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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Our experience is that basically the only really expensive thing is childcare. Are you eligible for subsidized, or free, care (or have trustworthy and willing relatives)?

    As for gear, babies don’t need much. But for what they do need, reach out to friends, neighbors, and family! We’re fortunate that we could have afforded everything new, but we really only bought a few things because friends and randos alike gave us so much free kid stuff (we bought a nice stroller, a baby basket, and an IKEA crib — basically everything else was a hand-me-down). Join local “buy nothing” groups, or parent groups (sadly they’re usually WhatsApp, but whatever). Most people hate throwing away stuff, and would rather it go to a good home.

    Look at programs for subsidized/free necessities like diapers. There are lots of resources out there, especially in cities.

    As everyone else said, no one feels ready. We certainly didn’t!



  • For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

    In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).



  • UPS and American companies in general

    But this is USPS, which isn’t an American company, it’s a US independent agency.

    Their mandate isn’t (AFAIK…) to make a profit, but rather to serve the mail requirements of a very large country.

    Personally, my experiences with USPS have been generally positive, from passports for infants to free change-of-address forwarding service to tracking down quasi-scam products from Amazon. YMMV though.


  • I think there’s a bias in the US against this sort of thing that doesn’t exist (or not to the same extent) in Europe due to the age of the cities/buildings.

    In the US, a building from the 1700s is a historic artifact to be cherished, while in parts of Europe a building from the 1500s is just the local pub.

    So, the US is often hesitant to modify these old buildings, but Europe seems to have more of a perspective of “it’s a building, not a museum, let’s give it new life by modifying it.”

    This is just from the perspective of me, from the US — and I think these old/new buildings are really neat!