morgan423

If you’re single, you can more easily downsize your life as much as you need to in order to save money.

I’m in my 40s and not single, but if I were, I’d be minimizing rent and expenses as much as I possibly could to get more money saved and invested.

Hell, people do crazy creative things to avoid rent, like intentional vehicle dwelling, or stealth-staying in storage units due to that being way cheaper than rent. You don’t necessarily have to go that extreme, but most single people have more going out than they realize they do and have some areas they can trim.

Increasingly, portion sizes are starting to come down a bit. The one-two punch of shrinkflation causing the restaurants to serve less, and the spread of GLP-1 drugs starting to help people eat less, are slowly whittling away the issue over time.

The only life hack that I use on a regular basis is covering toilet flush sensors with TP. It works pretty reliably to keep them from flushing until you’re actually ready to leave.

Figured that out earlier in life when a certain office toilet would wait until I was exactly 50% done peeing, so that I couldn’t stop or dodge, and then it would power flush and send up a nice germ-ridden uriney mist. Blocking the sensor until I was done totally fixed it.

Pretty much any other life hack that looked interesting to me has been effectively pointless and did not see continued use. I don’t think I’ve ever tried one that was detrimental though… just useless.

Oh no! Who could have possibly predicted that starting a new war in the middle east would raise gas prices?

If you’re doing consideration of past people, give consideration to baby Thomas Midgely Jr.

He’s the dude that effectively invented leaded gasoline AND chlorofluorocarbons. It can be argued that no other single human in history did more widespread damage to the environment than he did.

Hook it up to your living room TV, and make it your entertainment station? With a good set up, you can stream on it, play retro games and emulation, miscellaneous media… I could see it being much more useful than a standard Roku / Fire / et cetera USB stick.

I use Excel at work, not in a traditional accounting sense, but my company uses it as an interface with one of our systems I frequently work with.

Rather than tediously search the main Excel sheets that get fed into that system for all of the data fields I have to fill in, I made separate Excel tools that consolidate all of that data, then use macros to put the data into the correct fields on the main sheets for me.

Occasionally I’ll have to add new functionality to that sheet, so I’ll ask AI to write the macro code that does what I need it to do.

Saves me from having to learn obscure VBA programming to perform a function that I do during .0001% of my work time, but that’s about the extent of it. For now.

Of course most of what I do is white collar computer work, so I’m expecting that my current job likely has a two-year-or-less countdown on it before they decide to use AI to replace me.

The classics never die.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

I use a bunch of YouTube enhancing extensions.

SponsorBlock. so very, very good. First user into a video after it drops, who has this extension, marks the portion of it that is the YouTuber’s ad read / sponsor segment. Extension auto-skips it for every user who watches after. Saves a lot of time.

Multiselect for YouTube. Just what it sounds like, you can select multiple videos at once to add or delete from playlists, instead of doing them one at a time.

PlayerTube. Use approximations of player UIs from bygone years. I’m partial to 2013 myself.

Return YouTube Dislike and YouTube Shorts Block. Self explanatory from titles.

Others (non-YT) I use…

Change Case. I watch my keyboard and not my screen whilst typing, and this just lets me quickly flip large chunks of unnoticed caps-lock text back to normal once I discover it, rather than having to retype it all.

Simple Translate. Quickly run highlighted text through a translator on the right click menu.

It depends on what you mean by viewpoint. If they’re disagreeing about objective reality, 0/10. If we can’t agree on an objective level, there’s no point.

This is pretty much the crux of the problem right here. How are you supposed to have any kind of productive conversation about the world if they are living in a fictional one that doesn’t actually exist?

Is it possible to find a girl at the festival?

I’m going to say probably, considering that approximately 50% of the human population is female, give or take a smidge.

Airplane 2 (1 actually had pretty common “disaster movie” plot for the time)

Your fun trivia fact for the day is that Airplane! was actually a remake of a 1950s plane disaster movie called Zero Hour! Same plot, even long stretches where they go same plot points and sometimes even shot for shot…

Airplane! just had a tonal change caused by throwing a bunch of ridiculous gags in, essentially becoming a parody of its origin movie.

If you need a YouTube rabbit hole to fill a couple of hours of dead time at some point, well, there you go.

If they addressed the privacy nightmares that they are likely to present… by not being directly connected to the internet, by using a local and contained personal AI instance, by never being able to film anything with them without it being clearly obvious to others… then I’d be excited for that kind of tech.

But we all know that it’ll turn out to be the dystopian, corporately-connected, data-leaking version of the tech that’ll spread everywhere. So, I’m actually not really looking forward to it.

SB is my good friend. I love gaining my time back, and it does my heart good when I’m given the opportunity to give time back to others.

The simplest wind instruments are things like your basic wood flutes, recorders, ocarinas… simplest stringed instruments are going to be 3 and 4 stringed stuff like cigar box guitars, tenor guitars, and ukuleles. But none of them are just pick up and play.

Realistically even the simplest instruments are going to require at least 50 to 100 hours of practice and instruction to reach an advanced beginner / early intermediate level, where you start to be able to intuitively do things that sound good. The great news is that good YouTube teachers can help you reach that point, if you’re willing to put in the time and practice.

I learned to play guitar and tenor guitar in my 30s, and it’s been extremely rewarding to just be able to unwind and create some music whenever the mood strikes. It was work… but enjoyable work, if that makes sense? I liked the practice and getting the results of my progression. I’d definitely recommend learning to play an instrument to anyone with the time, patience, and inclination.

How will things be? Really rough and really dark, for several decades.

Hopefully we’ll all make it out to the other side, and see a (likely transformed) world trying to rebuild itself for the better.

I’ll use something real that I like about them, but to be clear, it’s still 99.9% money and 0.1% that other thing lol

Get a back and shoulder loofah and call it a day (not endorsing this one, just using it as an example of what I’m talking about).

We just might be able to stop repeating negative history in 60-100 year phases all the time, due to the overwhelming majority of people having living memory of those events, instead of a handful of people due to the restrictions of the human life span.