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I am not my education/career/institution/pet project.

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My grandfather bought a new mf 165 in 60s. It is still going strong and used for productive work. It has even fully functional original tires! Always been stored inside and almost always handled with thought. Ergonomics suck compared to more modern tractors but it's just fine for small-scale work anyway, kinda fun actually.

That's true if you were just managing the home. I know that "homework" and caring for kids alone may sometimes be exhausting, but regularly allocating time for studying is usually worth it for everyone. I personally know two mothers who successfully changed their careers for better during their stay-at-home years.

I prefer managing my childrens' screen time myself rather than delegating yet another thing to some cold institution or those outright evil companies. Thankfully in my case they are usually more interested in real three dimensional things so there is very little to manage.

In my opinion screen time is like the worst reward for your child. Screens should be treated like inherently evil tools that can be of value if used with awareness.

The thing is, bad guys have guns too. You can't really defend against many thugs if they take you by surprise. Somebody could just wait somewhere near you house and snipe you, it's impossible to detect everything all the time if you leave your house or go near windows even once. And bad guys can use even explosives to break into your house.

Don't get me wrong though, since guns are extremely useful for defense and most of the bad guys aren't very tough. Surviving without a community in a serious scenario is just impossible.

The quality of general music teaching in schools varies wildly, and I'm afraid the average experience is not too helpful. As usual, some countries are better than others.

Personal anecdote from a medium sized generally pretty average school in Finland: we were never expected or required to know anything about music, the lessons in primary school were just listening the teacher play some simple melodies with piano (we weren't allowed to even try that precious instrument), "singing" random stuff (it was more like shouting, there were never any exercises or guidance), and occasionally listening some pop cds, no exams of any kind (which meant music was our favourite subject after physical education, drawing was pretty popular too).

I learned awk before Perl and it helped a lot. I still use awk (and sed) regularly but for more complex tasks involving regexes and such Perl is my favourite.

If you seriously consider enjoying "unlimited" social and health benefits of NZ, you may just retire immediately with $2M in bank and lead more luxurious life in most places in the world no matter if you are 60 or 20 years old.

IIRC $2M is enough to "buy" a Swiss citizenship too, so that kind of money really enables you to live basically anywhere in the world and you need a specific retirement plan only if you want to spend a lot of cash regularly for the rest of your life. Personally I would not even think about working to get paid anymore if I had even $1M, but ofc that's just me and my modest living standards.

Not the parent but anyway: my completely tech-illiterare parents have been using Antergos (which is based on Arch, and with Cinnamon) now for several years without any issues. They use only browser and email most of the time, but it's nice to have a always up to date system even though it does not matter to them.

I consider user friendliness mostly just a buzzword in linux world these days. Almost everything works out of the box and if not you still need specific knowledge and/or help (and willingness to google error messages) to solve the issue no matter what distro you choose. If you have some special hardware or needs then some distros are better and easier to use but that's another story.

Antergos is what I recommend these days to beginners since it's easy and simultaneously offers most (all) of the benefits of Arch. Modern rolling release distros in general are nothing to be scared of.

In ConTeXt many people use mainly lua for scripting. Not strongly typed but still an improvement. After the initial struggle ConTeXt also feels more integrated than just a system of TeX macros but that's just my opinion.

At one point patoline had promising future (ocaml is nice) but nowadays it's neither widely used nor under active development.

What resources you used to learn elm? I'm looking for a good book on 0.19 elm that is written to folks who can already program (probably even in functional style and just want to learn the specific tricks of elm).

Left pinky for ctrl (capslock) and right ring finger for L. Works incredibly well for my hands (a quality keyboard helps too). The capslock mapping is obviously meant for vim but works great for many shortcuts like this (ideally there would be a second ctrl/esc and other modifiers to operate with right pinky comfortably, starting my first custom build soon...).

There is not too much common with having a farm and having a homestead except (in most cases) rurality. To support your homestead financially you can be a farmer but you can be a software engineer too like I am. Farming is commercial activity to produce maximum amounts of "stuff" to sell others. Our homesteading usually produces some extra veggies too, but we share them with neighbours.

Nowadays a lot of the most boring and repetitive stuff can be optimised even in commercial farming. Chopping wood (and felling the trees with a chainsaw!) for the whole year, for example, takes less than a week of combined relatively relaxed and certainly not mindnumbing labor with modern tools. Personally I just often use an axe anyway since it gives a superb workout and I like it (I grew up in a farm so it has no novelty value for me).

Doing a lot of various small tasks that itself are boring and mindless when done commercially is really the best lifestyle I know. Of course, your idea of perfect life is allowed to be different.

There are homesteading purists who refuse to use even tractors and that stuff includes a lot more hard labour with little results. Oil has really changed the game and running a homestead doesn't have to be from zero to completely self sufficient in a year sort of thing. Especially those who haven't grown up in a farm (or homestead) need to start slowly to see if the reality of homesteading is what they really are after.

Equating serious concern of the effects of cheap foreign labour with racism is a wonderful way to prevent any meaningful discussion. Bonus points for antagonizing white people, that kind of pure racism is not really helping anyone.