Sure, but if the options are to watch something in low resolution or not at all, I’m picking up the novelisation instead.

I suppose if you’re that far right the gap between yourself and other points on the political spectrum is quite a gulf.

Brian Lunduke is still around? Oh dear

I thought it had had that for twenty years?

That doesn’t sound like you appreciate the spirit of OP’s question. I’m not sure if I feel the social interaction will be worth it for me to engage further so I’m instead going to get some more sleep.

That seems statistically unlikely. I’ve met plenty of people who aren’t normal so I do have lots of points of comparison.

I’ve met so very many of them.

I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn’t study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

For example statistics bored me. We’re working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

I’ve used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that’s always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don’t know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc…). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay…?

My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don’t really see what there is to like. I didn’t dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

It felt like being taught someone else’s complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.

My job isn’t this bad but has the occasional pointless company meeting and the like. I’m fine with it - it’s their money they’re wasting. I do not look to my employer for meaning - I like the team I work with but I’ve no love for the work. I’m good at it and try to find joy in it where I can, but it is not my primary source of personal validation.

It’s a pretty comfortable life. I’ve worked for myself before and it was much harder in every way with nowhere near the pay.

You met me at a very strange time in my life.

Proscribed organisation. Now.

I can’t agree with that defeatism. If nothing changes, sure, but the general election isn’t tomorrow.

Hard to say, but I doubt it. Our governments don’t ask before doing stuff - they’ve seen how stupid we are when asked basic questions.

Huh, today I learned. I only tend to pop in for specific items but I’m still surprised I didn’t notice.

Presenteeism is such a daft model for employment. I am not sat at my keyboard for my whole work day. I could, if forced, but I’d literally get less work done and I’d burn out so quickly as to be a liability to my employer. Half of what I do is reading technical documents and understanding them. Lots of the time that means doing literally anything other than reading more documents - they need to be digested and that means not trying to cram even more data in.

Diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggy…” until you can find a big enough rock.

I started doing CS50 way back when and pretty much bailed when it got to C. I could understand it but it felt like I had to build the entire universe to do the simplest of things.

I like that with Python I can knock something together quickly enough to justify the time it takes. Having to do something manual and repetitious at work? Knock out a Python script to make it less error prone in future. If it took a lot of time I’d just have to suck it up and suffer through.

Fair enough, it read to me as a “gotcha” (as in “if python is do great then why can’t it…”). I’ve spent too much time on places like Reddit where every interaction is three seconds from becoming a knife fight!

…but wait at least two hours first.

…and people use MS Excel as a database, it’s not the fault of the tech that people force things to do things they’re not designed for.