I’m not sure if I’ve made my peace with it, but my despair was something of a phase. Everything unfolding is too big for me to stop it, so I’m just along for the ride now. I think a lot of people haven’t really seen it coming yet, so there’s going to be a lot of wailing and public gnashing of teeth (and blaming Democrats) in the relatively near future.

But I don’t think the opposite of hope os necessarily despair. The despair is still present if I want to go looking for it, but I compartmentalize it most of the time, and focus on the things I need to do in the near-term. I still have plenty of responsibilities to execute. One foot in front of the other.

Enjoy what you can when you can. Be thankful for what you have.

In hard times, it’s overwhelming to live only in the present.

Incorrect as a general rule. I find the present plenty overwhelming, but it’s precisely because of the overall societal trajectory into the future.

There is some minor to moderate difficulty right now in dealing with high inflation, but that’s not the overwhelming part. What’s overwhelming is the obvious worldwide collective descent into madness and the terrible future in store for billions of people as we blow past old climate goals.

Even if we all somehow manage to rein in the fascism that’s not serving the interests of the majority and is spreading across the world, we’re hurtling towards:

• worsening natural disasters
• collapse of insurance markets
• collapse of mortgage markets
• collapse of food supplies
• dwindling fresh water supplies, both rivers and aquifers
• worldwide refugee crisis from unlivable equatorial regions
• martial law to suppress food riots and refugees
• likely development of autonomous robot soldiers that removes any possible balance for front line morality
• likely accelerating and compounding climate impacts through tipping points
• collapse of the AMOC
• melting permafrost methane release
• sea level rise inundation

That all seems fairly well baked in at this point, but none of it has really come to pass yet. The future bad effects are not yet actually part of the present, but the feelings of overwhelmedness that they induce are very real for anyone paying attention.

Mindfulness in the present is a good escape from the future.

Ok that’s kinda cool but this land sailing thing looks way more awesome than puttering around on the flat in my SUV. Still wouldn’t want to own one though.

Right, I’ll just pull over and get my landyacht out of the back of my truck. OP, is there a rental place for these in Primm?

Water supply is dire. The Colorado river is oversubscribed and most of the aquifers are being sucked dry for unsustainable agriculture. For the west coast (California) to break away it needs to take most of the Colorado river watershed with it. That means Utah, Colorado, and Arizona are critical.

Take some Yin Yoga classes. It’s a much slower pace than other yoga (holding poses for 3-5 minutes each), and a proper Yin class also focuses on mindfulness during the activity. The goal is to clear your thoughts and bring your focus only to your body and your breath. Different instructors will approach it differently, of course, and not all studios even offer Yin. Forgive yourself for a wandering mind, just observe it when it happens and then recenter your focus on your breath.

It’s also probably the best stretching you’ll ever do.

Ever since I first saw it, this one has given me a feeling of ye olde Burning Man. I think it does have to do with the human form broken down into blocky robot shapes iterating across the page, but also the fire ring rollercoaster of Sauron in the desert with mountain backdrop. I don’t know, I just like it.

It’s the most curved but it’s oak and so far it has been strong enough for my hiking use.

Only one of them features a piece of quartz at the top to concentrate the wielder’s magical energy.

I, however, have no such power, so it’s functionally just a stick.

Thanks, that one is my favorite! It does have some curve to it, but only in one dimension so it hides when leaning against a wall like this. But it does feel like the heftiest choice to fight off a coyote that wants my little dog for a snack.

I had a model year 2002 as well, and it went through head gaskets pretty reliably every 30-35k miles. The failure mode wasn’t catastrophic damage every time, but it wasn’t pretty. I think exhaust gases would start getting into the coolant especially when the engine got hot, so I’d be maybe going uphill and notice the temperature spiking. Then I could pull off to the side of the freeway and wait for 30 minutes, start out again and drive home slowly.

Subaru admitted a gasket design fault for something like model years 1998 through 2000, but claimed for a while that everything was fine in 2001 and 2002, jerking me around and generally being awful.

It’s too bad. It was my second car and I was excited for the reputation of reliability and capability of Subaru, but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that I’ll never buy one again.

If the carpool stickers had come with a 20 year guarantee then nobody could reasonably be upset about the rules changing later because “forever” turned out to be too good to be true. This would be like solar, except that they want to change the rules later anyway.

If they simply left the original EV carpool stickers grandfathered but stopped giving out new ones, people who missed their chance would be upset. But the program would have worked exactly as intended, to incentivize early adoption of EVs by giving out a priceless benefit. It should never have gone on as long as it did, but government reacts slowly.

You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.

You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.

I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.

I used to have one of those and loved it but 3 head gasket replacements was too many and it was time to move on. Good luck with yours!

Only in electric vehicles. Gasoline and diesel engines generate a lot of waste heat, which is why they have radiators at the front of the engine compartment for water cooling. The cabin heater in most vehicles is an optional air path though a small heat exchanger on the radiator water loop, so it’s as efficient as possible. That’s also why the car has to be running for a few minutes before the heat starts working.

This article strokes my confirmation bias!

I love my 2010 Toyota with 140k miles, and I hope it runs forever. I could afford a new car if I wanted one, but all of the options have been getting worse for years! It’s just a car, but it’s a car from the perfect era of technology to be stuck with forever, and it drives beautifully.

I wish it got better gas mileage by 2024’s standards, for both financial and environmental impacts, but I believe it’s net better on both fronts for me to keep driving it than to replace it early. Fortunately it doesn’t snow where I live, so road salt won’t inevitably rust out the undercarriage.

There’s an aux in for the factory stereo, and I have a $25 BLE audio adapter with a ground loop isolator so there’s no alternator whine despite it being powered by the car. It’s not the most quiet for speakerphone calls, but it’s perfectly functional, and I’ve easily replaced it multiple times. It’s so much better than having a bad native Bluetooth audio system from that era.

I have a really solid dashboard mount for my magnetic phone mount, comprised of pieces from three different companies for maximal awesomeness. Then there’s my USB C PD supply that meets the charging standards of the present day relatively inexpensively and upgradably to any brand, powered by the “cigarette lighter” power socket. The existence of this simple medium wattage automotive DC power port is the greatest legacy left to us by the tobacco smokers of yesteryear. Is it gone yet in the latest cars?

A really slick trick I learned somewhere (maybe on reddit during the good years) is to use tiny zip ties on a cable that must run across your dashboard, such as the one to my mag charger. Put them at very strategic locations on the cable and facing the right way, and snip off the zip tie ends while still leaving a tail maybe about 1/4”, then jam that tail in between two pieces of dashboard trim. Do that repeatedly and the cable will go neatly and orderly around all your buttons and knobs without ever getting in the way.

An aftermarket dashcam is one thing that felt very worthwhile but was actually a decent amount of work to install, since I pulled a bunch of trim and ran wires through the headliner for that clean look with a rear facing camera mounted on the outside of the back. But I think those aren’t quite yet standard other than in Teslas.

2010 was the pinnacle of car technology, change my mind!