That’s interesting, because every time there’s something about a money transfer service, there are a ton of posts saying “Oh, the United States is so backwards, in Europe you could do this forever.” Apparently, by Europe, they mean the particular place they happen to live in.
Ralph Archibold, the Ben Franklin impersonator the article mentions, was a legend in Philadelphia and a really nice guy. I met him back in 1999 when I was working for a city tourism agency.
The Yahoo article linked says that exceptions will be made for people with conditions like that:
“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”
Speed dating is a scuzzy industry and would seem likely to get chargebacks. They often lie about who will be attending and what the criteria for setting people up with potential matches is. There are a lot of unsatisfied customers.
We never had anything different, though. Computers always became so obsolete after a while that there was no longer any point in trying to upgrade them. I think I got eight years out of my 1997 Power Mac G3, including a CPU upgrade to a G4, RAM upgrades, hard disk upgrades, a video card, and USB expansion, but then the new machines coming out were just so much better that throwing money into more upgrades was just tossing it into a black hole.
You don’t become one of the wealthy just by going to school with them. You’re still an outsider, lesser, just one of the little people, not their sort.
People have a very poor conception of what is easy to find on the internet. The author is impressed by the story about Chat GPT telling his friend how to enable the sprinkler system for his kids. But I decided to try just googling it — “how do i start up a children's park sprinkler system that is shut off” — and got a Youtube video that shows the same thing, plus a lot of posts with step by step directions. No AI needed. Certainly no evidence of advanced thinking.
On iOS, you can also hold down the hyphen and get a popup menu with an em dash option (along with en dash and a bullet). On Macs, you can get an em dash with option-shift-hyphen.
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
I know at least that it was back to that from 2008 - 2010, because I was involved in hiring then. The small company I was working for got swamped with new graduates. We ended up hiring more than we planned to, because they would work for so little.
I think generally, historically, being able to get a high-paying job right out of college with no effort is an anomaly that people just got used to treating as normal due to the periods of free money and fast growth because of the new and growing Internet, and free money. They’re gone now, and with the way things are, they’re unlikely to come back.
That doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual at the start of a career. When did you leave college? When I graduated 22 years ago, basically no one in my (Ivy League) class had a job lined up, and a lot of us didn’t find one until a year later.
Maybe one or two of them, but I had Macs in 1991, and much later, and they didn’t have built-in Ethernet. You would use a dongle off the ADB port for networking.
It's not just social media. What enabled things to get to this point was Fox News, which was created specifically to do that.
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In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition."
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This has been done with pizza, and books, and actual cash for at least 30 years. The results of trial programs haven’t been significant enough for it to spread.
Requiring a signature, as the article suggests, doesn’t help. The delivery people just ignore it. My iPhone was left outside despite requiring a signature. I changed my schedule to be home when it was delivered. They didn’t even knock on the door before they left it.