The challenger/mustang/camaro pulled this off fairly well for a while. There have been others, like the Thunderbird, but they never sold well.
These days, if it’s not a crossover it seems like no one will buy it. I am blissfully unaware of interesting looking old SUVs, but surely one is out there. Maybe the bronco qualifies? Too bad it’s suffering from size and price inflation.
They did see it coming, this was the goal.
Rather than 4x monitors, how about bigger and higher resolution monitors? I have 2x 27" 1440 monitors. They’re fine to read at 100% scaling, which gives me tons of space to put things. I often run four columns of windows side by side - two columns per monitor. Going back to 1080 in the office is a big downgrade. You could do a similar pattern with ultra wide and/or higher resolution.
Monitors with a built in KVM are tons cheaper in total, especially if you care about high refresh rates. I share my M27Qs and a mouse/keyboard between my personal computer and work laptop this way.
I’m not sure that I get the need for three laptops, but you do you.
Haha, our kids do go under our table at times but they know not to go under other people’s tables.
I don’t have much tolerance for absentee parenting either, especially if the kids wind up seeking attention from others, by say going under someone else’s table, because they’re not getting enough attention from their own parents.
As a parent of younger kids, we’re sorry. We come armed with as many activities as possible and will take our kids outside if they’re too excited until food gets to the table. That will help them focus on eating.
We very rarely went out to eat when they were toddlers due to fear of our kids bothering others and understand that our desire to experience some level of normalcy shouldn’t come at the expense of others.
All that said, if the parents are trying to keep their kids occupied, please extend some grace. Being a parent can be extremely isolating and we’re simply trying to pretend like we still get to do normal things once in a while.
Get a hear rate monitor and do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). It’s by far the fastest way to increase your stamina if you’re untrained and even if you are trained it’s a very effective means of increasing your stamina.
While significant improvements in endurance performance and corresponding physiological markers are evident following submaximal endurance training in sedentary and recreationally active groups, an additional increase in submaximal training (i.e. volume) in highly trained individuals does not appear to further enhance either endurance performance or associated physiological variables [e.g. peak oxygen uptake (V . O 2peak), oxidative enzyme activity]. It seems that, for athletes who are already trained, improvements in endurance performance can be achieved only through high-intensity interval training
It is generally believed that in sedentary (VO 2max <45 ml/kg/min) and recreationally active individ- uals (VO 2max ≈ 45 to 55 ml/kg/min), several years are required to increase VO 2max to that of the highly trained athlete (VO 2max > 60 ml/kg/min). [21,42] However, Hickson et al. [43] showed, in eight sedenyary and recreationally active individuals, that VO2max could be markedly increased (+44%; p < 0.05) after 10 weeks of high-intensity exercise training (alternating 40 minutes cycling intervals at VO 2max 1day, with 40 minutes high-intensity running the next, 6 d/wk
One other thought that occurred to me overnight: you might be asking about FIRE (financial independence, retire early). There are tons of strategies for going about that.
I would caution about moving toward “off grid” type scenarios. Your monthly costs will be less, but you will have significantly higher up front (if buying a new residence) and/or maintenance costs (if buying used and/or when you decide to sell). For example, our water and sewer bill is around $800/year. If anything outside the house fails, the utility company will fix it. My in-laws sold a home in NJ with well water and septic and had to replace their sceptic field before they were able to sell. That set them back somewhere between $30k and $40k. Depending on your goals it could be either an advantage or a disadvantage.
Feedback: your actual questions start about 2/3 down your post. Lead with them next time so we know how to answer better :)
it’s really hard to apply my city-living experience to try to extrapolate what life might be like if I make a goal to buy a small home in Nowheretown, USA to retire in 20 years down the line
We have younger kids, live in a lower cost of area, and bought our house in 2011. Excluding frivolous categories, our top expenses are:
Once the kids are out and we’re retired categories #1 and #4 go away, category #2 will probably get cut in half, and our taxes and insurance are currently well under $4,500/year. Speaking of taxes, mine are capped at a maximum increase of 5% or inflation, whichever is lower. With the housing run-up this has worked out in our favor.
Home expenses are a thing. It’s hard to say how much to budget for that though. Some of it depends on you (eg do you really need to renovate that bathroom in full), your taste, and your budget. I would expect a decent outlay every 5 years or so - roof, brick/siding/exterior work, furnace/ac, driveway etc. The more you’re willing and able to do yourself the better off you’ll be.
You don’t have to be in the boonies to live in a low cost of living area.
Thanks for new and fresh vs old favorite! I posted something similar further down, will be sure to check this out.
Let’s skip favorite and instead answer fun find that I’ve come back to a few times: Brothers of Metal - Kaunaz Dagaz (it is in English, lol). It’s viking metal, and as went through highschool with Blind Guardian and Rhapsody, it’s great to find bands still making banging fantasy metal https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzad__XGDbQ&si=atuCBlgpMSQ9UkRL
I’ve also been a fan of Bloodywood lately. Think an angrier Hybrid Theory Lincoln Park, but from India and with some fusion going on. Machi Bhased is a good toe in the water https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3kLKYWDQVec&si=xsmCHcr6llZdaAWc as is Dana-Dan: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=uo6OC34QjY0&si=6SxQ6T9MwvRUdlJF
Arm band! I have a generic one I got on Amazon and it’s been very handy. It does slowly slide down my arm over 45 minutes or so, but I don’t really know how anything else would do better without being even tighter or having a more grippy material that I don’t really want again my skin.
I wonder how they calculated the range. If it’s representative of the real world drive cycle these will experience, the estimate might not be too far off. A postal route is constant low speed stop and go. Regen is much more effective at higher speeds, so they’re probably dumping most of their kenetic energy to hear via friction brakes. Suspect their drive cycle is going to be something like an endless cycle of 25 kw acceleration, rest, 25 kw acceleration, rest, etc.
I am somewhat tempted to sign up and give it a shot. DDG is pretty solid for me, but it would be interesting to try a search engine where I’m not the product, it is.
If the biggest portion of your bill is AC and you live in a hot area the only things I could think of are planting some trees if they’ll grow and using a programmable thermostat to shift your usage away from off peek as best you can.
It was mostly for our younger kids. We live in a smaller ranch, so we close their doors after they’re asleep so we don’t have to worry about waking them up. This made one of their rooms a bit warmer In the summer and a bit cooler in the winter.
I should probably try balancing the ducts to compensate and might do that this winter.
Look up “home energy monitor”. They install inside your panel. The one we have has a bunch of current clamps, but not enough for our huge panel, so I chose what I thought our more heavily used circuits were. It also measures line voltage. Voltage x current = bingo. I’m not completely sure how I feel about the one I bought, so I’m not going to call it out. I wish it flagged trends per circuit over time to catch things like failing appliances. I could root it and mod it, but it would be nice if it did it out of the box. Catching a failing appliance would more than pay for the device, even if you do it by hand by simply tracking the data. It has slightly changed our habits (see: the furnace blower that we left on all the time and was pulling a constant 500 watts aka 12 kwh/day aka 360 kwh/mo), but I wouldn’t expect to find anything crazy unless you have high usage.
At least (some of us) are getting money back, when your solar production exceeds your consumption. But that is going to change soon.
The same thing is happening in the US. Solar panels used to be a lot more expensive to install, but the amount many utilities would pay your for excess generation was also a lot higher.
A $400 bill at $0.50 per kwh is 800 kwh. Our electricity usage in the month of August was 787 kwh. I wired an energy meter into my circuit panel a month ago, so I can break that down:
If you don’t have an EV and you’re really keeping your AC at 84 I strongly suspect you have a failing appliance. Unless you live in Phoenix and have a massive and very poorly insulated house or something.
During covid (I was doing remote work, so basically no EV charging), our old dishwasher finally stopped working with a dryer heater error code. When we replaced it our electric bill fell by a double digit percentage (I want to say 20%+) year over year.
As for things like insulation, going from 3" of 1969 insulation to a massive quantity of blown in helped our winter heating bill (gas) a lot more than our summer AC bill.
Good luck!
You can always talk and express yourself! Absolutely no one will be upset if you do, assuming you don’t have wildly unpopular opinions and/or aren’t interested in rehashing politically fraught issues for the upteenth time. Find a vaguely appropriate community here and go nuts.
It’s probably down to how much random crap is being loaded along with what you’re trying to see. The modern web means page load takes forever, in part because of all the random things your browser also has to pull down. Some of this content need to be loaded before you can render much of anything and some of that will result in calls to yet more random servers. Look at the network tab in your browser’s dev tools to see what I’m talking about. Without an ad blocker you’re probably looking at calls to 10-20 servers just to load a webpage.
The old reddit API was actually pretty snappy, in part because it didn’t need a lot of this overhead. I suspect the same is true for Lemmy - no extra fluff.