all of those things were beautiful. all long gone now.

No

they only present pics of dead or mortally injured children.

anyone who starts sentence with "bro" can f-off

use (ceiling) fans & turn the AC down. way down. heat rises. make the high ceilings work for you not against you. just like they did in the 1920's.

baby steps, baby steps.

Trump ran into the same problem Dubya and his daddy did in Iraq & Afghanistan- sure we can topple the government and defeat their military. That's easy-peasy. But after we do that, who's gonna run the country? In all cases, the answer is "nobody who is acceptable to the US", so the US ends up having to step in and run the place for a time so that it doesn't immediately devolve into "new boss, same old bullshit". Leave a political vacuum in that part of the world and it gets filled by Al Quaida, ISIS, Taliban, or other radical groups that battle it out among themselves for decades, creating another Lebanon. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan.

and bicycles have ~ $0 registration overhead wherever they are operated.

plant shade trees to the south and wait a few years for them to grow?

Aww why nitpick? She's gorgeous, young, talented. At least for now. I can't figure out why she hasn't become America's (always temporary, revolving crown..) sweetheart in a bigger way than she has. America has gone all goo-goo eyed for far less talents and looks than she's got going on right now.

using real timber so it’s probably not going to fall down

Nothing wrong with today's lumber, but there's a lot wrong with antique building standards of the 1920's + lack of code enforcement + old carpenters attitude of "that's the way it's always been done" if they even knew the current/correct rules in the first place.

A lot of near furniture grade lumber was used in old houses because it was common and cheaply available- unlike now. But there is no special advantage to using it in old houses for structural purposes. Today's houses are as engineered as automobiles are for cost and safety.

not touching it (until you replace it) is a good game plan.

that eliminates breakage and just leaves rats as the unpredictable variable.

check out "knob and tube" wiring if you really don't want to sleep well at night.

that stuff's a horror show by today's standards.

old wiring is sketchy. materials degrade over time. plastic polymer technology used in insulators before the late 70's was not what it is today. insulation on new wires will last 80++ years. The old stuff, not so much..

We have blacks picking cotton for free in the prison-industrial complex of the deep south and parts of the midwest. As Americans we have this thing for slavery and subservience. The optics of things. I guess at some unconscious level we just want to see the rickshaw come back in some big, highly visible way.