Yes, “teach them a lesson they’ll feel in their bones.” Although I thought the focus of being a despot, along with the Scattering, was to teach a humanity a lesson about avoiding the “Pharaonic Disease”; to reject authoritarians.

Yeah, later books seem like Frank Herbert was way too obsessed with sex. The idea of Honored Maitres as using sex to control humans seemed pretty misogynistic, even at the time (yes, eventually there was a guy, too). Still, I think the whole “put humanity in a pressure cooker so they explode outwards when the lid is gone” concept was pretty thought-provoking. Also the Siona project; if prescience is a real thing in that universe, it can be studied and understood, then weaponized. How do you defend against an enemy that knows where and when you’ll be?

No one was born in the United States between 1964 and 1981.

Yeah, it’s fine. Birth rates were just above 2 per woman for a couple decades before dropping again to current levels, but with a larger population there are still more births happening than in the 1970s. That decade, low birth rates combined with a smaller population resulted in a small number of GenX members. I am totally OK with continuing to fly under the radar.

He’s the reason I switched to dry flake dishwasher soap. It makes so much sense! Why pay to ship what is mostly water? That’s the same reasoning (along with reducing waste from packaging) that I used to switch to SodaStream and kegs of beer. Bonus: I got an adapter for my SodaStream that allows me to run it off the kegerator CO2 cylinder, which is much cheaper than SodaStream’s own cylinder exchanges.

I wish I had known about heat pump water heaters before I replaced mine about 6 years ago. Heat pumps for home heating and water heating should be mandated by building code here in mild California. It’s the perfect environment for them. Unfortunately, I use heating so infrequently during our “winter” that replacing my perfectly functional furnace is not really worth it. So, instead I started using the heat pump mode on my portable air conditioner (yes, I know, but also used infrequently) to provide just those couple of degrees of heat that I need. It’s not bad, with a COP of 2.7.