Hmmmmm. Let's see here.

People don't like cable, because it's too expensive and inconvenient

People start pirating

People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.

People don't like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.

People start pirating again......

I wonder what happened?!?!

There's an old saying in computing. "you improve usability by taking away options and features" apple didn't necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it "popular" by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they've made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn't want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn't want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn't invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn't invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They've done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

"Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows"

How does the math work that they did it 10x with 85% working?

Also wtf gaslighting. This is a whole new level of negging

Father of a 2.5 yr old here ... Have a few friends who just had kids as well.. I told them the same shpiel

1. The next few months will be the toughest thing you ever go through (comparable to back to back all nighters in college, but this time it's for a few months)... Esp if you're working and don't have good paternity leave. But after you get over that hump. .... It gets a lot better and now you're in the club where everyone knows what you went through because they've been through it too.
2. If your/your partners parents are in the picture and offer to babysit. Take up the offer. Go have a date night with your partner... It'll relieve a lot of stress
3. If you live in a decent area, go for walks with the little one as often as you can. (in a bassinet/stroller obviously)
4. If you're in a western country... If you ever feel like you're doing too little, the littlest amount of effort on your part gets much more props than the amount of effort. Just being there for your new kid and changing every 10th diaper is doing better than 60% of dads out there.
5. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has amnesia about the next 6ish months. They'll say things like "why are you so tired? I don't understand!" Or "it wasn't that bad when we had kids".... It was. They just blocked it out
6. When the kid gets off milk, any spices yall use usually in cooking. Or just generally like that aren't spicy. Expose it to them ASAP. It does wonders for their pallet and they'll be less picky in a few years
7. Both you and your partner are stressed. You will fight and hate each other. Don't make any big life decisions for the next few months.

Hope this helps... Enjoy the journey.

Worked at a medium sized retail startup as a software engineer where we didn't have root access to our local laptops, under the guise of "if you fuck it up we won't be able to fix it" but we only started out with a basic MacBook setup. so every time I wanted to install a tool, ide, or VM I had to make a ticket to IT to come and log in with the password and explain what I was doing.

Eventually, the engineering dept bribed an IT guy to just give us the password and started using it. IT MGMT got pissed when the number of tickets dropped dramatically and realized what was going on.

We eventually came to the compromise that they gave us sudo access with the warning "we're not backing anything up. If you mess up we'll have to factory reset the whole machine". Nobody ever had to factory reboot their machine because we weren't children... And if there was an issue we just fixed it ourselves

A trans friend of mine actually did this. After she came out publicly, her wife threw her a coming out party at their place.

Similarly, I dated a woman named Annie a few years back. Everyone of my geekier friends, when I introduced her, asked, "are you ok? Are you ok Annie?"!

I've tried this. Guy next to me was playing a video game on full blast that I can hear over my noise cancelling headphones. I asked him if he could turn the sound down.

He said "F you! This is my console. I do what I want! You're the only one complaining so shut the f up".....

As Cishet white-ish person, who is only tangentially connected to this community IRL, but wants to be supportive, is there a definitive list of pronouns? It seems to me and many other people that if you just keep adding more and more, people get confused and or feel alienated and then some people get angry when confused, because they get frustrated and don't want to do the wrong thing.

I usually default to "they" unless absolutely told, because It seems that once it gets so individualized, things go a bit nuts. We may as well just abolish all pronouns and only use proper nouns.

Side question, I'm neurodiverse (diagnosed ADHD, probably a bit on the spectrum), I feel very very weird before coming out to people, especially at work, as I think it will be used against me. There are still places in this world that would hurt/imprison/kill non-cis, non-hetero people. With such an interconnected world, especially with those places, how does one handle it while also trying to keep being proud of your identity? Wouldn't putting neo pronouns in a profile open you up for targeting?

(looks around)

(To neighbor) psst who's gonna tell this guy that unbreakable not only got a sequel. It's start of a trilogy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_(film_series)

(Neighbor to me) I think he's being sarcastic....

Elder millennial here

Ok so next question. If the computer can magically create anything. And they are on almost all space stations (including cardassian/federation ones) what's the point of a bar?

Gambling makes sense. Paying for food/drink when you have a replicator doesn't.

How technical is your dad?

Also honestly. Sometimes it's a lot nicer to just push a button and have something come on.

One of the main reasons I use Plex is their random feature. "Wanna watch a syndicated episodic show and don't care which ep? Press random" vs other streaming services you have to actually choose an episode.

This and caffeine

Wife thinks I'm being lazy bc I crash and don't help with baby on weekend mornings .. I call her lazy when she falls asleep after I put the toddler to bed on weekdays.

We have a happy marriage.

The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.

I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.

I end up just pirating it myself.

Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day......

Life well lived for me is the following.

1. My life ends in a comfy bed surrounded by friends and family having died before becoming a burden on them.
2. I've made a positive impact on those around me
3. I've left my children/family in better financial shape than I was born into (which, frankly, was pretty good already)
4. I traveled and saw what the world has to offer

Yeah, life is meaningless, and we're one small speck in a universe so big it breaks our brains to think about and we only last a similar amount of time in regard to the vastness of time itself. . ..... so I might as well make myself and the people around me feel good

As far as the short term? Have a good conversation with friends/family, go for a walk through a nearby forest.

Call me naive, but I always thought Curtis Lowe was about society not respecting bums who play good music for beer/wine money aka the starving artist. Even though the protagonist loved him as a mentor/entertainer.

Racism or the fact that he was black wasn't the main factor in the issues the protagonist is singing about, just that he happened to be black.... though I'm betting it didn't help the way people/protagonist's mom viewed the two of them spending so much time together

I always say him as an inspiration to Bleeding Gums Murphy and Lisa in the Simpsons.

Just my 2 cents. I agree with the rest of your list though.

I think Gene Parmesan made up for it .....

More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.

But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons

1. They made a movie out of it
2. The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
3. DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs.. Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.