There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could:
- get married
- buy a house after a year married
- start a family at 20
- had 1 car for the family
- had a boat
- had a motorcycle
right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
Everyone should ask themselves how much healthcare, and how high quality of healthcare, and how much defined benefit pensions old people received during prirun’s parents’ young days.
It’s 2/3rd of all federal government spend today, and doesn’t even included all the state and local government spend. There are cities and states spending double digit percentages on paying for pensions and retiree healthcare for labor that happened in the past.
You can liquidate all the equity rich people have (which will cause its price to drop precipitously and so you won’t get as much you think it will), but it won’t make a lick of a difference, because the numbers show the wealth transfer from working to non working is far, far greater than it was when prirun’s parents were young.
That is one of the reasons prirun’s dad had much more purchasing power. The president just said the country’s goal is to make sure the people who own land are prioritized over those who don’t, by keeping house prices high.
That would not have helped prirun’s dad buy a house out of high school. Everything we do is to benefit the asset owners and the old, at the expense of the young and yet to be born. And it’s happening all over the world.
We don’t want young people to have more fruits of their labor, we want the fruits of their labor to be eaten by old people to meet their expectations of quality of life because they are a bigger voting bloc.
I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator in 2005, mostly on a lark because I grew up on them in high school and college and they were pretty advanced for their time, with token ring networking, remote call file systems before NFS, lots of Multics-like features (the Prime founders were associated with Honeywell and MIT).
I announced it on the Prime Usenet group and a guy wrote to say he was interested in using it for production, but had been burned before and wanted to make sure it worked. So I set him up a VM in my basement, he uploaded a bunch of his executables, and they all worked. I charged $1000/mo for the emulator. Since he was in the EU, I knew I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to get paid if they decided to stiff me, so I did some investigating into a Matrix dongle. It was pretty slick, and I coded up a copy protection scheme that allowed the emulator to run only when the dongle was inserted, and it contacted a license server in my basement to verify that it was allowed to run. To make sure my basement server wasn't a critical resource, I had the dongle setup like a battery that got periodically "charged": if the license server was down, the emulator kept running for up to N days on its local charge, giving me time to solve issues with the license server.
This went on for a few years, but they were never happy they had to actually keep paying for the technology. I heard every excuse in the book about why they needed a backup dongle. I knew the real reason they wanted one was to hire someone to hack it, but unfortunately, that would mean removing it, and that would halt the emulator within 5 minutes. So they came up with excuses like:
"Our state regulator requires us to have a backup computer system, so we need 2 dongles". No, you start computer 2, move the dongle, and you're fine.
One time I heard from a guy who said he heard about the emulator from a Prime parts guy in Chicago I knew, and wanted to try it out for a large EU bank. I asked where to send it, and surprise - it was the same city as my other customer! So I call R in Chicago and asked him how the conversation went with this "banking" customer, and R says "It was kinda weird. He said he had a Prime with a failing disk drive, but when I asked what model drive he had, he didn't know. He kept asking if there was any other solution for him besides hardware until R says "Well, there's a guy that has an emulator", which the banking guy jumped on immediately. So I go to Google and lookup this address the banker gives me to send the dongle to, and it's a massage parlor!
All in all, it was a good deal for me and a good deal for him, even if he wasn't happy about it. He was getting paid to support his own Prime software that he didn't have to port. But I learned my lesson as a youngin' about companies saying they will pay for something. I sold some printer/spooler minicomputer software in my early 20's and had a large investment bank (huge actually, as in everyone at the time would recognize their name) try it out for a month. They called and said they were processing the one-time license fee of $1500 but could I give them the access code early so they wouldn't have a disruption for a few days. I did it, and never got a dime from them. Hard lesson learned about being nice.
I've taken a few days to think about this common response, to me (as a no-dependants forty-something with no need to meet exhorbitant US healthcare fees) — there's just no net benefit (v. e.g. paying cash to amenable providers).
Also, I no longer use email so... no effort there.
I doubt Microsoft gives a minute's thought to government monopoly concerns. One of their "punishments" after the monopoly lawsuit was to give schools free copies of Microsoft Office products. Teachers and administrators adopted them, forcing parents to also buy copies of Office. Now practically everyone's documents are locked up in Office formats, which Microsoft can change on a whim. Sure, there are products to read Office formats with varying levels of success, but Microsoft has the control and can make everyone jump through hoops whenever they feel like it.
Well yes but I feel like its because the threats of monopolization got less and less due to lobbying efforts but for the time, there are reports where microsoft was scared in the internal emails after what happened.
"Microsoft was more scared of taking over companies that were competitors because of this anti trust trial. They had to back off a little and this created this tiny little gap, this little window from which many flowers can bloom. These flowers ended up growing into massive trillion dollars competitors (google and apple)"
I would consider that much of what I wrote in the previous comment was I think something I had thought about but this particular video definitely helped me and you could say did influence me in a way to write the comment.
It also mentions how it was provable that Microsoft was scared about it. I am not sure about this contradiction though but I would consider that it atleast created a gap for around 10-18 years from which the tech giants emerged.
I think the main reason it isn't recommended for all ages is that it wears off. If you get it before 50, when your immune system starts declining, you might end up getting shingles when you're 60 or 70.
Insurance companies used to only pay for the vaccine at 60. They've reduced it to 50 now because people (like me) were getting it in their 50's. I got it in my left eye and because my immune system is kinda shit, I still have it, though it doesn't give me too much grief now. But it did trash my cornea in that eye, so it's messed my vision up pretty good. And since there's still an active infection (after 8 years), I can't get a cornea transplant.
My PCP actually recommended holding off until later in the 50s for this reason. There's not currently a booster so his suggestion was to play the odds & delay a bit in order to get longer protection in my elderly years.
This happened in 2013, 9 years before the Act. Hopefully the Act prevents this kind of stuff. The medicare limit is what really confused me. If there is a limit insurance will cover up to, then how is it possible to exceed that limit?
I recently read that on average, people are happy about 42% of the time, maybe up to 50%. And this applies whether you are single, married, with kids, no kids, etc. So the first thing I'd do is realize that half of the time, you're not going to be "happy"; but what you can worked toward is being content, realizing that the times you aren't particularly happy are normal, and everyone has them.
If you feel very unhappy or unhappy, ie, not content, more than 30-60% of the time, you'd probably benefit from talking to a therapist and learning about how you can like yourself more. You will always have yourself throughout your life, whereas people will come and go. Learn to be your own best friend first.
The bad thing is, I'm still getting this today and have not done another Firefox restart. Guess I need a new search engine now. Jeez. Sort of unbelievable.
My Mom had a washer that did this. I told her to unplug it to soak overnight. That worked, but she hated that thing, sold it, and took my sister's older washer that didn't have any "we know better than you do" features.
Most washers outside of Asia are horizontal, not vertical, so there is no lid to open. And the ancient tech ones in North America that load from the top don't have any electronics and are already immune.
I loved Netflix when they had the DVD service and the recommendation competition because it actually suggested shows I would enjoy.
Once they started producing their own stuff, recommendations no longer worked: they just promoted whatever crap they produced themselves. And with that, trying to find a show I wanted to watch became so much effort that I canceled altogether. Same goes for all the other streaming services.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
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