Changing how we vote can do away with the spoiler effect, making third parties viable.
Then democrats wouldn’t have to yell at people online who don’t feel represented by the Democratic party. I wonder what they would do with all that free time?
Create a tentative schedule working backwards from that date. Include dates for completing main tasks.
Give extra time in the schedule for minor setbacks between tasks.
Give extra time in the schedule for a potential major setback overall.
For example, let’s say the goal is to paint a house:
I can say I want it painted in 2 months, so I set it for the date of 9/17/24.
I figure I can paint a room every other day, so since the house has 5 rooms total, I think I can start painting 10 days before on 9/07/24. However, I need to consider that finding and purchasing paint and equipment will take time too. I think about it and consider that paint shopping can take me 2 days since I want to try out several stores, so the newer date is 9/05/24.
Now, I add some room for minor setbacks between each task. Rather than assuming I will paint every other day, I add two days in between. That means starting on 8/30/24. This allows me to take my time with rooms, skip a day if I feel tired, or adjust if I the rooms take longer to paint than I had anticipated for whatever reason. I also increase the time allotted for acquiring materials because so many things can happen: traffic, tired, unhappy with selection, need time to test samples and ask people, etc. Rather than only include 2 days for this, I include a whole week so I can see the paint samples on the walls and see which ones feel the best. We are not starting on 8/23/24.
Lastly, maybe something major could happen, such as getting sick, the store runs out of paint stock, my car breaks down, or I change my mind on one of the paint colors after seeing it up on the wall. I might even realize that I completely overlooked tasks, such as rearranging furniture, painting over errors/accidents, and clean up. I would then add a cushion of 2 weeks to the schedule to allow for that should it happen. So the actual start date is 8/9/24. This is much sooner than if we had gone with the original start date of 9/07/24, almost an entire month!
With this style of planning, I can take my sweet time, enjoy the process, and not get stressed out if something unexpected comes up. If I finish early, then I have extra time to work on details or enjoy the rest.
Safety razors - I’ve got thick growth and I was spending more and more on expensive multi-blade razors trying to find a decent shave without the blade going dull after 3 uses. The answer was to have less, better quality blades rather than the expensive trash in the market. A safety razor multipack costs a pittance and has lasted me over a year. Each blade is 2 sided and can be flipped. And when you’re done with it, it can be recycled with no plastic waste. There’s literally no down side if you wet shave.
Electric screwdriver - it doesn’t matter how much DIY you do or how rarely you make IKEA furniture, you still need an electric screwdriver.
Brain hacks - your brain and body are predictable physical objects that are programmed a certain way. If you take the time to learn how they work, you can use that to your advantage. e.g. If you know that procrastination isn’t a time management problem, but rather an emotional regulation problem about the task that’s due; then you can start addressing the cause. Or if you want to build a new habit, you can combine it with something you like, to make you look forward to it (e.g. pick a TV show you really want to watch and only allow yourself to watch it while you’re on the treadmill). Or realise that discipline and motivation are finite resources in the day. There’s too much info to cover here, but I learn about these things from podacsts mostly:
“Good enough” tech - You will save a lot of money if you define your use case for tech and then buy a product that is good enough to do the job (and preferably secondhand). I’m currently writing this out on a laptop I bought last week for £150 from eBay, brand new condition Dell, Intel 8th gen i7, 16GB RAM and half TB NVME drive. My gym TV is a £30 IPS Dell monitor with a Fire TV stick.
Facebook Marketplace - make a dummy account for a facebook marketplace. I have bought tons of “like new” things in brand new condition (e.g. a whole home weights gym setup) for a fraction of brand new price. Also if there’s anything I want to get rid of, then I just post it for sale. I have had a completely worn out, cosmetically destroyed desk that I posted online for £1. Someone came and collected it the same day. It saved me a trip to the junkyard by having someone come collect it and saved the waste by going to someone who will use it. 2nd pro tip: never post anything for free. Scumbag entitled people monitor facebook for free deals and you will have a bad time. Post things for £1 and you’ll get serious people who will be grateful.
Accept what you can’t change - your life will be much better if you stop spending energy pushing against things you can’t influence. Traffic cop walking away after giving you a ticket? Accept the hit and walk away. You took a risk not paying for parking, it didn’t work out. Go home and tell your spouse about it; then move on with your life.
I have given away things I state are broken but if someone wants to try and fix them it’s free on Marketplace. I did not have to take one thing to the dump when I moved last time this way. The guy messaged me later and said he was able to get a new pump for my old espresso machine and get it working nicely, so good for him.
I fully agree on the safety razor! I got so frustrated with the multiblade razors. Since I tried the safety razor, I never looked back. And as a woman, I don’t have a beard or super thick hair, they work their charm just the same :)
I bought a 50 pack of feather blades and a 12 pack of arko sticks in 2014 and I’m still going through them. I’ve been shaving for a decade on like a $30 expense.
I’ve got a pre-paid, burner sim card for bullshit like this so I don’t have to use my real number for anything.
Keep a bullshit number, bullshit email address and keep bullshit name/DoB. The pro-tip there is to start valuing your privacy and stop giving companies your data.
This will sound stupid. But if you press your thumb onto the center of your hand, and then close the others fingers around and press, you’ll suppress your gag reflex.
This saved me when I had to take some medicine as big pills. Without this trick they often got stuck in my throat, and it could take me minutes to properly swallow. With the trick? No problems anymore.
Ooo, does that have something to do with how moving your arms like that flexes muscles around your throat? Is this an autonomic process like flexibg the timpani muscle when chewing?
I heard something like this the other day. Is it the same thumb as the palm? 'Cos I can’t press my right hand thumb to the palm of my right hand very hard.
If you have a goal to find something (eg. buy a car), write your goal down, including details like make and model. You’ll start to see adverts, special deals and cars of the model you want parked with for sale signs. There’s nothing mystical about this - you’re surrounded by things like that, but the specific act of writing it seems to tell your unconscious mind to bring it to your attention when you pass them.
If you’re looking at a used car, enter the vin number into Google. It will often bring up photos from any auctions it went through and you might see that it had been in a wreck and fixed without being reported to Carfax.
It’s a reporting system for vehicles so that the next owners of a vehicle know its repair history. It will also tell you if any loans or leins are placed against the vehicle, so you don’t get screwed.
One time I was in Mexico with my wife while our daughter was still a baby and the lady at the front desk of the hotel where we were staying offered us a crib we could borrow. It was a kind gesture, but I was a little concerned because the crib seemed wobbly. I realized there were some screws loose but though I had a multitool on me, the holes were stripped.
So later, I was talking with a local and he’s like “I can fix that.” He comes over and pulls a pack of toothpicks out of his pocket. He sticks one into each hole and breaks it off so that it’s not sticking out anymore. Then he drives the screw back in. I shook the crib after that and it was rock solid!
Now I always keep some toothpicks handy. Fast-forward to just this year. My daughter is now an adult living in a condo, and was complaining the screw popped out of a kitchen cabinet door when her roommate yanked on it too hard. “I can fix that.”
Another adjacent life hack is when assembling flat pack furniture, use a quality wood glue on all the joints and connectors, but especially those little wood dowels. It won’t make it indestructible, but it’ll hold up far better over time.
I’m so glad you posted this - my integrated fridge door has dropped slightly after being taken off and put back on when installed. Can’t really screw back into mdf/chipboard/whatever and I’ve been stressing about getting it fixed for months because whilst it’ll get worse over time, it technically works and no doubt the fitter would say I need to take the whole thing out and replace the side panel.
Sometimes fridge doors sag because the bushings on the hinges break or deteriorate. I’ve fixed them before by adding washers in place of the bushings, or cutting a new bushing out of a hard plastic cutting board.
Well the toothpick shifts to one side as you put the screw in.
The problem with a stripped hole is that the hole is now as wide as the screw, so the screw has nothing to grip anymore. Conventional wisdom in this case is that you should get a wider screw and try again, but that’s not always something you have on hand, especially when travelling.
But the toothpick hack takes it the other way. It’s effectively narrowing the hole again by taking up space in it, and now your same screw can work again.
You can do something similar with damaged metal threads, instead of toothpicks using copper wire strands. Project Farm has a video on the technique comparing it to other fixes: youtube.com/watch?v=jknMrFOGMOQ
To stop infinite scroll on social media, quickly scroll 2-3 screen lengths down without looking at the posts. Now read the posts scrolling up. Eventually you’ll reach where you started and most probably the laziness to go all the way back will prompt you to exit the app.
I changed the icon location, and my muscle memory still was trying to open them from the previous location, basically in a complete auto-pilot mode. That led me to a realization of how fucked up the situation was, and eventually helped me uninstall/reduce screen time of those apps.
For some reason I always have a habit of scroll to the bottom of any list and reading up. Like I wanna confirm how long the list is before working my way up
For water stuck in your ear after shower or swimming, what works for me is tilting your head to the side that is plugged and bending/unbending your knees (making your body bounce) until the water comes out.
Easier method, tilt your head towards the clogged side, and then pull down gently on your earlobe. This will let an air bubble past the water, and it all drains out almost instantly. No weird hokey-pokey dance required.
Whenever you are loading the washing machine, or hanging the laundry to dry/loading the dryer, don’t put the socks straight away. If you get one sock, set it aside, and wait to have the other sock before putting them wherever they need to go. This way you drastically reduce the amount of odd socks/ socks with no pair.
If you find a single sock when you’re at the dryer, look for it in the washing or on the floor; you know it has to be there because you make the habit of always loading the pair. If you have a single sock at the washer, don’t wash it; wait until you find the other one, keep it in your basket.
I wash all my socks together in a mesh laundry bag and then dump it out into the dryer. Much faster than trying to match wet socks when moving the load.
I have a specific bag that lives in the hamper and I put socks straight into it so no chance of running out of mesh bags or losing socks in the hamper :)