My ignorant take:

Media brought the horror of US casualties in Vietnam home in a mass and immediate way that didn't exist in prior conflicts. The novelty of that media combined with the casualty rates drove unpopularity. It made the violence feel more real.

Even if casualty rates in post-Vietnam conflicts were higher I'm not sure we'd see negative sentiment because media coverage of violence is so normalized now. Exposure to violence in media is no longer novel.

That's the present. The future will be trying to cajole an LLM into interpretation of bogus rules. Not sure if that's better or worse.

(Yikes-- I feel my pulse in my neck and chest just writing about this.)

I likely need to see a therapist about it. Wow.

People using cell phones as cameras get a pass (at least in sports).

I had a nasty altercation with a parent last fall and now I can't pick up the camera w/o getting PTSD-like symptoms. I'd love to know how "pros" handle dealing with that kind of thing. I had a similar situation years ago w/ a guy who got in my face for shooting on the street at a festival. My solution there was to just stop doing it.

My Android phone says "SMS" under the "bubble", next to the time, when I send my wife's aunt a message. If I attempt to attach a photo to a message to her (which I've always thought was "MMS") she never receives the photo or any text I send with the photo. Nothing.

re: the identify verification

We had the bank send the message to my wife's phone. She received a message with a link to a website in the native text messaging app on her iPhone. My wife absolutely doesn't have the bank's "app" installed. The website linked in the message used her camera to photograph her aunt's ID and face. I don't know what color the "bubble" was on my wife's iPhone, which I know has some ability to differentiate SMS vs iMessage.

My aunt can receive text messages. She couldn't receive this message. That's what I know.

I don't want podcasts exclusively on YouTube because my podcast downloading pipeline isn't equipped to handle downloading YouTube videos and ripping the audio.

We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.

I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)

I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.

Edit: For those seeing an argument in my statement above re: forcing people to use technology or forcing business to make an accommodation for people who don't want to use technology: I am not making a statement either way. I'm simply saying it seems logical and reasonable, natural even, to value your time more when you have less of it.

My wife's elderly aunt has a flip phone that can receive SMS but not MMS. We just went thru an "identity verification" procedure with a major bank last week that sends MMS, not SMS, and could not reach her flip phone.

The whole ordeal was a huge pain in the ass and if my wife and I weren't there to help her it would have been completely impenetrable to her.

An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.

For sure. If that was true the answer would be "charge the non-app users a nominal fee to cover the cost".

Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.

Moving the MX for the domain and limping along from backups is my worst-case contingency but given that there's no place other than M365 to restore the backups to it isn't a very good strategy.