Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.

I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.

I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.

All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.

Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.

Now, semi-automatic weapons are easy to get in the states in the US that are still mostly free - but what does that mean? A semi-automatic weapon shoots one round every time you pull the trigger. Just like most weapons that have multi-shot capability for the last couple of hundred years. The difference is, the gas escaping from the round cycles a new round into the chamber rather than you having to mechanically do it via pumping (like a shotgun or a tube-fed 22) or pulling the trigger again (like a revolver), or advancing the round with a handle, like a Remington 700. Semi-automatic weapons are old technology, dating to the turn of the 20th century. If you want to ban semi-automatics, you're basically saying you want to ban anything developed in the last century plus. Which is ok for you to advocate for, just be honest about it.

As for banning explosive devices? Are you going to ban fertilizer, used by basically everyone who has a lawn, and all farmers everywhere? Are you going to ban diesel fuel? If you can't do one of those, you can't ban explosive devices.

The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.

Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.

In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.

Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.

That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.

I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.