People hate on the baby boomers for being the last generation right after the postwar boom, but every generation including them has had serious challenges. The boomers often saw their comfy domestic union jobs disappear or become shadows of their former selves, gen x experienced a really bad recession early on in their lives, the millennials experienced the 2008 financial crisis and things haven't been nearly as good as the numbers suggest after that, Gen Z has never seen good times in their adult lives, and Gen Alpha is being born during an era of tent cities and mass deaths of despair. The fact that we did have some outliers like the tech industry and the oil industry for a while doesn't change the overall picture. So it hasn't really been getting better except in little zones. With millennials and gen z having way fewer kids, however, the population is set to crash, and when that sort of thing happens usually the lot of the common man changes and the secular cycle begins a new golden age. The millennials will largely miss it entirely I expect, Gen Z will start to see it (hopefully), and with luck Gen Alpha will really get to experience a general upswing in quality of life. At the moment Africa is looking like it's having a bit of a baby boom, but Peter Zeihan has suggested that's in large part due to the mass investment of the baby boomers with their retirement funds, so it isn't something that's going to keep happening as they burn through their retirements and such, instead that money is going to be repatriated to buy exlax and dog food.

Saw this, now I'm dead. A dead hotdog.

One thing I love about reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with my son is that while I'm reading about this little kid being a fearless little twit, my son is trying to launch himself head first off the couch and only seems to care about the consequences once his face hits the ground. "Boys will be boys" indeed!

@SJ-co6nk 0 seconds ago Rage Against the Machine cucked hard (maybe they always were), but they had some good lines in their music. Mic Check asks: "Who has the power, that be my question; the priest, the book, or the congregation?" People seeking power think if only they can get the book and become the priest they'll have power over the congregation. They don't realize that the congregation choose to follow the book, listen to the priest, and that can go away at any time -- then they're angry that the book and their collar means nothing as people turn away.

Exodos is SSS tier. Holy crap, it lets you play over 7000 MS-DOS games, and it catalogues the settings required to make the games work so they all start with a click. The full version is a whopping 1TB(!!!!!), the lite version only contains metadata and is still 6GB, and when you go to install a game it downloads it using bittorrent from no doubt legal sources. It even lists some of those old shareware games everyone has forgotten. People who aren't old as the hills might not know this, but even if you had a top tier computer back in the 90s, you didn't have any guarantee that a game would run. I was subscribed to gaming magazines back then (as was the style at the time) and you'd have a game that didn't claim to need anything special, and it'd crash on startup -- completely dead, never to run. Same with some shareware, the stars aligned and it didn't want to run and it didn't matter what you did with your config.sys or autoexec.bat it wasn't running, so that's incredible that even for the old shareware stuff you can just click, download, and play.

eXoDOS

I thought minds fediverse support was one way, but I just saw likes coming back and I checked and saw my comment on the original story. Neat! I'm glad to see it's fediverse support improving!

Happy Halloween everyone. Just got back from trick or treating. My God, nobody's doing it this year! We got like half everyone's candy because nobody wanted to have to hang onto it!

WE LOST THE BLOODY STAR! WHERE DID IT GO? https://phys.org/news/2023-10-group-stars-vanishedastronomers.html

This year, I began trying to walk with my son as often as possible. I load him up in the stroller, and I just start walking. In particular, after the beginning of July I tried to get out as often as I could. At some point I started recording those walks using my phone. I didn't end up capturing all the walks that I did, and of the walks that I did end up capturing I didn't end up getting all of them because sometimes I forgot to put it down until late. However, here are the statistics. I walked a grand total this year of 65 km, and that took 18 hours. I climbed the equivalent of 700 m on upward hills. And all of this work ended up, at least according to the app, burning 3800 calories or about 1 lb. A long time ago I successfully lost a lot of weight, and people always ask me how I did it. The key isn't burning more fat as I've shown. That's an awful lot of work for 1 lb. The key is to eat less and to eat better. That's how people succeed at weight loss.

Huh. Turns out doing suicidal things for your organization leads to the destruction of your organization. View quoted note →

X (formerly Twitter)

Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) on X

We have about $7.6 Trillion (with a T) in national debt that is coming due within the next 12 months. Most of that older debt that is maturing th...

Just a few years ago, people were telling me we should take out more debt since money is so cheap. So what's the prescription now?

I have these recurring dreams where I buy cars. I've bought big trucks (like cargo trucks), I've bought sports cars, I've bought vans, and none of them are legal to drive or insured. I have recurring dreams where I'm figuring out what to do about all these vehicles everywhere. I just got out of a trip to a place I supposedly used to live in dream world where I had to promise the current occupants I'd get rid of those big cargo trucks I left parked in our yard. And it's like "I think there's a scrap yard that'll tow them for free and give me a couple hundred for the trouble..." Freud probably didn't have anything to say about used cars in dreams, but I think they represent subconscious concerns about responsibilities I'm taking on quietly that represent substantial effort or resources, but as long as they sit in the garage they're taking up a spot in my life but they aren't actively costing me anything but if I put the work and money in then I'll have one of a number of opportunities like having a variety of paid off used cars ready to drive.

I feel like in the idiocracy universe, three in one shampoo conditioner body wash would have just expanded to become the worst version of everything and the thing that everyone uses for everything. "Shampoo. Conditioner. Body wash. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Toothpaste. Mouthwash. Toothbrush. Knife. Fork. Spoon. Antifreeze for your car. Gunpowder. Lubricant. Fire starter. Screwdriver set. Adjustable Wrench. Sex toy. Gps. MRI machine..."

Every law is signed with a bullet. Every one. Yes, even the one you're thinking of that proves I'm wrong. People have been killed by the state for not complying with laws as innocuous as selling loose cigarettes or not cutting their lawns. Every law is a potential threat: "Do this thing, or the state might kill you". Some people want to make politeness the law. "You should be doing this anyway, it's just polite!" -- Well it isn't politeness if it's signed with a bullet. In the past, we have had people you had to be polite to under penalty of law. They were the aristocracy. Nobles or samurai could have commoners punished if they were disrespected. People did die for disrespecting the aristocracy. At that time, the aristocracy wrote stories to explain why they ought to be respected under penalty of law. They explained that they descended directly from God or heroes, that the people protected were specifically deserving of their station as protected. It bothers me a lot, that people don't realize you shouldn't put a gun to someone's head and say "Be nice". It bothers me that people want to create a new aristocracy. Some stuff just shouldn't be part of the state. "Everything is part of the state, nothing outside the state" (paraphrased) is literally fascist doctrine stated by Mussolini.

Oh, mushoku tensei day.