Honestly, no. I’ll credit three things - first, I trained my family to have the fear of god of the high-tier TOU charges. Second, I programmed my power-hungry devices to not run during on-peak. And third, we had a pretty mild summer up until this past week or so.

My last two excel bills have have $95 and $98 for a central air conditioned 1600 sq ft house.

The modifications I made to get here: ~ I put ceiling fans in every room that we spend a lot of time in. Bedrooms and living room. They’re on 24/7 and the very slight breeze is really helpful in making it feel a degree or two cooler than it actually is.

~Whole house fan. I have mine connected to my HomeAssistant and evaluating every hour if it should run for ten minutes. I leave a secured basement window open, so it exhausts the hot attic air and sucks cooler basement air upstairs. Once the sun sets and the exterior temp is lower than my upstairs temp, it will run all night until the sun rises and the exterior temp is greater than the indoor temp.

My A/C rarely runs more than an hour or so a day. There have been a few days where I ran it for hours to try and cool the house for guests and a few days where it was a little stuffy around 5PM while we waited for the sun to set, but it hasn’t been too bad.

I miss the local community Reddit has/had - meaning vibrant town/city subreddits. The one for my town here on Lemmy is just one dude (@ickplant you’re doing your best) but it just doesn’t have the critical mass.

I can’t decide how I feel about these stupid things. On one hand, they’re a limited time deal - all the boomers they ferry around will be dead in 20 years. But in the meantime, I really don’t think the lakes need any more people on them.

I agree locking kids into rooms is not a great way to handle this situation, but what other kind of tools are school admins given? As we’ve clearly seen, even students as young as middle schoolers are such trouble that they’re charged with attempted murder. So, they can’t send them to a different school, but they’re also not allowed to do anything to keep the rest of the student population safe? Got it.

Enjoy - it’s not worth what they charge.

Sure are! They’re all steel.

Yep, that’s what I was driving at. If you’re a “medium” the cards are stacked against you and there are very few levers to pull (if any) to level the playing field at all. The only reason the mid-sized guy I know is able to survive is that he owns all his land outright and his family has been amassing acreage for three generations. Even still, he’s in a tough spot and the mega farms are buying up what is left of the family farms all around him and doing crazy shit like trucking manure across the state on a scale that he just can’t compete with.

Yes! That’s it - Matfer. I think America’s Test Kitchen recommend them and I’d follow ATK off a cliff on kitchen advice. So far, the pans have been fantastic, but I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot to go wrong with a carbon steel pan.

I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.

I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.

Bonus points if you budget a little extra and make friends with a local upholster. They can work magic in turning that solid, but ugly, chair from something your grandma would have to something you might find in a design magazine.