You did just fine by my measure, it was folks reading what you wrote who screwed up 🤷‍♂️

I’ve personally never met a carpenter, union or otherwise. I’ve known a handful of framers - these are the folks assembling (way faster than is reasonable to expect) the somewhat pre-built wooden structures that eventually comprise a new house. The demands placed on those folks are extreme, they seem to be among the worst treated among the trades.

Spending your career in a trade isn’t a bad idea, probably a good one - it’s way better for a lotta folks than a thoroughly dissatisfying stretch of time in largely meaningless, forever anxious, corporate jobs.

Exercise some care though - don’t just assume something like “working with my hands will pay off”, do the research to find out what you specifically can be happy with, and the pros and cons involved.

And by and large, if you’re going the trades route, prefer one with a heavy union presence.

The Democrats’ stated strategy, after putting their heads together and trying to figure out how they got trounced on the last election - is to go more hardcore “center” than they previously have.

It’s basically impossible to tell at this point if they’re the most clownishly out of touch group of people imaginable, or actively complicit and just waiting for the pendulum to swing slightly back so they can be “successful” again, for a bit. Certainly a mix, but -

The only reason I lend credence to the former at all, is just how cartoonishly bad Dems are at almost everything lately. I say lately because throughout my life there have been at least sincere-seeming efforts from (some) Dems to help (some) regular people. Some might argue (with ample justification) that it’s always been this way, but the situation does feel distinctly bleak to me today.

Meaning that they claim and promise to care about (some) marginalized groups of humans but actually don’t give a single fuck and serve the capital-owning class with roughly the same slavering, dogged devotion as the goddamn Republicans?

People watch porn on their work computers, after being told not to. And not just a few. The Venn diagram of folks who do that and who wouldn’t give a single shit about handing over their ID has gotta be roughly a circle. A whole lotta folks are seriously ill-equipped for the burgeoning surveillance nightmare, in fact their complacency (and frankly just being thoroughly outmatched in sophistication) will march us all towards it.

Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, that show was crazy influential, at least initially. Punchlines came way faster than we were used to, sometimes deliberately abruptly (iconic example of that for me is Peter’s instantaneous face-plants, which I still find funny TBH). And people liked the endless gags that were just random non sequiturs of dumb stuff happening that had nothing to do with anything. Fun at first, not enough to scaffold a whole show around IMO, but most folks couldn’t get enough.

That kinda stuff really cheapened humor (“mainstream humor”? is that even a thing?) over the long run, according to me. I started to say I’m just crotchety and old, but actually I wasn’t then and I thought it was lame pretty quickly after the initial “fun new show everyone’s into” vibe wore off.

Then again if it wasn’t them it would’ve just been another, audiences were just kinda “ready” for that sort of humor I suppose, obviously wouldn’t have been the runaway success it was otherwise. I’d be shocked if The Simpsons weren’t influenced, seems almost impossible with the cultural swell around Family Guy at the time.

This is exactly why they tried not to bring him back, and I really thought he might end up dead rather than coming home. People who come back talk about the crimes going on down there.

Sad thing is from what I understand, Spanish language news commonly available in the US (Unavision I believe?) basically fed Latinos a straight up false version of the guy, the description I read sounded even less accurate than Fox.

The overwhelming effectiveness of widespread media manipulation is the real story (and human tragedy…) here.

Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!

Oh, also - largely with you on Robux. I mean I don’t have a problem with it in principle, ideally it lets kids (through their parents) effectively choose which games and creators to support, and there have lately been some big games with big frequent updates that kids have found to be super enjoyable. Like, content updates at rates traditional games would be embarrassed by.

But like all things involving $, I’m sure there’s lots of eventual exploitation. And manipulation of kids to want to buy is definitely bad. But then again, by my measure, kids need to be instructed on recognizing and resisting precisely that from a young age. That manipulation is everywhere and getting worse all the time.

You’re probably right, I’ve once or twice (from an older account) asked a user to elaborate or give specifics, after they’d made some wild claims about safety, never gotten anything.

I do know of at least one truly hideous group of people using the platform as communication and recruitment to some really horrendous (life ruining) stuff, maybe this article references that too. But again, that’s a problem of sufficiently large user bases (especially of kids). Among millions of users it’s mathematically not realistic to prevent every possible group in the size of dozens from congregating to attempt their awful shit. Motivated humans are good at overcoming even well-designed systems.

We’re certainly right to care about safety though, and I do want to know if Roblox is less safe than I imagine.

Roblox chat is so restrictive that it routinely makes it difficult to talk about normal things. My daughter has spent a ton of time on Roblox (while being prohibited from many other things including unfettered YouTube, for context) and I really don’t see what the fuss is about. I’ve played with her on and off for years, it has always struck me as a generally safe platform, and I’m both sensitive and clued in about the topic.

Anything with user numbers like Roblox is going to attract the darkest corners of the internet, that’s unavoidable. It doesn’t strike me that there’s anything particularly dangerous about Roblox beyond that fact, they seem to manage it well and actually the platform seems pretty safe all things considered.

Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it’s even a little worse though, it’s like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.

Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I’d argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.

Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.

And certainly never trust YouTube’s curation, ever, agreed.

4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.

I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don’t really restrict the time they spend at all.

YEAH MF, congrats, now your brain is malwared to fuck, you shouldn’t have looked at it dead on. Limewire is best treated like a Medusa… whose effects show up later.

Guaranteed 10 years earlier dementia onset at a minimum, probably some strokes that leave you “revealing” family secrets invented out of whole cloth by the w4r3z in your now-compromised, botnet brain.

Sorry, Limewire was a wild ride. Could just be the way memories work, but looking back, I think Limewire delivered what I actually tried to download <50% of the time, maybe <30% by the time I stopped using it.

Napster was super dope (and, oddly enough, accidentally produced a solid way for me to buy drugs from the hood, lmao), and Soulseek was absolutely delicious, but - alas.

Yeesh. I’ve been (blessedly) away from MS for a bit now so I’m kind of catching up / watching the carnage from afar.

When you jack up veteran user workflows so much that it makes the OS feel alien…you’re really just daring people to jump OS. I know it’s not that simple for work environments, but I can’t imagine administering this sloppy mess has gotten any easier, so…gonna be fun waiting for the suits to eventually catch up I guess.

I’m really starting to wonder if they just might fuck up their products so badly it fucks up their insanely strong market position enough to be replaced.

MS used to be more careful with the corporate/ enterprise side. Some notable exceptions of course, the tiles-only “mobile-tap-first” interface of 8 was rough on users, but forcing that on their server 2012 OS was an abomination.

But the stuff outta MS lately is just nutso.

How about “lacked a VHS player altogether” lmao. My movie ingestion growing up was basically 100% up to the whims of random people, strange way to do it.

Really dig the scrappy approach y’all used tho, that’s the good stuff. Being broke taught me a lotta the most important stuff TBH.

I played a buncha Vampire Survivors around that phase lol, just need one hand for the controls. Football cradle baby, hold bottle in that same hand (does require some wrist flexibility), other hand & arm free.

That hold doesn’t help with wiggles of course (and maybe you already use it) but at least you can pause VS.