Zink

Did anybody else just get LOST flashbacks?

I got my MBA almost a decade ago, several years after getting my software engineering master's first. We hadn't started a family yet, and my employer had amazing tuition reimbursement.

It didn't work on me though, even though there were some interesting systems, math, and psychology to learn about. I am still an individual contributor writing code daily, helping the younger engineers, and growing into my generalist graybeard best self.

Unfortunately my dark side training hasn't given me much insight that you don't already have yourself, most likely. I guess it's worth pointing out that while most probably live in that fantasy world, there are some smart nerdy people in that world who might be driven to optimize their business like they'd min-max a dungeon crawler build. There's just something else that went wrong along the way, lol.

Some of us are real go-getters and realize we can bring the farm to us long before we retire! I am currently typing this on my Linux couch computer wearing lightweight clothes with literal dirt smeared on them, on a dinner break before I return to the back yard and continue today's construction project. Sometimes being a "farmer" also means becoming a carpenter!

Granted, it works much better for the suburban homeowner than anybody living in a city and/or an apartment.

And when I refer to myself as a "farmer," all my animals are family pets cared for as a hobby. There is 0% business plan. Well, probably negative %. When we have too many animals (usually too many fish in the pond) we give them away for free!

You made me wonder if there could ever be an avenue for Apple to support this, especially with Google just getting worse and worse with android.

Apple makes a ton of money on just hardware sales. Imagine if the next iPhone had an option that would delete iOS, possibly blow some kind of security fuse in the CPU that voids your warranty (because they still have to be dicks), and reboot into an unlocked bootloader. They could boost sales and be even shittier to Google by rolling their own distro of Linux/Android/BSD for the phones with solid drivers for everything.

That veered off into fantasy land immediately, since that is not how Apple does things. And they do have services to sell too. But even if they only enabled open access on older models it could move a ton of units. Interesting to imagine.

I actually do this. I typically don't bring it up as a third option when this discussion happens because I'd rather not be seen as a maniac around here. But it works great.

I put the toothpaste onto the tip of my tongue, get the brush wet, then as I put the brush in my mouth I also mush the toothpaste into the brush with my tongue.

Hygiene seems like the obvious concern. But funny enough, in our household we each have our own tubes of toothpaste and the end of mine looks perfectly clean while my wife's and son's are gross crusty messes. I can apply the toothpaste super cleanly. And any concerns about bumping my lip or tongue and contaminating the end of the tube seem to also exist but in a much worse way for toothbrushes and whatever may be floating around in the air in a bathroom. I'll leave it at that, lol.

I played about 75 hours of it back in 2019. Most of the time I was driven by the same thing that drives me to spend dozens of hours in open world RPGs wandering and finding stuff before doing the main quest. It also helped that it had good VR support, and I had just played a ton of Skyrim VR that same year.

But of course in NMS, there is no main quest to return to when things on the open road get slow. And you do not have the same had designed locations and loot to stumble across.

In retrospect I can see parallels with f2p games that are just an infinite numbers-go-up grind. The game is designed such that you do the same shit forever. (If my info is out of date though, I welcome corrections)

We in the US have been living that Mad Lib for decades.

"I wonder how such people reconcile their vile _______ with the teachings of Christ..."

The real answer is easy though. Insert meme for "That's the neat part, you don't."

Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.

I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It's still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I've been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.

Another US perspective here, and one that was raised Catholic:

The loudest christians are often the arch-capitalists as well. I mentioned personal finance talk radio asshole Dave Ramsey in a comment the other day, and he literally says he is teaching people to be good stewards of God's money.

One way he does this, in addition to suggesting getting out of debt and investing in mutual funds, is to talk about how awesome real estate investing and landlording is. He's also into tithing, which means you give 10% right off the top of your income to your local church.

And that's not even scratching the surface once you get into the prosperity gospel. As in, yes Gladys please send me your social security check and that will make God smile upon you and send even more money your way.

Very thick with grifters, much of it is.

reasonable living wage?

Whoaaaaa hold on there Chairman Adolf Stalin!! Are you asking him to stifle his innovation??

I guess when one is in a gold-plated conference room with oligarch friends and you collectively have a couple trillion dollars in assets to "protect," peeling away a few billion to pay some of the poors to shoot the other poors before they take your shit (or your head) seems like a pretty reasonable business expense.

When you look at them as the protectors of capital rather than the protectors of the people, it makes a lot more sense.

They certainly aren't doing anything unexpected.

But, the word "wrong" carries an implication of moral judgment, and most people here are gonna disagree with you on that one.

That is one of the reasons conservatives are so gung-ho on rugged individualism and individual responsibility while being against regulation. In public they get to tell supporters that they are all strong smart boys who can make their own decisions, while also implying that "others" in disadvantaged groups are in their situations due to character flaws and subhuman status. In private they get to ruin the world and apparently prey on children pretty often because the people impose no rules on them.

Large numbers of individuals are easy for them to manipulate. Written laws and regulations are much less so, even though not impervious.

Edit to add:

This whole "they are behaving as expected == they are not doing anything wrong" attitude from the right quickly morphs into "they are a business, not a charity" and other similar sayings.

That flawed reasoning plus a few more leaps in logic then leads to seeing profitability as an indicator of morality.

And even THAT infiltrates personal lives. Resting for mental & physical health instead of building a skill or starting a side hustle? Laziness! Wasted hours of your life!

Spend some time and money on a hobby that brings joy to your life and gives you a reason to exercise? Wasteful! Selfish! Foolish! Just think of what that money could have done in the market h while you chose a better hobby that could scale into something profitable!!

Whoa whoa hold the fuck up. What do you mean that you intentionally lose money on your hobbies!? What kind of god-fearing red-blooded american just tosses aside the Rules of Acquisition so carelessly?