Found out another of my childhood friends is dead. I hadn’t talked to him since high school, but still. When you grow up in North Florida, events that happen to others in their 60s, 70s, and 80s happen to you when you’re in your 20s, 30s and 40s.

As Biden cancels (some) student debt, remember why the debt exists. A key Reagan advisor warned in 1970 that free college was producing the dangerously explosive "dynamite" of an "educated proletariat," and "we have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education": pic.twitter.com/SWqZFRRTuN

— 🦀 Jon 🦀 Schwarz 🦀 (@schwarz) August 24, 2022

Some claim saddling people with college loans had to do with integration. Not really. It was to load people up with debt so that the capitalist system could subjugate and dominate them so they were then powerless to rebel.

It wasn’t even a hidden reason. It was openly stated. Nearly everyone forgets even relatively-recent history so very quickly.

I was fat for 30 years and then lost 80lbs. It has made me appreciate the lack of male attention I’ve gotten my whole life.

I never feel in danger from women, but this increased attention happens to men too as they become more attractive. Since I’ve made major jumps up the hotness scale, women treat me so much more solicitously now. Customer service women flirt with me shamelessly and offer to help me in ways that they don’t offer to anyone else.

For instance, an airport ticket counter agent basically offered to walk me to the security line at the airport. That NEVER would’ve happened four years ago when I was still schlubby. I had to tell her several times I was fine and didn’t need any help to find the entrance (which was like 100 feet away; I could literally see it from where I was standing).

I’ve had two women assist me, ignoring all the other male customers, while offering to do all my paperwork for me when I was going in for a cert renewal. The next customer up got treated 100x more coldly; they barely glanced at him.

Etc. etc.

It’s a shocking difference when you go from plain or worse to hot. Absolutely shocking.

When we're dealing with decades, it's very hard to zoom out and see the wider context on how much more expensive everything is vs. stagnant wage growth. I had classmates who went to UCLA or Berkeley in '93 for about $5K a year. That'd get your 3-credit course here at Lehigh. (1) https://t.co/DmhSe6A5th

— Jeremy Littau (@JeremyLittau) August 25, 2022

My uncle paid his way through the University of Florida in the late 1970s and early 1980s working part-time at a convenience store during the school year, and full time in summer. He had no other source of funding. That wouldn’t even get you a class now.

College and rent were both far, far cheaper then. I think Boomers truly don’t understand this. Somehow.

Boomers melting down about how this isn't fair is really something. We know life isn't fair. You told us that every single day of our childhood. So I'll give you the same advice you always gave us: Get over it.

— Sarah Watson (@SarahWatson42) August 24, 2022

Ahahahahaha!

Yeah, half my early life was some Boomer or Silent Gen dipshit telling me “Life ain’t fair” when they did something utterly heinous to me that they just could’ve…not done.

What is the point of this kind of thought exercise? Covid isn’t sufficiently scary anymore but what if it leads to something worse?

There are basically infinity possible scary hypotheticals we could dream up for anything. https://t.co/NoQT1kbKCt

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) August 25, 2022

Oh, the Covidians are just pissed that their lies didn’t lead to the enormous societal changes that they longed for. They insisted on fibbing about Long Covid (claiming everyone would inevitably get it, collapsing society) and now that’s really come back to bite them as most people have had Covid…and it sucked, but amounted to nothing. People’s lived experience (as they say) directly contradicted the Covidian narrative, destroying it.

So now they’re scrambling harder than a line cook at a Waffle House at 3AM on a Saturday morning. Insisting on halting society for unknown unknowns is very, uh, “special.” But that won’t stop ’em.

Inheritance turned my boyfriend into cruel racist.

Nah, he always was. Now he thinks he has license. Needs to be dumped.

When I lived in Charlotte, I went on a date with a woman with an Amex Black card. She was very nice and I liked her. Beautiful, too. But a huge dealbreaker shortly emerged: she very much wanted kids — soon — and I did not. And she was not looking for a casual relationship.

Dang. There went my dreams of Ferraris and lounging on a yacht in the Aegean with her. All shattered in an instant. 😉

Our date was at a very expensive restaurant (bill was around $300 for two people in ~2003) in a Charlotte high-rise. She insisted on paying. That’s when I saw her card. She was surprised I recognized it. Turns out, she was looking for a decent man to start a family with and she completely didn’t care how much money he earned or what wealth he possessed. She rightly said that was not a worry.

She’d already told me her father was the owner of some high-end law firm, but that’s the first and last time I’d ever seen one of those cards.

Bet she has a couple of kids and is on a yacht now with some guy that actually did want those kids. I regret nothing, but sometimes your life can turn at the oddest of intersections.

I spent ‘99 travelling from the top of west oz to the bottom analysing embedded systems for date faults, for others to repair. So much of our mining industry could have been stopped overnight.

— Paul Williams (@buddhawilliams) August 22, 2022

Yep. Y2K was a “big nothing” in most people’s perception because hundreds of thousands of people spent billions of person hours fixing shit in advance. It’s the preparedness paradox in action. If you correct a major problem before the consequences strike, everyone believes there was no problem in the first place. It’s a major and seemingly irremediable flaw in human cognition.

I kind of wish we’d fixed nothing so the whole economy would’ve ground to a halt so these stupid wankers would now be shut the fuck up.