That’s kind of you to say. There was definitely no way I could have foreseen what the Web 2.0 era would be like.

When the internet became more of a common thing, I really believed that it would bring people together. That all everyone needed was to be exposed to information. That seems so very naive now.

I grew up in a very conservative household and genuinely believed everything I was taught due to not being exposed to other ideas. Over time, even when in high school, I started to notice that people hated things without understanding them. Ask someone to explain to you why communism is bad, for instance, and they probably can’t because they know nothing about it.

Over time, I became exposed to more diverse people, educated people, people from different places. I went to school and got my masters degree. I have found that I am frankly fairly liberal by US standards.

The MAGA types used to talk about an education when it was a way to insult people who make the minimum wage and make it their fault that they were underpaid. They didn’t actually want peoples’ lives to be better, but rather to find a way to look down on entire classes of humans.

I have experienced some recent schadenfreude with farmers who no longer have workers to harvest because ICE scared them away.

You’ve made a potential error in underestimating just how horrible some peoples’ lives are and how filled with hatred they are over that fact. This is really what drives so much of politics in the world–disgruntled people with no future who choose to hate others who have nothing to do with it.

I love the quote about how it is putting federal agents in danger…and I sort of think that they are doing that themselves.

The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.

Easiest: My brother in a field in front of his trailer with beers in hand. Hardest: Destination wedding on an island. I disliked it.

Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.

This has long been my experience. Although I believe that great therapists are out there, I have yet to encounter someone who didn’t blame me for the problems and cause me to feel rejected. The last person I went to looked over the intake testing and told me that nobody would want me as a client. No joke. I convinced him to let me stay but nothing happened and I burned out after 3 months or so and stopped going.

Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.

Back in the day, you scanned the disk. Folder by folder, file by file. If what you were looking for appeared early in your search, you were golden. It turns out, though, that scanning a filesystem is computationally very complex and takes a long time. Not something you might notice so much on a PC, but something that you would notice on a server. So, instead, you want to index the disk, slowly and over time, and then you search against the index. This works well in a server, but no so much on a workstation. Well there’s really no difference between Windows 11 and Windows Server 2024 except for some fine tuning of resource allocation. Essentially, you get the very (for desktops) ineffective server version.

Sorry I work in tech and may take things for granted.

Guess we’ll cut food stamps but tell people who can afford to to get a watch

Those are some reasonable parts, congratulations.

Helpful to know that the country was markedly different before and after each of these events. Think of things before and after WWII, for instance. We will experience similar over the next 20 - 40 years.

Of course it was. I had it.

I have thought about this over the years. If I am in a loop, it’s “which PhD am I doing this lifetime?” or “so I guess I am going to be the world’s best cabinetmaker this round.”

holy cow, I lived the afternoon half of that

OOOH Look at Mister FANCY PANTS with his dial up internet. You must be rich, Mister Fancy Pants.

I think I had AOL at the time…