Expose those Roman road designs to today’s vehicle loads, frequency, and speed and they won’t last long either.

As for getting utility sizing right forever so that they never have to be dug up again, that’s highly impractical as communities change - they grow, shrink, densify. Industries can move in and out of an area changing demand. Regulations change. Water mains and sewers age and fail and are replaced on a schedule. When new service connections are added, workers have to get to the main. And if they’re in a tunnel large enough for workers and equipment to remove and replace utilities, we’re talking a subway tunnel under every road and large access points every thousand or so feet. Tunnels will also deteriorate, flood, etc.

I had a clapper. It would turn the light on if I coughed just right in my sleep. And the subsequent cursing at it didn’t turn the lights back off either.

If I had to choose one to be a RL friend: Peppermint Patty. Having someone with that here-and-now optimism for life at my back could be infuriatingly annoying. But at the same time I’d silently admit to myself how thankful I am for the extra push.

Garfield and Odie. The laziness and sarcasm were inspiring growing up. The Saturday morning cartoon version will forever be the voice of Garfield in my head (Lorenzo Music).

I’m looking forward to the end of daylight saving time. give me back my hour of sleep!

5’3" (1.6m) and closing in on 25 years. It’s amazing how far a bit of kindness, compassion, and a sense of humor can go.

Definitely Rolf. I aspire to that level of cool.

“This is what not to do if a bird shits on you!”

Gummiberry Juice

Tax software. It’s the only reason I keep a windows VM.

Chlorinated water adversely affects PEX pipes. I don’t know that the amount of microplastics or nanoplastics has been quantified in a study yet.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b03673

The mechanical properties and lifetime of PEX were reduced after exposure to chlorinated water. (6) Prompted by concerns about the effect of chlorine dioxide on the chemical integrity of pipe materials, the pressure, tensile strength, and oxidation induction time were evaluated at constant temperature to assess the damage to pipe samples after exposure to chlorine dioxide for one year. (7) Overall, pipe aging due to long-term disinfectant exposure could cause decreased antioxidant contents; increased crystallinity; chain rupture; hydroxyl, carbonyl, and/or vinyl group production; and visible cracks in pipe walls.

Can such an aging process lead to MP and/or NP leaching into the drinking water network? On the basis of aging mechanisms and material performance characteristics, we propose that MPs and/or NPs can be leached from aging pipes.

The Brita pitcher comment is about my own growing paranoia about plastics that get scratched or cracked. I don’t know the conditions and time line under which this particular formulation of plastic keeps it from shedding MPs.

There’s also carpeting, synthetic fibers from clothing, PVC and PEX piping for water supply, paint, etc. The one that gets me is the plastic Brita filter pitcher. This thing is supposed to clean my water.

It took us decades to get to this point and it’ll take us more time to back out of it. And we have to start somewhere.

There are (huge) costs to retooling production to move from imperial to metric. Even if a company wanted to make that move they’d have to transition in phases and will likely end up with additional equipment to maintain. There’s also significant training for workers (who will likely commit errors in the beginning) which will impact production. And what happens to the old equipment? I’d guess a significant portion of that would end up getting scrapped and landfilled.

omg thanks for asking

Hot Sake. From what I understand, the expensive stuff is what is generally served cold. The cheap stuff is served hot.

Former Gentoo user here. It was my first distro. I spent 10 years playing with USE flags and custom kernels and finding out what not to do.