed it of course, but it for sure contributed to masking my ADHD until recently and that was a real kick in face.

The school district where I live straddles a wealthier, predominantly white area and a poor, predominantly black area. The idea when it was formed was because rich parents want good education for their kids, and contribute more taxes via bigger homes, the schools could provide better education to the poorer areas and over time help to improve the socioeconomic balance.

In reality, all the rich parents around us just send their kids to Catholic or charter schools, which fungus money from the school district which makes it unable to provide a decent education at all, screwing over the poorer area wise than if they had two different school districts (since the public schools need to have the capacity to in theory at year accept all the kids in the case none went to charter schools). Just more proof voucher programs are racism by another name.

I do exactly this. My bank will try to use ACH or a one time debit card automatically, but inevitably ends up sending a check each month. What’s better is if I use the bill the water company sends and mail it back with a check there is a fee, but they don’t charge it when my bank sends a check.

And I will continue to use it until they take it away

I think this is a huge part of it but there is certainly a lot of nuance here. We have a phenomenally funded, equipped, and trained military, but in the last 20 years it’s been shown to be only moderately effective at addressing the threats in the world that have a small fraction of the resources our military does with few exceptions (naval might is probably the largest of those exceptions). So even problems we think we should be able to solve we barely can.

There is also large and growing wealth disparity which drives the tribalism deeper and makes many folks dig their heels in to positions that just aren’t based in reality (see anti-vaccine and lockdown sentiment around COVID as but one example). Couple this with the majority of Americans being truly terminally online and being stuck in echo chambers that just further ingrain the basis they hold and it causes a lot of vocal Americans online to lash out irrationally.

I would like to offer OP a view that we aren’t all like this though. For many of us our incoming government, the corrupt people they are tagging to lead our various institutions, the incomprehensibly rich heads of various companies, and the brainwashed cults that worship them all are sources of deep shame. I can only speak for myself, but my friends, close coworkers, and even a few of my family all feel this way. Please don’t write off all Americans because of the loud, obnoxious jerks you have to see in many places, some of us are pretty decent people that really want to make the world a better place and help everyone we can.

Interesting fact. OBDII is a CARB requirement, so it’s tied to cars that must meet emissions standards. This is why Teslas don’t need to include one (ands it likely other manufacturers will stop including them in their electric models at some point as well). No emissions systems to check means no need for an OBDII port.

Perhaps for you, but for millions of Americans it no longer did. I mean I don’t disagree with you, but the reality is the increased presence and technology of airport screening is mainly an economic force to keep folks flying. The average American doesn’t really understand it frankly care that TSA doesn’t increase security in relation to the costs and hassle (and I’m not talking about the folks that ask questions like OP, or give TSA agents a hard time in line, or even uncle crazy that we all ignore at Thanksgiving as he rants about how mmWave machines give us all cancer, I’m talking about the folks that just grumble a little about how long it takes the once or twice a year they fly, then forget about it again, the 80% fliers).

So many have noted how the TSA is security theater, and even explained why it’s so bad, but I want to offer some reasoning as to why it’s still worth it. In a nutshell, it makes passengers feel safer. We all know that TSA is mostly useless at actually stopping a motivated threat. It’s really only good for stopping poorly planned or spontaneous threats which are generally uncommon in air transit. But for the general masses, that intrusive security screening feels thorough and so people assume their flights are safe and continue to fly all over the country. This keeps airlines in business, taxes going to localities and states from their airports, and creates a ton of jobs from gate agents to coffee shop clerks to rental car agents and beyond. The minute people stop thinking air travel is generally safe and secure is when all of that collapses. So we pour money into theater to make things look and feel secure (though most of the effort to actually secure things is behind the scenes, DHS/FBI/CBP/etc. using threat intel to stop planned attacks long before TSA would ever need to interact with anyone).

To your second question, we don’t really know if it scares away threat actors, but it likely does to some extent. It preps passengers to be somewhat more alert that they are in a secured area past the checkpoints, and complicates planning attacks at a minimum. No security system is 100% effective, especially one that needs to work at scales like TSA does, but the theater isn’t really an accident and for sure TSA heads know that’s all it really is, and they are fine with that.

Lastly, it’s not just the US with screenings like this, flying through Heathrow in the UK was just as bad in every way.

We don’t, we separate into bulky clothes (sweats, jeans, heavy shirts), everything else, and delicates. We wash with only cold water (modern machines and detergents don’t need hot water and it won’t get things any more clean, it just wastes energy). Bulky goes in first, then normal, then delicates. I’ve done this for at least 10 years with zero issues across a variety of machines and water hardnesses.

Another plus one for Proton with your own domain.

Self hosting sounds good, but it’s fraught with mines that if you don’t know what you’re doing can take from “can’t send email because my domains been back listed” to “everything in my network is now sending spam to the entire world”. Sure, many folks self hosting sounds with no issues, but the price for configuring something wrong can be steep and IMO is just not worth the trouble and risks when there are good options for encrypted, privacy protecting email services for a reasonable price.