I assume that the issue is doe to hard water from the borehole - and so limescale buildup, which can quickly kill heating elements.

I look after a few systems with this issue, and have installed water softeners to deal with it. There is some info here.

Never touched Instagram. Deleted Facebook a decade or more back.

This one is ok

If you are a producer of doohickeys and I buy them from you to sell on, then I am a retailer and a customer of yours, but I do not actually consume the doohickeys. It is my customers who are the consumers.

Or, if you produce a certain show and I pirate that show from a torrent site and watch it, then I am a consumer of that show - but not a customer.

I would say that kindness is an expression (not the only one) of empathy. Some degree of empathy is present in the overwhelming majority of people - barring extreme sociopathic conditions and an absence of mirror neurones. So for most people I would say that it is innate to some extent.

Even in cases where empathy is not present, kindness can be simulated or faked and some people with strong sociopathic conditions have proven to be very good at this when it suits their purposes - so I certainly say something with the appearance of kindness can be learned in one form or another.

It can definitely be cultivated - and I would say that this is one of the major qualities in the whole "two wolves" metaphor or, in classical Greek terms, a virtue to be developed.

To a colleague arriving 10 mins late: "Afternoon."

To a colleague arriving 10 mins early: "Shat the bed?"

I do pretty much all the time. Why? Because I like to keep up with the latest posts - and so the news and stories they relate to. It seems a bit odd to ask 'why' really.

I always stick with 'subscribed', of course. I have no idea what 'new' and 'all' would look like.

I have a day off tomorrow and will be spending most of tramping through dense and wet woodland dormouse surveying (unless it is actually raining: we make sure that we don't get the mice wet). That gets fairly tiring after a while so the evening will just be pizza and TV with my SO - probably Lower Decks, an old Parks and Rec and For All Mankind, then under the duvet and reading for the rest of the evening.

So, yep, really living it up.

Yes. I had no idea they existed until we had the problem and looked into it.

I have a couple of usernames that I have used - or, more often, used variations of - for quite some time over a range of sites. However, it is not so much that I am attached to them as such. It is more that I can't be arsed to come up with something new each time.

Why is that a good thing? It would only be good if the results of the decisions were good. Making bad decisions fast would make things worse.

Decision speed is simply neutral unless there is an associated bias towards good or bad results from those decisions.

I'm interacting with it far more and in far more varied contexts than I had been on reddit for several years. Overall, there isn't as much useful or entertaining activity in total of course, but the signal to noise ratio is soooooo much higher.