I going about the shelter thing, a few years ago they did a study and there was not a single shelter for men in the country.

And I get it, it’s important to take care of women, sure, but when somebody tried to start a support shelter for men there was a massive public outcry about it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/brooklyn-residents-protest-proposed-men-only-homeless-shelter-in-their-neighborhood-it-s-going-to-be-a-war/ar-BB1k9dcj

And even if you had the time and inclination to for instance start a men’s only gym, why would you risk all of that time and effort on the odd chance that you would offend a person who has a following and knows how to raise a Battle cry and next thing you know you’ve got a hundred angry protesters outside of your gym even though there are five female only gyms within walking distance because you have a men’s only gym.

It’s much easier to create a space that’s just slightly uninviting for the average woman and then let the chips fall where they may.

It’s easier to pass the buck and say somebody else will take care of the guys. We don’t need to build men’s only shelters. Guys are more resilient than women. Guys aren’t as at risk as women are. Guys are shitty people in general and life gives them so many breaks, they don’t need any additional support while there are still women who have needs.

Let’s not start a men’s only club because all it takes is one woman getting upset and suing us for discrimination and next thing we know we are out $250,000 in lawyer fees all because we wanted to have a boys space.

Let’s just let all of the men suffer in silence forever and ever. They’ll be okay they’ll just rub some dirt in it and move on.

I’m a little salty. But I can cope. But I still feel emboldened to express that I dislike the inequality and I wish things were a little better.

If meatloaf was made out of chicken it would still technically be meatloaf.

Anyone can say things that are technically true while missing the point completely.

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It’s got to stick eventually, right?

I would say the most polarizing thing I’ve ever said at least in an online community is that there should be spaces specifically for men to congregate where they can talk about their issues among like-minded men.

This was in response to me discovering that of the eight gyms within a 10 mile radius of my home, three of them are all gender gyms and five of them are women’s only gyms.

Of the associations in my area, places where people of like-minded orientation congregate, 4 of them are all gender, 12 of them are female only.

There are no male only semi-private spaces that I can find within a 25 mile radius of my home and I live in a city of over 500,000 people.

Of the multitude of homeless housing, homelessness support, soup kitchen, and other resources for the incredibly poor and disaffected, roughly half of them are explicitly female only, and all of the remainder are all gender with a preference for supporting women.

To me this is especially terrifying because of the homeless population that I have encountered only a vanishingly small fraction of them are women. The great majority by and far of the maybe 40 or 60 homeless people I have seen in the last year have been male.

If it is okay for women to have women only spaces why is it not okay for men to have men only spaces?

If it is okay for women to receive women only support, why is it not okay for men to receive men only support?

Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

I get that you are saying that after a person becomes a financial burden on the population that we should get rid of them and save the resources, but that’s very short thinking and it’s a very selfish stance and I get why you’re sharing it now because the question was what’s the most polarizing thing you’ve said and my response is very polarized because I feel like you and anybody who agrees with you should be excommunicated from society and put onto a small island somewhere where we never have to deal with them ever again.

Apparently it’s hydrogen peroxide and not baking soda but I am not aware of hydrogen peroxide being especially toxic.

You can definitely empty them and put them back, you just have to replace them when they tear otherwise all it’s going to do is suck the dust up off your floor and blow it around inside your vacuum, contaminate your vacuum fan and motor and eventually render the vacuum cleaner inoperable and possibly flammable.

There is a treatment for that that involves like baking soda and aluminum foil and UV light. I think it’s called retrobrite. Might be worth looking into but at the same time if you’re going to do that you might have other repairs you would need to make on the machine.

The house I grew up in.

I’ve told this story before but the house was built in like 1976. A freak tornado came down and tore it down when it was 3/4 completed. The builders got the insurance and built it again and when they finished it it caught fire and burned to the ground.

The builders got the insurance and built it again and another tornado came through and destroyed it a week before it was supposed to be completed.

In pythonian fashion the fourth time it stayed up, but one night I was down in the basement doing laundry on a dark and stormy night and I saw a movement to my right. A man in a full trench coat and wide brimmed hat was standing next to the water heater. I screamed as any preteen boy would and the man walked around the water heater and dis a fucking peared.

I ran upstairs screaming there’s a man in the basement there’s a man in the basement and everyone came down to look and there was no man in the basement. The doors were bolted locked from the inside.

A few years later my mom built a room into the basement and turned it into an extra bedroom. My sister woke up one night with a woman clad in all white with long black hair holding her feet down and crying and crying and crying.

She screamed and the woman disappeared.

My mom still lives in that house and will probably die there. That house is fucking haunted and was haunted before it was ever built.

I’ve told this story before and my friends have said maybe it was built on an ancient Indian ground or something and to me that is hilarious because I am native American so why the fuck would they bother me?

I don’t truly in my heart of hearts believe that selling your soul to the devil is possible. The logical Christianity in me says that anyone who would offer to sell their souls is already likely going to hell and so the devil has no need to purchase, and that is further tempered by the idea that All souls are the property of God and you can’t sell something you don’t own.

That being said, if I had to pick one person on this planet who I had to testify before a grand jury that I believed they had sold their souls to the devil I would pick Donald J Trump.

The man has no skills. He didn’t even write his book The art of the deal. He was born into wealth but many people are born into wealth and fall into poverty and yet somehow despite an entire lifetime of financial ineptitude he is still wealthy.

He has done so much shady shit that any person who did not have the protection of a dark force would be in prison right now for and he is currently under indictment for several Grand felonies and he still running for president and still has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

He has 35% of American voters believing in him. Nearly 100 million people willing to throw their once every 4 years chance for deciding the fate of America to him.

His wife is a model and even though he’s cheated on her credibly with a pornstar, Stormy Daniels, and had a lawyer pay her off with election funds, she has not divorced him.

If Donald J Trump is not the servant of Satan, signed and bound in an eternal contract, then the fact that he exists is a scathing indictment of the flaws of modern capitalism and why the whole system should be burnt to the ground.

I’m going to keep saying this until it sticks. The most profitable and valuable thing that human beings have ever discovered or created is information disparity.

Everyone basically knows the phrase that knowledge is power, but very few people know how to capitalize on that power.

The way that you capitalize on the power of knowledge is through information disparity.

Say for instance, you are at a flea market. You see a very good quality copy of action comics number one with Superman on the cover. You ask the seller how much they want for it and they say oh those are my sons old comics, I’ll sell you the whole box for $5.

Anyone who knows anything about valuable stuff knows that action comics number one is worth it the minimum a million dollars in decent condition.

Now you know that for $5 you can get a million dollars. That is how knowledge is power. That is how information disparity works.

Find ways that you can use information disparity in your favor (without bilking kindly old ladies out of million dollar antiques preferably) and you too will find yourself far more successful than your actual skills and abilities would otherwise qualify you for.

How is your insulation between your ceiling and the roof?

A radiant barrier helps but it’s not going to be a match for fully functioning r22 batting or anything.

And you might want to consider replanting shade trees now that the old ones have been removed. Once it’s the same height as your house it puts out as much equivalent cooling as a window air conditioner, and during the summer that’s money in your bank.

And honestly, since you live in Texas and you’re paying $285 a month for electricity, looking into some sort of solar might be well worth it.

If you have a larger property like my dad did down near Austin, you could probably do a ground mounted solar install and save a lot of money on the installation which is where with current rates the majority of the costs go to installing solar.

My usual commute to work is like eight miles. I’ve considered purchasing an old leaf just to use to drive to work and back. The fact that they only get 40-100 mi round trip is negligible to the fact that I would save a decent amount of money on gas.

The trade-off turned out to be that my insurance rates and the other maintenance would more than absorb the cost savings from any gas so unless I also got rid of my primary vehicle which I’m not likely to do it would be a bad move for me.

Costco has smart switches from feit electric, it’s a fairly simple install that should only take you a few hours to do six or seven of them.

Then anytime you want you can turn off all of those lights from your phone.

You can also upgrade all of your bulbs to led.

If you’re paying roughly the same as I am, every watt you cut annually saves you about a dollar.

I will also note that the water heater I had was 20 years old at the time and well due for a replacement, making some of this 1600 expenditure an actual necessity and not just a thriftiness move.

Take that into consideration when you are taking my advice.

If you have an area with sufficient sunlight it might be worth looking into a solar system.

With all of the tax breaks and the supply surplus if you have the space it could be very economical to add a four or five kilowatt solar set up and that would dramatically reduce your power bills.

You could even splurge a little and buy a grid tied inverter system That’s rated for 10 KW with plans to expand later as more money comes in.

Sounds like you should do an energy audit.

It’ll cost you $80 to 100 bucks but that money could be well worth it if it could identify where your money is going for your electricity usage.

It could be that you have a massively inefficient HVAC system, which would suck as that’s a very expensive repair especially if you go hybrid, but it could also be something as simple as not having sufficient insulation which depending on the layout of your home could be fixed with a friendly visit from a local foaming company, or adding some window treatments and some appropriately placed shade trees.

If it does turn out to be your HVAC, you could also look into a ductless mini split as an add-on to cool the hottest most commonly used rooms in the house. Those can be installed DIY or mostly DIY and if you have a single problem room making that one addition could result in a dramatic decrease in your electricity bills.

Any of you who are paying more than 20 cents a kilowatt hour, especially if you live in a warmer area of the country, are doing yourselves a grave disservice by not buying and installing a hybrid water heater.

They are fairly spendy, oftentimes costing $1,600 or more just for the water heater and then another thousand or two to have it installed, but heating your water is one of the largest most inescapable bills that you have and a hybrid water heater does double duty by taking the heat out of your air that you are paying to condition and putting it into your water that you were paying to heat, saving money on both at the same time by being more efficient.

If you encounter a scenario where you have $2,500 to spare on a project that will decrease your monthly bills and pay for itself, that’s the one to pick, especially if you are a diy’er and are not afraid of doing a little bit of PEX work.

My electricity cost me 13.2 cents a kilowatt hour and installing an 80 gallon hybrid water heater to replace the 55 gallon that I had took $20 a month off of my power bill.

I did it myself with a little bit of help from a friend and it took me roughly an entire Saturday.

Total cost out the door was about $1,600 because I got a $500 credit from my power company to get it installed, and the water heater cost $1,600, the parts and pieces I needed cost me another $250, and I slipped my friend 250 bucks for helping out.

At an average of $20 a month power saved that water heater will pay for itself in a little under 7 years, which is a good while yes, but if you’re paying 50 cents a kilowatt hour it would pay for itself in under 2 years, and if you live in a warmer climate than Washington State the extra air conditioning it provides free of charge will further decrease your energy bills especially in the summer.

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