I crushed it and have the American Dream. My experience now is, I’m surrounded by old people, trustfund kids, and people who broke themselves to get ahead.

I have to raise my kids knowing that 80% of their classmates have no chance and hope they luck out and also fall in love with a career path that pays well. All of my friends I grew up with are in a constantly struggle, none of them will own a house. I have friends with PTSD from serving in the military and even with the VA loan option and GI bill they will be lucky to own a house by 50 if ever.

I can’t even talk about my life, my struggles are meaningless compared to those around me. I feel like an outsider in America because I actually did what everyone says is the goal and it is wild to me. I’d give it up in a heartbeat just to feel like I was in a community of equals I felt safe to raise a family around.

I get it, and I agree that most people are not in the right job. This is a big part of why folks want things like a higher minimum wage and socialized healthcare. People often are stuck in jobs because they NEED something from that job and are unable to look around. Then on the other side, sometimes folks find their calling but it pays $9 an hour and they feel a need to try to do better.

I work with a lot of folks for example that got into management because they think that is what you do. They hate the job, they miss writing code, they are awful managers. It’s a very backwards way of living your life.

I am just trying to talk to an ideal and real scenario here. The idea that all jobs suck and that is life is exactly what keeps people down. That is the lie folks believe that keeps them from seeking peace and contentment. We gotta fight that even if we also know that it isn’t easy to find a spot and when you do it might not be viable with the rest of your life.

I am saying yes they would, yes I would. You entirely can find a job that is something you want to do and also not your hobby. Most things folks want to do are someone’s job.

The only place I can accomplish the tasks I’d like to accomplish are at my work. Some tasks are so large that they not only require many many people who wouldn’t normally choose to work together, but a regular flow of resources from others.

People are so lost in capitalism they tie it ALL work to just being money. Even if you remove capitalism, even if you remove money, people still need to work together and resources still need to channel from place to place. Your job wouldn’t go away if money went away. If you look at some of the largest most successful open source free programs in the world, most of the top contributors are all from companies that paid that person a salary for contributing to that code.

Syndication is also called reruns, when the show is rerun out of order on TV at a standard Timeslot. Like for me TNG was on every night at 7pm M-F. It was shown in random order as far as I know with I believe them skipping less popular episodes, I honestly never noticed if they did hits for a bit then did a rerun through it or what.

The first season of TNG is considered weak as a heads up, similar for DS9 though DS9 has some bangers in S1, TNG is mostly weak. That said if you like it, you’ll LOVE the rest.

SNW is fantastic and I really recommend it, it is certainly New Trek but it’s a MUCH better successor to the legacy than Discovery.

Start with the best episodic episodes of TNG and DS9. Most of us were introduced to Star Trek out of order, it isnt like modern TV. 90s TV and prior was focused on syndication.

My recommendations would be, TNG: Darmok, Tapestry, The Wounded, Inner Light, Cause and Effect, Lower Decks (The episode that inspired the show). For DS9: In The Pale Moonlight, Duet, Trials and Tribbleations, The Visitor (Rest in peace Tony Todd)

He was elected as Dictator many times on a yearly basis and sometimes multiple times a year. He was so vastly popular the citizenry they killed the assassin’s, hunted down an heir and put him in power.

Julius Ceasar and his follow on Agustus were insanely capable leaders that did great things for their country. The empire was so great and lasted twice the time America has, it’s fall caused the Dark Ages.

Rome is a bad example here because technically the Dictatorship was good for them. Rome fell due to corruption that came in via enabling the Christian church to operate freely. Now that is a much better analog here that we enabled religious organizations to become tax free political action committees and uncapped their ability to influence government. This meant the evangelical grifters became the most powerful political entities in America.

Let’s not lump Trump in with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a war hero and a capable leader who’s final crimes were giving out citizenship and housing.

Trump’s final crimes will be giving all our state secrets to every other government in the world and obliterating our infrastructure.

He is 78, in awful health, and has no interest in a legacy or supporting a successor. He keeps everyone around him at odds and maintains enough infighting that no clear heir apparent could really show up.

So like, he really only will hold power long enough to make everything terrible. So we got that goin for us.

deleted by creator

The US has literally 0 third party representation at the federal level and 10 state senators all libertarian. Even Bernie isn’t technically a third party he just is no party. So to be clear, having no party is far far better in the US than representing a third party even in a local election.

Yea, if you want more leftist policies than right, vote and work with Democrats at the federal level and try to get Ranked voting in more places. Exactly like Bernie has. Continue to support your third party in local until they become able to actually get folks elected to even a Senate post. As long as the Green Party can’t even manage to get the most hippy district in the nation to get a single House Rep elected you might as well just cast your vote for Bob Ross.

A second loss should be a death knell of the current Republican party. He won’t transition any of his power to Vance or any other Republicans. He could die and we still would see 10% of the Americans to vote for him in 2028 because his death was just media propaganda as far as they are concerned.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.

The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.

This is why I used Spotify listeners and not plays or ticket sales or album sales. It’s a metric that doesn’t really require a band to be currently active. New hits will clearly improve the metric but we’re talking here specifically about a person’s outreach today and influence on a voting population.

The idea that more individual people listened to her music than had a single Beatles song in their playlist or a single Michael Jackson song in their playlist is pretty insane. I know I listen to at least one Beatles song a month, it doesn’t matter if it is new.

45 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That is 10 million more than The Beatles right now. 60th overall on the top list of plays just above Michael Jackson. Half the amount of TSwift

So they are a well known artist.

Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.

Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?

Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.

The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.

Unwrap them and open it and then put them all back so they look used. Write on the box in sharpie “Backups 1/127”. Delete the critical production system at your work. When someone asks where the backups are, hand them these.

deleted by creator