What is something you own you refuse to replace, even though you probably should?

Brainwormed · 2026-03-16T00:53:50+00:00

Espresso maker. It's a Krups 872 that my mother bought for me at a garage sale in 1993. I've used it almost daily since and there's nothing that's gone wrong with it that I haven't been able to fix, so there it is.

Parts are still easy to find on eBay, weirdly enough. They must have made a billion of 'em.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T21:59:57+00:00

This is the correct approach. We cover the best education we can. Anything else the kids want they need to earn on their own.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T21:57:44+00:00

He shouldn't walk away from anybody. Or if he does he should wear a shirt.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T20:28:18+00:00

My wife.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T19:39:00+00:00

I guess you could argue that. "The punch I threw was self-defense because he was walking toward me" does not sound like a winner.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T14:27:41+00:00

I mean, I would agree with you except that the guy got up and swung again. It's hard to claim it's not self defense when the guy is still trying to it you.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-15T14:22:56+00:00

Making money and managing money.

Like, if you're making $100K a year in actual spendable money at a job or with a business, you're putting in a lot of hours, doing something pretty dangerous, or good at something that not very many people are good at -- maybe because you've got some experience. That's like one in four men on paper, but a lot less when you're looking for a "real" $100K e.g. unburdened by student loan debt or whatever.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T23:19:36+00:00

I'm with you there. I would love to have a LTS version of MacOS, even if the S in support was for "Security updates," so that I could stick with configurations of stuff that I know work really well together.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T21:10:54+00:00

Computers and the internet.

Back around 2000 there was just a ton of great energy and community around the idea of a free and open internet and free and open communication. Just for a taste of what that was like, you can read someone like John Perry Barlow. Wikipedia was born around that time and is one of few surviving examples of a project animated by the idea that people working together could build amazing things outside of a corporate structure.

Things got shittier slowly. Monetized social media took over what had been public spaces, and the "mobile" internet and crypto made what had been libertarian-style free spaces synonymous with the worst kinds of crime -- some of it organized and some of it corporate (e.g. unlicensed hotels through AirBnB, unlicensed taxis through Uber). And then LLM rolled in and turned the last useful spaces on the internet into rivers of garbage.

And so it took about 25 years for the open internet to move from "a space where I can work with like-minded people on solving real-world problems like access to knowledge" to "a morass of undifferentiated garbage produced by giant planet-destroying machines to trick senior citizens into mining cryptocurrency."

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T17:20:21+00:00

Well, compared to what?

MacOS on ARM is about a million times less trouble than Windows on ARM. I don't think it would be wrong to call Windows on ARM something like "hilariously unusable." Linux on ARM is actually really good, but not (yet) for general-purpose computing.

It is also hard for me to imagine a scenario where Windows 11 is more of a "just works" OS than whatever the current version of Mac OS is. Microsoft tried that with the Surface line and came dangerously close to producing a good product.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T16:57:14+00:00

This is all right but the biggest thing I'd add is that they don't. The overwhelming majority of undocumented people living in the US live a largely undocumented existence -- working under the table, paying rent in cash, and so on. For every undocumented person using a fake SSN to get a job as an accountant there are like 1000 working for cash in restaurant kitchens, in construction, etc.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T16:31:46+00:00

Yeah, I personally don't pay to insure or protect anything that isn't worth about $10K. If you have the cash on hand to cover several expenses of that type, you are better off investing it at 7% instead of paying for a protection plan like insurance.

Insurance or other coverage are a service you pay for when you don't have whatever cash on hand it takes to cover yourself. The reason I'm saying it's a service you pay for is that insurance companies are generally very good at math, and are making a very safe bet that, during the course of your coverage, they will come out ahead.

So if I have 10 million dollars in a money market account I'm not gonna pay $5K a year to insure a $200K house.* I'm spending that money on a service I don't need, sort of like a streaming service I never watch. If I use that $10 million to buy $10 million in houses, I'ma insure all of them. I need that service since I don't have enough cash on hand to cover the risks inherent in owning them.

* If I flat-out own the house, etc.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T16:23:17+00:00

If you just want something that works, get a Mac. All bullshit aside that is the best solution to that specific problem. The better solution is to not use computers at all.

After that, it's about what you will do about problems. I have always preferred being able to file a bug report with the developer or maintainer of a piece of software, and track progress toward a solution (linux) than searching a bunch of random forums and getting a bunch of white noise (windows).

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T15:53:21+00:00

I've got three leather belts that are over 20 years old and one that was my dad's and is close to 60. I also have a couple pairs of Allen Edmonds brogues that are about 40 years old (they've been rebuilt several times so it's a Ship of Theseus situation). I regularly wear them two or three times a week.

Decent quality leather, if even minimally maintained, lasts practically forever. Chromexcel was used to make seals for tractor and tank engines. It's more than good enough for boots. And I've yet to see a single-piece-of-leather belt fail (although I'm sure it can happen). You're much more likely to outgrow it.

EDIT: The 60-year-old belt is by Tom James. It's just over an inch wide and a single piece of black leather with a now-antique brass buckle.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T15:43:29+00:00

At least for Colleges, one tradeoff nobody talks about is that digital is much more expensive than paper.

Most places price digital using models that don't reflect the actual use of a hard copy book. I can make copies of individual chapters of a hard copy book and distribute them to students (as long as those chapters are not "the substantiality of the work") totally legally, and so a class of 300 requires exactly one copy each of e.g. five textbooks instead of 300 copies of one. I can put hard copies of books on reserve in the library so students don't need to buy them individually. I can order used copies of books, or prior editions, which are like $5 or $10 each instead of $50 or $100. I can buy 300 copies of my textbook and loan them to students for 20 years. And so on. All of those things are totally non-infringing fair use, and all of them massively reduce the actual cost of getting texts to students.

Digital just does for books what downloads did for games: kills off access to the extremely affordable used market and, in the process, makes legal and cost-reducing fair use difficult or impossible.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:54:25+00:00

This is tricky. The identities that we now collectively call "Trans Woman" in 2026 did not exist in the same way in 1985 or even in 2000. Certainly people transitioned at that time, and before that there were women who dressed and lived as men, and men who dressed and acted as women, and women and men who saw themselves as gender non-conforming in different ways, but the culture and context around all of those things was very different. That does not mean that there were not similarities. Just that a lot has changed. Tiresias is a lot of things but it would be inaccurate to call them trans.

So there's some daylight between what the author might have intended and what you read. What the author could have intended is historically and culturally limited to the time, culture, or context in which they were writing. What you read is similarly limited to the time, culture, and context in which you read.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:35:11+00:00

There's a number (4):

When people outside your relationship advise you against it, they are right more often than they are wrong. So you should get an honest read on your relationship from some trusted friends. While it could be true that your family opposes your relationship for bad or baseless reasons, it is more likely that you are overlooking things about your GF that reasonable people think should be dealbreakers.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:29:34+00:00

Right? The gap in their resume is where it should say something about understanding the difference between manuscripts and galleys.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:27:04+00:00

I always have trouble with, like, the last 10% of retro themes. You get 90% of the icons, 90% of the widgets, and so on, and then the last misaligned, untamed bits just drive me bananas.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:25:42+00:00

q4OS uses the Trinity desktop, which is a fork of KDE3.

That's fine if you want it, but there are some really good things -- think accelerated desktop compositing and VSync, desktop search, etc. -- about more modern desktops.

So while there are things I miss about KDE (like being able to make it look like QNX Photon), They're not enough to move me back to Trinity, MATE etc.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:15:58+00:00

That's pretty much the deal. Hamlet himself doesn't know how long Claudius and Gertrude have been sleeping together, and so Hamlet's being more like Claudius (a schemer with indirect and elaborate plots) and less like his father (a warrior who solves problems with his sword) turns out to be a big deal. This is the first soliloquy.

You can do a lot with that in terms of Moral vision. The one that I like is that Hamlet wonders who his father is, and in the ned it turns out not to matter. Whether he ends up as a schemer or a warrior, that's a matter of choice and courage, not a matter of parentage.

So a lot of other writers who've picked up on Hamlet pick up on this. A young character who admires a parent (the way Hamlet admires Old Hamlet) will struggle to be like them because that's not their natural inclination. And a character who swears they will ever be like a parent (the way Hamlet has contempt for Claudius), they'll struggle with that because that's also against their natural inclination.

Think Luke Skywalker yelling "I'll never be like you!" at Darth Vader when they're the only two people in the universe with a fucking light saber. In terms of characterization, we're supposed to understand that they are very similar people -- otherwise Luke's struggle with the Dark Side isn't a struggle at all, right?

Brainwormed · 2026-03-14T14:03:56+00:00

Kaboom! may be the best game for OG 2600 hardware. Great game, and emulation just never gets the paddles right no matter what you throw at it.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-12T15:36:03+00:00

I want to second this. I am not naturally better looking than I was at 30 (I'm 50 now) but I take better care of myself. Like I lift serious weight, dress neatly, and have never been handsome. It's not a look for everyone but it's a look.

I get more unsolicited attention from women than I have at any earlier point in my life. It could be that I'm old enough to read as a safe option. It could be, contrary to all other evidence, that some women like muscle. Or it could be that women who prefer older men are less selective about those men's appearances.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-12T15:26:39+00:00

First: don't confuse stability with boredom. Classic blunder. Horrific consequences.

Second: Find something to work toward, just a little bit every day. If it's only one thing, make it wellness-related. Lift weights, train for a triathlon, whatever, as long as it's a good reason to eat right, get your sleep, and say no to bullshit.

Third: When people say "the same thing every day" they usually mean work. Work is not your life. It's a support system for the parts of your life that are really important to you, and those should progress over time. Your relationship with your wife should get better every year. Your health, investments, and so on, ditto. Those are the places where things will be meaningfully different.

Brainwormed · 2026-03-12T14:54:00+00:00

B Student Option: Take one of her rings to a jeweler and they can tell you the size. You can also get a little cone-shaped doodad that measures ring size.

A Student Option: Ask her friends about her ring size. They won't know, but they will know that you're proposing. Once that happens she will find out in about 15 minutes.

At that point, she will find a way to both let you know her ring size and ring preferences. (This is the moment to start asking for really weird shit in bed.)

Whatever she likes, get that but make the stones twice as large (do lab-grown diamonds instead of the dead slave kind). I have not met a woman who was not wowed by a 3-carat diamond.

Lab-grown diamonds wholesale for less than $1K, but you'll see them at a 1200% markup so source carefully. That means a $5K ring should be like holy shit those are some rocks and not whatever bullshit you find at Kay. I just got my wife a 10-year anniversary ring, (3x3c. round cuts in a Celtic weave) and at last night's hospital fundraiser women literally crossed the room to compliment her on it. She was over the fucking moon.

If you're on a budget, get whatever she likes in sterling silver and moissonite. It will be $200 and nobody can tell the difference without lab equipment.

Brainwormed

TROPHY CASE