I'm going to hope that was a joke. I don't have the heart to explain all of economics tonight.

"oopsidentally" - what a fine, wonderful, sensical word!

I'll return two for the gift: u-trou, and flutterby (perhaps the best descriptive noun I've met)

I wouldn't mind having my old desk telephone. Tedious when in a hurry; perforce gives time to think before speaking.

Then let me invest, rather than prebuy. Let me buy a tiny part of the profits. But I'm not going to pay to pre-purchase an item that doesn't exist yet from a company with little to no track record. That puts all the risk on me, the consumer, rather than the entrepeneur. That's ass backwards.

That's funny to the point of being absurd. One has to wonder what would happen if no fee were paid.

Thank you. Just to be clear, also, I meant it to add to, not to detract from, what you were saying.

It's a tough thing, a difficult place to be, when fresh out of school or training, especially if in an area which is in demand; one is confident yet nervous, even a bit scared. You're excited and maybe a bit burnt out, hitting the interviews, all that. Making plans, daydreams, seduced by a lifetime of the weirdness of television where the 'good' people live in luxury as their due, being simply human to want those good things, honest enough to want a mate, a fellow traveller on life's journey, hundreds of often competing criteria of what makes that good companion, a good job, ditto place to live, car to drive, the whole shebang. It all makes it so very hard to try to keep in mind what really pleases and rewards the inner self, that place where you really live.

Finding a bit or two of useful advice, and being able to pay attention early enough.... yeah.

Which is why I'll never do a kickstarter- I'm not going to pay extra for early access to a product that I can't test and may never be made. I'd be willing to invest for a share of the profits, but not pay extra for a presale.

Funny, I first saw it as "honni suit, qui mal y pense," but looking it up, find it's "honi soit." Guess that 8th grade French book had a few mistakes in it, back in '60. But then I don't know French, just a few bits here and there that kinda stuck. Bonne chance, and all.

I'd add a yardstick, or at least a ruler: is what you are doing useful or necessary.

Bingo. I've been saying this in one way or another for decades. We need it all for things to work, and too often the parts carry distinctions of caste and regard, and from that also a skewed market evaluation of pay.

Quick reality check, how many of us even say "Hello" or "Thank you" to a restaurant server or garbage collector. (And stop already with the inflated titles and such. The person dumping garbage cans into a truck is not a sanitation engineer. The removal of the inflated title in no way detracts from the essential task or its respectability.

For a time years ago I made my living by pumping out septic tanks and cleaning sewers. This is a distinct field from plumbing, but we (a partnership of five) often as not had to do the whole trip from a clogged sink or toilet to unblocking a drain field.

Done well and honestly it's an honorable if shitty profession. I say profession in the sense that to do it well required gaining a fair amount of knowledge of various physical and biological processes or gotchas as well as all the relevant ordinances and laws. We also had to carry a number of bonds, and some of the permits entailed inspections and certifications.

There are polls that have asked in several ways questions about privacy and rights versus giving up some more of that for what is claimed to be more security and safety. The results from the past few show that an increasing number of U.S. citizens want less intrusion into their lives. That is, they do not accept blanket promises if it means less privacy and even more erosion of the basic rights spelled out in their constitution, most especially in the Bill of Rights.

That's to the good.

However, in reality, as we've seen in the past twenty or thirty years, what has happened is that the majority of Americans, whatever their responses to the polls, have almost always elected to office those who are of the totalitarian persuasion who invariably operate under the guise of law and order.

Years back there was a survey done of a large number of scientists from various disciplines asking them for suggestions for use of current and future tech. A (to me) shocking number proposed things along the lines of implanting everyone from an early age with a chip that would include everything from medical records to criminal records, and postulating the eventual inclusion of sensors for brain-wave, endocrine, and other physiological monitoring. The latter could of course alert medicos to strokes and other life-threatening or serious problems; it would also, as we learned better how, lead to what would amount to thought monitoring à la an "intent-o-meter" to detect lawless thinking so's the cops could arrest people before they committed a crime.

We live in interesting times. Some here have stated that CALEA II will never be taken seriously. Given recent events, actions, and laws, I am not so sanguine about that. Some apparently think we are at a cusp, that we have a chance to stop something before it gets out of hand. I tend to think we are already behind the eight-ball. I also tend to think that trying to undo what's already done is akin to a verloren hoop. I hope to be wrong.

True enough, but any scheme that makes me buy and own another thing is failure prone - it could break, get lost or stolen. Too many flawed assumptions about the real world are complicating the pursuit of useful solutions.

Not sure 'boulder' quite qualifies as a metaphor, especially in that we're talking about the same thing, rocks. I was taught that metaphor was used to describe one thing in terms of another, disparate, thing. "A rock the size of a ship" could be a metaphor, for instance.

As for size, I wonder if that might not be generational or possibly geographical. When I was a lad, there were rocks. Unless specified or implied by context, rocks were usually something that one might readily pick up. Boulder, on the other hand, of any size, was something that was generally considered to big and heavy for an un-aided human to pick up. A small boulder might be knee to waist high (a knee high boulder is gonna be easily several hundred pounds). A large boulder might the size of a house. And so on. YMMV, of course, but those are the ways I've long thought of these things, from reading and from direct experience.

Except it hasn't. There's a reason why empathy and altruism exist, and both have shown positive correlation with the ability of the species to survive.

They actually put them in far too much, giving the false impression there is still a scientific controversy, when there isn't.

This combines with the problem of accredation. Most of the 'MSM' is far too sloppy with checking sources. Writing "Side A says - Side B says" is an easy formula for a story, and makes the writers look wise and fair (at least in their own minds), It gets worse when they don't really look at Side B's backgrounds as well as their claims. (please note that I am including Fox News in the MSM, and in fact they have a very bad record in claiming people have degrees and positions they in fact do not, (and in my opinion, just to make an argument from authority.)).