We both work in very precarious fields, so we aim at 12 months of expenses plus cash on hand equal to the single largest machine/system in the house (maybe it’s the heat pump, air conditioner, etc for you). I’m happier when we have 18 months in reserve.
Same for non fiction writing. If people can see how you might make a living from what you make, they love to downvote it to oblivion. Guess we’re all suppposed to have office wage jobs all day and write fanfic for free at night. It definitely keeps me from ever posting about my writing.
I’m tearing down a plaster and lath ceiling hung from beams to replace with sawn boards sitting on top of the beams. Not only are board and beam ceilings nicer to look at, I gain an attic floor. The boards are sawn from trees cut from the communal forest two years ago.
I would use a commercial concrete cleaner to remove any bad oil stains and then a solid sealer. Sika should make both of them and be available at the big DIY stores in the masonry section.
A well-sealed concrete countertop is a great work surface in a kitchen, though you might have to reseal it every year.
a notebook and pencil in my shirt pocket are faster to open than a phone app
handwriting is faster than thumb typing
I can sketch an electrical diagram on paper way faster than anyone can with a stylus on some janky phone screen.
3.1) Even if there was a stylus/screen combination with the same haptics, fidelity, and input recognition speed as pencil on paper, it wouldn’t be 0.78€
I can toss the notebook and diagrams to anyone working on a project with me with zero worry that they’ll drop it, forget it, or look around in the rest of it
I can tear out a page and hand it to anyone instantly, instead of finding out what messaging app we have in common, copying (or screenshotting) the note and pasting it in an app
I can insert a note into a physical book, stick it to the inside of a toolbox lid, a wall next to an electrical junction, inside a breaker box, or any other surface, and always have location-aware reminders waiting for me when I need them.
With minimal environmental control, my notes are effectively immortal. I have notebooks of measurements and diagrams of most rooms, wall cavities, pipe runs, electrical runs, cable pulls, and dimensions of various equipment that have outlasted hard drives, backup tapes, and a few cloud storage companies.
Another reason that English speakers talk about common usage is the ridiculous number of words in the language:
The RAE contains something like 93k words, including all the americanismos.
The Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 470k words, and estimates that only 170k of those are in common current usage. So there are VASTLY more words in the English dictionary than most English speakers have ever even heard, much less could use properly. I didn’t know that the word touristic existed in English until I i moved to Spain, for instance.
So for English speakers, getting down to the 100k or so most used words means ignoring 80% of our dictionary. So when we say something isn’t common usage we really mean something between “no one has used that word in 60 years” and “I had to go look up if that even WAS an English word”.
People are fixated on common usage because it’s common, and therefore, by definition, most likely to be unambiguously understood by the largest number of speakers.
The rest of this is in the spirit of modern linguistic nerdiness:
If there is a common word, it should be preferred over uncommon words simply for ease of communication. It is much more common in the English speaking world to say “a tour bus” for a bus that goes around a city near the sights to be seen, and while “a touristic bus” might be a perfectly acceptable synonym, it is less common.
The same holds for “salubrious”. While by dictionary standards it might be the best option, it isn’t that common, and most people would say “healthiness” or “wholesomeness” for salubridad and “sanitariness” or “healthfulness” for sanidad.
Source: USian immigrant to Spain married to a filología inglesa / translator
These products (have been determined to) have environmental, economical, and health risks.
There isn’t really a word in common usage in English that means “with respect to the matter of ones health” that can be used in that construction,so you end up with passive voice statements.
Currently reading The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Excellent both as ethnography and as multivalent critique of capitalism.