But for Gen Z folks, that stuff is ancient history, isn't it? Even the oldest members (using 1997 as a starting point, but some definitions use 2000) were too young to protest or serve in Iraq[1]. By the time the youngest Gen Z folks were starting school in the mid-2010s, the US stock market and unemployment rate had reached pre-recession levels too.
[1] I mean when people cared about Iraq, 2003 to circa 2008. We still have troops there, but I don't think most of America is even aware of that.
I'm pretty sure that only a small minority of Americans, let alone those in the 18-29 age group, can name their senators and representative and anyone on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, most Americans instead seem to imagine this country as an autocracy in which they get to vote for a new ruler every four years.
I've been fascinated by the shift towards Trump by 18-29 voters in this past election, and I think this is a good explanation that I haven't heard before. Yeah, and Bush 43 was so long ago that his popular image has turned from kind of a villainous "worst president ever" to a favorably remembered elder statesman according to some polls.
Note that it was a shift for Trump, still not a majority voting for him. Exit polls that I've seen still indicated an 11-point lead for Harris[1], but that's much more narrow than the 24-point lead that Biden had in 2020[2]. Anyway, I've been fascinated by this because it kind of broke my mental model imagining that the Republican party would eventually be marginalized as its voters died of old age. I definitely thought Trump was going to lose this age group in 2024 by the widest margin ever.
> Kill all the algos and let me find stuff via regex
I love this. As someone who increasingly feels old and dissatisfied with what computing is turning into, I'm going to start using this along with things like "you'll have to pry local accounts, passwords, and plain text email from my cold, dead hands."
I have a single anecdote, not much insight, but I'm interested in advancing discussion around your question.
My wife, in her mid-30s, has friends who will share or send her links to TikTok videos. She says that she can't view them because she doesn't have an account, but she doesn't want to create an account because she "knows she has an addictive personality" [1] and has read about the power of TikTok. Anyway, I imagine that this is how it starts for a lot of people: not wanting to miss out on stuff sent by a friend, creating an account to check it out, and then rapidly getting sucked into the addictive user experience. And it keeps spreading the same way from there.
[1] She does, and I'm thankful that she recognizes this. She's already a heavy consumer of Facebook Reels, by the way.
I've never thought that I want to own a coffee shop, but I've sometimes thought about being a barista (i.e. "Barista FIRE"). I make my wife a latte every morning, and it can be fun and satisfying. I imagine being focused on perfecting a simple craft, and then being able to turn it off at the end of a shift. My work, in comparison, feels like I'm trying to solve impossible problems, and it never ends.
However, I suspect that the reality of being a barista is dealing with lots of demanding and angry customers, frustrating corporate management practices, and more cleaning than making coffee.
Warrant officers, not NCOs. But yes, this is the crux of it. New lieutenants go to flight school alongside new warrant officers, and then their day-to-day responsibilities rapidly diverge. The lieutenant becomes an administrator who, at best, struggles to keep up with the warrant officers in the cockpit for a few years. At worst, the lieutenant ends up in jobs (as a captain and major) where they don't even have flight-hour minimums anymore.
> You you can’t be in love with a particular idea or business. You have to be in love with the idea of running a business.
I'm saving this quote. I'm a career Army officer and the application to my world is that newly minted officers compete like mad to get into their preferred career fields / communities, because some like "Aviation" (e.g. flying helicopters) are hot and others like "Ordnance" (e.g. managing the lifecycle of ammunition and hardware) are not, but then find that 90% of their careers end up being the same HR and logistics middle-management with attendant meetings and paperwork and bureaucracy. The result is that the hot career fields actually tend to have the worst rates of retention, as officers become disillusioned when reality doesn't meet expectations, among a few other reasons. So prospective officers should really be in love with the idea of leading organizations of all various types.
I tend to be cheap, not even just frugal, but it's worth it to me. During my first winter in my own place, I set the thermostat to the low 60s F to save money. After about two weeks I concluded that feeling perpetually uncomfortable in my own place wasn't worth whatever money I was saving. It felt like trying not to drink water when thirsty to save money. Warmth is just such a basic human need. Better to save in a number of other ways. I definitely wouldn't do this to my wife and kids now.
By the time we implement any of these things, if ever, they certainly won't be. I work on military networks and applications, and it's hard for me to believe that I'll see any of this within my career at the pace we move. This is the land of web applications that only work with Internet Explorer, ActiveX, Siverlight, Flash, and Java Applets, plus servers running Linux 2.6 or Windows Server 2012.
The idea of "Just-in-Time" access control where "a user is granted access to a resource only while she needs it, and that access is revoked when she is done" is terrifying when it takes weeks or months to get action on support tickets that I submit (where the action is simple, and I tee it up with a detailed description of whatever I need done).
[1] I mean when people cared about Iraq, 2003 to circa 2008. We still have troops there, but I don't think most of America is even aware of that.