… The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.
The Fridge arrived earlier than expected but thankfully I was able to reschedule the elevator booking.
As instructed I let it sit for 2 hours to allow “the gas” to settle before plugging it in and went shopping for some groceries. (No I never heard of the gas thing before either.)
It looks a little barren inside and frankly Xavier has more food on hand than I do.
What I found immediately off putting was having to bend down to look into the fridge, a forgotten advantage of the old bottom freezer model.
The crispers and deli tray are made of what seems to be very brittle plastic and everything is just a little less solid looking than the old one.
You get what you pay for and this was on the low end of current fridge pricing.
Everything seems to be working so I can’t complain.
This is my third fridge in these digs and the first I purchased online.
I miss the whole process of “shopping” as it was, the back and forth of pros and cons and the tire kicking that took place when a ‘major appliance’ was purchased.
Fridge cat has yet to hop inside his new habitat. It’s a different world.
Well the old fridge gave up the ghost completely yesterday.
The freezer had been working so I had hoped to save all the food packed in there.
Not to be, something seized up and it began to emit an awful sound, like a dinosaur dying.
So everything is defrosting and will be heading for the garbage … except
My building’s compactor broke down and we’ve been advised to hold on to our waste until further notice.
Any way here’s a pic of my new Frigidaire fridge due for delivery Saturday. Of course mine will never look as neat and tidy. Hope Fridge Cat likes his new digs.
Woke up to a lightning strike around 5:30 am.
Everything in the joint turned on due to a power surge.
Now I have power in half my unit.
Waiting for Hydro to do their stuff.
This happened once before and we lost K’s Apple computer and the TV, we had a surge protector installed in the breaker box after that episode.
So far everything that has power is working.
And now for a fridge update …
Thanks to everyone for their help.
In the end it seemed prudent to write the fridge off.
Not only had the fresh food section ceased to work but the door seals are also failing and I just couldn’t justify spending more on a unit we had paid around 1200 bucks for over a decade ago.
11 years seems a long lifespan for an appliance these days. Right now it doesn’t have power.
I hope the replacement lasts longer, I opted for a basic top freezer model from Frigidaire, one they’ve been making for years, lots of good reviews and I’m sure the internet never lies.
Cost is reasonable after a discount with taxes and delivery charges it’s just under $1100.00 Bucks
Delivery is Saturday. That was a motivator, other models I looked at had an August delivery “estimate.”
“It’s just a stunning social change”
The decline and fall of a society can be measured in statistics like these. The decline of marriage has long since been paired with a decline in relationships in general. Pregnancy and even abortion rates are falling. Families are breaking up or not even forming. More and more Americans are living on their own.
So last time I checked in my dishwasher was made normal by a simple reset process.
Of course appliance happiness is not made to last.
It was way back in 2012 that Kath and I had a fridge give up the ghost on us.
Replacing the compressor cost near as much as a new fridge.
Overnight the replacement we purchased just over a decade ago began working improperly.
The freezer works great, the fresh food section is no longer maintaining a cool temp.
This could be due to a number of reasons, coils need cleaning, fan failure or vent blockage.
It was a major effort to pull the fridge out from the counter.
It was stuck fast. This is what happens when you live like an 8 year old.
I had to rely on an incantation to K for inspiration.
Kathy Kathy come real quick
There’s a problem that needs a fix.
Damn but they work. I freed the stuck fast fridge in a heavenly hurry.
I have an incantation for lost items as well and to date it has only failed me once.
It seems that each appliance repair runs about 400 bucks. Both the washer and dryer have needed fixing and that has been the cost for each visit. Next time I will just replace them if possible.
Now I am wondering if 11 years is good lifespan for a fridge in this day and age.
Maybe it’s time for a new one or maybe a reader has an idea to fix my current one.
Let me know if you have a fix or a recommendation for a new one.
It was just four weeks ago today, I bled until I went unconscious. I’ll spare you (and myself) a repetition of the disgusting details; suffice it to say that the physician who was operating the “guided” biopsy machine on that fateful Friday afternoon got a little carried away. He poked a few too many holes in my prostate and, in his enthusiasm, jubilantly nicked an artery in the process. It was apparently just a nick at first so I had what was described as “not an unusual amount” of bleeding at first. Maybe the artery had been weakened but not entirely broken open just then; so they put me up on my feet and walked me out to my waiting angel of a wife and told her to take me home and put me to bed for the weekend with a warning to not lift anything or pretty much do anything at all.
From our friend Yaacov ben Moshe.
Pew research reports that, as of 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married. In 2010, the figure was at 20 percent. In 1980, it was at 6 percent.
What kind of society have we become?
In the early months of COVID, as one government after the other enforced lockdowns and mask mandates, one country stood as the outlier: Sweden. Going it alone against prevailing left-wing thinking was an unusual way to make headlines for the poster child of European progressivism.
Sweden and its Nordic neighbors make for an unexpected addition to the list of countries where the European Right has achieved victories in the past decade, including Orbán’s Hungary, Meloni’s Italy, and a Brexit UK. Poland and Spain, where elections this year will determine the fates of the incumbent Law and Justice party and the rising VOX party, will receive much attention as a test of the phenomenon’s durability. The Nordic countries, though, will also be worth keeping an eye on.
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
h/t Sweetpea
MY grandfather was not prone to sentimentality. Overt demonstrations of feigned emotion would usually be met with a short rebuke along the lines of ‘what a load of b*****ks’.
Much of this, no doubt, was just who he was. Some of it, however, must have been born from his experiences.
On June 6, 1944, at the tender age of 18, he parachuted into Ranville, Normandy. The next few months saw him fight across France and Germany, suffering life-threatening wounds along the way and losing his closest friends, particularly his mate Frenchie, which stayed with him till his dying days some 77 years later.
‘Those of us who came to adulthood post-Pill stand on another shore, an ocean apart from all generations before us.’ That’s how Baroness Alison Wolf describes the impact of the invention of the contraceptive pill on the lives of women in The XX Factor. ‘Sex can be safe. You can relax about it. Women can avoid an undesired pregnancy, completely, securely, and on their own’, she writes.
Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, could hardly be more different from the scholarly Professor Wolf. Yet, born just two years later in 1951, she shares Wolf’s view that the Pill revolutionised women’s lives. ‘In the name of women’s lib, women were becoming like men, and that was good news for me because I wanted what the boys had’, Hynde wrote in her 2015 memoir, Reckless. ‘In thinking we were in charge of our own sexuality, now we could say “yes” instead of “no”.’
What happens with the competent retire, burn out or opt out? It’s a question few bother to ask because the base assumption is that there is an essentially limitless pool of competent people who can be tapped or trained to replace those who retire, burn out or opt out, i.e. quit in favor of a lifestyle that doesn’t require much in the way of income or stress.
These assumptions are no longer valid. A great many essential services that are tightly bound to other essential services are cracking as the competent decide (or realize) they’re done with the rat-race.
h/t DS
All across the globe, from Tokyo to Turin, an increasing number of young men are walling themselves off from society. In Japan, the issue of social withdrawal among young men is so severe that the Japanese have coined a term for it: hikikomori (hiki, “to withdraw,” and komori, “to remain inside”). This sociocultural phenomenon involves a complete rejection of the social contract, and a refusal to engage with other members of society. At least 1.5 million Japanese people, many of whom are young men in their 20’s and 30’s, have completely withdrawn from society. They don’t date, and they don’t work. They don’t do anything that requires them leaving their homes. In Japan’s neighbor, South Korea, some 350,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 are “reclusive” or “lonely,” according to a Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF) report. Again, many of these reclusive individuals are young men. They tend to live in small spaces, be disconnected from the outside world for extended periods of time, and display “noticeable difficulty in living a normal life.” Forty percent of the affected begin their isolation in their adolescent years. Numerous factors have contributed to the phenomenon, including financial difficulties, increased social media use, and battles with mental illness.
Of course, one needn’t live in East Asia to see the hikikomori phenomenon playing out.
The great strategist sees a globe riven by U.S.-China competition and threatened by fearsome new weapons and explains why he now thinks Ukraine should be in NATO.
Eight years—that’s all the time Henry Kissinger was in public office. From January 1969 to January 1977, Mr. Kissinger was first national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, holding both titles concurrently for more than two years. He was 53 when he cleared his desk at Foggy Bottom to make way for Cyrus Vance. In the 4½ decades since, he has worked as a consultant on strategic relations to governments around the world and consolidated beyond dispute his reputation—first earned when he co-piloted the U.S. opening to China in 1972—as the pre-eminent philosopher of global order and the most original, erudite and hard-nosed statesman of his era.
