j4k3

It was much the same nearly 20 years ago too. My folks got their first house for less than $100k. I barely scraped by with my business painting cars around 04-06. I went back to it around 07 and did alright until used car lots flat lined for 3 months straight in late 08. I never recovered from the criminal shit the banks did to real estate and fucked the economy. I tried to gt a good job but stuff like an apprenticeship with a local Union had 3k+ applicants show up for 15 positions. I would have been 3rd generation and work my ass off but it did nothing. I did the Los Angeles Fire Department interview one time. They literally use the Long Beach convention center's basement level to do the first two stages. The first stage had over 10k people show up to take the written test. I made it to the last 600, but they filtered on EMT experience and that cut me in the second to last before the fire academy. When I worked in the bike shops as a Buyer for a chain, everyone working there had a university degree but me. Such is life here. Nothing is made here so it is a race to the bottom. And this is as good as it gets in the USA. I have lived mostly in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia but south of LA now. The rest of the country is much worse than here.

I was disabled by a terrible driver at 29 while riding a bicycle to work. That was 11 years ago. When my folks die, I will die shortly thereafter because I face homelessness in an impossible system in the USA. There is direct evidence of people taking care if the disabled and elderly in the remains of ancient humans many tens of thousands of years ago. If we cannot rise to the standards of prehistoric people living in caves, perhaps none of us has a right to exist.

No. There are no simple anecdotes like this.

One of our biggest problems is cultural across the entire West. We have a mindset like we are at some final state of technology and extraction of wealth is acceptable. It largely stems from unchecked inherited wealth. Meritocracy is critical for success in any system. Inherited wealth will always cause stagnation and decline because intelligence and business acumen are not inherited traits. For example, Donald Trump is worth far less now than if he had taken his vast inheritance, bought government bonds, and stayed on Epstein island permanently.

When you're young, such ideas about the burden of others lack perspective. Your view will change as those around you that you care about face the probabilities of life poorly and you notice the injustices they encounter where the social safety net is their only lifeline. If you do not develop to the point of such depth of self awareness, you're likely to be the one in need of assistance eventually.

I hereby name mine Mr. Law Yawnson, it's a total bore

This year has been quieter than the last few; the booms not as big, and not as many in the past week. People are much poorer around here is my takeaway

It is fundamentally a theft of the autonomy, self determinism, and right to unfiltered information required for citizens in a functioning democracy. Loss of ownership is fundamentally a coup against democracy by overlords of neo feudalism.

Frame your argument as a citizen wronged by thieves and you will defeat the nonsense. Ownership of any part of your person including your digital presence to exploit and manipulate is a form of modern slavery; literally buying and selling people to manipulate and exploit them. Anything that has any potential to filter information, no matter how remote, unlikely, or illegal, is an act of treason in a real democracy when it lacks full transparency. Every digital device you use must be fully publicly documented with a publicly accessible toolchain for anyone to monitor or review. Trust as a policy is fundamentally opposed to democracy without exceptions. Trust is a trap of authoritarianism. Citizens are required to be fully informed and skeptical of all sources. For example, every mobile device made has a proprietary SoC processor and modem that are interconnected in undocumented ways. There is absolutely no way to know who or what is truly connected to these devices at any point in time. This is the real reason removable batteries no longer exist despite being more dangerous, wasteful, and an environmental disaster.

All the cafés were a long way away from where I lived so yeah we went there like going to the movies or bowling and it followed a similar event like dynamic. It was an optional thing to do but not some default or daily thing.

Comparatively, side by side it looks square to me

It is kinda hard to explain and grasp just how much I have and can adapt. Probably the best two examples are weight and religion. Only somewhere around 5% of people that are morbidly obese, and manage to lose that weight at some point, then manage to keep it off for over a decade.

Very few people ever manage to grow their self awareness to the point of taking action to move away from their religion they were born into. Many people have various levels of engagement, but to actually logically break down and reason upon dogma and tribalism to the point of taking action for moral and ethical reasons is rare. I was never run a foul, offended, or wronged in some emotional way. Quite contrary I was exceptionally engaged, did a good bit if leading, and was well regarded. I know the information better than anyone else I have ever spoken to. When I asked questions, no one had substantive answers.

When I get into a subject, or hobby I do so on a level that is very intense and unlike anyone I have met before. I may find a friend that meshes with that one interest, but I have never met people that cross different spaces. Like right now I am doing CAD every day. I make stuff that is very different than anything uploaded on thingiverse or printables, the two main 3d files sharing websites. I design stuff that is unlike anything I've ever seen elsewhere too. I mull over ideas for weeks. It is always on the back of my mind. I taught myself CAD and at an advanced level beyond what most hobbyists learn.

The overall project I'm working on is for a GPU water cooler for my laptop. That in turn is for my custom agent framework in Emacs on Linux where I want to push my hardware to its limits. I got into AI after hitting a wall learning some of the material from the second year courses in computer science on my own. The agentic AI framework is basically a system to augment the LLM outputs with the materials I have in books I bought to follow along with the CS curriculum.

Another major area I dive into from time to time is electronic circuit design. I know KiCAD well and have done some rather in depth reverse engineering projects with hardware too. I can design in analog or digital and have two tooling setups for toner transfer and photolithography etching to make my own circuit boards. Coding complexity is probably my biggest weakness in hardware.

When I lost the weight, I did so as the most hardcore cyclist I have ever met. I rode in all weather. My first bike shop job was 66 miles every day round trip and I rode that for nearly 2 years. I also lead a shop ride out on most Saturday mornings, rode there and home too making that a 100+ mile day. I never had a week under 400 miles back then. I spent a lot of time on a bike. That is a chapter of my life. These are the things that define me. Holding me back from that kind of change is what I'm really talking about.

I had a really bad heart issue in the middle of a Target store one evening around 2009 and decided I wanted to change because I was on the wrong path. Before that, I was the most hardcore car nut you would have ever met. I painted cars professionally, built motors, worked in a machine shop a couple of times, ported heads for nostalgia dragsters, and was into metal fab with mig stick and tig. I was very close to doing my own metal castings, and I got into making my own custom composite parts. I specialized in plastics and repairs on stuff that couldn't be replaced with reproduction parts too. I was so into carburetors that I was studying WW2 aircraft engines.

I can geek out about nearly anything. I have so many potential things I would love to explore but haven't yet, like sewing and upholstery, sculpting, ceramics, radio, further into astronomy, radio controlled stuff, robotics and automation, homelab, FPGAs, jewelry making, mosaics, metrology, reverse engineering silicon, glass blowing, chemistry, organic chemistry, writing more science fiction, more fermentation stuff. There are so many cool things to get into and learn. I don't expect anyone to have a list that matches mine. I expect someone to have a list in the first place. These things are exciting to me, they drive me, or rather the curiosity does. To some people I am tedious and boring, but that is how I feel about the stereotypical normal stuff most people are interested in or doing. I'm more than willing to do something like reshape my life because of stuff like cycling, but I would just as soon try something else with a friend or partner to better their lives in significant ways. I will gladly reshape my interests because there is no ego or narcissism underpinning any of this. I'm not naming stuff because I care how you perceive me. I don't even think in a space like that naturally. If anything I'm hyper aware of my limitations and desire to learn more. I'm just driven by the curiosity but not like super actively either. It is a slow churn, like an unstoppable bulldozer a snail could outrun. Stand still long enough and I might grow past ya.

So for me, meeting people is simply shifting my interests around. If I was not stuck with my physical limitations, pursuing any interest of mine that has a more balanced participation between the sexes will put me on a course that intersects with at least another long term muse. My problem is that I may learn pottery, but when that moves to sintering and metal casting followed by a deep dive into CNC machining, do they follow or complain about something tedious. What about when I decide to build an EDM machine to take it a step further or I shift gears and get into music for awhile building guitar effects or amps or some analog synthesizer stuff, or writing, or airbrush graphics, or get into criterium racing. I'm not ADHD or OCD at all. I spend months to years on these things exploring them in depth.

So that is why it seems silly to go looking for someone instead of turning inwards first. Of all of my facets, companionship is not a dedicated curiosity or interest. There are many aspects of relationships I find curious and engage with in practice, but this game of hide and seek courtship rituals with perspective strangers is not at all interesting to me.

The part that is hard to understand about who I am now is that I am limited by posture. Sitting up or standing hurts like lifting weights in a gym where you're going to fail. The moment I'm upright I have around 15 minutes of a clear head, 30 until I degrade significantly, and within 1 hour I'm unable to mentally function at competent levels and highly irritable. Anything over 1 hour will begin impacting my sleep beyond 24 hours. By around 3 hours, it will take me a week to fully recover to a consistent circadian rhythm. It compounds worse for subsequent days of activities or random injuries that occur around once or twice a month. I appear fine other than a little limp in my gate and I can fake that if I try. Sitting in a restaurant with a date, I am just not me. I can do a lot to mask just how much pain I am in but it is miserable, and conversationally I'm not myself. To speak my mind openly, I need to be lying down and without a lot of stress beforehand. So I exist in this homebound prison. I have nothing to offer anyone anyways. And I have had to come to terms with that. Most of me died, only a shell survived. I cannot change that so I make the best of what I have.

People around me had mixed motivations in this later era as you called it. My buddies and I used cafés as a time management tool. Any of us could have built a gaming rig but we would have been on it way too much. Cafés were a destination and way to partition off gaming in our lives.