Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715230

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It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.

Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.

I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.

He recently missed several notifications from his truck’s dealership that the part they ordered was in and ready for installation, because they sent text messages that he didn’t read, instead of ever calling and leaving a message when no one responded to the texts. I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.

He’s fine flying as long as one of us can buy the ticket for him and he just needs his ID at the airport; I dread the day airlines start requiring their stupid apps.

He also developed several important surgical techniques and operated on cancer patients at a time when that was considered an absolute waste of time and resources, and that latter thing caused him to lose his position at the hospital he had founded, after which he started the first cancer hospital.

Shockingly unbureaucratic for Germany.

There is, as one could imagine, somewhat more burden for larger systems that require the involvement of someone who is actually an electrician, but I don't want my neighbors to be able to DIY fire hazards.

I am right with my late grandfather, a Baptist preacher, on the subject of gambling after watching people back home constantly checking their phones during the college bowl games and periodically sighing and cussing over the performance of teams they had never cared about before.

Between the 24/7 gambling and the easy answers machine being in their pockets (“well, ChatGPT says…”), the resulting brain rot hurts my soul.

To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.

"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.

Until the past century or so, “eat up the available food while available” was generally a plus for survival for most populations - a person who could keep some of that excess around on them was more likely to survive a famine than their leaner peers.

Even my grandmothers (born in early 1920s Texas) remembered not always getting as much to eat as they wanted as children, and it wasn’t because their mothers were afraid of them getting fat - there just wasn’t any extra food. One of them likely did have a caloric deficit a few times here and there around age 10-12, and it showed: she was rather small.

One of my grandfathers lied his way into the Army at 16 just to be one less mouth for his mother to have to feed.

We’re really not that far separated from “eat all the food” being a health benefit.

Antibiotics are definitely prescription-only, as are birth control and morning after ("Plan B") pills. I was once able to talk an airport pharmacy into selling me an albuterol inhaler without a script in hand, but only when I promised that I'd had it before and explained how to use it, and that I was about to get on a flight.

Get used to using public transit, if it’s at all an option for you. Going down to being a one-car household instead of two saves us at least 5k EUR per year, even counting the additional cost of two unlimited local transit passes.

Avoid habit-forming conveniences like restaurant delivery, and instead learn how to grocery shop with a list and to cook things you like to eat. If you’re really pressed for time, order your groceries online and pick them up, or get them delivered (that’s an easier thing to back away from if money gets tight than restaurant delivery).

Develop non-consumerist hobbies, where you can get a lot of enjoyment out of little marginal expenditure. I’m partial to fiber arts (free/cheap sheep fleeces I clean with dish soap, then spin and crochet/knit), but there are plenty of relaxing ways to spend time that don’t involve spending much money or being convinced to spend money (like most media consumption - everyone is susceptible to advertising, to some extent)

But yes, it's disgusting that ICE has access to that data via Palantir, or that this data is being used for anything other than administering Medicaid.

Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.

Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.

Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.

If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.