Hmm, I don't think I have a profile page myself. I wanted to post something in forums once but couldn't without a profile, but I didn't want to create one so I let it slide.

I noticed things like "Half Life 2: Lost Coast" is very high on the owned by unplayed list. But I think people got that for free as part of HL2 at some point? I know I've got some HL2 add on that I've never touched (too disappointed that it wasn't a full game with an actual ending, so I'm not continuing that franchise). I think I have one or two other things that are in that category.

Also left 4 dead 2 was given away for free not too long ago, though it has a much smaller percentage of "not played". I suspect people grabbed it when it was free without even knowing much about it, tried it a little bit, then stopped because it wasn't their favorite style of game.

I also think that with a low level language that more developers are aware of potential problems than developers using high level languages. In some sense I think this is also due to the types of programs being developed. C/C++ today is common used for embedded systems, operating systems, runtime libraries, compilers, security facilities, and so forth. So systems programmers versus application programmers versus apps programmers. The system programmers are forced to take a close look at the code and must be mindful of how the code affects the system. I think that if you had such a comparison done back in the 80s that the numbers would be different because many more application programmers were using C/C++.

Ie, interview for a systems programmer: do you know about priority inversion, do you understand how the hardware works, do you know the proper byte order to use, what does the stack look like, etc.
Interview for the modern applications programmer: have you memorized the framework and library facilities.

I'm pretty sure I'll have a million all told in various things and I'm not the highest paid or even a financial whiz (I'm lousy at investing or monitoring what the money is doing, which is why my peers will do so much better than I will). However that's not as much as it used to be. It's not necessarily a comfortable retirement where I live. The condo I have worth a bit over $300k is dumpy and in a borderline neighborhood, and the price has gone down since I purchased it.

Outsourcing has definitely made me work harder and remember to say "Yes Sir!" to my overlords when they ask me to fetch coffee.

The kits that used to be just a random collection of bricks are a lot harder to find today. Head over to Toys-R-Us and almost all of it (other than big blox things for toddlers) are specialized kits. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. The lego kits we had in the 70s or 80s just aren't common at local stores.

People have to get the legislators to make laws saying what is right or wrong. The legal system is only there to decide whether those laws were followed correctly or not and to adjudicate in cases of disputes over the law. Thus the anger of the people needs to be directed towards congress and not the judges.

How about terrified that it's another civil war in the brewing, and that these thugs appear little different from the thugs in eastern Ukraine or northern Nigeria who take power when the government is weakened?

Most of the land was originally the feds in the first place and only leased to others. And before then the land belonged to the natives who lived in the area before the white man came and decided they wanted it instead. At no point in the long history of southern Nevada was there ever a divinely granted right to this farmer or his ancestors to own or occupy the land.

The lesson of Nevada is that there are self entitled people who don't realize that they belong to a country. This guy only had grazing rights because the feds allowed it in the first place. Since he is not a native American then the land he is on is only his through the good will of the federal government. If his cattle were grazing on some other private citizen's land then you could be sure that those cattle would have been removed from the land, possibly shot, and any incursion by the cattle's owner with an accompanying gang of militia onto someone else's land would have been likely met with violence. But instead the land he's tresspassing on is the fed's land so that makes it ok to the anarchists.

I don't believe that's true. Most of the bullies I knew in school would never have been able to become cops and most certainly never judges. The people I knew from school who did become cops were not bullies.

Teachers are essentially forbidden from controlling the classroom anymore. Parents disapprove of this. Their children are special angels who can do no wrong. A teacher who uses disclipline, even non-physical discipline such as detention, can get into a lot of trouble with the school and the school can get into a lot of trouble with the parents.

School admins have basically hamstrung themselves. They have zero policy rules which remove the need for any thinking, and indeed even forbid any independent decision making. These changes have been brought about through fear of lawsuits, fear of what would happen if there was a school shooting and there was some rule they failed to implement that may have prevented it, and fear of angry parents (and I put a lot of blame on parents too for being too protective of their precious snowflakes and intimidating schools into making the changes).

I had the update waiting in the list of optional updates (listed as "important") but it was not automatically installed for me.

Y2K was indeed going to be a problem. But there weren't too many serious problems precisely because people did something about it. There was enough warning that there was some time to solve things. In 1996 even we had some Y2K problems. The myth was that things would suddenly die at midnight on 1/1/2000 which was not what Y2K was all about.