Remember kids, you can’t be a good communist if you don’t have any skills. We already have people well practised at arguing on the internet.

My tools. I’ve amassed quite the arsenal of hand and power tools from 1840-1970. I refurbish and rebuild them into much higher quality workhorses than you can get these days for a fraction of the cost. Even if the price of modern tools wasn’t of any concern, outside of two very premium niche manufacturers, you literally can not get good tools anymore. Nobody makes them. Home improvement stores are full of poorly designed, low quality garbage for people who have never used an actually good tool before. No one has made a made a good combination square in so long that most people have never used one. Chisels and saws are a goddamn tragedy. Power tools are all run with chips than burn out, are covered in plastic guards that break or melt, and are running entirely on brand favoritism from people that don’t know they’ve been had. My table saw is from 1953. It cost me 40$ and an hour of sanding rust and tuning. It has one mechanism and will eat through anything. My band saw is from 1968 and cost me 60$, plus 28 for new guides and tires. My favorite chisel is from 1884, and cost 5$. I still can’t find one I like nearly as well in any other size. My favorite block plane was 6$ and an hour of tuning. It’s from 1878 and kicks the hell out of the 40$ Irwin dogshit I picked up before I knew better. My panel saws have been used hard for 160 years, and will not only outlive the disposable garbage from home depot, but will do a better job and outlive me.

I’ve made a hobby of bringing anything I can find at thrift stores back to life. It prevents waste, and keeps a tool that had real care put into it’s development from ending up nailed to the wall in applebees. As a bonus, collectors generally hate refurbished tools, and I hate someone removing things from the shrinking pool of good, cheap tools so they can put it on a shelf or try to sell it for hundreds as a rarity.

Since ice is made up of molon labe guys, they should be fully supportive.

It’s not that optical pros are idiots, it’s that there are so few of them you’ll likely never meet one, and only a true professional can tell they’re full of shit. I can give advice if you’d like. I may be a rando saying Trust Me, but you’re not one of my patients, and we’ll never meet, so I have no reason to mislead.

Most nearsighted presbyopes can read without their glasses. Presbyopia isn’t losing the ability to see up close, it’s losing the ability to change your focal length. The point of a bifocal or progressive is so you don’t have to put on and take off your glasses to see things. You just wear them and can see everywhere.

The DMV only tests your distance vision. Reading starts going at 38, is noticable by 40, and becomes a problem at 42. Your ability to focus at different lengths dissipates as your lens hardens from years of growth. If you can read just fine at 44, your distance isn’t as good as you think. If you’re distance vision is fine, you’re the guy holding his menu at arms length in a restaurant.

You’ll notice when something is up when:

-your phone is hard to see unless you hold it out further.

-you ever find yourself complaining about fine print.

-driving at dusk or in the rain is uncomfortable.

-you get tension headaches at the base of your skull from squinting out your astigmatism.

If you have access to an itemized receipt, I can troubleshoot for you if you DM me. Worth noting, an add jump from 75 to 175 will make you swerve for a week, but it can be lessened by good measurments and high end lenses.

There’s not really any true low and medium level products. They’re just older products. The mid grade was the top of the line 15 years ago. The basic progressive at most places is probably a Shoreview, ovation, or adaptar. They were great lenses, in 1993. But every few years there’s a new breakthrough, and the high end lenses at most places are the newest tech. Don’t want to have trouble with computers? You need a lens designed after everyone started working on one. Feel like your phone gets distorted? You need a lens designed after smartphones became commonplace.

By avoiding the companies that made everything confusing and filled the world with misinformation and buzz words. No chain stores, no online retailers, no budget places.

Find a local optometry office, and get your script and lenses from the same place. Don’t fall for branding, and understand you’re getting a prosthetic. You’re going to wear these every day for a long time, and you’re picking how well you’ll see.

Online and budget retailers have made billions by convincing the average person glasses are a scam, and that they’re all the same. Insurance companies save a lot of money by propagating the same misinformation.

The big players and chains, luxottica, marchon, warby, vsp, etc. Refuse to let anyone know the real technology they use in their lenses, because if you only know their branded buzzy term, you can’t ask for the correct product from a competitor. You can’t find out that they buy their designs, and don’t actually produce anything.

Anyone with a c suite of people to pay has to cut costs somewhere to pay out million dollar bonuses. They hike up costs and cut quality, and want to make sure you think oakley and rayban are high quality when they’re just marketing.

Years ago, some optometrists started something akin to a union to fight back against luxottica buying everything. That group was called vision source, and then, as the biggest fuck you in the history of optics, luxottica fucking bought vision source a few years ago.

On the other side, Anyone advertising two pairs for 89$ can’t afford professionals. You’ll never get the kind of optician referred to above from somewhere like that. With my knowledge base, if my offices went under right now, I would have every office around beating down my door to get me in, so why would I ever agree to put up with corporate bullshit, or working commision? But they stay in business by making sure everyone thinks all glasses are the same, so you’d be wasting your money if you went anywhere else.

There’s a few points to note

-there are 1500 different progressive lenses, and a lot of stire are still selling 35 yeae old lenses. You get what you pay for, and avoid chains.

-the eyeglass industry is full of reps who think they’re professionals, but don’t actually know fuck all about how they work. What the other person said about measurements is way more obvious with a progressive. Because of this, online progressives are dogshit.

-if you’re a hyperope, it takes more time to get used to the lenses. Plus prescriptions add more distortion, so it takes longer to adapt.

-the age you got the first progressive makes a huge difference. If you get one at 42, you’ll have a much easier time than if you wait until 60, because the reading addition keeps getting stronger and causes more distortion. Side note, if you’re over 42, you should be wearing a progressive. Stop lying to me and yourself.

-it takes about two weeks to feel natural, but you have to wear the glasses, and not switch back to an older pair. If you don’t put in the effort, you’ll be the old person with lines. If you wear them for two weeks and don’t get used to them, theres something wrong with the lens.

• get a premium, dual sided antireflective. Plus power lenses have more space between the surfaces, and double the effects of glare on the lens.

-don’t take advice from anyone you know, youtube, or especially reddit. Nobody knows any of the actual science behind optics, they just keep parroting things that sound legit. Even supposed professionals in my industry are goddamn idiots, including most licensed opticians i know. The only sources of info that can be trusted are lifelong lab managers, and the people designing the products and systems of manufacture. Everyone else spouts buzzwords like they know what they’re saying, or they saw a video once.

I’m an advanced optician running three offices and a lab, working towards my masters designation, and i’m infuriated to be one of the last professionals in this industry.

It implies that you should pay to park the car you had no choice but to drive due to lack of any credible infrastructure. In the US at least.

I mean maybe. I didn’t make it, just conjecture.

I run three offices, and I can tell you we don’t get any of that money. In fact we pay out the ass for whatever bullshit tech company was forced on us by insurance lobbyists to make you see those ads, while they also make the questionaires unreasonably long and uneditable so they can data harvest and make another dollar after tech fees, Ad revenue, service charges, and insurance payments.

But we can’t just not use them, because every new regulation is a 60,000$ fine, and they send ghost patients at least once a quarter to try and catch violations to rules they lobbied to make as difficult as possible to conform to.

My EHR system is 1700$ per month per office, and it has only made everything much slower and less personal, while forcing me to constantly do tech support for half of our patients.

Hippa is supposed to protect us from the data harvesting, but since the insurance companies own the tech, device, ad, and service companies, as well as most offices, they don’t have to sell your data, because they’re the ones who want it.

That’s funny there’s only one in my town, and it’s facing the Lowes parking lot.

Ochre

Get handy. Fix things before they go bad, and learn basic construction on the way. Second hand tools are cheap, and there’s a number of good youtubers to help in any situation. After you get your bearings, it turns into a fun way to make the place into what you want it to be. Nothing is terribly difficult, and materials can be had cheap if you’re not in an emergency. Facebook marketplace allowed me to build a house for 70k over two years, and it’s valued at 350k, and not finished yet. The experience gained led me to doing odd side jobs and reselling unused materials to keep paying for new additions. If you can replace your own water heater, you can replace someone elses for half the price of Lowes and still take home 700$ for three hours work. Pick up some resold tile and put in a bathroom wall. You’ll find out what you did wrong in your own bathroom and won’t mess up someone elses for some extra cash in a pinch.

Electrical work is my favorite. Know the code, and how to stay safe, and it’s a lot of fun that the average person is HORRIFIED of. Get a good electricians multitool, a current tester, a drill and some tape, and you can perform miracles.

Most people will never afford a house. You don’t have to fix it, you get to fix it, so take pride and make it somewhere you love to live.

Not the original commenter, but what theirs saying stands true. The issue of “sounds legit” is the main driving force in misinformation right now.

The only way to combat it is to truly gain the knowledge yourself. Accepting things at face value has lead to massive disagreements on objective information, and allowed anti science mindsets to flourish.

Podcasts are the medium that I give the most blame to. Just because someone has a camera and a microphone, viewers believe them to be an authority on a subject, and pairing this with the “sounds Legit” mindset has set back critical thinking skills for an entire population.

More people need to read Jurassic park.

A USB cable?

Not advertised at children, though

So I don’t have a habit of playing terrible games, but I can say the worst games I’ve played are sneaky. They trick you into thinking they might have something going for them, only to never go anywhere or get better.

Husk is the first one that jumps out at me. It announces itself as a silent hill inspired horror game based on domestic violence themes. After three hours of painfully slow controls and enemies that don’t make any sense to the story, it just suddenly ends with a cliche, tacked on, “you’re the asshole here” monologed conclusion with no explanations whatsoever.

Another category of absolute butt-trash I’ve fallen for is games that appeal to edgy teenagers, and so have stellar reviews regardless of how they in fact suck shit.

Lust for darkness is a prime example. It’s a horror game with nothing remotely scary in it about a sex cult full of people with British accents in America who refer to themselves as cult members, and whose outrageous taboo sex acts are really just regular shit but they wear masks. It’s like a wet dream fantasy for a 13 year old incel. It’s not scary, it’s not clever, it’s not even just porn, and it’s most of all not fun.

A game that fits in both of these categories, that I played to completion just hoping I’d click with whatever coolaid the reviewers drank, was The Cat Lady. Reviews made it sound so deep and emotional, and it seemed like it was going somewhere for a minute, but at the end, it was just a cringefest hidden object sidescroller with weird voice acting that was targeted at angsty children who romantisize depression and death.

Years after leaving my negative steam reviews I still catch flak on occasion from superfans of these dogshit time sinks who have never read a book in their lives.

I have a 1600s Turkish rebel sword and scabbard with a pommel carved into a rooster head. I picked it up at a curio shop that was closing a few years ago and while I did some basic dating on it to make sure it’s not a reproduction, I really donot know much about it.

I have several fossils that are perticularly unique, but I’ve never seen that kind of thing on the show, so I don’t know if it would be worth it.

An antique shop had a four barrel pepperbox revolver from the 1860s that was sold as a non functioning novelty, and I cleaned it up and actually got it working again. I’d be interested if it has any value higher that the 150 it cost me.

Last option is a buffet, library table, dresser, and side table my great great grandparents got as a wedding gift. They’re made of tiger oak, stained in pitch and very heavy. They were locally made, and I’ve bumped into several pieces that are very similar, but they’re always falling apart. The set I have has never been out of use, and never needed repairs. The mirror on the buffet still has it’s original silver. The manufacturing stamp on the back says the guys name, the city, and 1904.

I use an add on called noscript. It’s a little scorched earth, but I hardly notice it now that it’s set up.