kungfooey

Good lord, I nearly died at “horsepunk.” It’s a western, yo. I agree that it’s a great read.

Yes, he was in Europe at the time. Chernow's biography of Clemens, while ridiculously long (audiobook was > 40 hours) was also very good and spent quite a bit of time on this.

I do suspect financial losses were a big contributor -- but part of it wasn't just that he lost _his_ money, but also his wife's inheritance. Of course, even aside from this money-losing invention, they were quite the profligate spenders.

I hope those trucks become white elephants.

I haul a lot of dirt, hay, etc for gardening and drive a 1993 Ford Ranger. Even the new Rangers are twice as large (sits higher, taller, and wider) and the bed is 1-2 feet smaller. I just really don't understand the appeal from a usefulness perspective.

I live about a half mile from my kid's school and we walk most days, or I bike.

However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road.

Even the sidewalks we _do_ have on our route are paltry... about 3 feet wide and immediately adjacent to a busy 30 mph road. We sometimes walk in the grass next to the sidewalk, and I actually had one neighbor yell at us to "Get out of the yard, get on the sidewalk." That one took the cake for me.

So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons people don't walk to work, but one of them might be that everyone and everything assumes you're supposed to drive in a car and idle in the parking lot for 20 minutes rather than walking. Walking can be _stressful_, especially if you're doing it with multiple kids (which I often do).

There is a shockingly large group of us trying to figure this one out. See reddit.com/r/dumbphones community as an example.

This is the whole thesis of the (very good) book by Bryan Caplan, "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."

(Noting that this is US-only.)

While I'm glad to see this, it appears this article is from February. I guess this hasn't gotten much press?