Love the brutal honesty of your reply. I’d only add we need to focus on all the root causes (what we eat, breath, drink, not just smoke) as the primary longer term solution to dramatically reducing cancer from ever happening.

As a young airman working at the NSA I’d learn top secret passwords (they were all top secret, including mine) because people had to constantly type them in to work on those systems. Elsewhere in the military we insisted on random passwords changed every few months which meant no one ever memorized their passwords,…

While I do a daily Macrium Reflect backup on all my PCs, I’ve been happily upgrading my Microsoft OS, similar to your example. In addition when I upgrade my hardware, including the motherboard and CPU, I just pop in my old OS disk and let it adjust to it’s new hardware. I have on rare occasions restored my system from…

I stumbled across Wim Hof and in trying his breathing technique I’m convinced that there is something to all of this. I’ve just put a hold on Nestor’s book at our library.

I expected to get through an episode or three, see the plot pattern (demon of the week, etc) and stereotypical shallow characters (the cute girl, the nerd, the fighter, minority guy, bad girl, etc) then bail. Instead I loved each of the characters, their development stories. The plot line used fewer of the typical…

The music industry discovered that dropping prices and making it easier to stream music made more money for them than all their attempts at stopping free copying. The movie and series industry might think they have the right to make whatever the market will bare (with government paid help) but as long as it is too…

Ugh. I can no longer delete nor snooze mail with a swipe. It all defaults to archiving which is suspiciously like Google wanting to keep my emails so they can analyze them. Love the other toys but will be looking for a simpler client that makes me, not Google, more efficient.

I’ve done this for my kids whenever they’ve had earned income. Their income was small but we matched them 100% which went into their Roths. So it is not a lot but it is in an S&P 500 index fund and it will grow for a long time and they can add to it once they complete college and have full time jobs.

Keep in mind that the phone companies get paid for each spam call. It is like the US Post office gets paid to deliver junk mail, they love it. Allow me to ID a call (with a # code) as spam that results in the phone service having to pay a good fine to the FCC, then the phone companies would quickly find ways to reduce…

I backed up my old hardrive and then put it into my new computer. After a lot of plug and play actions by Windows 7, automatic internet downloads, and finally a few reboots, my new PC was working fine with all my data and programs. I did have to go through the “call our number” routine with the Microsoft licensing…

Nice, rock solid, fact based, boring ;-), advice. I was a poor kid who joined the military to help pay for college, who lived a frugal life (the other half of the FIRE equation) and retired early due to this kind of approach. When my young kids got summer jobs I matched their earnings by contributing to their s&p 500…

A couple of times I got a prompt from Amazon asking if I could answer a question that someone asked about a product I just bought. I think this confuses people and they answer “I don’t know” or similar and that ends up in the Q&A section. Something else Amazon needs to improve.

A few weeks ago I finally changed my Windows 10 laptop over to Ubuntu to avoid the carnage of one more Windows update. So far the battery lasts longer and since I use my laptop primarily with chrome, I’m not missing any Windows features (except the constant seeming productivity sapping updates). My desktop is still 10…

Ripped all my VHS and DVDs to disk many years ago. My library lives on a USB drive attached to my Windows Media center PC that lives in my family room. I automatically backup my library daily to another PC. I originally thought my library was obsolete with Netflix but Netflix changed and is unreliable as a source of…

I still use Amazon regularly but some time ago I relegated then to my last resort instead of the first place I go. It started when they sent me a box with supposedly three items and it only had one. There was literally no way I could tell them on their web site that I did not receive two items. Hilariously, I got a…

I loved Netflix for all those obscure sci-fi movies. I thought I no longer need to maintain and build my own library of movies. <sigh> I’m back to building. I still have Netflix as my college kids use it. I also pay Amazon Prime, Comcast, Redbox, and my local library for access to movies and series. I’ve paid so much…

I loved civ 3, hated 4, reluctantly played 5 hoping I’d find the magic again, and now I love 6 as it feels like they took off the parking breaks that were built into 5.

My observation is that”medical science” is really only good for offsetting the bad behaviors and bad environment that reduce our lifespans. We live longer not because of “medical science” but because it is already in us. I suspect that someone will not only beat 122 but will blow through it. And it will have nothing…

Civ V 833 hours according to steam. Yet Civ V is not Civ. Civ 1-3 reflected our world (I could never get into Civ 4). I could watch the news and better understand what was going on in the world because of Civ 1-3. Civ V is an alternate universe, fun to play, but too many arbitrary game features (such as religion —…