ZDL

I use so-called "eternal pencils" now. They come in various "hardness" ratings (like pencils: B, HB, H, 2H, etc.) but even my "softest" (read: darkest with broadest tip) has been in use now for a couple of years without noticeable wear on the tip. That one is guaranteed to be usable for a decade. My hardest will likely stop working when the sun dies in four billion years or so.

I've tried them. I still prefer the compressed ones, but they're pretty good, yes.

I have lived in small towns (smallest: about 3000 population) and in big cities (largest: about 14,000,000 population). I have family who live so rustically that even a small town is an hour's drive away.

I like all three situations for different reasons, albeit for the rustic life only in short bursts of two months or so.

Overall I'd say I'm a "city girl", but if I have a decent Internet connection I probably would enjoy small town life more since I'm aging and slowing down. There would be some adjustment, of course, to not being near hot spots and good restaurants and such, but it would also give me the peace and quiet to actually catch up on reading the books I've accumulated over the years and getting practice time in on the instruments I want to learn.

So you're only missing out if you really want those things. But don't think that you're going to have more time to do things in the city. As plenty of others have pointed out, the realities of traffic in most cities are such that you'll face long transit times anyway, although if you live in a place that has actual public transit that gets mitigated quite a bit; I can cross the megacity I live in now from extreme ends in just over an hour; most of the places I want to go I can be at in under 15 minutes, the majority of these being even in walking distance.

Cousin. Did I typo that?

Good plan.

Step 1: Ban all US social media. Step 2: Ban all US citizens. Step 3: Ban all US businesses of any kind.

There. MEGA.

Yes. At work, for example, I make a cup in the morning about 10AM and then keep refilling and drinking until about an hour before quitting time.

(P.S. Even at 50,000,000 dollars that's less than 1/8 of the Apartheid Manchild's net worth.)

Saturn V was that expensive because the sheer volume of calculations that had to be done were done BY HUMAN BEINGS. Electronic computers weren't up to the task. Salaries were a huge expense item because computers (in the original sense of the word) liked to be paid.

SpaceX has the advantage of having computers literally four orders of magnitude more powerful in every one of their engineer's pockets. Plus computers far more powerful than those available at a very low price. Calculations that took thousands of person-days (daily!), with the commensurate salaries of the people doing them, are now done in seconds.

There is simply no excuse—beyond the toxic "move fast and break things" ethos of modern "tech"—for constantly having rockets blow up in this day and age. The simulations and static test analyses and such that were once such an expensive chore are orders (note the plural) of magnitude cheaper today than they were in the 1960s.

It's just incompetence and arrogance.

Also I note with interest that from inception (1962) to first full stack flight (which was also the first flight of any component) was only five years.

Starship was officially announced in 2012 and its first flight (of sorts, if you call "spinning out of control until it disassembled itself a "flight") was in 2023.

ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS and SpaceX still hadn't made a surviving launch. For reference, eleven years after the Saturn V was started, the Saturn V had made 13 flights, all successful, doing its final flight that year boosting Skylab into LEO. (You know, that place that SpaceX hasn't even yet put an empty Starship into.)

I get it straight from a collective representing the farmers in Liubao. There are some Internet vendors who sell it, though, so you don't have to move to China. I can't vouch for any of them though since, well, I don't use their services.

You don't. You finish your cup, you put the leaves back in, you pour hot water over top.

I cycle among these four randomly:

I don't know. This one looks a bit sticky!