Living Off The Grid Leaves You With Too Much Energy, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: How to find your opposite job, living off the grid leaves you with too *much* power, and breaking down "American innocence."
Living Off The Grid Leaves You With Too Much Power
Luke Evslin thought he was so clever. As Amelia Urry reports for Grist, Evslin wanted to live off the grid. Remove himself from society. In Hawaii.
Easy, right? Erect a yurt. Plant food. Assemble a solar power system. There's a assumption that Evslin and his family would be roughing it. Maybe they'd go for days without power, or spent weeks eating the same food over and over again thanks to bad yields.
Evslin's biggest challenge was that he had more power than he knew what to do with. Or more accurately, he used too little power and generated too much. Which, for someone trying to live off the grid seems… wasteful. This could have been power that other people on the island could have used.
Evslin's story is one of trying to disconnect in a world where it makes more sense to just be connected to everyone else.
Your Opposite Job Is Probably 'Model'
If you're reading this, chances are you have a job. Maybe you're reading this very thing at your job. Maybe you've thought about where you might be, had you gone to a different school or taken that job or moved to that town. What would your life be like if it was the exact opposite?
Only you can look deep inside to answer this. That said, the New York Times analyzed labor department data on the various skills required for certain professions and created a tool to help find your "opposite job." That is, the job that requires the complete opposite of skills your current job requires.
Curious as to how it works? Well, I put in "News Editor," a position that according to the Labor Department, requires things like communication skills, reading comprehension and time management. According to the Times, the opposite job is a model. This is a position that requires things like a good sense of balance, coordination, and trunk strength — skills, seemingly, definitely not required to edit the news.
Most Americans Are Mostly Brainwashed Nationalists
Suzy Hansen grew up like most middle-class white Americans. She grew up around white people, with white teachers who spent a majority of their energy teaching Hansen on just how amazing America is. You're taught to be polite, and that evil exists in the world. And in the end you don't feel like an American so much as you feel "normal."
This "American Innocence" Hansen deconstructs in the Guardian, is something she didn't discover until she moved to Turkey. Which: I know what you're thinking. American travels abroad, realizes there are more perspectives than her own and in the process finds who they truly are.
But in Hansen's case, realizing that this innocence — this ignorant understanding that America is inherently good and it's influence isn't felt throughout the globe — is so pervasive and so ingrained within the American psyche was truly destabilizing.
Most of us might look at the current administration and think that this will, eventually, pass. That somehow, the right people will finally affect the change we need and the American Experiment will be back on track. But what if it's not the people but the machinery that's bad. We're all taught that America offers freedom, and we should believe in America. But should we?
A Couple Just Bought Up A Street In 'Frisco
The cool thing about dated municipal law is how people find ways to exploit it. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a couple managed to snatch up a private street in the San Francisco — home to some of the most expensive homes in the Bay Area.
The couple, Tina Lam and Michael Cheng, did not do this through sheer purchasing power. Thanks to a clerical error, the property tax bill the local homeowner's alliance of the street was supposed to pay was being sent to an old address. For 30 years. Due to the tax delinquency, the street went up for auction and the Lam and Cheng snatched it up for a cool $90,000.
Of course the homeowners are filing suit. But it's pretty great to imagine that for a time, Lam and Cheng could charge these millionaires to park cars on their own street.
