lostapathy

Gentoo made a lot of sense WAY back in a pre-docker world, where you had to run the whole world on the host OS. Being able to compile it all meant you could link it all together with whatever weird combination of optional libraries you wanted. Things like getting sendmail to auth over LDAP, that nobody packaged in the base distro, become possible. And with Gentoo's tooling, you could build a coherent distro to your own unique demands.

Now though? It's way easier to have a herd of unicorn docker containers running that each handle one weird thing in isolation.

2-wheel dollies with motorized stair climbers are a thing too. Not super common, but aren't cost prohibitive for a use case like this where they'd see daily use.

> The topic here is travel to small towns.

The solution is simple - plan ahead just enough to have enough charge to get back out of the small town.

> Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road

A level 2 charger adds about 40 miles to a Model 3 or Model Y in an hour of charging. I don't know what you drive that is so much less efficient. 8 hours on a level 2 would fill the battery, not just get you to the next charger.

> I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station You're being dramatic the other direction here - plenty of routes have you more than 15 minutes from a gas station, including the one I described in my prior post.

I'm sure there are places where it actually is a little tricky. Maybe more so depending on vehicles (Tesla does seem to be the best experience, by a lot). That doesn't change the fact that good EVs are just not a big deal to travel with anymore.

How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?

Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.

I think there's a common misconception by non-EV drivers that every charge you have to wait until the battery is full - you don't. You just have to charge enough to get to your next stop.

If you're in a small town with a level 2 charger at a city park, you just charge enough to get back to civilization. Then hit the fast charger when you're back to the main highway.

Yeah, it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning. And the built-in navigation takes care of most of it for you anyway. I was genuinely surprised on my first trip (again, through not-EV-friendly territory) how much of a non-issue it was in practice, and how much I didn't feel like I was waiting on chargers (even relatively slow "fast chargers"). I just took my time using the restroom, grabbed a fresh drink, checked my notifications on my phone, and it was time to head out again.

Just got a Tesla. I was worried about travel through western Iowa, it seemed fairly worst case looking at the map of my route, because I’m not on the interstate and the Tesla superchargers aren’t near my route. To my surprise, it was a non-issue. Modern EVs have enough range and there are indeed just enough chargers.

So what do you actually recommend?

Perhaps the kids that could be soccer superstars stick with basketball until they figure out they aren't tall enough for the NBA, but are too old or just never developed enough interest in soccer to become a pro at that. But if they didn't have that NBA dream growing up, they may well have become a soccer superstar?

This is probably less true than you'd think. Freak athletes are great athletes no matter the sport.

There's kind of a soft cap on NFL player height at about 6'5" or 6'6" - hardly anybody is taller than that. But the NBA is majority guys 6'6" or taller. That split isn't because all those kids got sorted into the right sport when they were kids. It's because if you're enough of an athlete to go pro and tall enough to make a living off basketball, that's a lot easier life with a longer career than playing football.

> Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.

This may be a function of the fact that no other women's team sport is at all popular in the US?

Honestly, I'd debate this.

The problem is the "handyperson" may "know" (but not actually) and do what they think they know. When I encounter the same task, I don't know I stop and try to learn the right way first. So there's a good chance the homeowner is actually on a better path.

A lot of the handypeople you hire, kinda by nature of being under-the-radar, also end up intentionally cutting corners where "it doesn't matter" because savings are a priority for their customers, and it can go too far. I, on the other hand, at least know I'm not trying to cheap out on my own work just because my last customers were broke and I'm conditioned to working in that mode.

The other trouble is that every handyman thinks they have a great handle on everything but have at least one blind spot where they do really, really stupid stuff.

Self hosting a mailbox is easy - getting email back out is the hard part.