I’ll add my own recommendations as well!

• Mike Okay (travel)
• Any Austin (niche gaming deep dives)
• Inheritance Machining and This Old Tony (machining)
• Pask Makes (woodworking, metalworking)
• Tested (particularly Adam Savage’s One Day Builds series)
• Quips&Guac (MTG)
• Pete Complete and Ambiguous Amphibian(gaming challenge and long form roleplay series)

As a Gen Z’er I will definitely be using this incredibly stupid joke even though “67” is 100% a Gen Alpha thing.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” - Abraham Lincoln (or honestly a like a dozen different other sources…this one has many different variants).

My wife and I take near daily walks through our neighborhood. One day we decided on a whim to take a couple bags with us and pick up trash as we walked. Ended up turning into an impromptu competition and we were laughing our asses off by the time we finished the 1.5 mile loop and got back to our house. We dumped about four bag loads of litter in our garbage can, and now we do it once every few times we walk. We couldn’t believe how nice it was just to walk around and not see litter for once! Just an idea :)

Wasn’t trying to be a dick, pard. Apologies I came off that way. Hope you have a relaxing evening!

My brother in Christ, you are confusing Richard Nixon with Ronald Reagan. Nixon resigned. Reagan was wildly popular while implementing policies that have fucked over America for nearly half a decade now.

I like this summarized as “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.”

OH thank you I understand now. Unfortunately, no.

What?

I don’t have any revolutionary advice to give to you my friend. I’m quite a bit younger than you and I already am feeling the creep of losing touch with the speed of new technology. I think to a certain extent that is inevitable. I will say that there is a tremendous amount of survivorship bias in the videos of young people making racks off of day trading. These videos are designed to get people hooked on what is functionally gambling. No offense meant whatsoever, but if you’re living paycheck to paycheck it’s the exact type of slippery slope that can turn a bad financial situation into a ruinous one. I hope you find something that you like though and wish you the best of luck in whatever you do!

I imagine interstellar coalition governments probably function a lot more like the EU than a single country. Individual planets/solar systems would probably function under a somewhat independent governorship that is still subject to the overall laws of the federation/republic.

It’s sort of like asking “how big can a city get?” before states and nation-states existed, when in reality at some point a higher tier governance inevitably takes over. An interstellar or galactic scale government is necessarily going to be massively stratified with many levels of hierarchy in between. I think this is why many sci-fi governments at this scale are also described as bloated, unintelligible bureaucracies.

I believe it is immoral to own more than one house.

Just a friendly reminder too that a 2015 report from the ATF found that 71% of the guns the cartels use are bought in the United States and carried south across the border. The United States is just as complicit in the rise of cartel related crime as the cartels themselves!

My wife and I had the realization this past week that we have both been in a near constant state of seething anger since the election. We decided that we both need to pump the brakes on reading news for our collective mental health. That doesn’t mean we’re ignoring things, but it does mean we plan to remind each other to take a breather when we’re caught doomscrolling.

We cannot afford to become complacent or ignore things, but we have found that redirecting our anger to productive activities has been helpful. Every time we read a negative article it is a reminder to reach out to our friends who are parts of communities which are currently under attack to see what we can do to help or offer companionship. We also regularly look for local opportunities to connect with marginalized communities in our area, volunteer, and generally make a show of our support.

I work a 9/80 currently (so 9 hours a day every Monday through Thursday and then alternating 8 hours every other Friday with a Friday off) and I have grown to love it so much I think I would have an extremely hard time taking a five day workweek job. I also think I would easily work for 10s if it were an option as a constant three day weekend would be wonderful.

I have done my own research on my productivity levels and found that I pretty much get nothing done on working Fridays anyhow, leading me to believe a 35 ish hour four day workweek would be more than sufficient to get everything I currently do done. That’s notwithstanding the fact that during each day I swing back and forth between high and low productivity too, so really something closer to like 25 hours a week of total work is accurate. So something like a certain minimum mandatory set of hours with flexible time to get your tasks done as others have suggested would be the ultimate solution.

We should do both! A human being can do more science in a handful of days than all of our robots we’ve ever sent to Mars have done in the years they have been there.

I still cannot fathom how anyone thinks it is a good idea not to do these things with another person before marrying them. My wife and I were both adamant that we live together and go on trips together and do “married” things long before we made that decision. I like to think we ironed out many of the early kinks without the pressure of “we’re married so this absolutely has to work” lingering over us.

I have been disappointed by that as well but this has been astoundingly good as far as debates have gone. The immediate fact checking is long overdue. And frankly I look forward to pointing at Trump’s extra speaking time as a bulwark against the “iT wAs BiAsEd By ThE lIbErAL mOdErAtOrS” complaints.

I have a strange relationship with masking these days. I had no idea I had autistic tendencies until I married my wife who has been diagnosed with autism. Since then it has been very rewarding having conversations about how our two flavors of autism differ. One of the things we differ tremendously on is our abilities to mask effectively. My wife has struggled with it, especially as a kid, but it always came naturally to me such that it is now my “default mode” when I am in public. Instead of missing social queues like many people, I find I have the opposite problem where I over-analyze social situations to the extent that I read too much into them and it drives me crazy. So masking has actually been very useful for me in that regard because I feel like when I am masking in public I am less “aware” of how I am acting because I feel like I am mostly coming off “normal” relative to the social expectation.

My wife is also very socially aware but she struggles to turn off her over thinking meaning she frequently comes out of social encounters panicked that she said or did something wrong. Whereas I’ll be so blended into the situation I won’t even remember her saying or doing what she is worried about. We work together well in that regard because I remind her that if I am married to her and I don’t notice her say or do something “atypical,” then someone who doesn’t know either of us well almost certainly either didn’t notice either or won’t remember it five minutes after the conversation ends.

So it is a mixed bag. It has been rewarding being able to unmask at home around someone I can trust and who I know loves me, but I still find today that I rarely completely unmask unless I am literally home alone in our house. That usually manifests in me walking around the house doing chores and things talking to myself about a thousand different made up scenarios, which even as a kid I always regarded would probably come off as weird to everyone else.

I think the most important thing is striking a balance between masking and being genuine. I know many people struggle feeling like they are not being their true selves while masked and others even view masking as manipulative. But I think everyone has a different relationship with the practice.

We can be nice about helping people who ask honest questions too :)

Many people are unfamiliar with the concept of different communities having different rulesets. Even people who come from reddit land.