I would say not all birds sing, mainly just song birds sing. Lots of other birds don’t sing either like crows, woodpeckers, jays, pelicans, eagles, hawks, owls, etc.

Note: I’m not any kind of bird expert, so it is possible some of the birds that I listed have a song-like call that I’m unfamiliar with or am forgetting about.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived in the US you tell the electric and gas company what date you’ll be moving in or out. The power and gas are normally already turned on and they just switch billing to whoever the new responsible party is.

In Georgia (USA) you have the illusion of choice in a “deregulated” market. In reality, there is a single gas provider and you get to pick which company provides billing service to you. Each company advertises a rate to “compete” with each other, this rate is added on top of the base rate that the actual gas provider charges and then they charge you a service charge on top of the that ($5-6 per month) that is not advertised.

The base rate is the same no matter who you choose. And the base rate plus admin fee make up most of your bill, so the advertised “competitive” rate is basically meaningless. Also, you have to sign a contract or you pay a variable rate instead of the advertised rate, which is MUCH higher. Also, there are big discounts for “new” customers (lower rate, monthly bill credit, cash back visa, etc.), so after the first contract period your price goes up quite a bit.

So you need to change providers every 6-24 months (depending on contract length) in the month before your contract expires. Otherwise your bill goes up because you either switched to the much higher variable price or lost your new customer discount. Or if you switch early, you pay an early cancellation charge.

Also, if you ever have any issues with your gas lines, you have to call the actual gas company to get assistance. The company that you pay doesn’t actually have any technicians or anything and provides no other service than billing you and paying the real gas company their share of the bill.

I’m so glad I don’t live in Georgia anymore for lots of reasons, including this.

Yes, this is the answer!

That looks like a super car with a healthy 6-figure price tag to me.

Yeah, I was guessing that one might be way worse than that. When my kids were born, it was cheaper for my wife to quit working than to pay infant rate child care, but that was a long time ago.

I was curious what this might look like, so I ran some numbers. It would be easy to hit this in a high cost of living area where rent will easily run 5-6k per month, but what about a medium cost of living place? I assumed a family of 4 with both parents working for 75k each and a 20% total tax rate (FICA, federal, state). All of this is based on what I know of typical cost of living items in the US.

After Tax Income (monthly) 10000

Housing 2500 Child care 1500 2 Car Payments (25k each) 1000 Groceries 800 Medical (incl. insurance) 800 401k (6% deduction) 750 2 Student Loans (30k each) 700 Utilities 400 Auto Insurance 300 Total Core Expenses 8750 Leftover for Discretionary 1250

So, you’d have 1250 per month to cover clothing, auto fuel, dining out, pets, fun money, subscriptions, activities for the kids, gifts, etc. You could easily run that to zero or below every month.

Now, there may be some room to cut in this budget, like not funding your retirement and giving up your 401k match or living in a much smaller home. But I would also say some of these numbers are very generous. Rent could be over 3k, most people don’t have a 25k car loan, if you own your home you can get hit with random major repair costs, and probably most parents would laugh at my estimated child care cost.

I think a key takeaway here is that kids are really expensive. Aside from the child care costs, most people with kids will want a little more living space than is doable in an apartment and kids go through food and clothes like crazy. You could probably chop at least 2-3k per month off this budget if it was a couple living in an apartment closer into the city core, with shorter commutes and maybe even options for public transit, biking, or walking.

You can pressure cook frozen chicken in an instant pot.

Oh, that makes sense!

The tall one in the back looks a little inconvenient. Are you growing native prairie grass in there?

Not even a little bit true for me. I listened to pretty much only country at 14 and I don’t listen to any country now, not even the stuff I liked then. By 16 I had switched to mostly rock & alternative. I will still listen to that occasionally, mostly for nostalgia, but it isn’t on any of my playlists. I suspect most everything on my regular playlists came out after I was 30, but it continues to shift forward over time. I suspect eventually most of my current playlist will age out too.

I love this cover!

If your unit is a heat pump, are you then paying for that savings in the winter when it doesn’t benefit from any solar warmth to help heat your house? If so, I wonder if it is a relatively balanced outcome or if one of the seasons has a bigger impact. I imagine it depends in part on which season is more extreme in your area.

To some extent this isn’t new. Lots of companies stopped hiring entry level positions ages ago and just hoped to hire employees that other companies had already developed.

I bought the first one for $20. For the second I’ll play on Game Pass, if it is available, or again wait for $20. Maybe even less if I forget about it, which I might.

Someday, that’s what we’ll be sold as “The Singularity”. Some company like Apple or Google will offer us ascendance into the cloud, but we’ll actually just become digital slave labor.

Yeah, my only major criticism of the game is the way they handled difficulty settings. “Story” mode still requires you to learn the mechanics and play the way they intended. It should have been called “easy” or “casual” or something and had a separate “story” mode that is really just about enjoying the story without any combat difficulty.

I don’t really enjoy turn-based combat or quick time events, so this game would have been a complete pass for me, but I decided to check it out on Game Pass and I really liked the art, music, and story. I ended up modding out all the combat challenge so I could enjoy it anyway, but it would have been better if I could tweak it through the settings and maybe end up with something a little more balanced.

My favorite mod to the game is increasing the parry time.

I streamed it on Game Pass for about 30 min and was bored and quit after the first level. I’m not really the target audience, but I still expected more.

It drives me nuts that my state has “deregulated” natural gas. All natural gas in the region is supplied to every home by a single company (the same one as before deregulation). I pay at least $35 a month all year just for the privilege of being connected to it.

BUT, I don’t actually do business with that company. I get to pick from a dozen companies that all provide front-end billing for my natural gas. They advertise how much they will charge per therm used (plus an admin fee), but that price is on top of what I pay to the company actually providing gas. If I have an issue with the gas, the supplier comes out to deal with it, not the company I pay every month. And, I have to change companies every 6-24 months to maintain the advertised rates, otherwise they increase my cost after the new customer price expires. Its fake competition that added an extra step to the process and increases prices compared to the regulated version that used to exist.