As long as you both consent to it and he is willing to also put in the work it takes to raise a child then what’s the problem?

Malcolm Gladwell just recently had a child in his late 50s/early 60s and so did Peter Sagal of Wait Wait fame. People have kids later in life all the time.

My wife and I had our first child when I was 39 because that’s finally when it happened for us and we had the means to support our kid the way we wanted.

I’m in my mid 40s now and would love another. I still have the energy to swing our kid around and throw her up in the air. Now she’s getting into the ages where she can hike with us, it’s a wonderful journey watching her grow and learn.

One thing I would just ask of you, personally, is just make the commitment to read to your child. Read to them every night. Read to them as much as they want. Read to them even when you’re tired. It’s so important for their development.

You’re up north? I’d be thinking of ways to keep the house insulated, warm and with pipes unfrozen.

Pipewrap. They come in a few different options. The cheap foam works ok, but can be a pain around elbows and expansions. The insulation roll is a bit easier to get done well but takes more time.

Pipe heaters - relatively cheap, somewhere around $20-40. Run it along the pipe and plug it in.

Do you have a well or city water? If a well, make sure that cement encasement is lodged in the ground good and then stuff insulation all in it. Pipe warmer may serve you well here too. If city, then you’re in a bit of an easier situation.

If you have a crawl space, seal the door well. Don’t forget to open the vents in the summer and for sure close them in the winter. If you have a basement, make sure your water barrier is doing its job and get a dehumidifier to prevent mold. Try to get one with a drain tube so you don’t have to empty it all the freaking time like I currently do.

Get one of those foam dohickeys for your outdoor faucets and for the love of all that is unfrozen do not leave your hoses attached in the winter.

Get a preventive maintenance plan on your big ticket items like furnaces boilers and aircons. People neglect these and then end up with an eventual $8k unexpected bill. At least the pms will tell you if you’re close to their expiry so you can prepare. They may also help you prevent mold in your aircon before it becomes a problem.

Get pest control, we do monthly. It’ll help keep out the ants, mice, bats and squirrels.

Get yourself a backup battery that can run a fridge for a day. Or invest in a backup generator.

Figure out what your secondary source of heat will be (e.g wood stove, propane, kerosene.) Make sure you have it stocked. If you burn anything, make sure to get a CO sensor and that your fire alarms are working. Houses are so tightly built nowadays that you’ll need to ensure anything burned has proper ventilation.

Change your air filters every 3 months depending on use. Make sure to clean your fridge air filter every 6 months. If you have a kitchen stove exhaust fan, make sure to clean that up every few months as well.

Invest in some salt and a snow shovel if you don’t already have one. You’ll need it. .

Change out your locks. Who knows who the previous owners gave a key. If your doors have the smart key system, then it’s very easy to do nowadays.

Learn where your electric panel is, make sure you don’t have two or even three elsewhere around the house, sometimes inside, sometimes out.

Don’t be a stranger, talk to your neighbors. They’re your best resource in a pinch

Congrats on owning your own castle. It’s a lot of upkeep but it’s a lot of piece of mind too.

Yes, I do, because we are many and we persevere.

Here we are celebrating Labor Day, the day that celebrates workers rights - overtime pay for working over 40 hours, limiting children from having to work in factories, weekends and time off.

It was a hard fight from serfdom to poor factory conditions to now. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.

The junior resources are going to struggle to find jobs because they are lacking in the KSAs that schools simply cannot provide training for. And that means when us Gen Xers and later Millenials retire there could be a major gap where we have few people with that inherent knowledge to replace us. And where there’s no work and no hope, you get something akin to what is starting to occur in China right now…or revolt.

My hope is that schools will be rethought and there will be a lot more focus on getting an internship early and for the long term. Something more like apprenticeships, which the blue collar workforce maintained, but it’s something we’ll likely need to bring back to white collar jobs.

This isn’t to say that schools should diminish a well rounded education. I think it’s extremely important for students to take electives outside of their focus for a multitude of reasons, one being that it helps students realize the importance of how others contribute to society.

Apprenticeships can help to fill the knowledge gap, but the white collars that are in the jobs now will also need to be retrained and made comfortable to work with a large influx of apprentices to make this approach a success.

If history serves me correctly, his first name is Uncle and if you follow him everything will be alright.

Huh, maybe DT has been following RFK Jrs recommendations and he really did make America healthy again.

Donkey Show Barbie

• Everything Daven Hiskey and Simon Whistler make
• Geographics channel could use some love
• Eric Rosen chess
• Veritasium (popular but well produced and informative)
• Adam Savage’s channel of mythbusters fame
• Montemayor - rarely posts but his WW2 battle breakdowns are so good!

Well that certainly aligns with someone who would be best buds with a guy who trafficked women into sex slavery.

Where are the Epstein files Donnie?

Not a puppet! Wanna-be dictator proceeds to concede everything to dictator of weaker regional power.

If the people were all invested in taking out the billionaires, then the people would win, hands down.

But if, as in the current situation, the people have higher priorities, in which 50% do not find billionaires to be an existential threat, and at least 300 million think they are simply temporarily embarrassed billionaires themselves, then the billionaires win, that is, until the Earth inevitably cannot support them any longer.

I used to give fairly often, but after handing one of the more famous homeless folks in my community a 5 spot and him immediately saying “thanks man, I’m going to go buy a beer with this” I took a hard think and realized I don’t want to enable that lifestyle. I mean a beer is fine every once in a while, but I’d rather see the guy have a safe environment where he can drink it.

So now instead I donate to our local hospitality house every time someone asks me for some change.

It’s easy to hate and fear the “other” - not just a conservative thing, though I do think they’re a bit more vitriolic about it.

I use it to help give me ideas for DND character building and campaigns. I used it to help me write a closing poem for my character who sacrificed himself for the greater good at the end of a long 2 year run. It gave me the scaffold and then I added some details. It generated my latest character picture based upon some criteria.

Otherwise, it gave me some recommendations on how to flavor up a dish the other day. Again I used it but added my own flair.

I asked it a question to help me the remember a movie title based upon some criteria (tip of my tongue style) it nailed it spot on.

I’ll tell you one place I hated it today. The Hardee’s drive through line. Robot voice drives me up the wall.

Hellraiser and the original Dune. Claymation looks so fake now, but it didn’t back then.

You know those movies as a young kid that you watch over and over? This was mine. From like 7 to 12 I would have these recurring dreams of a school with a flag in front and then going the stairs into a basement. I wondered where the hell it was coming from, then I watched the intro to the movie again in my 20s.

If not arachnophobia, then perhaps starship troopers?

Haven’t seen writingprompts in a while, really liked that one.

I’ve had this odd thought lately that I just want to put into the ether. And honestly, I’ve been a free trade person pretty much all my life, because I think free trade can and should empower societies to trade what they’re best at, and it has the capability to help pull billions out of poverty.

But one thing I’ve always thought was fucked about free trade is the countries that we exploit, that is, those that pay the kind of wages the US suffered through in the 1800s and early 1900s. The kind of labor that works too long and still barely struggles to survive.

What if the tariffs do balance that a bit better? What if American workers get a fair shake to do work for American consumers? What if this awful, awful dark period in our lives somehow gives the Vietnamese or Cambodian worker a better life because the US is no longer willing to buy goods from countries that exploit their workforce?

I personally don’t want to be part of the tomato problem if I can help it. This is on no way an endorsement of the current administration, but why the fuck did it have to be this administration that acted upon this? Why couldn’t it have been prior administrations over the last 30 years?

Gonna disagree with you there. BloodSugarSexMagic was nice when it dropped. Music video of them dancing in their underwear with P-funk was revolutionary at the time.

Their stuff in the 2000s though? Yea, too overproduced.

Flea slappin’ bass though…that dude is a legend.