791–800 of 1001 posts
Peeling bananas. I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8svUCSuMS4
One of the worst thing I did for many decades was drink bottled water and/or tap water. For many years I bought bottled water for home consumption. I eventually learned about under-sink reverse-osmosis water filtration systems and invested in one. For the last ~15 years, I've used such systems, following scheduled filter replacements. The water tastes and feels better than bottled water. Last year, my county water ut…
Typical reverse osmosis filter systems have to throw away 1x-3x the amount of water filtered, which could be quite wasteful depending on your water usage. It also removes many minerals which some people then have to add back into the water. With the water shortage issue in California, I decided to switch to just regular undersink water filter as a replacement for bottled water instead of reverse osmosis.
If you have hard water, I suggest a whole-house water softener and reserve reverse osmosis for the kitchen.
Re: remineralization. Ick, I just skip these. They taste awful to me.
Staying warm. In the winter, I used to stay warm by turning up the thermostat. Then I discovered (via HN) the Low-Tech Magazine article, "Insulation: first the body, then the home." [0] The article argued that it's much more efficient to focus on heating yourself rather than your whole living space. I invested in high-quality wool clothes that I wear in layers and warm slippers. Now, I keep my home about 5 degrees F…
Typing. I've always been a self-taught hunt-picker, but for some reason, as a teenager I picked up a terrible technique that involves using thumbs for keys to the side of the spacebar. Later in life I trained myself into touch-typing (and then to use Colemak), but for some reason I can't seem to shake off this annoying thumb bit.
And in fact I'd find it very hard to hit something like Cmd+Q with just my left hand if I use the pinky for Cmd.
Oh! Another! Car side mirrors. I spent more than a decade of driving adjusting them wrong. You want them so you don't see cars behind you at all in your side mirrors until they're transitioning off the edge of your center rear-view mirror. This gives you far more coverage of your sides, and every car is still visible in at least one mirror at all times. For me, where I put my seat, this usually means setting them as…
Most people's side mirrors are filled with their own car which tells you nothing.
In my late 30s, I learned that I'd been tying my shoes wrong my entire life.
I used to be a NIMBY. I thought small neighborhoods that have nice characteristics should never evolve or change, I thought places with tons of people were unpleasant to live in, I looked down on people who could afford market-rate new housing ("evil techies"), I thought new development increased rents (it doesn't). 20ish years later, seeing the homelessness, property crime, and housing crisis in the Bay Area, I am c…
Our homeless crisis is determined by factors unrelated to the amount of housing (though it used to be, and it’s important to build new housing in general) - nowadays we actually import homeless people to places like SF.
As to San Francisco homeless coming from outside the Bay Area, that's true for only around 10% of the population. Most (70%) became homeless in San Francisco and many others became homeless in other parts of the Bay Area. See the `PLACE OF RESIDENCE` section from https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
A little context: Growing up, no one ever talked about managing their money. No one had any money to manage. Everyone in my circle lived paycheck-to-paycheck. Any talk about money management was for rich folk, and that wasn't us. So basically, I never learned any of this stuff. Next, my career hit its stride right after the Enron scandal, and then the early-2000s dot-com meltdown. So I just saw investment/retirement accounts, and the stock market in general, as a big con to steal my money. (If you don't know about the Enron scandal, and you wanna be depressed, read up.) Anyway, I was full of FUD, and I was just gonna keep stuffing money in my mattress.
Then, a random conversation with a trusted colleague led to him spending an entire afternoon explaining it all to me. He explained that his various investments were extremely low-risk, and he was still making thousands every year, and that my mattress-stuffing strategy was leaving a lot of easy money on the table. It was the way he explained it all, and the fact that I trusted/respected him that changed everything for me. I'll always owe him.
I used to assume the religious people were missing something and missing out on the latest and greatest. Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious that have lost something of value and are trying to replace it with things that don't work as well.