It's not just about the stove. It's also about the state of the wood you're burning (humidity mostly). Very dry wood burns much more cleanly than less dry wood.
> fixing our broken culture and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life
why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).
This appears to be the whole point. The think tanks agreed half a century ago that humanity poses the greatest threat to itself, and that the best way to save humanity is to drastically limit reproduction. The simplest way to do this is to make it unaffordable.
Unfortunately, this disproportionately discourages the most responsible people, with the best long term planning, from reproducing.
(At least, among those who are financially struggling. You could also argue that those who can't get out of poverty don't deserve to reproduce (and many in those think tanks appear to share similar views), but (1) that's reprehensible and (2) it doesn't work anyway since there's always a subset that just doesn't care and reproduces anyway.)
>People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children).
"Supposedly" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as is your parenthetical note.
And we're focusing on parents because this article is about melatonin use in children.
I'm curious how you came up with that rent values ($800 - $1200). I'm in Western Europe, a medium sized city, and I can't get a studio without 1000 EUR. Similarly, I imagine that in most places in California, that amount won't get you much of a home.
$800-$1200 is probably roughly either what they paid for rent when they were in their 20s or what they pay for rent today. My guess would be the former because people tend to default to thinking that their reality is someone else’s reality.
Where I live, rent rates are around that. He also said that he's sharing an apartment with a few other people... so he's probably not paying full rent.
Out of curiosity, do you have a partner/girlfriend/wife?
Because much like you, I haven't really kept good friends along in life. I've had periods in my life when I had a "good" friend, that I could talk a lot of stuff with, share my problems, and generally do activities in common, but I moved around, I haven't really kept in touch.
Problem is, without a social circle, it's much more difficult to find a partner, and I'm at an age now where that's the main thing I think I'm missing.
But I understand the issue very well from a theoretical standpoint. At its core, it's about a disordered attachment style, a sort of fear of attachment, or a failure of the brain to regulate the affect resulting from interactions. A result of early developmental trauma. I'm also familiar with some techniques that are supposed to fix the problem (I was building a neurofeedback system based on ADS1299 at one point), but life got in the way. Which is ironic, since I think this is the most important aspect of any life, social functioning.
> Out of curiosity, do you have a partner/girlfriend/wife?
No, not at the moment.
I've been through several long-term relationships, and I think I'm too emotionally fucked up to actually be in one for real. There's a whole array of issues, and I don't even know how to sum them up. In a nutshell, I don't really like being myself.
Find a good therapist / counselor, which may take more than one attempt. The first counselor I had, for maybe 3 sessions, was terrible. The 4th session was with his boss, she asked me how it was going, I said I didn't really click with the guy, and she took over my case. She was great.
It's well worth it to learn how to accept and like yourself. After all, the one person you can count on having the rest of your life, is you! Good luck!
There are places that have fees based on income, or their used to be when I was in counseling. The place I went had that, I think mostly for drug and alcohol abuse, but maybe just for everyday counseling too. I wasn't using it so don't know much about it, but it is/was a thing.
I've done it at the edge of a small town (~12k inhabitants). My grandparents' home was sitting uninhabited for a few years and it once had a beautiful vineyard, a big orchard, and generally a wonderful view. At the edge of a forest.
I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs).
I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown.
Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time.
5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work.
Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time.
Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks.
The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well.
In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it.
I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated.
Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
The big plus of having such an experience to me is that you will much more appreciate what you have in life that others around you might take for granted.
> It is very noticeable on a bicycle at high speeds
Huh? I've been cycling for 15 years, many of those years doing 15k km a year, all year round. Mountain biking on mountains at -15C, down to urban cycling in 38-40C scorching summer heat. I've never noticed speed, effort, stamina changing with temperature as you suggest.
And I've done lots of road cycling at constant 35-40km/h, descents of up to 70+km/h.
I am not really contradicting you here. Just want clarification from GP. My reaction was Huh? As well.
With N=15 years of gps data and 40-70 of those days per year below zero very few below -10°C. I can say that I ride slower on cold days on avarage.
I am not fit and do not track that at all. I can barely keep my avarage above 25km/h in city traffic for 15km, very few conflict points maybe twenty but not comparable to road cycling. So a km/h decrease of avarage speed during winter is common but not a given. I do not count bad road conditions, but Stockholm has really good maintanance during winter, ice free asphalt all year.
I definitely ride slower in winter too but I always assumed that was due to my body having a harder time in the cold rather than air density changes.
That seems to be born out by using better (read more expensive) winter riding gear. I naturally run a bit cold so spending on low temperature tights, base layer and jersey/jacket has made a massive difference for me.
Interesting! I’m also a long time high volume cyclist, and I see a clear effect of slower rides in winter. I’m talking about around specific routes and training sessions where the point is to go as fast as possible. With the same power I seem to go more slowly when it’s cold.
Obviously there could be many reasons for this: less aerodynamic clothing, more cautious cornering etc etc, but the effect is very noticeable to me.
I lived for a while in a 12-15k small town, having spent most of my life in much bigger metro areas. As a single, 20-something, who spends a lot of time alone, and loves nature, it was fine, for a while. But the fact that I had very few connections there, very few like-minded people, gets to you in time.
If you're in a similar situation I think you'll do a lot better in a bigger city, even though you may not think you need those things for the time being. Eventually you will.
I'm not for clearing out djvu, but it sure is frustrating when a PDF isn't available.
It's not just about laziness preventing one from installing the more obscure ebook readers which support djvu. It's about security: I only trust PDFs when I create them myself with TeX or similar, otherwise I need to use the Chromium PDF reader to be (relatively) safe. I don't trust the readers that support Djvu to be robust enough against maliciously malformed djvu files, as I'm guessing the readers are implemented in some ancient dialect of C or C++ and I doubt they're getting much if any scrutiny in the way of security.
It's super easy to convert a DJVU file to PDF though. There's an increase in filesize but it's not the end of the world.
And since you're creating the PDF yourself seems like you can trust it? Since nothing malicious could survive the DJVU to PDF conversion since it's just "dumb" bitmap-based.
If your DjVu file contains an exploit for your DjVu decoder, even if you run it in a bombproof container, it could still conceivably inject malicious code into the resulting PDF file. That sounds far-fetched because the exploit payload would need to recognize that a PDF conversion was going on and respond by generating the PDF, but I remember when people thought exploiting buffer overflows was implausible, and this is not the same level of rocket science.
djvu is really quite a marvellous format, but I'm only able to read them on Evince (the default pdf reader that comes with Debian, Fedora, and probably a bunch of other distros). For my macbook I need to download a Djvu reader, and for my ipad, I didn't even bother trying because the experience would likely be much worse than Preview / Ibooks.
DJVU is supported by numerous book-reading applications, including (in my experience) FB Reader (FS/OSS), Pocketbook, and Onyx's Neoreader.
As a format for preserving full native scan views (large, but often strongly preferable for visually-significant works or preserving original typesetting / typography), DJVU is highly useful.
I do wish that it were more widely supported by both toolchains and readers. That will come in time, I suspect.
Calibre supports djvu on any platform. Deleting djvu books just because Microsoft and Apple don't see fit to support it by default would be a travesty.
