I’m very thankful and fortunate.

While I wait for Diablo IV to download 95GB of data, someone mentioned how games used to come on a pile of floppy disks. King's Quest V in '91 was 8 floppies. In 1997, I worked at the University of Wyoming as a user support tech, CD-ROMs were not standard equipment for staff yet... so I had a box with 46 Office floppies & 14 Windows 95 floppies & a couple utility ones to rebuild the DOS baseline install with the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Yes: These are old man stories.

I will “yes, and” this with a tweak that: It’s like someone had a “everyone’s getting cancer these days, sign up here to get cancer or you’ll never make more than $5 an hour!” Ponzi scheme going for 50 years, and suddenly the last rounds of people are mad they can’t cash out of the Cancer, and the early cashers who got their returns are laughing at them. Banks & Universities are shockingly quiet on the matter, eh? Funny, that.

“Be a voice, not an echo.” Attributed to Einstein but unsubstantiated in the literature. Still useful guidance.

Those of you who remember the "outspoken libertarian" version of me should know that: I could no longer be part of that political philosophy once it became clear that a majority who shared that viewpoint in this country would choose selfishness above selflessness, anarchy before community, and personal biases over facts, science and math. Libertarianism was founded firstly on personal accountability and growth, not merely the rejection of external governance. What is has become is an abomination

Regarding COVID: the CDC has rolled off their ongoing COVID metrics into the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System, which tracked flus and other respiratory illnesses since the 80s. So while 2% of tests are still coming back positive, vaccines & treatments are better and we seem to now accept that the current CoV strains are "endemic": A virus we have amongst us like colds and flus. Remember that Covid can still be bad for older & compromised people. https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/rsv/natl-trend.html