As someone who has successfully FIREd, I would disagree. If you are fortunate to be in a successful tech career and have a like-minded spouse, you don't need to do anything extreme to be able to FIRE. We only own one home that is comfortable but not impressive; we take care of our cars and drive them 10+ years; we leaned into hobbies that are cheap or money-saving (cooking, gardening, hiking, biking) and didn't get into owning boats or taking trips with first-class airfare and all-inclusive resorts.

I would say we "live humbly" and therefore had savings that covered expenses well before the age of 65. Part of our motivation was early retirement, but you can be doing the same thing without intent to retire early.

If it gets you to the point that you could retire early, then you were following a FIRE strategy, even if you weren't doing it with that goal in mind.

And if I weren't American and thus very familiar with classic American diners, I expect there would have been a lot that is new and interesting in this article & photo collection.

But still, if he is saying that for a national park, Gateway Arch is fine, but the Grand Canyon is about as worthwhile as Times Square Margaritaville and Yosemite valley is comparable to anyplace else in California, I have to believe this is rage bait (or disingenuous engagement bait at best)

When I got to that part, I was sure this was rage bait.

I ask because I do a lot of backcountry hiking, camping, and foraging and rely on true GPS-only navigation. My most recent two phones (iphone and pixel) have noticeably worse GPS performance than previous phones, and I even changed OS ecosystems mostly hoping for better GPS, but it didn't help. Maybe I've had bad luck, but two noticeably bad phones in a row seems like it may be a pattern.

And is there any way to find phones with very good GPS performance?

I'm also still unclear on how it was used to treat human illness (treating boats and roofs is clear enough)

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/

It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.

But making that judgement requires more cooking experience than a lot of people have, and executing on it requires the time & money to buy the more expensive stuff that has a shorter shelf life.

I'm pretty certain the flour used to make standard grocery store pasta is both refined and bleached. Even if I make it at home, I'm using refined and bleached white flour.

And my understanding is that should be considered fairly processed - the refining makes it less fibrous and easier to digest, which spikes insulin levels and is bad for gut bacteria etc.

I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.

I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?

Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.

I can't find a citation now, but I recall reading at some point that weight gain with age (in adulthood) didn't used to happen very much before the obesity epidemic, though nowadays we take it as a given. I wish I could find a source for/against that idea, I'm curious now if it's true.

I assume they mean circumference rather than diameter, but this is still a shocking increase in only 30 years. I knew the obesity epidemic was an ever-increasing problem, but this really puts it into perspective. I wonder if we'll ever fully understand the causes behind this rapid shift.

I enjoyed the writing in this a lot; I'll check out the book.

That early sentence "i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.

It's a very different but rather interesting puzzle!