I just got a set off marketplace and they do the job. So if you don’t have any, that is what I’d do. If you really get into mechanical work and want to spend the $$$, then I would ask a mechanic for their opinion and get that. Then you’ll have a nice set and a shitty set, and the shitty set then becomes very useful for when you need to smash something with a hammer or put a torch on it, etc.

If you already do a lot of mechanical work and are looking to upgrade, then this is not the answer you are looking for

The catch is that

1. A smaller downpayment means a bigger loan, which means to total price of the home over the lifetime of the loan is higher.
2. It increases the risk that the owner will default on the home, since having sufficient savings for a downpayment is a good indicator of having the financial means to keep making payments.
3. Any time you use a financial strategy to expand homebuying power to more people, what happens is that more people can buy homes. If the market is limited in the number of homes that exist and can be produced, that drives prices up.

The math is simple. If you want more people to have homes, you need to build more homes.

Also, decreasing the required downpayment increases the number of people who can make that downpayment, which increases competitive pressures for a limited number of homes, which…

say it with me

raises the prices of homes.

To me, these seem like marginal benefits. If knowing where your food comes from is important to you for some reason, by all means, carry on.

However, every scientific discussion I’ve ever seen on organic food has found the same thing - there is no significant difference in nutritional value between certified organic food and nonorganic food. Of course, “certified” organic food is still industrially produced - just according to arcane regulations that make it more expensive. You could make a case that “organic in spirit” food is more nutrient dense in some way or other - but the lack of a real scientific definition of “organic in spirit” will make it harder to study, and I have not heard any scientific discussion of this. And improved health in people who eat organic foods are corrolational, and can be chalked up to these people caring more about their health in general, and being wealthier. All the most robust science on diet and health points to the same thing - the big factor is simply avoiding junk food. Getting farm fresh eggs is just a way to show off how much money you can throw away if you use them to make french toast covered in locally tapped mapel syrup.

All that to say, I really doubt you would find any noticeable health difference.

The benefit of keeping chickens and eating their eggs is that you get to enjoy the process. You get to watch your chicks grow into chickens, feel pride when you get the first batch of eggs, and enjoy eating those eggs (which I find are tastier than the cheapest ones at the store that I buy - though I think the taste is comparable to the fancy high price eggs my friends sometimes feed me). Do it to enjoy the process. But don’t do it under the illusion that you are saving money, saving the world, or saving your health.

If you wanted a story set in real life, you would watch cspan

I feel like about half the time Trump’s choices are driven by his childlike impulses of spite and self-aggrandizement.

But then the other half are sort of made on a coin toss so he can forget about the choice and get back to shitposting and self-aggrandizement.

So really, about 1/4 of Trumps choices are halfway decent based on chance alone.

You probably can run a train on propane. Propane cars were/are a thing. The issue is storing enough for the journey - though with today’s LNG transportation tech, this seems more possible than ever.

* note that this is not an endorsement of propane trains, just an acknowledgement that it is technologically feasible

Or they could just mean they would pay down the house, which can be a big financial boon, even if not completely paid off. If you are in the US and have a normal 30 year fixed rate mortgage, then paying down 50k means you get to save on the remaining interest due on that 50k - so you don’t just save 50k, but the compounding interest due on that 50k across the remaining liftime of the loan.

*index fund

So essentially: get rid of women’s sports (at an elite level anyway)

My honest recommendation: realize that you’ve been sucked in to using youtube as an addictive coping mechanism. You say you love youtube, and I get it - there is a lot of fun stuff and a lot of useful information there. But YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIFE. For many people, watching some youtube videos sometimes is fine - but for you, at this moment, you should strongly consider the tradeoff between continuing to watch videos and doing literally anything else in your life. Finding and spending time with a significant other, cooking healthy food and exercising, making new friends and spending time with old ones, advancing your career and making more money, creating art, exploring nature, learning about the world, becoming a valued member of your community, etc. Looking at those great big distant dreams you had during childhood and adolescence and chasing them!

I highly recommend that you do everything possible - EVERYTHING possible - to remove youtube from your life Right. Now. Seriously - take your tv off the wall, stand it up on the ground, and give it a swift kick in the screen with the toe of your boot. Or if you wanna be an environmentalist about it, list it for sale on fb marketplace and take it off the wall so you can hand it off as soon as someone comes around.

Install every app/site blocker you can on every device that you own. Pay for the premium version so you can get all the features to keep you off the platform.

Make plans for what you are going to do with the time you are no longer spending watching youtube. Hang out with friends. Sign up for a pottery class. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Clean your home up.

Your brain will fight you. It will say “but youtube is so fun, and I’m really invested in these channels right now, so I can just cut down a bit and it will be fine.” It will say “but youtube has lots of good information - what if I need to fix my car?” It will say “but youtube has a lot of cultural relevance - how will I keep up with the memes my friends are sharing without it?” Your brain is trying to protect itself from being deprived of its most consistent, low effort source of feel-good chemicals by coming up with all sorts of convincing-sounding reasons for never having to change. Don’t listen to it. For any benefit youtube might provide you with, you can get that somewhere else in the world. If you want to laugh, you can see a standup show or make jokes with your friends. If you want to learn something, you can read a book or take a class or read wikipedia or ask a friend who knows more. And the biggest one of all - if you want that feeling of feeling comfortable hearing about the small minutiae and updates of someone’s life that you’ve known for a long time, you can do that with your friends! You can do that, and have the other person actually know you exist!

And of course your brain will say “I’m not addicted, I just need to cut down a little, but I could stop anytime I want.” Yeah? Then prove it. Try to go 2 weeks without youtube. If you can’t, then you have a problem

d/dBasketball

I’m not angry, just disappointed

Dating advice is extremely personal. You’ll get better advice if you tell us:

age, sex, location

why did you stop dating?

what is your previous dating experience?

what are you looking for (hookups, marriage, something orthogonal or in between)?

Why are you asking for advice - ie, what expectations do you have for why dating will not be easy and straightforward?

what does a typical day/week look like for you? What is your job and your hobbies? Do you stay active and eat a healthy diet? Do you have a solid group of friends and various networks for finding new friends? How much of your time and money is available for whatever you feel like, versus already allocated to something?

*distill

Relevant

I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.

And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.

But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.

I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.

And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.

I feel like some of this is greenwashy. I can’t imagine, for example, that kinetic dance floors are going to produce much power at all. And I do wonder how much carbon reduction was achieved simply in net by planting trees, which we should all know is not nearly as important as reducing emmisions in the first place.

The real win, Imo, is the PR, pushing the industry towards more sustainability one step at a time. And also the fan engagement, which will hopefully fan out beyond the concert stage and into local politics.

Hot take: all this drama exposes the real problem with the utopian anarchist/communist/socialist philosophies of many Lemmy users - the philosophies assume that, unshackled from the oppression of a ruling class and the need to work for sustenance, people will naturally come together to work for the good of humanity. But outside the human instinct to help people we know in real life directly, the desire to be pro-social falls off rapidly as the necessary tasks increase in abstraction. People need some other form of motivation beyond altruism.

In a market economy, that motivation is profit.

It the fediverse, the motivation is getting to be the king of your own little castle where you can push your personal political philosophy on the world. Well-adjusted, happy, reasonable people don’t spend thousands of hours writing code for obscure social media sites in their free time. Those people go snowboarding. Or they hang out with their friends. Or they volunteer at a food bank. Or they raise a family, or start their own business, or hit the gym and fuck a bunch of hot people. Developing software is almost universally an exercise in frustration - broken dependencies, undocumented side effects, protecting against cybersecurity threats, unreproducible bugs, angry and ungrateful users, passive-aggressive stack overflow comments, etc. Only the truly unhinged would do such work for free - like if you desperately need a platform to shout that Mao did nothing wrong.

The real solution isn’t to build an anarchist utopian social media site. It is to stop expecting people to do work for free. If you want reasonable people to develop a good social media site, you need to pay them. If you want mods who moderate to foster positive, helpful discussions instead of for the sake of their own egos, you need to pay them. They could be snowboarding instead! Snowboarding is so much more fun than deleting bot accounts and getting death threats from racist incels.

Has anyone ever opened one of those books? For all we know, they could just be a bunch of blank pages on the inside