The lack of a fixed back button on the phone just sucks. I alwats have to make random gestures until it appears, hoping I don't accidentally click on something. I just want a browser with a basic, non-fucked UI.

If you're talking about how much the most successful 0.1% can make, then sure. Also not very relevant. Awful is, of course, subjective, but stress sucks. We dramatically underestimate the psychological and physical toll of sustained stress. Still, everyone should individually consider what sort of thing they find awful if they had to do it all the time. If working in hot spaces, or just generally outdoors, is awful to you, an office job recommends itself. But for lots of people, bing stuck ditting at a desk all day is more awful.

Well, that's true of many fields. Lawyers have a very high failure rate, but that's very poorly known. Something like 90% of lawyers fail to make it to partner, and have to find a new career after 10 years. But it's still true that most people who become master whatevers have their own business.

Heck, the reason I really like software as a career is it's almost unique in that you can make a lot of money without starting your own business. You're just not going to ever make much money in almost any field if you're working for other people, aside from a pretty short list of technical specialties that very few people can actually do.

It's useless telling people to become a software dev or aeronautical engineer for the upward mobility, as it's the very fact that most people can't do those jobs that makes them pay well at the top end. For almost everything, it's the ability to start your own business that gives the upwards mobility, and that applies equally to tradesmen and dentists.

Well, you can go with the objective truth, or you can go with what makes you happy, or you can go with what frightens you. Why do so many people pick the last one? Be wary of real threats, not imagined ones, and you be both happier and more successful in life.

Yeah, but that's a domain specialty, a project management specialty, sales talent, and you're running your own business. With those skills you can make six figures in quite a few lines of work.

The total confirmed death toll from Chernobyl was in the dozens, man, dozens of people! Nuclear is scary!

Admit it, you pick what policies seem smart after first seeing which are Trumps, not the other way around. A ton of people on both sides praise or condemn Trump loudly fort he same economic policies they condemned or praised Obama for.

But almost no one does. It's not worth worrying about multi-generational changes when picking a job. Do something that pays well enough and isn't obviously on its way out. The fact that other people mught choose to pile on in a decade or two matters very little.

It's actually fairly common for senior tradespeople to have their own business. Where you have to be smart beyond the trade is to grow that business to where you have employees - a "two-truck" business. But, really, where are you going to find six figures without being smart beyond your specialty? Software dev, maybe?

What isn't? The cable networks are just the propaganda for Boomers and GenX who haven't cut the cord yet. The rest of us get our propaganda from the internet. I recently culled everything overtly political from my consumption, because fuck them all.

My phone's back button isn't even displayed by default. It is not a place on the screen where I can click, without doing some dance to bring it up. Also, why are you simping for Firefox? What an odd thing to lust over.

How easy is it to run VisualBasic code today, now that the language is long gone?

I would happily pay for a good browser! And that's not hypothetical. I still have my receipt/license for Netscape Navigator.

And these aren't petty complaints: a browser without a back button is fundamentally broken.

The reason Macs never really took off was they were eye-wateringly expensive. Rich kids toys. Apple was content with that because they had the Apple II family alongside the Macintosh for many years. It was only when they killed off the Apple line that prices for the Mac dropped to be competitive with Wintel, and then just a year or so later the Pentium came out and soundly beat the 68040, making the Macs overpriced again for the performance.

The main selling point for Macs for business use was actually Word and Excel, of you recall, and the Mac UI was soundly better and color wasn't relevant so for a while it was a great choice for business use. But then Win95 came out, caught up to Mac in UI, and of course Word and Excel "mysteriously" outperformed even beyond the Pentium advantage. It pretty much killed Apple, until they brought Jobs back to resurrect the corpse.

Ahh, IRQ hell, what fun. The best was when you have a mix of jumper-switch IRQ settings and "automatic" ones, but the automatic ones were disjoint so sometimes they'd land in a working configuration and sometimes they wouldn't.

And then you'd finalyl get it all stable, only to have the hell start all over when you needed to boot into DOS/4G for games, and needed a separate auctoexec.bat and config.sys just to get the few cards working the game needed.

Unlike Win95, NT did not have a kernel-level backwards compatibility layer for DOS, and wasn't launched from DOS or had anything to do with DOS, really, except a command shell with similar commands.

They gave you tools to dual-boot though, which was nice, though I just booted from floppy when I wanted to boot to Win95 for games.

Drivers were always kernel mode. Thr problem was that DirectX wasn't.

IIRC, it was one of the early service packs for Win2000 that moved DirectX into the kernel, and suddenly any game that actually used DirectX properly ran on Win2000. That was common for new games after the change, but Starcraft just worked, which was really nice.