As long as they don't turn off the Census Bureau website it doesn't really effect me. Last time they shut down the government, I camped in the Finger Lakes National Forest in October 2013, and nobody cared -- a NY state game warden drove by and didn't even stop.
I am curious about the whole laundry pod movement, assuming it's another tacky wasteful invention like K-Cups to just force you to pay more. I've always used liquid laundry soap. But apparently powdered soaps are better at cleaning clothes and cheaper. And it comes in cardboard, rather then plastic. I'll have to keep that in mind.
"Good news for trappers!
#truthaboutfur"
"Richard Stallman (a.k.a. RMS) is considered to be the founding father of free software. He began thinking about the issue while he was working in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. The lab used a printer that often broke down, but because the lab workers had the source code of the printer's driver (1) at their disposal, they were able to modify the program so that the printer would send an error message to everyone's workstation every time it broke down and whoever was available would go the the printer room and fix the problem."
"One day the lab bought a new, more reliable printer from Xerox. Unfortunately, the source code of the printer driver was not included in the package, and they were unable to put in place the same kind of maintenance set-up they had used before. Richard Stallman later heard that another scientific laboratory had a copy of the source code of the Xerox driver. When he tried to obtain it, he was told that the lab had agreed to keep the source code to themseves and not to make it available to anyone else. Stallman was quite offended by this selfish attitude, and it was then that he became aware of the dangers of a proprietary system."
"Electric motors do not have the same limitations as internal combustion engines. They produce the same amount of torque at near zero as they do at high rpm. Turning slower does not use less battery power. The load is what determines how much power the car uses. Eliminating a gearbox also has the advantage of eliminating weight and gearbox losses, which makes the load smaller. And finally, doing so conforms to a long standing wisdom that engineers often forget. It called the KISS principle."