That’s basically what Arlington National Cemetery is. The union government seized the land of Robert E. Lee, and planning for if they couldn’t keep it after the war, decided to turn it into a cemetery to basically make it useless as a farm/estate. Lee’s heirs eventually sued and won the land back, but didn’t have much use for it, so they sold it back to the government.

Stop arguing semantics. We’re done here.

Compare to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.

Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you’re basically not having a conversation at all.

Your comment was confusing because you don’t seem to understand what is or isn’t part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.

It’s a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.

I still say “y’all.”

Y’all means all.

I’d argue the opposite.

Because you can use metal utensils on stainless, that means that an ultra thin fish spatula is an option when you’re cooking something delicate. Silicone or wooden utensils tend to be too thick and clumsy for working with anything delicate.

From what I read the cleanup is just warm water, soap, soft cloth.

What’s stopping you from using just warm water, soap, and soft cloth on every other type of pan? If the answer is that it doesn’t do a good enough job cleaning those things, then you’ll want a pan that can stand up to more aggressive cleaners/scrubbers.

To me, the obvious answer is stainless steel. There are cheap ones and expensive ones, and everything in between. The more expensive ones tend to be constructed with more even surfaces, with better heat transfer (things like an aluminum or copper core), and more durable to regular or even careless use. But even the cheap ones are great.

Stainless advantages over traditional Teflon-based nonstick:

• Metal utensils and scrubbers don’t damage it, which means you can use thinner spatulas and scrub more aggressively, or do things like whisk in the pan (helpful for making sauces or gravies)
• No need to worry about maximum temperature (Teflon reacts poorly to high temperatures, degrading quickly and off-gassing fumes that are mildly harmful to humans but deadly toxic for birds)
• Oven-safe (if the handle is oven safe), which is good for certain recipes that are easier to just transfer to the oven (certain sauces or braises)
• Much better thermal conductivity, for faster temperature response to turning the heat up or down.

Stainless advantages over ceramic non-stick:

• Metal utensils and scrubbers OK (ceramic nonstick is more resistant to scratches than traditional nonstick, but the guides still all tell you not to use metal)
• Can withstand higher temperatures (ceramic nonstick isn’t as bad as traditional nonstick at high temperatures, but it still loses nonstick properties under high heat, over time).
• More likely to be oven-safe (some ceramic nonstick is oven safe, but you’d have to look and check, and still be mindful of temperature limits)
• Better thermal conductivity

Stainless advantages over cast iron:

• Better thermal conductivity (cast iron actually sucks at this but nobody seems to acknowledge it)
• Easier care, no need to season
• Can handle acids no problem, so things like slow cooking a tomato sauce or deglazing with wine/vinegar/juice are possible without weird dark discoloration in your food.
• Much lighter in weight, so much easier to use when transferring or pouring food, washing the pan, etc.

Stainless advantages over carbon steel (including carbon steel woks):

• Easier care, no need to season
• Can handle acids

Don’t get me wrong: I literally own every single type of cookware listed here, and I cook on all of them for different purposes. But the stainless is my workhorse, the default I use on weeknights, because it’s easy and mindless and I literally can’t mess it up.

EDIT: Wow, can’t believe I forgot to actually list the disadvantages of stainless. Main disadvantages:

• Not non-stick. When things stick, it can be a huge pain in the ass, ranging from making your food ugly to actually ruining a dish (for example, if the sticking causes you to destroy the structural integrity of the thing you’re cooking, or the the stuck food starts scorching and adding bitter burnt flavors to your food).
• A little bit more effort to clean in typical situations, and a lot more effort to clean when there’s food residue stuck to the pan.

I can’t seem to shake the feeling that child care is in an economic death spiral right now.

If a child care facility follows NAEYC standards by having 2 teachers for 8 infants, there’s no way around the fact that the revenue per child needs to cover 1/4 of the cost of a teacher’s salary after all other expenses (rent, insurance, utilities, administrative overhead, supplies). If the costs attributable to that class is at $4000/month, and the teacher salaries (including taxes, insurance, retirement, PTO, paid holidays, etc.) are $4000/month, that’s a total of $12k/month to split between 8 infants: $1500/month at minimum, or $2000/month for a minimal buffer/reserve against emergencies, vacancies, etc.

Meanwhile, the actual workers can’t even afford to pay for that child care on their own salaries taking home $3000/month (cost to employer $4000/month), so they end up exiting the career when they have kids of their own, or their child care facility gives up a revenue spot as a perk for retaining workers (requiring a higher charge for all the other kids attending).

If the economics are unsustainable for the parents and for the workers, how can this industry avoid turning into a luxury service only for the rich?

I guess it’s a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was “worth it.” The second part, though, I don’t think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there’s plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.

High cost of living cities are previewing a problem that seems to be spreading everywhere: The cost of providing child care is getting far too expensive for working parents, while wages of the actual child care workers are insufficient to actually keep people in that career.

I don’t think of it as “destruction” so much as “consumption.” And there’s no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

Moreover, even with a very generous definition of “destruction,” the comparison should still be made to what would’ve been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn’t made the sauce, what would’ve happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.

Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20’s, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30’s. Now in my 40’s, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it’s easy to enforce a “fun first” atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.

That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you’re trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).

The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters’ basketball game.

I’m slightly annoyed at my kid’s new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn’t participating (with other half classes signed up), I’ve gotta get childcare coverage.

Can’t wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.

Why can’t we just wirelessly transmit the power, maybe have it hit a collection device that can harness about 4 kwh/m^2/day

the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths

This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).

And maybe I’m jaded because I’m a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don’t think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that’s a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don’t know.

My kids are still young, so some of my list might not work for OP’s 8 year old, but if it’s an all ages discussion, I’ve got a few, some of which might translate to more ages.

Free stuff when weather is nice (relatively speaking, in this unusually hot summer):

• Playgrounds/parks, including splash parks and swimming pools.
• Scavenger hunts on a walking loop: give a list of things to find, either by just seeing and checking off, or things that can be collected (e.g., acorns falling from trees). Combine with farmer’s market or other street markets to make the journey slightly more productive.

Free stuff when weather isn’t as nice:

• Free Museums, if you have any nearby.
• Cooking at home together. (This is free in the sense that it doesn’t cost any more than feeding yourself by cooking without the kids.) Things involving dough or batters are often fun for kids: pizzas, muffins, pancakes, etc. My daughter loves “whipping” cream by putting heavy cream in a mason jar and just shaking it for a few minutes, until her arms are too tired. I also like dishes where they understand every step, even if they can’t perform every step involving high heat or sharp objects: fried foods that get battered/breaded before frying, ravioli or dumplings that need to be filled/assembled before boiling, etc. Some steps are more about them watching than them doing anything, but if they take an interest at a young age you might be able to introduce teaching them how at the appropriate age. My kids obviously aren’t allowed to touch the controls on the stove/oven, much less the open flame of the outdoor pizza oven, smoker, or charcoal grill, but always like watching me light up some fires. Little pyros.
• Photography. An old unused cell phone might be good enough, but kids can learn the basics of capturing a moment or composition/framing just from the lives around them. My kids have standing permission to take my (locked) phone to take pictures, and I’m probably going to buy a dedicated kid-friendly/rugged point and shoot for them soon.

Low cost activities:

• Art projects at home: markers and crayons, sure, but one-off projects that involve sculpting or assembling or gluing something 3D can sometimes mix it up.
• Some sort of fun musical instrument where the kids can be creative with audio: toy keyboards/xylophones, kid-oriented electronic beat machines or drum kits, etc.
• Museums or other fun places with one-time memberships where you pay once per season/year to go for free each time. Some parks/pools/playgrounds might be privately run, but could sometimes be worth the cost of a season pass.
• Car camping overnight in state/national park areas. Work in a few day hikes and other outdoor activities, make a thing out of setting up the shelter/tents, maybe starting a fire (weather and location dependent), making smores or other camping friendly food, etc.

Higher cost activities:

• Hotel or house rental near a beach or lake, with beach activities during the day.
• Sending them off to visit out-of-town grandparents and other family (or hosting family to come visit). A big part of the fun of summer camps is the people anyway, so giving the opportunity to interact with loved ones they don’t normally get to see is often a fun break from the routine. Depends on the people in your family, though.
• Big theme parks or water parks with higher cost of admission (and often more involved travel logistics).

I’m probably missing a bunch. But that’s what I can think of right now.

OP, how about you? You mentioned you’ve already got some things going on, maybe we can compare notes.

You’re right that a big part of it is social/cultural expectations of the people around those parents. If Bluey is normalizing what it means to be an involved dad for millennial dads of kids born between 2015 and 2025, we’ll start to see critical mass of that kind of expectation.

In my social circle (millennial professionals living in big cities in the East Coast), it seems the knowing how to cook well and owning a dog are really important for the dating scene, and seem to set a certain baseline expectation for what unpaid household work one is able to do alone or with a significant other. And, if we’re getting married later than previous generations (marrying between 30-35 to people we knew for 2+ years), and engaged in active family planning (that is, birth control), there’s an opportunity to show during the dating years how career and household responsibilities interplay, before the couples actually choose to have children together.

And it feeds back onto itself. I personally don’t really run into the issue of diaper changing stations in women restrooms but not men’s restrooms (where I live in DC, most restrooms are single stall unisex, with one or two diaper changing stations that are also in unisex stalls). There’s a pretty healthy representation of other solo dads at the playground, or at daycare pickup/dropoff, etc. It’s not 50/50, but it’s closer than in some other cities I’ve lived in, or the stories I hear from family and friends elsewhere.

So we’re moving there. Our generation just has to continue to model the behavior for those that come after (especially our own children).

It’s Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it’s revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.