cubano

If what you are trying to say is that what's new and modern today will someday, probably sooner then later, be old and "normed" tomorrow, then yes...absolutely this will be the case.

This understanding is the basis of the Right's "slippery slope" argument...that in normalizing behaviors today that yesterday were considered "wrong", they tomorrow can we expect ever more and more outrageous behaviors to follow this same template?

The answer is, of course, yes.

Back in the mid 80's when I was in collage, my primary CP professor was a huge fan of the 6502 and thought it the ideal chip for undergrads to learn the basics of computer engineering...and it was, for me at least.

Way easier to breadboard and write opcode for then, and more powerful than the Intel 4004 and 8008 (what would eventually become the 8086..the great-great-great grandfather of the i9's we now use of course), my very first working "computer" used a 6502 at its heart for my senior project...we attempted to build a voice-activated phone and actually got something that would pick up and shut off the phone with some noise, but obviously a working voice-activated phone was something that was still many years away.

Also, I remember writing an opcode instruction emulator for the chip as a extra-credit project for one my classes. I wrote a really nice emulator on my beloved Atari ST and, much to my horror, discovered a horrendous bug in he C compiler I used for the project, almost ruining both the project and my grade for the quarter.

The program had a graphical representation all all the primary subsections of a basic computer...CPU, disk memory, the various busses, and some other things that my old brain can no longer remember, and the program would step thru the processors opcodes and show, with literally the 1s and 0s on the screen, how all the parts of the computer processed the opcode instruction set into something that coordinated all the chips into doing very useful stuff.

The problem was that due to some sort of crazy hex arithmetic bug in the compiler, one of the values at one of the nodes was stuck at like x0E or something like that...and no matter what I tried to do to debug it, I could not get the damn thing to work perfectly. I thought I was going to fail the class for sure, and it wasn't even my fault!

Thankfully, I was able to show the results in pure binary form, and the rest of the program was quite impressive. Also, my professor was a HUGE fan of the Atari ST (probably because it used the 68000 and wasn't Intel), so the day of me showing him my work wasn't a total failure...in fact, his face totally lit up when I asked him if I could pop the floppy into the ST in his office, and we verified that, yes, the bug was there in all versions of the compiler.

Only one other student had chosen to do the assignment, and he had used a minicomputer from his work to do it and his results where shown in reams of printouts where mine was there graphically represented in real time updates as you stepped thru the opcode instructions. I remember its addressing modes and GP registers made writing opcode a breeze as you didn't have to waste cycles juggling data and memory addresses at all.

[edit] wow...sorry this was such a long post! I just got lost in remembering old times...

Thank you very much for your insightful and kind words...they really do inspire me.

You have to know that I've tried, and continue, to try this, but apparently it seems like my addictions are almost certainly tied to my inability to create relationships like the ones needed to get hired like this.

Loner-ism isn't exactly the best trait for landing contract jobs, or for sales in general...just in case you were perhaps wondering.

I had a fair amount of success on the Upwork platform until some real dickweek in New Jersey destoryed my JSS score because I wouldn't violate federal law and allow them to dictate the exact hours I was to work as a 1099 IC.

Worse, I feel, is that Upwork agreed with them (of course because they have the money) about this situation that could not be more plainly written on the IRS website.

I don't know exactly how you landed the contracts you did in order to pay the bills and such, but I don't seem to have any skill with that, so while I really appreciate the brainstorming everyone is doing, people should know that I'll never give up trying to better my life and make a living doing what I love.

Yeah...the just/unjust aspect is kinda of hard for me to judge fairly. I did some extremely careless crap in my life, and obviously never considered the pain of the consequences of my actions.

I totally accept that many of not most people who read my BG think I'm getting exactly what I deserve...to never be given the chance to redeem myself or to pull myself out of my shit situation.

I think that's an extremely harsh way to judge someone, and that everyone should be given an opportunity to make a living if they show they have learned from the pain of the past.

Also, considering that hiring is such a crap shoot anyway, (I read somewhere that over half the people hired as programmers today won't be at that job in a year) what is the huge deal with giving someone like me who has been in recovery for 2.5 years a shot to contribute to the bottom line?

I really am a damn good programmer, and I still have an amazing passion for building new systems using modern stacks. I am fortunate as hell that I'm apparently a "natural learner" defined as someone who spends their entire life always chasing new knowledge.

Expungement is one of those things..like "the year of the linux desktop" that always get brought up but never can actually happen.

The problem is the way the law is actually written...it 's written for a very specific use case (at least the one in Florida is) for people who committed ONE and ONLY ONE felony in their entire life (I think the Florida statue say that you can't even have another misdemeanor on your record, but perhaps I'm disremembering that).

It was never made to throw a big blanket over a lifetime of impulsive decisions like I have done. Plus, there is the problem of actually purging the perhaps 100s of private BG check database out there that various companies use that do not even advertise to the public.

Man I wish more than anything that I could just be given one chance to "start over"...you would see perhaps the most law abiding, risk adverse person you have ever seen.

I've been thru true hell with all this stuff, and people actually do change when the pain of staying the same crushes the pain of making changes.

In fact, that's the only time they do change if you ask me.

Hey man thanks for this...one thing I never want to do is to make a spectacle of myself and my predicament, so I am always really hesitant to bring it up bcuz, yeah, I get it I fucked up my life pretty damn good and people in general have plenty of problems themselves.

Yes I'm looking into perhaps putting together a classroom on one of those pretty killer live educational apps that are available these days. I used to teach guitar 30 years ago and I really enjoyed it, although I'm not sure I'm the best teacher ever.

Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can't really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office.

Why they don't kick me off is something I haven't been able to figure out, but I'm grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week.

Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing "when cities grow". What I've seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts.

To be honest, I've always been very much a loner so I don't really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff.

I really don't want to be poor like this, but I guess it's no one's fault but mine why I'm in this predicament.

What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree "Escape" charge that's always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don't "match" to the real charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges.

I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I'm sure think I'm a super junkie who has 50 felonies.

I don't really think it's fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that's happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don't you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways?

I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!

It's SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I've applied for I've gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.

> But the article isn’t about re-litigation of that election, or the next one. It starts from the premise that the result of the election was unprecedented, and that someone like Trump would not have had a chance in earlier times.

I'm supposed to blindly believe everything I read in highly pollical magazine like that one?

Millions of people loved Trump because of the way he spoke so directly to them, and not like a typical politician. There is nothing at all "unprecedented" in that election...inferior candidates have been losing elections since the beginning of the US.

That article was so full of FUD and wrong-headed nonsense I had to refute its assertions.

So let me get this straight...

Facebook is the reason that Trump got elected?? This is possibly the most asinine thing I've heard in a very long time.

Trump got elected for several reasons, and Facebook had nothing to do with it.

1. H. Clinton was perhaps the worse presidential candidate in the history of the Republic. She rarely if ever campaigned in the all important Rust Belt states, she could not even articulate a reason, when asked, about why she wanted to be President.

2. She and her husband were sitting on a very suspect war chest of like $168mil US...remember, these were the same people who complained 15 years earlier when Bill left the Presidential digs that they were like totally broke with little or no savings.

So this couple had earned WELL over $160mil (not counting their quite significant expenses) in 15 years since Bill left office? Why? Why in the world were so many people just giving them millions of dollars?

To many a hard-working US voters who have struggled their entire lives to save a small amount for retirement, this smelled of "pay to play" on-the-come corruption...and she didn't even try to hide it!

For these reasons, and several more but I don't have the time to post them, H. Clinton did not get elected President in 2016,

Just to keep the record straight.

browser validation keeps honest people out.

I am completely baffled by the imposter syndrome talk.

Guess what? We are all imposters, all of the time! Our whole lives are filled with times we are thrown into situations that we have no idea how to handle, and the act of just living them makes us imposters.

Like who wasn't an fucking "imposter" the first day of kindergarten? Do you stress about that? How about first day of high school? Your First date? Yes without a doubt you could be classified as an imposter in all of these cases.

And yes...at times during work you are going to be expected to know more than you do, and its your fucking job to deal with those feelings and get shit done. That doesn't make you an imposter, it just makes you someone who need to learn something they don't know yet.

Why in the world would you bother to think that your being an imposter? I don't understand why you would waste even 5 seconds stressing about this.

You were almost surely hired not only for what you know, but for your perceived ability to quickly realize what you DON'T know, and then to research options and select the one that solves the current issue.

It's called "learning",,,not "imposter syndrome".

How amazing...great job sir the site/app looks very promising!

Being a mid-50s dev with 35 years of programming experience, I'm finding ageism (or something) blocking my ability to get hired these days, so teaching is something I've been seriously thinking about. Your platform could very well be an ideal way to explore this path.

So a practical question...do you have any way to gauge course interest before one spends the time creating it as to make sure there will be a profitable number of students when the course starts?

As someone who is needing some income, I would hate to blindly spend a few weeks creating a course on, say, LAMP-stack + Bootstrap webapp development...only to find out that only 2 people are interested in this tech and I just spent a month to make $100 bucks or whatever.

I'm sorry if this is perhaps coming across as "crass" or something like that with simply focusing on the income side of things, but in general having a list of course topics that potential students have expressed interest in sure could be a useful thing to help one build courses that people actually want.

Anyway...congrats on the launch. So far the site seems really easy to use (LOVE the single email registration/login prompt! You have no idea how much I've argued for this sort of thing with past clients) and hopefully this will be the start of something mutually beneficial.

[edits]

Sounds like your the type of person who most definitely shouldn't be renting any property to people.

The simple fact is...when you start accepting money to allow others to use your stuff, things out of your control are going to happen. Of course, I'm not excusing these "certain type of people" you are discussing (I think most of us call those people "assholes"), but as they say...shit happens.

Am I a total idiot as I am completely unable to get any output from this?

I mean, I spent about 5 minutes reading the various inputs and trying to modify them, yet I am baffled as what to do to actually see, or even know what's going on, what the system is producing.

Very frustrating.

I believe that scenario totally depends upon OPEC's ability to keep prices artificially high by limiting production of its vast supplies of oil.

I remember a few short years ago when fracking was dominating the news about oil supply all the talk from the Middle East producers were about just that...limiting production in order to "break the backs" of all the American wildcat frackers,

I guess with a President in office who seems to want prices to go through the roof, its much easier for them to do just that.

I am almost positive this depends upon how socially active and adept the individual is, and if they specifically seek and join internal societies that work at promoting this sort of post-grad networking.

I graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology and although I notice that Amazon is currently loaded with alumni from there, when I applied I received absolutely no "insider help" or whatever from anyone employed there.

Are you saying that a luxury watch costs the same as a luxury car?

If that is true (which I find incredibly hard to believe) it literally makes no sense. The utility and the ability of a car to give you a ROI compared to a watch is almost infinitely more.

Well the obvious issue here is...how do they truly know you wrote the code? Its pretty much impossible to source where OS code comes from, and it sure wouldn't be hard to find an obscure OS project and pass off the code as yours, if you were that sort of person.

And this takes me to my 2nd point, and that is they current hiring model totally leads to companies hiring people who are good at interviewing not necessarily people who are good at doing the work required. There is no doubt t that interviewing for a job is a skill that can be learned and improved upon, and lots of crappy programmers have learned to be damn good at being I interviewed.

Sounds pretty close to RSS to me...what do you see as the difference between what you envision and existing RSS?

I believe you are talking about the Microsoft ODBC API which was language and platform agnostic data acquisition layer. Early versions of it had pretty bad performance issues if I remember correctly, but eventually it became somewhat useful.

I believe that developers back in the 90's wanted a way to "drop in" various low and higher cost DBMS systems to their client-server based apps without the need of hiring full-time database sysops.

ahhh yes...you were working with an infamous "idea guy" where you were expected to do all the work while he sits back and just thinks of new ways to crack the whip with you.

that sort of thing is very rarely a good way to structure a business. the people who do the actual work almost always need to be the ones who decide on new features as only they know the proper work/reward ratios.

if i had a nickle for all the proposals i've seen from the "idea guys"...well i sure would have a lot of nickles.

so in this view I'll ask (with a nod towards Fermi of course)... just where are all these AIs you speak of?

wouldn't these AIs begin to contact and perhaps battle with each other? certainly it seems to me, there would be some tell-tale sign left over from the expected millions of AIs, right?

now of course, it's impossible to tell what super intelligent AIs would choose to do... but I do feel that an extension of Fermi's paradox would be needed with your comment.

really? i thought it's purpose was to take us back to the good old days of sellable proprietary binary blobs instead of the more open HTML/JS/CSS stack.

HTTrack is a powerful package, but unless it can now handle JS-embedded links properly, it still can't take you all the way to. perfect local site mirroring.

Isn't ALL written history somewhat revisionist?

Well it sure is hard to tell because, of course, I wasn't there of course, but isn't that exactly the problem here?

For my entire life I've heard the bot mot that "History is written by the victorious"...well doesn't that mean at its base level that ALL of it bathes in its own bullshit?

I like Malcom's writing and his pod...and at least he has the honesty to call it "Revisionist History" as he is obviously telling us that HERE, yes, narrative story might win out over historical accuracy (which, once again, we have been taught is BS anyway).

Why shouldn't non-textbook history reflect the shades and biases of its author? As long as its well written and presents fair reflections upon this history, why should the author be pummeled by critics for doing so?

Too many questions and not enough answers...as usual.

Bingo...we have a winner.

This issue reeks with the rank smell of base politics and in/out group dynamics, and humans have been fighting, in the abstract, these issues since the time Egyptians were building the pyramids.

How can there possibly be an "objective rating" when career advancement, peer respect, and big money all are in the mix depending upon results?

Why would you believe that both the individual voters and their delegates wouldn't be susceptible to almost all the same corrupting and manipulative factors that plague voting systems today?

The OP is correct...spending in mass media on the various issues would almost surely allow the purchasing of voter mindshare just exactly as advertising today drives sales of almost identical branded products for inflated prices.

Don't get me wrong...in general I like the idea of "liquid democracy" (I remember it being called "Superdemocracy" back in the 80's when MajorBBS creator Tim Striker very much lobbied for its creation)...but it would be foolish to believe that the same forces that corrupt modern politics wouldn't be able to corrupt it as well.

> You can quite literally save millions for retirement as an individual, and have coverage for drugs and treatment under Medicare, and still run out of money due to having to pay extortionate prices for covered drugs.

This is a totally ridiculous statement. Medicare-assisted drug costs are absolutely NOT going to bankrupt someone who has very wisely saved "millions" for retirement.

I have watched both my parents now pass, and I actually helped them both work out which Medicare plan to select based on their specific medications by creating a spreadsheet and carefully going thru the documentation of each plan and doing the math.

2 million dollars can rather safely throw off 3% after-taxes, so thats 60k/year not counting the odd 1800 that the federal government pays everyone with Medicare "benefits", that that is 6800/month someone who has saved "millions" has for income, and that's not even touching the principle nest egg.

There is no possible way someone's monthly drug costs are going to be anywhere even CLOSE to that number..I think each of my parents spent around 1200/month for what seemed to me to be way more "medication" then they could possibly need.

Unless you somehow come up with numbers that are way, way different than mine, your assertation that drug costs could bankrupt someone with "millions" saved is rather laughable.

you cannot possibly be postulating that profitable activities can never be considered useful, are you?