Yeah there are some similar suggestions but all the examples I can think of are at least a bit of a stretch. Matthew 7:3–5 mebbe? Remove the log from your own eye before focusing on smaller chunks of wood in the eyes of others?
> ... most pickup trucks aren't designed for maximum utility. They're designed to sell a lifestyle.
Yes, but that lifestyle can and sometimes does include actual needs for some of the utility. There is a great observation from Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington’s 3rd District in an NYT piece a couple of days ago. I included a perhaps too long quote in lieu of apologizing for the paywall.
> “Spreadsheets can contain a part of truth,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “But never all of truth.”
> Looking to illustrate this, I bought the recent book “White Rural Rage” and opened it more or less at random to a passage about rural pickup trucks. It cites a rich portfolio of data and even a scholarly expert on the psychology of truck purchasers, to make what might seem like an obvious point — that it’s inefficient and deluded for rural and suburban men to choose trucks as their daily driving vehicles. The passage never does explain, though, how you’re supposed to haul an elk carcass or pull a cargo trailer without one.
If I mostly trim my hedges, but sometimes, very rarely, need to cut down small trees, am I best served by simply owning a hedge-trimmer and renting a chainsaw or other appropriate tool when necessary, or by buying a katana for both jobs?
Everybody knows why you bought the katana. We know you have a story to tell yourself, it's just not convincing.
> and renting a chainsaw or other appropriate tool when necessary,
I don't think most people realize how expensive and time consuming tool rental is.
This is where things also get kind of messy in the US. In manicured suburbs you probably don't need a chainsaw. But in older growth and places with larger lots you really do need one. If you wait till you need one after a big storm, you may travel 100 miles out of the storm damage to find one to rent or have to wait for weeks as your driveway is blocked and contractors are booked up.
For me the utility function is somewhere in between a car and a truck, hence why I have an SUV. I can carry the large boxes/items I seem to have at a regular basis. When I need something bigger I can rent a trailer to hook to it. Trucks themselves are way too expensive now, and I don't need that much capacity. A car would have me constantly renting or borrowing one from someone else (which I did when I owned a car and it was a pain in the ass).
We recently moved to a more rural location that has needed more tools. It is shocking just how expensive and inconvenient it is to rent tools (and even vehicles to some extent) and just how much worse it is being even just a little bit rural.
The big box store in our town doesn't rent tools or vehicles. You have to drive 45-60 minutes to get to a store that does. This means the 4 hour rental prices (which for something like a wood chipper or chain saw might be sufficient for a lot of jobs) become nearly non-viable or highly stressful rushing through unfamiliar power equipment that really shouldn't be rushed.
A full day tool rental is often 1/3 to 1/2 of the price of a new mass market version of the tool. A week rental is almost always more. The tools are rarely in great shape. You are almost always way better off going to an estate sale or local marketplace and buying a used tool. If there is a job you end up doing 2-3 times or need for more than a week its even cost effective to just buy new ones. You save so much on labor doing things yourself that even with new tools you basically always come out ahead.
The best case is that you have a community run tool library that lets you check stuff out cheaply for a week and can have a relationship with the folks that run it. Similarly, getting to know the neighbors and being able to swap/borrow stuff. For vehicles this is a little more dicey because of liability & insurance issues.
We've definitely struggled with the vehicle for long and sheet goods. We really don't need a pickup truck and it would honestly be a hazard on skinny mountain roads... but we do need to move lumber, sheet goods, appliance sized things just enough that it's a pain without one. We settled on a midsized SUV with passable towing power (as an aside, EV power and control makes towing a breeze as long as your round trip fits in one charge). Renting a trailer is still annoying, but at least can be done close by. For larger orders delivery can sometimes be cost effective (vs renting a vehicle or buying and maintaining a truck) especially because places often subsidize delivery to win business.
>A full day tool rental is often 1/3 to 1/2 of the price of a new mass market version of the tool
For sure. I had to dig some post holes in limestone that was very hard. Rental was going to be $200 for a tool that would do it in a day.
Instead I went to harbor freight and bought a tool closer to $100 even though it took me a bit longer, and I get to keep the tool which is still working to this day.
Heh, and labor costs in the Austin area are off the hook. I did a project for around $5000 that a neighbor had a similar but smaller in scope project quoted for $21,000.
People seriously underestimate how much trouble a pickup truck rental from U-Haul can be.
I’ve wasted so much time trying to track down which location near me has one available on the exact day I want to do major yard work. Often I have to reschedule my work or plan out super far in advance. Or take a day off during the week because everyone else also wants to rent trucks on the weekend. Then I’m running against the clock the whole time.
An extra $100-$200 a month car payment to have a truck instead of a crossover is totally worth it.
This is my favorite piece of music right now. I love that this exists. But the title is quite misleading. What is amazingly presented is not the Epic of Gilgamesh but rather, "... a few of the opening lines of part of the epic poem". It is a great 3 minutes and 55 seconds, but don't fire up this URL thinking you are going to hear the entire epic.
There has never existed an "Epic of Gilgamesh" in Sumerian.
The Sumerians have created a series of separate short stories about various adventures of Gilgamesh ("Gilgamesh" is used in Akkadian, it was "Bilgamesh" in Sumerian).
A few hundreds of years later, maybe around the time of the King Hammurabi, the Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh have been translated into the Old Babylonian language. Then they were slightly altered and various new texts have been written and intercalated between the old stories in order to integrate them into a single complete "Epic of Gilgamesh", telling the story of the entire life of Gilgamesh.
So the first version of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was written in Old Babylonian, being derived from the older Sumerian stories.
During the next millennium, the Epic of Gilgamesh has been rewritten in later dialects of the Babylonian language and it was also translated into other languages spoken in the region. Various minor changes have been made to the story, but none so important as the great changes that exist between the Sumerian cycle of stories and the Old Babylonian first version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh are interesting, but I believe that the Old Babylonian version is a text with a much higher artistic value.
Among the Old Babylonian completely new additions to the Sumerian stories are some segments that I consider beautiful in their Old Babylonian version, but which, a millennium later, have been horribly deformed into the stories about Eve and about the snake, who became villains in the "Genesis" part of the Old Testament.
Line cooking in a restaurant is very different than cooking at home. Mis-en-place is usually not efficient for the home cook. The example cited by Jeff W is contrived. I've cooked at least hundreds if not thousands of onions at home and in restaurants and in almost every case I was chopping carrots or celery or peppers while those onions were cooking and never once did I have a failure due to timing.
I don't know. I've found mis-en-place to be a great help when cooking at home and I've never worked as a cook in a restaurant or caterer. It helps with timing and it is also just nice to feel like the cook itself is simply "going downhill."
Now, for qualifiers, I live in a full house so things aren't always where I left them (so simply removing searches is useful) and I do cooks both small (just my meal) and large (for the whole group or pre-cooking meals for the work week).
I was a line cook for over a decade too and cook a lot at home obviously. Mise just looks different at home but it still happens. I still get out my cutting board and hone my knife before I start peeling the carrots you know.
I've always thought of the goal of mise being a sort of process fluidity rather than raw efficiency. Especially with tasks that can't be done simultaneously it's not going to shave much if any time off. But it still leads to less things to keep track of, fewer context switches, smoother transitions, fewer mistakes, more opportunity to notice and account for variations, etc.
You also have to remember that you have the skills and accompany judgement of a once-professional cook. You can cut the celery before the onions burn, but can you cut it before the garlic burns? Could a home cook without a professional background?
It's not that one of those options is "mise en place" and then others aren't. The answers depend on the person doing the cooking, and making that call is part of the mise process for the dish. Having a plan, basically.
It's quite a nice reminder at the top of an emacs config.
It's basically the same thing as 5S methodology in manufacturing. Doesn't make as much sense in a garage workshop, but when what you're doing is the pride of your craft and your day-in-day-out, your setup and tooling should be dialed enough that you almost never have to think about it.
I have never heard of mis-en-place but I have always done it in my home cooking in order to have a better flow. Chop, then move on from chopping to the next thing; the next thing; don’t bounce back and forth.
It’s just how my brain functions best. I would hate to be sautéing onions and in the back of my mind be “gotta chop the peppers in 2 minutes shit”. Plus I like to clean when I have downtime, so if I have two minutes I’ll wash my cutting boards and stuff.
netflix: costlier so-so content AND a soul crushingly annoying interface. I am 100% sure that I will never want to watch the vast majority of the items available, and yet I must scroll past them over and over and over in four to ten different rows during the same session even.
They are a better content company than a software company. As you note, they currently have the best music, instructors and variety of classes. But the software itself has a LOT of room for improvement. For example, the now playing widget is constrained to a tiny little chunk of the view in which artist names or titles are routinely truncated beyond recognition even though most of the screen is essentially empty (a view of a big black studio with an instructor in the center).
I tried a peloton and I thought that for the price it would have things like match the video speed to my cadence. To watch a video of some dude going super slow in France I might as well put a YouTube video on.
Also I’m stuck with their music, can’t I connect my Spotify?
I don’t understand what’s the Peloton revolution at all other than the gamification of it.
I've been a one bag traveller since approximately forever. One hitch I encountered after getting married: the spouse's family has a tradition of bringing back gifts for everyone from any major trip. I understand that back in the olden days, rare and exotic items (an orange? for me? really?) could only be shared via travel. But those days are gone. There are nearly no other remaining friction points left our otherwise awesome marriage.
Can't you just mail things back? We did that from a trip to Italy, mostly wines. Almost all local vendors of expensive items was well prepared to mail things to the US.
Depends on where. In Latam, I was quoted like $200 to try to ship back a small package to the US. We gave up on that quick. In Mexico, it was just about $30
Not sure if this is a serious question or not, but OP tells us in the /about page. To quote:
This site is built upon WordPress. I use a custom child theme that calls the excellent GeneratePress Pro theme. I have a lifetime subscription to GeneratePress, and it’s worth every penny.
The font I use on this site is Fira Sans Condensed, which is (in my opinion) a beautiful sans-serif font, created by Mozilla.`
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