They want to merge with Albertsons, who owns the other half of grocery stores: Acme, Safeway, jewel osco, and a bunch more.

Community canneries still exist, but they used to be way more popular. In rural communities where people grow a lot of their own food, people can their own food, but pressure canners take a lot of time for a single batch to come up to pressure, cook, and cool.

Community canneries have much bigger pressure canners where you could feasibly can everything in one batch. It's also really enables people sharing surpluses, trading, etc.

Many hobbies are better shared, too. If you have 20 people sharing a super high quality "item", they will have a better experience than if each of those people had to buy their own crappy versions.

Basically, a whole lot of things can be "libraried".

Yeah, no one wants to buy a log splitter and store it for 360 days a year, but those few days you can use it, it's really useful.

Usps has "informed delivery ", where they send you pictures of all of your mail before you get it, so you do know if you are getting something important.

Yeah, reviewing is about making sure the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data. Whether or not the data are correct is largely something that the reviewer cannot determine.

If a machine spits out a reading of 5.3, but the paper says 6.2, the reviewer can't catch that. If numbers are too perfect, you might be suspicious of it, but it's really not your job to go all forensic accountant on the data.

Yeah, nursing is probably a job that is always going to have steady demand, but it seems like (and I could be totally wrong here) there's a pretty broad range of job opportunities where some might work you like a dog and pay horribly, while others are great.

If you are interested in jobs in your area, definitely reach out to some people to ask their opinions on long term job prospects. Your local hospital's CAT scan technician (or whatever their title is) can tell you if they are hurting for people, or if all of their peers are close to retiring.

No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there's nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.

For most jobs, the "filter" is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn't mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that's cause it's really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the "filter".

You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.

You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can't just go to class, get all A's and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.

The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It's probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.

My local library system has tools, kitchen implements, a recording studio, musical instruments, stem kits for kids, video games, and art.

They need a better inventory system, though, cause all the non-book items are inventoried alongside the books. If you want to rent a shovel, you will see every book with "shovel" in the name before you see any actual shovels.

At least at my library, there's basically just a separate form you have to sign to say that if you chop your hand off with a saw, you won't hold them liable, and I think there are more strict limits on how long you can rent things, and what the penalties are for being late.

That is super cool! I should see if I can do that at mine

their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing

Cool. So let's pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car "assembled" in the US doesn't mean that your data isn't being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.