I think Gen X went from “invisible” to “the enemy” in a lot of folks’ minds when exit polling showed that they broke for Trump in 2024 by a greater margin than any other age group. Before that point most millennials just knew them as their cool older cousins, whose childhood was shrouded in a warm haze of half-remembered, half-imagined 80s nostalgia.

Mine is about the same for family coverage, and the shocking thing is that it’s pretty good relative to the market – my previous employer was about ~100/mo cheaper for an equivalent HDHP plan, but I’ve seen much, much worse.

Honestly, though, even more than the cost (having run the numbers, the tax I’d pay in a European country to cover similar services is about the same, all things considered) is the sheer level of friction that insurers inject into the healthcare system. You have to get a referral to a specialist even if you know you need to see one. You have to get insurance authorization for specialty treatments. You have to think about deductibles and out-of-pocket-maximums, and Lord help you if you start having complex medical problems around the end of the year and the maximums reset in the middle of your treatment!

We pay out of pocket for a direct primary care pediatrician for our kid (on top of his insurance, to cover any meds or emergencies) and the fact that there’s no insurance to deal with means that it’s vastly easier to get a hold of her to get a medical opinion whenever there’s a bad bump or a strange rash that needs a professional opinion. It’s shocking to see how things could be if insurance companies and PBMs and for-profit hospital networks hadn’t inserted themselves in between patients and doctors, with a sole eye towards making sure they pay out at little as humanly possible while maybe keeping patients alive in the process.

Terrible. Take your upvote and get the hell out of here.

Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.

My high-school friend group adopted “it goes” from our French class (“Comment ça va?” “Ça va!”, roughly meaning “How goes it?” “It goes!” being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

Similarly, my grandma had a set of electric carving knives that would wash out the game on TV every time she started cutting the Thanksgiving turkey.

Had to do that with our 68k Mac with an external drive, yeah! 700MB CDs were amazing compared to the piddling 80MB internal hard disc. Being able to put so much stuff on one piece of removable media relative to what would fit in onboard storage had a big impact on how developers approached the platform.

If optical disc tech had kept up that differential until today we’d have 100-terabyte BluRays. Funny to think how that sort of capacity might change the way we use computers…

I’m a bit squeamish, so I arranged myself so as to be seated basically next to my wife’s head, facing the wall, and was laser focused on holding her hand and maintaining eye contact with her.

Meanwhile, the delivering doctor was narrating a play by play as our kid went from just barely crowning to head fully out in three contractions, and then she just had to maneuver his shoulder free and he popped out on the fourth push. Three random things I will never forget from that night:

• The doctor seeing the umbilical cord and announcing “That’s a man that likes to eat!”
• The doctor further complimenting my wife that she “rocked that thing out like it was her job”
• One of the nurses looking into the hazmat bucket they’d packed the placenta into and muttering “Jesus Christ…”

Overall, 10/10, never doing it ever again.

Pad thai? Panang curry? Larb? Lumpia? Adobong manok?

Joke’s on you, creep, I have a toddler. All my algorithm serves up now is Blippi videos, steam locomotives, and construction equipment!

There is a certain sort of ennui that comes with the realization that the heat death of the universe is inevitable, and no matter what you do, no matter how much you manage to make your mark on the world/solar system/galaxy/universe or how successful and prosperous your descendants may be, it will all eventually be lost to eternal entropic stasis.

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

The trick is that many of the factors that make wood more or less structurally desirable are environmental rather than genetic, and there’s always a tension between things that are good for productivity (I e., rapid tree growth) and performance (tight growth rings and dense fibers).

Engineered wood is already giving us better wood. LVLs, LSLs, and PSLs are stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid sawn lumber, for a price. In commercial construction cross-laminated timber is giving us the performance and fire safety benefits of mass timber construction without requiring the destruction of old-growth forests. You just gotta pay the premium associated with those products, rather than budgeting for utility-grade scotch-pine-fir and expecting every board to be so straight that it scores a 0 in the Kinsey scale.

We actually found out when my wife was over visiting, and he came in through the cat door, locked eyes with her, froze, and slowly backed out of the house. 😅

Not a lot of coyotes in our neck of the woods, but the little orange moron kept writing checks with the neighbor cats that his disarmed front paws couldn’t cash, so he was always coming back with scratches. One of the other reasons we stopped letting him out.

I would never do it to a cat, but when this particular one wandered into my then-girlfriend’s house one night and decided he lived there, he was already declawed. He never seemed to suffer too badly from it, fortunately.

The only cat I’ve had that I’ve felt okay with letting roam was a stray that came to us declawed, so he was mostly harmless. We still ended up making him an inside cat because we caught him sneaking into the neighbor’s house to steal their cat’s food and poop in its litterbox.

Can’t forget the spineties!