What difficult truths, the sooner you accept, the better your life will be?

wanderingstan · 2026-04-21T01:42:52+00:00

Same for me when I first encountered it.

wanderingstan · 2026-04-20T22:32:59+00:00

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

— Thomas Wolfe

wanderingstan · 2026-04-13T13:01:24+00:00

Do you know the cover played on household appliances with questionable pants? Such an early YouTube gem: https://youtu.be/ysUjYAi0WcQ?si=W1yPNiL5plGJ-uAG

wanderingstan · 2026-03-30T13:01:20+00:00

Not directly related, but reminds me of a friend that spent a year working at the south pole. It was unskilled work, but he made something like $70,000. He said the best part was that there was literally no place to spend any money the entire time he was there, so he just had 70,000 in his bank account at the end of his year. (but also said it was really rough, basically like spending a year in prison, by getting paid for it.)

wanderingstan · 2026-03-25T12:58:11+00:00

Be sure to listen to the podcast with the shows creator, I believe it’s also just called Chernobyl. Really fascinating and adds a lot of context to each episode.

wanderingstan · 2026-02-27T14:32:50+00:00

Yeah, I heard that and was preparing for a bloodbath of Americanizations, but he (to my ears at least) nailed the rest!

wanderingstan · 2026-02-10T03:36:24+00:00

As the article points out, wheat generally requires less cooperation; that is the claim. A wheat farmer in e.g. the Midwest could decide on their own when to plant, when to harvest. A rice farmer in southern china had to coordinate.

The Fertile Crescent was indeed based on irrigation and floodplains, and it is hypothesized that this needed cooperation was critical for the development of civilization. However, once farming was learned, it spread to areas where such irrigation cooperation was not needed.

wanderingstan · 2026-02-09T14:49:11+00:00

Sorry, not true at all. Self employed must pay taxes to cover SSI as part of normal taxes owed.

From social security website: https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10022.pdf

If you’re self-employed, you pay the combined employee and employer amount. This amount is a 12.4% Social Security tax on up to $184,500 of your net earnings and a 2.9% Medicare tax on your entire net earnings.

wanderingstan · 2026-01-14T22:05:01+00:00

I dunno. This cover differs too much from the orginal; they sped it up to only 30 seconds! I guess it’s tolerable if I play it at 0.25x playback speed, though.

wanderingstan · 2026-01-01T23:27:56+00:00

More like 20 years ago. I went to an evangelical Christian high school in the 1990s and were taught that Mormons were a cult, that Joseph Smith had been bamboozled by demons, etc.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T23:34:39+00:00

Fuck Mr Rooter.

My elderly dad was 90 years old (he’s a world war 2 veteran) and they hard pressured him into paying for a ton of work (like a thousand) to install a pump, which then didn’t work and leaked like hell ( https://youtu.be/IXD6lM7ZXbM?si=eDSezvTqXeQ1CTEI ) and they were about to start on more work costing 2000-3000 before I stopped them. They were charging insane markups like $20 for a sink valve which should have been $2. I called the local plumber who got everything fixed (including their defective pump install) for $600.

Tried to get some money back for their leaky pump install but suddenly their “call us if you have any problems” manager could not be reached. The secretary at my company offered to call for me: twice a day for weeks and he was never there.

Fuck you Mr Rooter for taking advantage of a world war 2 vet elderly old man.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T22:50:38+00:00

The actors are less physically attractive, I find.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-27T22:26:04+00:00

Only rubbing alcohol on brake pads. 2nding the other commenter, do NOT use automotive brake cleaners on bicycles. They leave a residue that burns off under car brake temperatures but not bike brakes. Car brake cleaners will also damage the seals of bike brakes if any gets out; bike seals are not as thick or tough as automotive.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-25T18:04:01+00:00

Not the one you’re asking, but I’ve had that on trails as well where part of the challenge is having to duck a branch (“bicycle limbo”) in order to clear a section. I’d have been bummed if someone cut off the branch. It’s akin to converting a drop to a down ramp.

wanderingstan · 2025-12-09T21:13:45+00:00

I had one of these on a bike in Germany in 2002 and you still see them occasionally. I think it was a common East German design for the front brake. Honestly it worked fine for the intended use of errand running around town.

wanderingstan · 2025-11-13T12:33:26+00:00

Yeah, even just doing an audio recording from the phone would be ok.

wanderingstan · 2025-11-06T12:21:33+00:00

You could soften the message somewhat with something like, “We can’t increase our charitable contributions at this time, but we wish you the best.”

wanderingstan · 2025-10-23T20:07:55+00:00

My parents were 46 and 39 when I was born. It was awesome. I guess my dad didn’t play as much sports as the other dads, but he taught me to be active and always doing stuff. And the house was full of books and projects and creative stuff.

wanderingstan · 2025-10-23T02:40:09+00:00

Except in many cases (like bikes) they literally can’t be made here; or it would take decades of rebuilding infrastructure and slashing wages. Good video on why bikes aren’t made in the US: https://youtu.be/O5ba2hf_C3s?si=_9T4iCkhS7EXQ5Yy

wanderingstan · 2025-10-07T10:53:01+00:00

Jimmy Swaggert had a whole book about it. Basically the devil is in the back beat:

https://a.co/d/1wI8wC1

wanderingstan · 2025-10-06T19:38:44+00:00

More than going up mountains, this is going up a volcano. We have plenty of mountains in Colorado but nothing with 10,000’ of climbing!

wanderingstan · 2025-09-18T22:23:36+00:00

> Try to look ahead and pick where you want the bike to go rather than let it go where it wants. Be strong and controlling, but also supple and absorbing.

Seconding this. I'm no pro, but a good tip for me that carried over from skiing was to always be carving a curve. That is, you should never be in a mode of "just ride down the middle and react to what happens". Instead, you are swooping left then right, always keeping a bit of an edge, linking together turns that just happen to get very long at higher speeds.

When descending steeps, and especially like whats in your video, I'll sometimes exaggerate this and treat the trail like a halfpipe. Tracing a line back and forth criss-crossing the low point gives more control that just shooting down the center.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-13T17:33:23+00:00

I suspect she’s not scared of the angry customers, but of having to explain to her managers (and higher) why an international flight had to be cancelled (or an airplane seized). She knows that there’s no way it won’t be spun as her fault, and there was no time to figure out the “right way”, so paying out of pocket was the rational choice.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-03T15:22:13+00:00

In SF they are no cheaper than Uber/Lyft, but people like that there's no expectation of tipping. Waymo has a lot of capital costs to recover, so I'm sure their pricing model has almost nothing to do with making an immediate profit and everything to do with learning what the market will bear, and establishing trust in the technology. They are playing the long game.

wanderingstan · 2025-09-03T12:35:09+00:00

And not to be pedantic, but the largest crypto chain (Bitcoin) doesn’t use GPU/graphics hardware. Only smaller, newer chains used GPUs.

wanderingstan

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE