We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I recently took a poll about whether the American Dream is a myth or fact, and whether it's more achievable or less so today.
I know my views aren't the same as most, but I think my take on the American Dream makes it more attainable than ever. The American Dream is whatever you want it to be, and ultimately it's whether or not you're happy with yourself and your life. It's not money, it's not home ownership, it's not success or fame. It may be, if those are things you believe will make you happy. However, if you're happy and you like yourself and your life, then you've achieved the American Dream. In many nations, just surviving is a problem, and in many advanced nations, living your life with limited intereference from elites, politicians, cranks and other non-essentials is impossible. In the US, it's not impossible to go through life while limiting external interference, and focus on your own happiness. (Allow me to clarify - there is always external interference, but how you deal with it and react to it is what enables you to limit its impact on your life.)
So why do a fairly large number of people believe the Dream is no longer achievable, or that it is/was a myth? Why are there so many people who currently feel the Dream is unachievable, or less achievable than when their parents were younger?
As with accumulated sets of china, why not use your real silverware for everyday too? It is pleasantly heavy, lovely, and civilized. Should nice things be only for special holidays?
The youth do not care about china and silverware - or brown furniture either, nor should they. It's not practical. However, life is not all about practical. And we all have scullery maids to polish the silver, don't we?
There is a difference between Old and Antique. Nobody wants late 19th C/early 20th C brown furniture, regardless of how pleasant. It's fuddy-duddy, one of my daughters says.
Luckily, our Columbian painter's family loves our dining room table and chairs which were quite valuable decades ago but are unwanted orphans today. It is formal with all sorts of nice inlay like the tables in the White House. You can either donate them to Good Will, or pay junkers to take them away. Glad somebody will love it all because the kids will not.
We are replacing them with our 1960's amazing Danish slate table and some country-style chairs. I am no decorator, but Mrs. and her decorator pal can figure it out.
I will never get rid of my real antiques - Queen Anne bureaus and table and 1830's American stuff. They can do that when I die.
In the same vein, Mrs. BD has her cleaning helper going through all of the closets. Tons of nice stuff that she will never wear again. Dated, or whatever. Well, our energetic Polish helper wants all of it for her family and relatives, so that's great.
Come to think of it, I have too many firearms too.
Remember when experts were claiming "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day"? Perhaps that concept was paid for by Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
Of course, it is not true. Some people are hungry in the morning but as we have documented many times hunger does not necessarily indicate a need for food. Overweight people are always ready for a meal or a snack. Same for growing kids who need lots of food.
I like coffee for breakfast. While I do not lift weights, I can not argue with the need for 30 gms of protein after heavy weights. However, anything more than coffee in the morning just slows me down. If my work entailed manual labor, I am sure I would see it differently.
I will admit that, on vacation. I like European breakfasts. In Italy they might give you a hard-boiled egg, a little toast or mini-muffin, and an espresso or two. Nice. Or in England, a plate of bacon, black sausage, maybe some eggs and toast and jam.
The survey question is this: Do you routinely eat a breakfast and, if so, what sort of stuff?
In his science fiction novel Nemesis, Isaac Asimov describes a female character as possessing the "unloveable virtues": Serious, Practical, Responsible, Dutiful.
When I googled the concept, I found this: "Stan Asimov used to say that his brother Isaac had "all the unlovable virtues". Then, while describing a character in Nemesis, Isaac wrote "she possesses what someone once described to me as all the unlovable virtues"."
Life is easier now. Right before washing machines there were washtubs and washboards. In the US, I think this was women's work, good for toning the arms and burning calories.
The status quo bias is one type of cognitive bias that involves people preferring that things stay as they are or that the current state of affairs remains the same. This bias can have an effect on human behavior, but it is also a topic of interest in other fields, including sociology, politics, and economics.
By being aware of how the status quo bias influences your decisions and behaviors, you can look for ways to reduce the bias in the choices you make each and every day.
It is an anti-change bias, or an anti-risk bias. Surely it has some costs (and I do not mean financial). I know people who love change. It must be a bell curve of personality tendencies.
My bias is to resist change. It is a personality trait (perhaps not an ideal one), but maybe partly because I tend to be sanguine about my own life. I use the Serenity Prayer for additional support when needed.
On the global scale? World "stability" will never happen. Climates? Change will always occur over time. Re the latter, some change might be good but almost nobody discusses that.
Scientists discover laws of nature by acquiring evidence that some apparent regularity is not only never violated but also could never have been violated. For instance, when every ingenious effort to create a perpetual-motion machine turned out to fail, scientists concluded that such a machine was impossible – that energy conservation is a natural law, a rule of nature’s game rather than an accident. In drawing this conclusion, scientists adopted various counterfactual conditionals, such as that, even if they had tried a different scheme, they would have failed to create a perpetual-motion machine. That it is impossible to create such a machine (because energy conservation is a law of nature) explains why scientists failed every time they tried to create one.
Depending on what you want to hear, sound quality matters a lot. For background sound, or podcasts, it doesn't matter much.
For focusing on ambitious music, it does matter to me. Another factor is choices of music. I like to pick a CD, or sometimes even vinyl. If I am in the mood to hear Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, Can I do that with wireless?
The expert's conclusion: ... the best working speaker system will always be wired speakers. Their ability to transfer massive amounts of sound data physically from source to device without any interruptions will always put them at the top of the list. Just be sure to invest in a good set of amplifiers and speakers to complete the whole system for the highest quality sound.
I also want to mention that I feel the idea of surround sound is silly.
If you listen to our WW2 posts, you will learn that Craps was a popular pastime among soldiers. They played street craps of course, not bank (aka casino) craps.
Mothballs seem to be obsolete, because of their old-lady odor and some possible carcinogenicity.
Cedar seems to deter these bugs to some extent, but only if fresh or freshly-sanded. "Deters," not eliminates. There are moth trap things on Amazon. I do not know whether they can eliminate moths
Wool is what their larvae like to eat, plus spills in the kitchen pantry.
Have you ever faced culling the books you have accumulated in your cabin?
We are eliminating an overflow of bookshelves and books accumulated over decades. I kinda hate to do it with books (and furniture), but, on the other hand, getting rid of accumulated stuff makes our cabin feel lighter.
Found a few jewels on my kids' shelves, along with a few remaining textbooks for the garbage.
Examples of jewels:
-Intro to Paleoclimatology -Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh - I'm sure I read it but do not remember it - Biography of John Paul Jones by Samuel Eliot Morrison - Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I read it in youth (who did not?) but can't remember much about it. -Tristram Shandy: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), a comic novel by Anglo-Irish clergyman Laurence Sterne. What a crazy book, almost stream of consciousness. The sort of book that you can put on your pile and read a few chapters when in the mood because it has, really, no plot.
An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.
I recently took a poll about whether the American Dream is a myth or fact, and whether it's more achievable or less so today. 
Smartphones vs Cameras: Where things stand in 2022 and what’s to come