We could allow certain kinds of commercial use.

A family without a car doesn't need a garage.

A garage could be turned into a grocery store and a transportation stop for other neighborhood families who don't have cars. That business would support the family living in the house.

Or else the population density of the neighborhood increases with multi-generational housing -- grandma and grandpa, kids and their spouses, grandkids, all sharing one house and grandpa's old car, which is parked in the driveway because somebody's cousins are living in the garage.

That's probably the inevitable future of the suburbs as the U.S. middle class evaporates.

Or else these suburbs will be abandoned entirely and people will move away to places where it's easier to survive with less money, as somebody's cousins, living in a converted garage in another suburb, or a tiny apartment in a city with good public transportation services and, most importantly, jobs.

The fear of "falling property values" will increase the rate of destruction in some suburbs as empty houses are left to decay because the bankers and neighbors won't allow their conversion to viable housing adapted to a world with fewer automobiles and work that pays poorly.

The CEO's of these fracking companies should have to drink a liter of these fracking fluids a day...

... for two years before they are approved for use.

Lead acid battery recycling in India is a disaster.

Until that problem is solved inexpensive solar is bad news.

India

Vietnam

http://www.okinternational.org/lead-batteries/Recycling

Without a modern battery recycling infrastructure many of these "cheaper than diesel" solar systems soon become an environmental nightmare.

The Greenest Building is the One Already Standing...

Our two year olds always went rock climbing by themselves.

They were little runaway monkeys.

It's damned amazing ***I*** as a parent survived.

I guess I deserved it. My mom tells me how she was gardening one day and looked up and saw her dear little two year old Hunter peering down at her from the edge of the roof. I remember that too, climbing up the porch trellis and feeling quite pleased with myself. I also clearly remember what raw fresh-from-the-garden pill bugs, earthworms, and escargot taste like...

The reason my wife and I didn't keep our kids in playpens or cribs is that we couldn't. My mom bought us a nice crib for our oldest. I think the third time we heard the "THUNK!!!" of a kid leaping (or controlled falling...) onto a wooden floor, well that was that. The crib was useless. Kids want to sleep with us, kids will sleep with us. It's either that or a cage.

The weirdest thing is I sometimes dream I'm a gibbon, flinging myself through the trees. That's the single reason I would approve of building I giant moonbase. I want a public park on the moon with a jungle so I can swing through the trees chasing flying chickens. I think the chickens would enjoy flying as much as I enjoyed swinging through the trees.

wikipedia

This fracking "market" is bullshit.

They are drilling short-lived very dirty wells that will never pay back the last suckers who buy into them. The last players in this game will be left with nothing but a vast wreckage of stinking liabilities.

This is ENRON all over again, played on a larger scale by scumbags who plan to be sitting on the verandas of their safe-haven mansions pinching the asses of party girls and drinking piña coladas as their fracking poisons seep into your drinking water and your energy starved economy collapse around you.

I grew up in a city that was more than 99% white.

This wasn't accomplished by restrictive covenants, sundown laws, or anything like that. It was all under the table, wink-and-nod crap.

Apartment owners and landlords simply didn't rent to "Negroes or Mexicans" it was unwritten, and unremarked. People who were not white couldn't get loans to buy houses. Restaurants would hide non-white families away in the corner and give them poor service. The police would harass "suspicious" people, meaning anyone who wasn't white. Driving or walking while black (DWB) enforcement was a major police activity. We had neighbors who would call the police if they saw a black guy walking down the street, and the police would show up to interrogate that person, demand to know what they were doing there, etc. If you were Mexican you'd best be holding a leaf blower or a vacuum cleaner if you didn't want trouble.

I went to one high school reunion (that's all I could take) and quite a few people told me straight up, without shame or embarrassment, that they'd left our hometown or California entirely, because their were too many Mexicans now. Most astonishingly, they don't consider themselves to be racist. I think that's why the South takes such a bashing, because the South was more explicit in their racism, and the white suburbanites in our community could claim they weren't like that. After all, anyone, black or white, could use a public drinking fountain.

I fled my home town and have lived my entire adult life in communities with diverse populations, mostly in places where white guys like me are the minority. When I visit places that are entirely white it feels creepy, like I can just hear the Twilight Zone theme music playing in the background, like people are missing somehow, that they've been sucked into another dimension, yet the people remaining somehow don't notice...

Things we buy generally cost less to make than what we pay for them.

That's how capitalism works.

Photoshop is not worth $699 dollars to me so I don't use it.

I'm pretty sure Adobe spends more on marketing than they do on software development and I've no reason to support that nonsense.

Then again, look at me. I drive a car made in 1984 and generally acquire my computers by diverting them from the dumpsters.

Human technical progress would have a vastly different nature if most people were like me...

In my futuristic utopia you can grow anything you like in your garden. Clothing, hamburgers, bicycles, medicines, cell phones, supercomputers... who knows, maybe even space ships. All you have to do is ask around, someone will have the seeds.

Our weirdest religion is Monetization. Nothing beats it. Not snake handling, not wine into blood...

... Nothing.

Trusting God or the Emperor or the Party to turn debt, numbers, bits of paper, metal, stones, etc. into some magical substance called money? That is freaking bizarre, a cruel religion and a leap of faith beyond all reason.

Talk about making weird shit up... Banks are the weirdest churches and temples mankind has ever built.