At the end of the day, most of what people care about isn’t age, it’s cognitive function (though age itself is important; why care about the America of 2040 if you won’t live to see it).

Many of these people in power would fight age limits, but they are usually so sure of their abilities, that they may not fight cognitive tests with published results.

For example, if you give someone a Montreal cognitive assessment, and their reaction to it is:

Yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions

And those last 5 questions are:

What month are we in? What year are we in? What day of the week is it? Where are you right now? What city are you in?

You might think that person shouldn’t be in charge of the country.

Oops.

I’m in the midst of planning out some built-ins. When looking for inspiration, it is so annoying how many videos/blog posts, etc, on creating built-ins start with “buy IKEA cabinetry”.

If you are buying cabinets, you aren’t building cabinets. Yeah, there’s assembly involved, but watching someone buy a cabinet, and then just paint it and put different hardware on it doesn’t help me at all.

For example, I’m trying to figure out the right way to have the cabinet doors interface with adjacent window trim. I.e, do I cut the trim to fit the cabinet doors, or do I alter the cabinet doors to fit the windows trim.

The “ikea cabinet” people can’t have these choices cause it’s not possible to alter them since they are built of chipboard.

In addition to what others said about the availability of the source code itself, there’s a whole legal framework around it.

A company could have code where the source is publicly available, but they still could say that you are not allowed to copy, fork, sell/distribute it. In that case, there wouldn’t physically be anything preventing you from doing it, which sounds strange, until you think about how that’s the exactly how it works for books, music, movies, etc.

There’s also an in-between for software that’s not publicly open source, but is open source to users. A company could sell you their software, and deliver it to you as open source code.

https://www.goral-shoes.co.uk/products/the-smugs-horween-natural-pre-order

Certainly out of my price range, lol. To make a long story short, though, sneakers (and all other athletic foam-based shoes) are inherently not durable, nor designed to be. To get long life out of footwear, you really need to wear more traditionally constructed (i.e., no foam) shoes or boots for 95% of the time, and save athletic footwear for when it’s needed. You don’t even really need foamy shoes for all athletics.

I’m lucky if I can get 700 km out of a standard pair of running shoes, but foamless (or foam-lite) “barefoot” shoes like xeroshoes have a 5000 mile warranty.

It’s okay for some items to be “wear items” while others are held to a different standard.

I think there has definitely been a huge increase in the use of merino wool. It’s nice and soft, doesn’t stink, and handles moisture well, but the fibers are so much smaller than most other types of wool, that they aren’t nearly as durable or warm.

I have wide feet, and I can’t stand having my toes squeezed. What you want to look for is a boot with stitchdown construction. Your most common decent boots have either a storm welt or a Goodyear welt (basically the same thing, but storm welt is better in wet conditions). This involves the upper material wrapping most of the way around your foot and stitching it to the welt (a strip of material around the perimeter of the boot) and the midsole. The welt is then stitched to the outsole. Replacing the outsole then just involves popping those stitches. A cross section of the boot turned sideways looks like a “þ”.

Stitchdown, on the other hand, rather than wrapping in on your feet, turns outward before being stitched down to the midsole and outsole. This results in more of a “D” shape, which is nicer for wide feet.

Not to shill a particular brand, but Jim Green has a lot of good boots (of the work and casual variety) as well as shoes that have a nice, wide toe box, and would be repairable/resolable by any cobbler.

It depends on the level of humidity. In really humid areas, the dust basically fuses to surfaces rather than sitting on top of it. It’s a lot more annoying to clean.

As others mentioned, the geoguessr community has a lot of resources, but it’s largely focused on locations on streets (cause the game is built on Google streetview). Things like streetsigns can really help narrow down a country.

As someone else mentioned, Open Source Intelligence (OSInt) is what you want to be looking for. Investigative journalism sites like Bellingcat actually show their work, which is really cool. For example, they wanted to find the location of a massacre in ethiopia, so they used an app called Peak Visor to match the topology of the mountains in the background to triangulate the position. There’s also tools to use the angle of shadows and things like that. They have tutorials on their site.

Relevant and interesting if you’ve never heard the story.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-feather-heist-180968408/

Your mistake is in what you are making your comparisons to. You can’t compare your solid wood bookcase to an Ikea cardboard bookcase, you need to compare it to the fancy brands that actually do make things from solid wood.

The rare occasion that “the thing” ends up being exactly what you needed is incredible, though.

Costco sells them as dog treats

This book describes it well, I think, around page 32.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger

Basically, helping others keeps you sane.

Plus you might be able to get government incentives for it.

In a similar vein, heat pump clothes dryers. Due to the way they work, they can dry your clothes more gently than a traditional dryer.

That sounds awesome. There seems to be a bit of a gulf in investment between getting a few panels to charge a backup battery or run some devices while camping, and actually doing a proper home integration. I’m in the midst of that gulf where I can generate more than I can easily store and use later, so I’d like to find some worthwhile uses for direct use of solar energy.

Don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but here’s an interesting article about direct solar.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/

Did you manually switch it on once your battery storage was full?

What kind of heating element did you use for the water? What type of control system to send power to it?

Crossbow bolts and modern arrows are not something you could produce more of in an apocalyptic scenario. A trad bow can use wooden arrows, but producing arrows capable of taking down large game is quite a challenge, and not something you can just go out and do in a pinch with a pocket knife and some sticks.

Arrows are reusable, but as someone who bow hunts, 100 bullets would probably last longer for me than a dozen arrows. If you miss your target, you can easily lose an arrow, or break it on a rock, break it on bone, break it by hitting your own arrow. Damaged arrows are really dangerous to try to use.

I see where you are coming from, but I think there are better ways to handle those issues than blanket tariffs. For example, you can get clothes from Bangladesh for cheaper than Norway because Bangladesh pays workers much less, (probably) has much lower environmental regulations, and the focus is on price over quality.

Adding a tariff to goods from Bangladesh would not improve the goods, it would just squeeze the business to cut even more corners to remain competitive, and likely put a lot of poor people out of work. Additionally a tariff on goods from a country is likely to be retaliated.

If the end goal is reducing production of garbage products at great impact to the environment and the workers, laws can focus specifically on those factors. We already place antidumping and counterveiling duties on goods that we deem are priced with unfair business practices, why not do more of the same for unfair labor practices, or environmental practices?

If someone can pay Ethiopian farmers a fair wage to produce landrace coffee (where it grows natively), and the environmental costs of shipping it to the US are accounted for, I don’t think it should be arbitrarily upcharged relative to monocrop coffee grown in a narrow band of expensive former rainforest in Hawaii.

CAD is a bit like programming, there’s a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.

If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don’t get frustrated when you get midway through.

Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.