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I have never had success using Freecad or librecad on xubuntu. Tried a couple times and couldn't figure it out. I became very proficient in AutoCAD/inventor in school.

But qcad is very straight forward to use, runs on Linux, and is affordable. Unfortunately no 3D

Use the IRS free fillable forms. It autofills information from one sheet to the next and is pretty easy to figure out after reading the PDF instructions for each IRS form. Makes way more sense then filling bubbles on a tax website that always seem to use inconsistent wording to the actual IRS form

I bought an Alibaba well drilling rig for $3k plus shipping and tariffs. I drilled 130ft deep with it. It took months to fix problems the machine came with and get proper drill bits adapted to it. Then at 130 ft I hit a void. All the drilling mud that you intend to recirculate drained into the ground. This can be a great sign. Aquifers also can absorb liquid. But I couldn't drill further. I did some testing with an airlift pump out the drill stem. It seemed I hit an aquifer. I had to reem the hole larger and used bentonite at the bottom of the hole to restore circulation.

During the whole process the manufacturer offered little guidance. The user manual is just a few pages of poor translation. Their YouTube channel is disjointed 10sec clips of them drilling. The best advice I got was from a local retired driller that came by.

In the end, I still can't get water out of the hole. I drilled some geothermal wells next to my house so I can theoretically use those and not feel like it's a waste. I'm selling the machine and hiring a pro haha. That was a fun hobby for a year. I had better success on friends property's with shallower water tables where we could hand auger 30ft down to water for $100 worth of tools.

Also refrigerant has a very high carbon cost and installing piping on site between all of these appliances would require more refrigerant to fill those pipes and a higher potential for leaks.

President Garfield died from blood poisoning too. But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them and no healthcare to remove it. But Garfield being president had all sorts of excessive medical attention before proper sanitation procedures were common in US medical practice. By the way I've just read Candice Miller's book on him and find her writing style great.

The fact that doing a drug once compelled you to move countries and become a distributor for drugs does not convince me that it is a good idea.

I have a few friends who I just visited in that valley. They bought 40 acres for 5k and are starting to build a straw bale house. We augered a 25ft deep well with brackish water at the bottom in a afternoon.

Animals don't eat vegetables. They eat hay and grains that can be dry land farmed on undesirable land with minimal labor.

How did you learn freecad? I really want to switch to it from auto desk inventor but have spent hours messing around and can't even make a cube. The YouTube videos I was watching assumed I knew too much.

Biodiversity, I think is the biggest problem. The potato blight spread so rampently because mostly one clone of the exact potato was being grown everywhere. Some sort of rice or corn blight would be catastrophic.

Golden Rice is cool. And it's "nice" that the intellectual property owner has relaxed royalties for now. But it will be interesting to see how fast ancient local strains of rice disappear and there is less biodiversity. How hard is it to mix in a few greens with rice to get vitamin A?

You just said it. They do their shopping in Oregon. So they probably buy the bottles their tax free. Save ten cents on tax, spend it on deposit. It's a wash to the consumer.

It is cheaper to install solar than run electric. For under $2,000 I have built solar systems that power an efficient fridge, led lightbulbs, normal electronics, and the occasional power tool (even stick welding). Thats only ~2 years of power bills.

I've also made a well drilling auger and manually dug a drinking well for only a few hundred dollars in parts. Many offgrid people collect rainwater into a cistern and meet their water requirements. If these plots were small enough it wouldn't be unreasonable to have one well that supplies 10+ houses.

I have friends that have lived in the national forest for a significant amount of time. Know people who live in cars and RVs in cities. None of them are mentally ill or drug addicts. I know techies and rednecks who are held back by the cost of real estate.

The world needs a modern homesteading act. Give people small parcels of land with limited restrictions.

Real estate speculation/investing/absenteeism has jacked up prices in a lot of areas. This excessive ownership by some is subsidized and allows rent seeking and perpetual wealth growth. Land is not capital. Land is limited. Bare land should be free.

I used k9mail for awhile until I realized it had sent every temporary draft of an email as I revised something and changed between apps. Was super embarrassing. Hard to trust it now even though the ui seemed great.

I did the whole flip phone thing for awhile and you can load a version of google maps onto most phones that run Java applets.

Also, I worked on an epaper feature phone startup. But as a company we never got it to take off. I open sourced it to an extent but havent worked on it as much as I would have hoped. http://woodstead.org/epaper.html

But then if the password is reset, the original scammer has no access to the account! And the scammer cannot reset the password because they do not have access to the email.

I was just checking out the harbor freight air nailers. The main concern I had was for the triggers, the plastic seemed really thin and poorly connected. I'll have to check out this video

Sounds like what you can already bounce off amateur space APRS repeaters already for free. Just would be nice to have a few more.

You can add dense pack cellulose insulation pretty easily to an uninsulated house. Home depot rents the machines to do it. Use a hole saw at the top of the drywall, shove in the blower tube and fill the cavity up with low cost cellulose.

Hydrogen creation using electrolysis is really inefficient. Somewhere under 50%.

Not 50 acres. Give people a quarter acre to 10 acres. So they could still live in or around a small town.

Homesteading act could still be applicable in modern times. Ownership of real property is low and a large part of most American's budget. If people didn't have to pay rent and mortgages every month, everybody but banks would be wealthier.

I spent two years living on a small permaculture farm. The place took on wwoofers and so I got to meet a ton of young people who wanted to farm. But most couldn't afford their own land, so instead they roamed around and worked nearly for free for wwoof farm owners. It's a cool program, but unfortunate land is out of reach

The two times I have been with people with fake ish service dogs it made me way more anxious in public. I do not want to stand out. I would not want the stares or attention from a dog where it is unwelcome, cannot understand that these people actually feel better pissing people off.

I disagree. Currently, people's food and goods travel thousands of miles before reaching the user. Not too long ago, people grew most of their own food or it came within 50miles. With technology, it would not be hard for people to return to that lifestyle and still have many day hours to dedicate to intellectual or fabrication pursuits.

I am very in favor of Georgist style land taxation.

Industry was concentrated in these centers not by choice of workers. Peter Kropotkin makes a strong argument in "Fields Factories, and Workshops" on how the decentralization of manufacture would benefit the craftsperson.

There actually is a lack of affordable land. Rural land has been amalgamated by the agriculture companies, timber companies, and government. Buying rural land usually has to be done in large acreages and it is still expensive.

Utilities aren't needed. Solar is cheaper than running new electrical. Wireless internet is affordable and fast.

Henry George has some good ideas on valuing and taxing land. Maybe even negatively taxing the worse land.

Space is as necessary of a life resource as water and air. We should look at the 1800's and the Homesteading Acts as a template for a new land distribution program. There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere.

It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have enough space to grow a garden.

A fully open source RTOS that is trusted and only running this single application. The only external communication is the encrypted messages.