Fabricating (or not) disadvantage and fear helped me to quit smoking four years ago. It came down to basically two things: health and money. I contracted bronchitis and didn't have insurance and lay awake all night coughing knowing my cold wouldn't have developed into this if I hadn't been smoking, and fearing it…

@izikavazo: yams are purple on the outside, white on the inside. sweet potatoes are orange! Definitely interchangeable in the same way you can do the same with potatoes.

Work up to it slowly! Sometimes I get a cereal that doubles my daily morning dose, and I'm gassy all day. :( Not pleasant.

I forgot to mention this. Doing hot yoga regularly (at least once a week, it gets expensive) got me quite wiry. I don't really know what happened, but a lot of the dermal (?) fat overlying my muscles went away and over a period of the first 2-3 months I started being able to see this muscle tone I'd never seen before.…

@Wes: Is it possible you're not eating enough? I'm moderately active - I play team sports 3 times a week, cycle to work (not very far, but still a pleasant workout), throw in a 5k run and hot yoga on the odd week, and I'm fairly trim. I eat massive amounts of vegetables (stirfries and roast veggies are da bomb). My…

@unwallflower: since you have such a big budget, though, I'd say get a thinkpad. I got mine in 2006 and it still works (although I have scrubbed it in favour of ubuntu) and I love it. I have the 14" T60, and it doesn't feel like a come-down when I'm mobile and off my 21" monitor at home.

@ocdude: heehee, as a university educator, it's a sure sign that work has been plagiarised! Copy/pasted chunks of text, hyperlinks included, different fonts, different font sizes, different paragraph spacing and alignments... Ah, the things you'll see..

@MattyMattMatt says use UserScript 'Gawker Media Redirect': It tells me they no longer support my browser. I'm confused. I'm using firefox on ubuntu. hmm..

@General_Gozz: I thought it was a coke or something. I vaguely remember him pouring it out of a coke cup...

@bloknayrb: mmm, it's just a reaction to "how do we deal with rising gas prices that probably aren't ever going to come down", right? "Use less gas" is one solution; I'm also offering a different way to look at it - ie. "stop thinking of gas as a cheap, readily available and easily affordable thing". Which would mean…

Clearly this is idealistic thinking, to try to reverse the consequences of easily available and affordable transportation along with the kind of lifestyle (suburbia in particular) that emerged from it. But not impossible.

Even if we removed the subsidies, it would make quite a big difference, wouldn't it?

Imagine if we paid and were paid for the actual costs of labour, and the goods and services that we consumed. what a bizarre concept! I can't even begin to imagine it!

Ah! You're right of course. Perhaps another incentive to stop consuming so much petroleum is to keep our money out of the pockets of these companies. ;P

I see what you mean, but it is - as you say, a luxury to begin with. With this mindset, people would think twice about seeing it as some kind of cheap, commonly available good, and would therefore seek out alternatives before turning to this. This is how you would minimise expenses. The "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra…

This is going to be quite unpopular, but how about changing your mindset about how cheap gas is? Gas is, and should be expensive - consider all the work that went into producing the gas that fuels your mode of transportation. Gas in North America is the cheapest I've seen in many countries. Maybe just reconsider that…

Does it really take so much effort to say hi to somebody before you talk to them?

Lately I've gone the school of Don't-clutter to save money. Stop buying shit. Just stop accumulating stuff.

Students are adults - they should act professionally

Earplugs and eyemask. And a thick, brainless book.