When you get on an airplane, take Your backpack off and carry it by hand. You’ve got luggage on your back sticking out 12, 16 inches and you’re swinging it around like a brain dead fool.
The number of people that cluelessly hit people in aisle seats, shove backpacks in the faces of aisle sitters as the wearer turns to to talk to friends or tries to remember their alphabet and how to count while looking for their seat is ridiculous.
Take your backpack off! You’re hitting people.
Wastewater based epidemiology is really freaking cool, and we have covid to thank for moving it from academia to industry/government testing, where the results are actionable.
We are now tracking covid, mpox, the flu, RSV and many other diseases in wastewater. It's very cost-effective community monitoring and can be applied anywhere from the influent of treatment plants to the manhole cover in front of your gym.
Luxury is cheap if you are clever. You can buy a premium 500$ office chair from 10-100$ if you can find one locally used one.
Buying the best value refurbished laptops and computer parts can save so much money. You can buy a refurbished laptop with 512gb SSD storage and 32gb of ram for 250$, the newest MacBook has 128gb SSD storage and 8gb of ram for 1000$. You can literally buy 4x the ram and storage for 1/4 of the price.
I have like 20,000$ worth of furniture but payed like 2,000$ for it. Use Google lens on cheap furniture you see and you'll find some extraordinary value. I once found a 4,500 brass chandelier for 45$ at a habitat for humanity. Make sure to buy it from a store that checks for bed bugs etc.
Knowing how to repair stuff. The value of expensive items are very delicate, a single broken part can make the price plummet. This way you can get an expensive device, or anything, and replace a small or simple part. Did this on a cheap laptop with a broken power button and it works great.
Knowing how to "tune" your tools and stuff. A lot of cheap tools and items can be made much better with some fine tuning. On a saw, re-set and sharpen the teeth, on a knife thin and sharpen the edge, run Linux on old hardware etc. For everything you have, squeeze every last bit of performance out of it.
Carnivorous plants are not as hard to take care of as most people think. Sundews are literally an invasive species in New Zealand, and Venus flytraps are from South Carolina. The reason they seem hard to take care of is because many companies that sell carnivorous plants provide incorrect care instructions or pot them in the wrong type of soil. Most likely as a planned obsolescence scheme to get people to buy more. Learn the proper care instructions, and they're extremely hardy.
Spend as much time as you can, with your aging loved ones.
Every time you pass through a door that locks, do this:
- hold the door open, not allowing it to close
- locate the key that opens that lock and hold it
- now let the door close
- let go of the key
The more you do this, the more it becomes a habit: you never let a locked door close unless you’re holding the key that opens it.
The fact that it’s physical touch and not just mental confirmation makes it stronger, and easier to program as a habit since you sort of build it into your body.
It’s just a mental trigger: PASSING THROUGH DOOR -> TOUCH KEY
Then sometimes you’ll be unconsciously reaching for that key to touch it, and you can’t find it, and you’re still holding the door open, and it just saved you from a major hassle of being locked out.
Understad the things you use every day.
Using a phone? understand how computers and operating systems work and how networking works, at least at a basic level.
Brushing your teeth? Learn how to do it correctly. Understand the logic behind it. Do some basic research.
Own a car? learn how to maintain it, understand how it works, understand its limitations.
live in a house? understand how to maintain it, how to repair it, how it works, where your electric box is.
Etc. You don't have to be an expert on everything, but you should have a basic understanding of the things you use every day.
If you have recurrent anxiety-related chest pain and shortness of breath that has already been evaluated by a professional and conclusively determined to be non-cardiac in origin, here's how differentiate the two for yourself going forward:
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Think about what your panic attacks usually feel like. I'm going to describe some common presentations, but ultimately you need to learn YOUR body and what YOUR panic attacks feel like. If something feels wildly different than usual, go get checked out again.
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Anxiety pain is usually stabbing, heart attack pain is usually heavy/crushing. (In women, however, heart attack pain is often jaw pain and indigestion).
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Anxiety pain and shortness of breath usually gets better with physical activity and getting your mind off the pain. Heart attack pain gets worse regardless, and extra worse with physical activity. So when in doubt, call or find a trusted friend, and tell them your location and that you're pretty sure your chest pain is a panic attack, so you're going to go on a walk or fold laundry or some other light physical activity and want them to shoot the shit with you. They will hopefully help take your mind off things, and if it turns out it is a heart attack, they can call 911.
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Make sure you don't have GERD/indigestion/heartburn, and if you do, get it treated. Turns out that can actually feel exactly like a heart attack even to people who have had both, and it can actually be caused by stress/anxiety. I can't tell you how many of my psych patients get passed off as simply anxious when their EKG is clear, and it turns out its GERD! Bonus protip: skim milk is the best drink (aside from water) for GERD because the calcium neutralizes the acid, but there's no fat to be metabolized into more acid.
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A bicycle doubles your speed for the same effort as walking.
When cleaning your glasses, wipe from the temples towards the nose. That way you're not spreading any nose grease you missed across your lenses.
I just wrote a post about getting your life stuff in order. Its really important
Gender and sex are not the same thing. Gender is an emotion experience, sex is a biological categorization based on an individual's role in reproduction. Gender and sex needn't match. Gender can change (mine often does), sex cannot. Just like sex people do not have control over their gender, if someone's gender changes or doesn't match their sex it is not because of a decision they made, it is merely an emotion. So be nice to trans people, they're just people trying to not be uncomfortable living in their own skin.
Life gets a lot easier if you make an effort to be kind and understanding. You have to deal with mean people either way. Sometimes the person you least expect is really cool and will open doors for you. Don’t bother yourself with the little things. Don’t feel like every situation requires action, especially if you’re feeling emotional.
Always remember that this, too, shall pass.
I lost my kitty a couple weeks ago and I'm really sad and miss him so much, but I got 2 new kitties from the shelter and I'm so happy to have them.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The cucumber is a fruit, so a cucumber + tomato salad is a fruit salad.
If you think someone is a piece of shit just because you perceive their life to be better than yours, and they relate to your friends more than you do, you’re the actual piece of shit.
SCOTT
Well, to be honest, not that I can think of at the moment.
The cake is a lie
Most countries have at least a few dozen countries they can travel to without a visa and visas are easy to obtain anyway, so if you ever want to take a break from the rat race, all you need is a plane ticket to a destination with a favorable exchange rate, and with a thousand dollars of savings you can take a hiatus from working or work on a creative project you're interested in for months or years, depending on your lifestyle.
Its true that in life you need some luck. But luck can be made. You can carve the path and work hard for luck to come.
I kind of wish more people realized how much of everyday computer usage can be simplified with keyboard shortcuts. Take a look around your favorite apps/programs and/or Google for “keyboard shortcuts”, and try to build a habit of using shortcuts for some of the most frequently used commands. It's very liberating as it gives you a feeling of greater control.
For example, in Windows, did you know that if you pin your most used apps on the taskbar, you can access them using Win+1, Win+2, etc.?
In browsers, you can press Ctrl+L for the location bar (URL) and Ctrl+K for the search box. Ctrl+Shift+T will restore your last closed tab if you closed it accidentally.
Menus can be accessed with Alt plus the underlined letter. The File menu is pretty much always Alt+F. Many dialogs have elements with underlined letters too. We should demand this on the Web as well, as it's kind of becoming a lost art with fewer and fewer people knowing about it. It only takes an
accesskeyattribute!
