One other thought that occurred to me overnight: you might be asking about FIRE (financial independence, retire early). There are tons of strategies for going about that.

I would caution about moving toward “off grid” type scenarios. Your monthly costs will be less, but you will have significantly higher up front (if buying a new residence) and/or maintenance costs (if buying used and/or when you decide to sell). For example, our water and sewer bill is around $800/year. If anything outside the house fails, the utility company will fix it. My in-laws sold a home in NJ with well water and septic and had to replace their sceptic field before they were able to sell. That set them back somewhere between $30k and $40k. Depending on your goals it could be either an advantage or a disadvantage.

Feedback: your actual questions start about 2/3 down your post. Lead with them next time so we know how to answer better :)

it’s really hard to apply my city-living experience to try to extrapolate what life might be like if I make a goal to buy a small home in Nowheretown, USA to retire in 20 years down the line

We have younger kids, live in a lower cost of area, and bought our house in 2011. Excluding frivolous categories, our top expenses are:

1. Saving for our retirement. Between our 401ks and IRAs, this is our biggest expenditure by quite a bit
2. Food. We don’t eat out a ton, but also don’t do a great job of eating low cost. Feeding four is also fun, we can’t wait until they’re teens. This category is not much ahead of #3 though
3. Our mortgage (it’s a 30 year and taxes, insurance, principal, and actual mortgage are $1,250/mo)
4. Saving for our kid’d potential college tuition

Once the kids are out and we’re retired categories #1 and #4 go away, category #2 will probably get cut in half, and our taxes and insurance are currently well under $4,500/year. Speaking of taxes, mine are capped at a maximum increase of 5% or inflation, whichever is lower. With the housing run-up this has worked out in our favor.

Home expenses are a thing. It’s hard to say how much to budget for that though. Some of it depends on you (eg do you really need to renovate that bathroom in full), your taste, and your budget. I would expect a decent outlay every 5 years or so - roof, brick/siding/exterior work, furnace/ac, driveway etc. The more you’re willing and able to do yourself the better off you’ll be.

You don’t have to be in the boonies to live in a low cost of living area.

Thanks for new and fresh vs old favorite! I posted something similar further down, will be sure to check this out.

Let’s skip favorite and instead answer fun find that I’ve come back to a few times: Brothers of Metal - Kaunaz Dagaz (it is in English, lol). It’s viking metal, and as went through highschool with Blind Guardian and Rhapsody, it’s great to find bands still making banging fantasy metal https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzad__XGDbQ&si=atuCBlgpMSQ9UkRL

I’ve also been a fan of Bloodywood lately. Think an angrier Hybrid Theory Lincoln Park, but from India and with some fusion going on. Machi Bhased is a good toe in the water https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3kLKYWDQVec&si=xsmCHcr6llZdaAWc as is Dana-Dan: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=uo6OC34QjY0&si=6SxQ6T9MwvRUdlJF

Arm band! I have a generic one I got on Amazon and it’s been very handy. It does slowly slide down my arm over 45 minutes or so, but I don’t really know how anything else would do better without being even tighter or having a more grippy material that I don’t really want again my skin.

I wonder how they calculated the range. If it’s representative of the real world drive cycle these will experience, the estimate might not be too far off. A postal route is constant low speed stop and go. Regen is much more effective at higher speeds, so they’re probably dumping most of their kenetic energy to hear via friction brakes. Suspect their drive cycle is going to be something like an endless cycle of 25 kw acceleration, rest, 25 kw acceleration, rest, etc.

I am somewhat tempted to sign up and give it a shot. DDG is pretty solid for me, but it would be interesting to try a search engine where I’m not the product, it is.

… There’s a setting to auto play gifs I just found. Does it not work and/or loop?

Inline gifs!

Cross posts, or links around Lemmy generally, also open in an embedded version of my default web browser (Firefox), which present the native Lemmy UI. This is a bigger one for me, but I don’t run into it often.

If the biggest portion of your bill is AC and you live in a hot area the only things I could think of are planting some trees if they’ll grow and using a programmable thermostat to shift your usage away from off peek as best you can.

It was mostly for our younger kids. We live in a smaller ranch, so we close their doors after they’re asleep so we don’t have to worry about waking them up. This made one of their rooms a bit warmer In the summer and a bit cooler in the winter.

I should probably try balancing the ducts to compensate and might do that this winter.

Look up “home energy monitor”. They install inside your panel. The one we have has a bunch of current clamps, but not enough for our huge panel, so I chose what I thought our more heavily used circuits were. It also measures line voltage. Voltage x current = bingo. I’m not completely sure how I feel about the one I bought, so I’m not going to call it out. I wish it flagged trends per circuit over time to catch things like failing appliances. I could root it and mod it, but it would be nice if it did it out of the box. Catching a failing appliance would more than pay for the device, even if you do it by hand by simply tracking the data. It has slightly changed our habits (see: the furnace blower that we left on all the time and was pulling a constant 500 watts aka 12 kwh/day aka 360 kwh/mo), but I wouldn’t expect to find anything crazy unless you have high usage.

A $400 bill at $0.50 per kwh is 800 kwh. Our electricity usage in the month of August was 787 kwh. I wired an energy meter into my circuit panel a month ago, so I can break that down:

• 210 kwh for EV charging. I don’t drive a ton and can also charge at work sometimes. This is 27% of our total
• 130 kwh for AC. We live in SE MI, so it’s not hot. We keep our AC set to 75 when it’s on. These two combined are now 40% of our bill
• 62 kwh for my work desk (hybrid work) and deep freeze
• 61 kwh for our furnace blower motor. This one surprised me. We were leaving it on the low setting to equalize temperature. On the low speed it pulls 500 watts, or 12 kwh/day. It obviously pulls more power when the AC is on
• 61 kwh for our fridge
• 28 kwh for our washing machine and gas dryer
• now we’re in odds and ends territory. 17 kwh for our instant Hot water (tea), 12 kwh for our sump pump and dehumidifier, 11 for our dishwasher, 8 for the TV (old fluorescent)/garage/ps5/modem/route, 7 for the microwave
• another 100 or so that doesn’t have a clamp on the breaker

If you don’t have an EV and you’re really keeping your AC at 84 I strongly suspect you have a failing appliance. Unless you live in Phoenix and have a massive and very poorly insulated house or something.

During covid (I was doing remote work, so basically no EV charging), our old dishwasher finally stopped working with a dryer heater error code. When we replaced it our electric bill fell by a double digit percentage (I want to say 20%+) year over year.

As for things like insulation, going from 3" of 1969 insulation to a massive quantity of blown in helped our winter heating bill (gas) a lot more than our summer AC bill.

Good luck!

Bonsai burl? I didn’t realize those were a thing, but now that you said it of course that’s a thing.

You can always talk and express yourself! Absolutely no one will be upset if you do, assuming you don’t have wildly unpopular opinions and/or aren’t interested in rehashing politically fraught issues for the upteenth time. Find a vaguely appropriate community here and go nuts.

Building an audience over time is exactly how blogs, and publishing in general, work unless you start off with a lot of advertising or endorsements. For better or worse, there’s far more content than there is time for a large audience to read it all.

This gives you three choices:

• specialize and post in an existing community that’s aligned with that specialization. People will nearly always engage, especially if the content is good
• specialize and start your own blog. You could even try seeding it by referring people to it from already existing specialized communities. People will know what to expect content wise and keep coming back if the subject you’re talking about is interesting to them and the content is good
• don’t specialize and strike out on your own. If the content is good and you stick with it your audience will eventually grow. This will probably take more time because your audience will initially be looking for content that relates to what they’ve seen in the past, but what you’re really offering is your personality, writing style, world view, etc

Personally, if I’m looking for engagement I choose the first option.

Believe me, no one here is going to be upset if you write some interesting content. The real challenge will be whether or not your content find traction with the masses.

Both Lemmy and Reddit also favor new content over existing content, so expect decreasing engagement with a post as time wears on. This is different than a traditional forum, where a new comment will bump the whole thread.

I’ve kicked off a few good conversations here with OC, granted my posts tend to be more project/image based than what you’re thinking.

Burls are a deformity in the tree (those round protruding bits on the trunk). They result in interesting grain patterns and are fairly rare, so they’re saught after by some wood workers.

The middle is probably resin, but the sides are burl:

That’s nuts to me. We paid around $1.2k for our 55" about 10 years ago. 77" also feels way too big for our space, but it would be nice to jump up from 1080 and have more contrast/dynamic range, etc. I recently bought a laptop with a 3k OLED display and it’s beautiful. An OLED TV seens like it would be amazing.

I feel old, but also haven’t bought a TV in ages so I don’t really know the market. 55" used to be very large unless you wanted to shell out serious $$