Yup, those private individuals who live aboard boats all the time. There are a number of companies that provide exactly the service you want, complete with anonymizers and end-points in various countries.

solved long ago.

Get yourself some regulated 12V buck-boost supplies. I use a Logic Supply Intelligent DC-DC Converter; good for 10 amps. Then get some 5 VDC regulators from mouser; a Texas Instruments PT78HT205V works nicely.

Now you're ready to rock. Plug a Roku into the 5VDC regulator, a TV into the Roku, and you're almost there.

Get an OpenWRT compatible wifi access point. A Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300HR has more horsepower than you need. Plug a hard drive into it, set it up. Install lighttpd and roconnect, install the ro-cnnect channel on the roku, and you're good to go for movies.

Now install some of the other channels; you can play movies from a usb stick, and there are some music channels.

Set up the wifi access point to serve up the movies and music; now you can stream from your van to your iPod or whatever.

And the whole thing draws about 3 amps, not enough to worry about.

Been to Japan lately? Like in the last 30 years? The standard of living is higher than in the US.

There's no law against driving. There are laws against "reckless driving".

Why can't this be applied to guns?

Umm.... I shoot. A lot. And one of the basic tennets of shooting is knowing what you shoot at. If I'm shooting in a tinder-dry environment, that's probably not a good thing. And I should not do it. I should go to a firing range or something....

Gun ownership is about responsibility. A very vocal minority of gun owners have managed to ram "right to own and shoot guns anywhere anytime together with "guns do no harm and we're not responsible for what guns do". IMHO, as a gun owner, they should prosecute the people who started this. For all you know, they were shooting tracers.

Apparently Utah has passed a law that prohibits anyone making laws that restrict firearms. So no charges can be brought against anyone who starts a fire while shooting on public lands. At a guess you'be absolved from blame for shooting those pesky liberals, like Orin Hatch.

I guess it depends on which part of Europe; I spend a lot of time in a small town in the Czech Republic and service there is very good. Even in Prague outside the tourist areas it's pretty good. You have a lot of old timers who kept their skills and passed them on even under Communism.

That's the definition of a "living wage".

We in the US have taken up this "up or out" mentality where it's no longer possible to spend your life doing a simple task; you have to somehow "better yourself" in order to actually make a living wage.

So we start off at starvation wages, and if we can't make the cut we starve. Just listen to some of the rhetoric.

There's a lot of value in having an experienced person doing basic tasks, but we've forgotten that. Go to Europe, or Japan, and see what level of service you get there.

Also, he's got a $450K house paid for. At some point he was making a lot more than $30K/yr. Sure, if my house was paid for I could be holier than thou and pontificate about how wasteful you are.

The reality is most of us don't get $1M to play with by the time we're 37. So sir, take your holier than thou attitude and go fuck yourself.

$500/month for a 4 bedroom?????? WOW!!!!!

What are your building costs? On a 30 year note, that's roughly, what, $50K US to build a 4 bedroom apartment? So we're talking building/purchase costs of $50/sf? What part of the world are you in? 1950?

Buying in bulk and such works if you have a group of people. The poster was claiming that his girlfriend could live on $15K/yr unassisted. Sharing rent expenses, sharing cooking expenses, etc. are all some form of assistance. Single portions in grocery stores are extremely expensive.

Here you can't get an apartment at all (unless it's in a drug infested dump) unless you can prove you make at least $35K/yr, or someone (university, mom) vouches for you. And roommates don't count; someone has to sign that makes that much. Getting someone to guarantee you will pay your bills counts as assistance in my book.

I'm not saying it's impossible to live on $15K/yr; I'm saying to do so you have to do some serious cost sharing with others and get assistance from someone somewhere, even if it's co-signing on the lease agreement.

Budgets please. Unless you live in some total backwater, you can't live on $12K/yr, or $15K/yr without some form of assistance. Where I live a cheap apartment can cost $6K/yr. Groceries are easily $400/mo, so that doesn't leave enough to buy gas for one of your paid-for cars.

Do you have kids? They go to friends' houses and surf the net there. Libraries, schools. You can't bubble wrap your kids.

Best to teach them how to react when they do find something offensive, and give them the confidence to say "turn that off" to a friend that might bring that up.

Great for boys, you mean. Heinlein was at his sexist best in that one.

I like Heinlein, but he was a misogynistic racist, especially in his earlier books. Not sure I want to dump that on a kid.

I don't know where you went to school, but the "drivel" you refer to looks really good to me. The food is visually appealing, and looks varied in texture. The presentation is pretty good. In other words, for mass produced industrial cafeteria food it's darn good.

Try running a kitchen before you spout.

When you're given a budget where you have to produce a meal for less than $2 and this includes your labor costs, and meet all the "nutritional needs" and make stuff that people actually want to eat, you realize just how great a job some of those people do.