I cluck my tongue at fowl language.

The amount that math is actually used in any job vs. how very much it’s stressed in school is hugely disparate.

Judging by what teachers say, 99% of jobs use calculus 80% of the day, when in reality less than 10% of jobs make much use of math at all, and then it’s typically only simple arithmetic. It’s mostly scientists who use any higher math in a serious way, and even then it’s restricted to tiny areas necessary to perform their work.

It’s important for most people to jump over the seemingly-endless useless math hurdles to achieve other goals, but as far as actually being necessary?

Nope.

In a way, I am glad many of my family and peers liked to remind me early and often that I’d be a failure, and that I was essentially innately terrible.

Without that, I never would’ve had the impetus to escape Lake City, to do the wild and wonderful things I’ve done in my life, and I never would’ve been successful beyond even the remotest imaginings of my teenage mind.

So thank you, people, for treating me like utter trash. Tuns out this detritus floats in your cesspool, crystallizes in the dry air into something strong and unyielding, then blows away in the zephyr to a much better place.

After some hassling, some folks from AT&T finally came out to bury the fiber that they’d run through our yard for their fiber-to-the-door service. It was previously just exposed on the ground as the install is separate from the bury.

The service itself has been great, by the way, especially as compared to the merged Time Warner and Cox — now called “Spectrum” — which went down 20+ times a day and did so for weeks on weeks. Hence, why we switched.

But I wanted to observe that several of the workers who did the bury had prison tattoos.

Good on AT&T for hiring ex-cons. I was glad to see that.

Being convicted of a crime doesn’t mean that you should never have a job again. Not sure how we ever got to that state as a society.

Oh wait, yes I do: under capitalism, producing superfluous people is kind of part of how it functions.