My wife and I were the first ones to have kids in her family. All of her siblings got the loudest, largest, and most obnoxious toys for my kids.

Ever since then I have extracted my revenge with glee and tons of malice.

Every Christmas and birthday since, I search out the perfect toy for them.

As my kids have gotten older I have donated their old, loud, and obnoxious toys to them randomly through the year if I am in the area. I am totally the favorite uncle because of it.

My house has slowly become almost toy free.

I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.

All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.

Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.

With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.

The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.

The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.

Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).

I would have a plumber look at it. A sink smelling is a possible sign that sewer gases are pushing past the p-trap. This may be because of an obstructed vent.

Jobs was his own worst enemy for a while on the compatibility issue.

New OS launches- all your old programs don’t work on it.

Want to use a floppy to transfer files between a Dos/Win and a Mac? Nope, not compatible. When USB drives started coming out they dropped all support for floppy drives, even in machines with them installed.

Constant driver issues with all sorts of things. Many never got resolved. To be fair the market share for Mac’s was so tiny, offering support for them didn’t make business sense.

Want to play a game? Good luck. The majority of games didn’t work on Mac. Same reason as the drivers.

As for stability issues, for a while I ran a computer lab for a college 50:50 win/Mac machines. They both crashed about equally as often.

For lesser known subjects, a literature review in a dissertation works. It at least gives you a list of papers to review.

Been on my own since I as 17. The first few years were rough to say the least.

I worked 2 jobs, 30-60 hrs per week and went to college. I shared shitty apartments with some pretty creepy people. I moved so constantly I ended up paying for a post office box so I could get my mail. I did not have a vehicle (no car) so I rode a bike for up to 60 miles per day. Even all that wasn’t enough without government grants and student loans to pay for college.

Food was something that I ate when I had it. I spent a few months with mybe 4-5 real meals. Cornflakes and ramen where the bulk of my diet for a while.

I took the first professional job I could find. It was terrible but it paid well. I gained 50lbs to be at a healthy weight the first year. The next few years I jumped around jobs until I landed in one I liked.

The last few weeks before I graduated college I met my wife. Her family has become mine over the past 25 years.

Today my income alone puts us in the top 10% of earners. My wife makes close to the same. At many crucual times in our lifes we’ve taken advantage of government assistance. To be blunt, it’s not possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You need a helping hand once in a while no matter how small.

High value crop consultants - good ones can make a surprising amount of money (200k+) This isn’t your dumbfuck row crops like corn and soy. Think fruit trees, nut trees, viticulture, vegetables, organic production etc.

Many college graduates have a job offers their junior year. Anymore you’ll want to have a double major of biology/Ag.

Weed guys can’t pay me enough. 😉

I am an expert in crops. I have traveled the globe to learn about them. I have created new varieties to plant. Landowners around the globe seek me out for knowledge and seeds.

Weird how they lump cosleeping as both the same surface and same room. Very different situation for the safety of the child, especially when they are under 2.

Both my kids slept in the crib in our room for their first year. Mainly because we all slept better. We still got woken up the same amount but because we responded faster, the kid went back to sleep sooner after being changed and fed. 30 minutes versus 2 hours makes a big difference in how we felt at work that day

It’s not wood but vinyl.

Wood flooring needs to acclimatize to the environment for a few days before being installed (shrinks/swells with the moisture in the air).

Vinyl flooring are designed to latch together. Every board has to be completely seated and latched together. The only way to fix it now is to pick it all up and try again.

That’s a good one to hang up in my office.

I tend to pace when my brain is working on a problem. When I do some heavy analysis, I often look at data for 20-30 minutes and then pace for 15-20 minutes as I process.

Good thing my office is empty most of the time, so I don’t bother others.

Of course after 4-5 hours my brain is done so I often find and excuse to leave the office after lunch. Gotta go walk a field/visit a customer etc…

I share a name with and average skilled hockey player who played for long time on mediocre teams. We are also the same age.

Although my name is uncommon it is not rare. So many other lawyers, insurance sales, etc who have a larger online presence mask me very effectively.

It’s enough that googling my name is a waste of time.

It also helps that I have a small footprint online with no social media accounts linked back to my real name.

My wife would pretend she doesn’t know me go the other direction.

This varies depending on the cultural norms of the country.

Japanese: I have been in high level meetings with a Japanese company. As soon as I walked into the room they all switched to English. Some of their English was weak but they still made the effort. When I commented on how much I appreciated it, surprised Pikachu faces all around. They responded course they would swap, to do otherwise is rude.

In France I have had business meetings with with 8 people around a table all of who all spoke english. 4 of them were native French speakers, 1 polish, 2 Arabic, and me the sole native English speaker. The native French speakers spoke French the entire time. They would swap to English to interrupt the English language conversation then swap back to French amongst themselve. If two or more native French speakers are together, they speak French and don’t give a fuck if they include you or not. They then act all surprised that you didn’t follow their in French conversation.

Unless the program you need is not in the store, which, for some reason is still normal for the programs I want to use. Then it’s back to the stupid tar.bz bullshit and typing in random shit I found on the internet into the command line hoping it works.

Every 2-3 years, I get fed up with the bullshit Windows is doing and test out a few distros in a vain hope it’s finally usable. Then for some random thing I have to hit the command line and inevitable failure to accomplish what I want to do. So I unistall the OS and wait a few more years.

I have messed around with Linux for 20 years. In all that time it’s always been completely unsuable for most users. The use of the command line for anything routine is complete bullshit.

All I want to do is download a program and click on it to install. How fucking hard is that. I am not a programmer and have zero desire to be one.

I do not want to go to the command line and try to fucking remember the sudo bullshit and fail because I missed one letter in the sintax.

Just let me use the fucking computer for the tasks I need to do, not fuck around with the OS.

I have a older Eureka and a Dyson (broken one I fixed from my sister-in-law).

The Eureka is all around better. It’s 15 years old now and I have replaced a ton of stuff on it but the motor and suction still top notch.

It greatly depends on the age.

For under 10’s. I highly recommend the small tablets with educational games and videos. I had the homepage on the webbrowser set to PBS kids. Any other website was locked by parental controls. I also had Netflix with a kids account back when they had everything. For the games they wanted to play, I had to preview before they were installed.

The hardest age is 9-12. This is when they act all grown up but absolutely should not be online unsupervised. This is when they need room to explore what they are interested in. I open up the restrictions and allow them more of the world but routinely check to see what they are up too (an make sure they see what I am doing).

After 13, it’s all about education, not control. There is no fucking way to stop a determined teenager from accessing places they shouldn’t. The totally “locked down” school chromebooks are a great example. I am constantly impressed with the ingenuity to circumvent the controls. At this point, open discussions on all the issues online are key. They need to know about what criminals and perverts are up too. It’s no longer blocking them, it’s learning how to identify, avoid, and report them.

I also spend a few hours hanging out while they are gaming with my teenagers. It’s let’s me know what they are playing and showcase my incredible skill to their mocking.

I get spam to my work account saying that they got my information from LinkedIn. The e-mail I use on linkedin is a spam collection account that I never use for anything real. I check it every couple of months and delete the entire inbox.

The only place they could get my contact information is one of my suppliers has a shitty webpage design with my info listed. Easy for a bot to scrape and sell.

My current theory is that the professional “sales list” data collection companies are running scraped data against Linkedin data and claiming it came from there.

I get e-mails from from companies who want to sell “sales lead” lists to me as well as a few poorly targeted fools who bought the “sales lead” list from them.