Voyager I and II are 48 years old running on thermoelectric generators. that’s amazing. They are winding down because the half life of plutonium means there is much less power than when new.

I can see future probes lasting even longer with americium as a fuel source

But introducing moving parts for a sterling engine? In space? And expect it to last like that? Seems unlikely

Opposite for me, maybe because I never make bread by hand. Throw in the ingredients, press a button, four hours later fresh hot amazing bread. The only real limitation is a i never figured out a recipe that could hold up for sandwiches

Got the machine during pandemic and it was an instant hit. Our weekend tradition became starting the machine after dinner, sitting down with my teens to play video games. When the machine beeped, we needed a break anyway. It was like six months before there was ever any leftover to put away.

I stopped using the machine when I got my cholesterol numbers back

Let me blow your mind: mini food processor/chopper! Fewer moving parts, much easier to use and clean, and it completes 90% of the tasks I used to use a food processor for.

You want to chop an onion: skin it, quarter, shove it in, brief pulse. Done, put everything in the dishwasher. Perfect size and So much more convenient

Plus one for the glove. I always lived in fear of the mandolin but I got a microplaner that included the glove. Now I use it for the mandolin, the grater and the microplaner. Life changing.

Upvote for freezing as “pages”. It’s good to see someone else thinking that way

Gotta give both rice cooker and cast iron skillets, because they were part of a huge change in what and how I cook. They’ve also both become central to cooking

Looking back ten years I used a different set of tools for a different set of programming languages for different purposes. This has been a general pattern as the industry has evolved over my career.

Yes I have a good depth and breadth of knowledge that would help me pick things up but I’m not sure relearning the technology would be different from learning a new one, and all the frustrations of old tech would be there.

As an example, I’d have to relearn the ins and outs of virtual machines and would be damn frustrated to lose the benefits of containers. All that fiddling around with networks, and being tied to specific component brands to get scalable performance. Having to relearn something like puppet or ansible or chef to build out the machines instead of a straightforward dockerfile. And the frustration of how slow it all is and not being able to run anywhere

A swat on the butt with a magazine is a humiliation fetish now? Holy crap, I thought I was too vanilla

We have a winner!

I have no callouses or stamina. It would take a long time for me to become productive at labor. As an older guy, maybe never

No medicine, no hospitals, no diagnostic or treatment tools? No trauma care. How much can you really do?

As a non-medical person, I can’t do much more than sterilize a wound and apply a bandage. All respect to you but that far back would you be able to do any more?

Can you do it without a shovel? Even if hard packed? What if there’s a rock too big for you to lift?

As a software engineer, I’d struggle with the limitations of ten years ago.

But on the non-work side, I have no problems with maintenance on my house and hand tools haven’t changed much, so at least 80 years

You’re assuming Italian pasta is fancy and expensive. I’m sure some is, but some is just common mass market brands on your grocery shelf. Until this nonsense started I didn’t realize the pasta I sometimes get is from Italy

You missed the part where everything became global. There are well known mass market pasta brands that are owned by Italian companies. The brand I sometimes buy is, and I don’t get it because it’s Italian or the cheapest, but that it’s a good value of quality for a reasonable price

I’ve read stuff like this online and was hoping it wasn’t real

Yeah, well I paid for a middle seat and people think they can walk in the middle

Yeah but none of the seats have shoulder room. I’ll take squished shoulders over getting hit by the drink cart every time

That’s fine. I’ll take wall seat, as long as I’m not paying extra for a window that doesn’t exist. As a big and tall guy, wall seat means the drink cart doesn’t hit my shoulder because of how narrow the seats are. It means I don’t have to struggle out of my seat every time someone in the row needs to use the bathroom

I certainly hope this becomes true but plastic is damn useful.

On my own journey to reduce plastics in my life, I went back to cotton t-shirts. However it’s been enough years that they need to be replaced but the rayon blend t-shirts of the same age are still nice looking

We can at least cut back but it’s not going to be easy