That’s kind of you to say. There was definitely no way I could have foreseen what the Web 2.0 era would be like.

When the internet became more of a common thing, I really believed that it would bring people together. That all everyone needed was to be exposed to information. That seems so very naive now.

I grew up in a very conservative household and genuinely believed everything I was taught due to not being exposed to other ideas. Over time, even when in high school, I started to notice that people hated things without understanding them. Ask someone to explain to you why communism is bad, for instance, and they probably can’t because they know nothing about it.

Over time, I became exposed to more diverse people, educated people, people from different places. I went to school and got my masters degree. I have found that I am frankly fairly liberal by US standards.

The MAGA types used to talk about an education when it was a way to insult people who make the minimum wage and make it their fault that they were underpaid. They didn’t actually want peoples’ lives to be better, but rather to find a way to look down on entire classes of humans.

Firefighers/EMTs/Paramedics are the true heroes. That’s a “don’t touch” zone.

Don’t blame it on CA. KKK types have been moving to northern Idaho for decades now. They tried to do a terrorism as a pride march a couple years back and got caught because the police found so many U Haul trucks in the area to be suspicious and checked out a few.

Easiest: My brother in a field in front of his trailer with beers in hand. Hardest: Destination wedding on an island. I disliked it.

Back in the day, you scanned the disk. Folder by folder, file by file. If what you were looking for appeared early in your search, you were golden. It turns out, though, that scanning a filesystem is computationally very complex and takes a long time. Not something you might notice so much on a PC, but something that you would notice on a server. So, instead, you want to index the disk, slowly and over time, and then you search against the index. This works well in a server, but no so much on a workstation. Well there’s really no difference between Windows 11 and Windows Server 2024 except for some fine tuning of resource allocation. Essentially, you get the very (for desktops) ineffective server version.

This is me. Grad school was about interest not work.

Helpful to know that the country was markedly different before and after each of these events. Think of things before and after WWII, for instance. We will experience similar over the next 20 - 40 years.

It will turn out that the corporation exists in Nevada due to some sort of tax break years ago.

It seems like every 10 years or so a story like this comes up.

I remember in the 90s there was a case of a teenager who vandalized or put graffiti on a building in some place like Singapore and was sentenced to caning. There was this huge outcry about how cruel it was and such, and I remember (I was in high school) thinking that the guy was an idiot who made how own bed.

Then you get Otto Warmbier who somehow was allowed into North Korea and then decided it was a good idea to rip a post of the country’s founder off the wall.

The lesson? Know where you are. When you’re not in Kansas, then don’t do Kansas things. Consequences are different in different parts of the world. It’s really easy to be a respectful traveler.