Northeastern US. Things are okay. Worse than I would have predicted 5 years ago but not terrible.

We pay our bills, contribute to the 401k and HSA, and have still been saving every month. Our electric + natural gas bills fluctuate as we switch from electric cooling to gas heating, but their combined monthly average has doubled in less than 5 years. I’m eyeing up solar systems for some relief. We don’t drive much so the direct price of gas hasn’t been huge. Groceries are a bit more expensive, but usually not as crazy as I see on the news. Clothing has gotten wildly expensive, with thrift and outlet stores selling stuff for prices I would have paid at regular retail 5 years ago.

We’re holding on. I wish we ate out, and especially drank out, less. I was always a homebody, but nowadays its $15-$20 for a cocktail, $10 for a domestic draft, plus tip.

Imagine unironically quoting Ronald Reagan in 2026. On Lemmy of all places.

A lot of these are actually good examples of the difference between a hobbiest or a professional. If she just held it correctly and you told me there was a bit of solder somewhere we can’t see, I could very easily believe this was a real photo of a hobbyist.

Most of what you listed are luxuries and conveniences. The one exception is the fume hood, which is a safety concern, but I would say that’s overkill for any hobbyist and maybe even a lot of professionals. A small fan and a reasonably vented/sized room is fine. Heck, I only bother grabbing my fan if I know i’m going to be doing more than ~15 minutes of soldering.

It could just be the circles I run in, but lately I see the opposite problem prevailing. People just decide that if a law doesn’t suit their “ethics” or whimsy in the moment, they can go ahead and ignore it.

Silly stuff like “I dont want to spend 90 seconds finding a parking spot and walking into/put of the store, so I’ll just leave my car right in front of the store entrance. Who cares about traffic patterns or emergency services or blacking access ramps for mobility impaired people?”

Or more serious things. Some friends of mine recently bought a vacant lot near me intending to build a house, and a workshop for their business. It’s on a hillside so they would need to spend ~$3k to have a contractor grade the property. But they needed to handle the permitting themselves… Which needs an engineer to verify their changes won’t destabilize the land and endanger their neighbors. Analyze the drainage to ensure their changes won’t cause flooding. Environmental impact survey to check for endangered and protected species on tbe property. Comes out to $7k. All of a sudden my extreme left-wing, progressive friends sound just like my conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving, ranting about how the big government won’t let them do anything. Meanwhile, since I live nearby I have been feeling a lot more comfortable knowing that my neighbors are required to go through these processes before doing any projects that could impact me. We have been getting more extreme weather lately and I had a landslide on my own property a few years ago.

They also wanted to build a separate workshop building for their business. It is just the two of them now, but they hope to grow and have employees, and want to have some seperstion between the work space and their living space. Which means extra parking, and the workshop needs stuff like a bathroom and break room. And the business needs regular truckloads of pallets of chemicals that they use. And they also use resin 3D printers which need to ventilate toxic fumes outside. This property is zoned for residential and entirely surrounded by single-family homes. Their plan was to just build and hope they were too small to get noticed by the city.

Would they be able to do all of these things without causing disaster? Probably. In my own uneducated opinion, I think they were probabky correct that there are nk endangered species present, that their plans would result in thr land being more stable rather than less, that drainage would not be concerned, and that there business woukd be small and quiet enough that the neighbors would not notice or care.

But none of that is the point. Everyone who does this stuff always thinks its fine. Disasters like that are things that happen to OTHER people, not me! A LOT of regulations are written in blood, but people want to ignore them because they are inconvenient or a hassle or they just don’t want to consider the impact to anyone else. Often laws are there to remind us of the ethical considerations we would otherwise overlook.