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Yes, but those things bring more value than simple green grass. I can eat the chickens and their eggs. I can eat veggies from the garden. I can’t eat St Augustine grass because I’m not a goat.

I would never!

If I simply stop, I won’t be able to find my house. There has to be a better plan. Native plants are probably the answer.

> There’s a lot of yardspace that could become gardens and chicken farms in a pinch.

I’d do anything to stop caring for the damned lawn.

People I know in Manhattan are still paying their cleaners even though there’s no more cleaning. These are fewer and fewer as folks permanently decamp from the city.

Your comment echoes my experience... in New York City. I’m white too, and I’d gotten pulled over more times in NYC than anywhere else. There’s always something: you drove over the yellow line for a second; your hands weren’t on 10 and 2; we may have seen a cell phone at your ear; why does your car have a big dent? The NYPD is one huge pain in the ass.

I live in Florida now; sheriff’s deputies in my county are very chill. They wave and say hello, and they don’t care why there’s something weird in the back of my truck.

I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved? When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.

And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.

> That is like saying "the sick made this hospital uninviting".

But the sick do make a hospital uninviting! Think of all those heart attack patients who opted not to visit their local emergency department. Heart attacks are still happening regardless of how many additional patients are at the hospital due to infection.

> My fear of the decline of traditional marriage?

The only marriage you have the right to be concerned about is your own, if any. If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married. It’s that simple.

The whole “traditional marriage” mindset stems from religion. When forced upon others by law it’s just another way to limit individual freedoms. It’s disgusting and has to stop.

I was fat before the pandemic. I continue to be fat during the pandemic. I will be fat after the pandemic is over. Fitness is for other people.

I’m doing great, thanks for asking. I drink good whiskey on my porch while I watch the bomb ass explosive sunsets that Florida is so famous for. I shoot projectile weapons into an earthen berm. I listen to my favorite synthwave playlists. I eat good food. I go to the beach.

Just because I’m fat doesn’t mean I’m doing poorly. In fact I’m willing to bet that I’m happier than most posers who go around telling everyone that they do CrossFit. (That my iPhone has capitalized CrossFit is alarming in itself...)

You don’t have to download the internet upon each build.

First, in a corporate environment it’s common to run builds backed by artifact servers that’ll cache just about anything.

Second, it’s easy to place files in a Docker build context (that’s just a $25 dollar way of saying “next to the Dockerfile”) that would have been downloaded from the internet, but are stored locally instead. This is easier said than done for some formats. Source tarballs? Easy. Anything Java or Debian that requires a pesky server which works a certain way? You’re going to have to use a caching artifact server.

“Free market” isn’t “free everything”. In a free market the bid-ask spread is king. It’s just another kind of tyranny, which, like all such things, benefits those who are set up to take advantage of it, and leaves most others in the dust.

This reminds me of a famously obtuse and obdurate boss who asked for things that were utterly impossible. He had delusions of grandeur which left him convinced that he and only he was qualified to challenge the “cheap, fast, good - pick any two” triangle.

Naturally, I did my best to explain the laws of physics to him, but he wouldn’t hear it. In a spectacular display of Stockholm syndrome I did my best to appease him for four years, but, as many of you can surely predict by this point in the story, I failed in every possible way and eventually gave up. Just wish I could have my four years back.

I was glad to read that OP at least got paid well for his efforts.

For this reason I’ve been dockerizing my builds for almost five years. I was late to the Docker party, but when I saw the benefits it brings to build pipelines, I was sold.

It's true that a dockerized build isn’t any simpler than its non-dockerized ancestor, but at least there’s a Dockerfile that lays bare all the black magic and special sauce which goes into each build. And it can be version controlled to watch for drift over time.

This stuff is useful in a corporate setting, but the other fetishization of reproducible builds is just a distraction that can stay where it belongs: open source mailing lists.

Gold is a poor asset no matter how you turn it. Most people don’t hold physical gold when they trade in it. If the current financial system were to fail, do you really believe that people will begin taking delivery of their physical gold positions in their garages? They’ll simply get wiped out, and that will be the end of it.

Even barring a catastrophic nosedive in the level of civilized trading, regular people aren’t equipped to store gold in their homes. The problem of securing such holdings isn’t something the average Joe will be able to solve well, and he knows it.

What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.

I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.

Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.

I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.

Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.

Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.

Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.

> Also how is outlook any better?

Google: our business is ads, and you’re the product. Put more of your data into Gmail so that we can show you more ads and do a million other things that benefit us.

Microsoft: our business is software and services and hardware and a bunch of other stuff you can pay us money for. E-mail service is the product, and you’re the customer.

Stop cutting part of my sentence to present it out of context.

> People want gasoline or gas. People don't want to pay for CO2 removal, because they don't get anything back immediately - maybe a slightly cooler planet and better biosphere 50 years in the future.

I don’t want gas; I want some means to propel my car from A to B. I’ll choose the most economically practical option, gas being the currently most available one. I live in Florida, so the “underwater in 50 years” meme hits very close to my home: about 3km away, to be precise. Lots of people will see the incentive to use less gas, or to pay for carbon sequestration in the absence of a non-gas option.