Remember the good ol' days when people just didn't discuss politics or religion out of decency? There was a reason for that, both bring out the worst in people.
Suddenly I'm reminded of the decent (grown) people who yelled in six year-old Ruby Bridges' face when she was merely attending elementary school. So if that was 1960, I'm just wondering when those good ol' days you're referring to where.
The problem is that living life is inherently political. Being able to ignore politics, not having to feel the need to discuss them, is a sign that you are inherently better off than a good chunk of this country.
A lot of people spend most of their waking hours having to deal with or at least keep in mind the fall out from regressive politics. Asking people to not discuss politics is like asking someone living in fear for their safety to not try and improve said safety. You're asking to not have to be bothered by something that annoys you to talk about in exchange for someone not being able to advocate for their life and livelihood.
I agree with the sentiment. My point was more people used to have a common understanding that there was a time and place for political (and religious) discussion - and that those beliefs were deeply personal, shaped largely by experience, and not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character.
Somewhere along the way we lost that idea, not all cultural changes are for the better.
Older generations have an implicit trust for what is on screen because they grew up in an era where getting something on screen was not easy, and thus had an implied credibility.
Take advertising as an example. Before Google Ads and the so-called democratization of advertising, it was expensive, and you didn't get an ad on a TV program or a national publication without some level of quality and/or trust behind your product.
Similarly, content was not easy to produce and certainly not cheap to get in front of eyeballs in the limited medium that was television. People were selective in what they watched so in order to be watched it needed to meet a minimum threshold for quality.
These days however, the barrier to entry for advertising and content are so low that any implicit trust should be ridiculous. Unfortunately for our parents and grandparents however, that is what they know - and old habits die hard.
You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying.
I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.
My sister liked to make her own clothes. One time I asked her if she did that to save money. No, she replied. She often spent more to make her dress than it would have cost her at the store. But her version was nicer, and better fitting, using nicer materials, in exactly the style she wanted.
I think there’s a lot of overlap between that and modern PC builders. It’s not necessarily cheaper, but is likely to be a lot nicer at the same price.
They sure were. Building is what got me into this crazy field. Abusing VBscript (and myself in the process) got me into my software developer era later on!
Because from a human perspective, it doesn't matter. The planet used to be a ball of molten rock at one point, it doesn't mean we should shrug our shoulders at the thought of it returning to a molten state. It may be "natural" but it's not suitable for humans.
It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.
People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My point is actually that nature doesn't care, but I think we should. Although, even if we try our hardest, we still might not like the outcome.
Look at all the comments under your original comment.
Their point is very valid. Geologic scales are extremely long and the planet does not care.
Humans, on the other hand would physically not be able to survive in most climates going back 100 million years or more. Too little or too much oxygen. Temperatures too high or too low, etc.
We cannot compare this event, which is much, much, much faster than any natural warming, to natural warming events. Those generally take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to shift as much as we're moving things in under 200 years.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago we were basically apes living in caves that could barely speak.
I never said their (or your) points weren't valid. In fact, I think they are quite self-evident and well known. People are assuming in bad faith that I'm unaware of these facts or that I sought to mislead with my original comment.
I don't disagree, but in this context I don't think those are the same parents that are yeeting their kids off to board at university as soon as they are of age.
As one of those kids, you could’ve just stopped at “I don’t think”, because you’re not thinking critically if you think we don’t exist.
I wasn’t allowed to have a personal device or unsupervised internet access until I graduated.
My parents forced me to go to a school with a summer work program. I was yeeted to university by my wing clipping abusers THREE DAYS AFTER GRADUATION.
Rural, miles from the nearest town of 1200 so I didn’t have access to the resources needed to change any aspect of this.
I was deeply hampered by this, and despite being one of the salutatorians of my graduating class (we had ties due to AP), I crashed out of that university after a semester.
Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.
The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.
I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.
I'm a freelance interim EM and I do it for the same reason the article explains: I genuinely enjoy it.
I love engineers and I love tech. I still code daily but I'm not the guy that delivers at the pace of some of the amazing engineers that I had the privilege to work with. I love putting others ahead of myself wherever I can and it's never cost me anything, so I'm not afraid to do it again. I love telling the engineers how what they do actually matters because they're too focused on the work to sometimes see why changing goals doesn't mean their work and efforts were wasted and I also love shielding them from the corporate mess upstairs (that I somewhat masochistically don't even dread being part of)...
So, yeah, I really love my job and if one of my guys (or gals) wants that too, the more of a joy it is to me to mentor them into that process.
It is one of the few franchises that spans generations. My kids enjoy it, just as my wife and I enjoyed it before them. We have fun playing the games together. I imagine my parents felt the same way with Star Wars.
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
Maybe I should have qualified it with "successfully" span generations. I think most of the examples you give could be better explained as Member Berries, but I agree with the sentiment. I just don't think kids are as interesting in Halo, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, etc as we were - despite incredibly heavy handed pushes from studios.
I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.
As an OG Star Wars fan (I was 21 when it came out), I had a really hard time when my kids liked the prequel trilogy more than the originals. As my youngest once told me (when he was in his teens), the original trilogy was great, but the prequels were the Star Wars his generation grew up with, and that made a difference.
I'm fortunate that my kids grew up not only with their own favorites, but with appreciation for mine as well. The Star Wars comment opened my eyes to generational differences that have only grown since then, but at least with mutual respect for our differences. (And none of us really like the sequel trilogy that much).
my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.
that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)
i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.
or is it pretty easy to code us? lol
their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?
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