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/

As with any technological advancement , there are risks, but if humanity is ever intending to become a spacefairing species, we will have to make peace with nuclear energy. It’s the only technology that comes anywhere close to making interplanetary travel feasible at large scale.

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.

Strongly agree. We’ve already learned that prohibition doesn’t work and that people will always find other ways to get their fix.

If flavored vapes are “marketed to children”, what about flavored THC edibles and fruity/candy flavored alcohol? What about energy drinks and highly caffeinated sodas? What about high calorie ultra-palatable foods with absurd quantities of high fructose corn syrup? How is nicotine so different from any of the other drugs that society has decided are socially acceptable?

Humanity has had a relationship with mind altering substances since the dawn of time. It’s ingrained in our cultures, and may even be partially responsible for how human intelligence has adapted to where it is today. Nobody is going to overwrite thousands of years of history by banning vapes. People will just find some other way to access nicotine and other substances, probably by switching back to smoking or chewing. A brief ten-year interval of pushback against smoking in select countries didn’t mean that people no longer wanted nicotine, it just meant that people wanted a less objectionable way of consuming it than burning leaves in paper.

• Hottest 14 days ever recorded so far…

So true! Whisker stress is a real thing.

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