If you remove the arm, is it still a trebuchet? Even the current design is pushing definition of trebuchet. That said, a gravity powered supersonic whip-a-pult would be pretty awesome :)
It's hard for temperate folks to appreciate just how incredibly agressive tropical vegetation growth can be. I'm only subtropical but I've got a tree that's about 6 years old and a foot in diameter. And that's after I've topped it at 5 ft(0 branches left, just a stump) every 6 months or so just to try to keep it under control. If I'd let it run rampant it would be at full growth now, around 50ft and 1.5ft across. I had another tree that went from 10 inch seedling to 10ft and bearing fruit in 9 months. A field abandoned for 30 years in the amazon is 100% jungle.
Oddly enough - facebook groups are not terrible for very niche hobbies. Not sure what makes them attractive, but the groups are there. Thinking about it - there is really no alternative. My Retro Computing group is there, car owners group is there, very niche metal bands' posters group is there.
Or it's worth buying a decent power sharpener. One black friday I picked up a worksharp(1/2 in belt sharpener with jig) and it's right up there with the microwave and instantpot for being worth the money and space in the kitchen. A few times a year I sharpen every single non-serated knife in the kitchen (2 blocks) and it only takes like 5-10 minutes total. And yea having a few extra cheap chefs knives lets me push it to 6 months or so till I start running out of sharp chefs knives.
ER wait times are long because ERs are the only place in the country where we effectively have medicare for all, albeit in a particularly perverse and dysfunctional form. Everyone gets treated at the ER even if they're broke & uninsured as long as they're willing to wait long enough. Now imagine if those folks could go to any primary care doc or even use One Medical, CVS walk-in clinic etc. That would go a long way toward fixing our overloaded ERs. We've legislated quazi-medicare for all but only in the most inappropriate part of the system.
Agreed. We all collectively understand that we can't allow people to die in the streets because of their lack of health insurance. We already have universal healthcare, we just have the worlds dumbest way to pay for it.
Same thing you do if AWS goes down. Same thing we used to do back in the desktop days when the power went out. Heck one day before WFH was common we all got the afternoon off 'cause the toilets were busted and they couldn't keep 100 people in an office with no toilets. Stuff happens. And if that's really not acceptable, you invest in solutions with the understanding that you're dumping a lot of cash into inefficient solutions for rare problems.
Some teas(white and green particularly) are better brewed well under boiling, but even those lower temps kill 99.9...% of pathogens in a few seconds(vs a fraction of a second at full boiling)
same. I've settled on Empower + google sheets. Empower mostly as a free shortcut to pulling a dozen account balances in seconds. Sheets for keeping quarterly snapshots(in case empower goes away like mint did) and for turning those snapshots into a graph. Took a little setup, but then it's like 15 minutes once a quarter when I get the calendar reminder. Wish I had data going further back in time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with more detail/a full budget. The only things I've ever really cared about are approximate net worth/investment returns as a sanity check on retirement assumptions.
It's a weird hybrid. There is a connection to a persons earnings but it's far from what most people mean by a personal account(savings, 401k, IRA). It's closer to an annuity, but a very generous/flexible one that no private company would offer. The difference is minor for the never married but not for most people, and there are unusual cases. I know a guy who retired overseas, married a young wife and had kids. They get like 180% his benefit till the kids hit 18. Then assuming he's passed, the wife gets 100% survivor benefit at 60. I figure his SS account will probably pay out around 3x what it would if he was a bachelor, and that's strictly needs based not contribution based. If, instead, it was a 401k or a personal lifetime annuity at his personal benefit amount, their financial situation would be a whole lot uglier.
Life in the last century or so has become far less conducive to oral history with travel and entertainment. It's much easier to maintain an oral history when live storytelling & music are practically the only form of entertainment and your extended family has lived in the same place for many generations. Still it's not that uncommon even today. I don't know much about my mothers family but I grew up hearing occasional stories and genealogy about the famous ancestor on my fathers side despite the fact that he died over a century ago on another continent. And boy oh boy did we get an education when we went back to visit the old family farm...found out I was related to him at least 2 different ways, as well as half the people on that stretch of road and the hotel owner in town. It seemed like there wasn't a person in town who couldn't tell you their connection to the only really significant person/even in the towns history.
