A long time after I did.

Bullshit

This X1000...

Management, in many (most) companies consists of two complimentary skills. Stealing credit and deflecting blame.

These people love meetings. Attending a meeting is a chance to claim involvement with the project if it turns out to be successful. If it fails, you just say you didn't really have anything to do with it except attend a couple meetings.

Either way, you just sit back and wait for your promotion. No productive work necessary!

Of course I don't know every personal detail of everybody I deal with.

But once I become aware of information, good or bad, that information will factor in to opinions I form and decisions I make.

You either have character or you don't.

Cheating on your wife may not be "proof" that you'd steal from me if I hired you, but it is definitely proof that you lack integrity and are not they type of person that I would want to associate with on either a professional or personal level.

Thanks. I needed a good laugh!

Home brewing beer is most definitely growing, as evidenced by the much larger variety of gear and vendors to choose from today vs when I started 10 years ago.

I brew in 5 or 10 gallon batches. Most definitely not a commercial operation. And I would never waste time brewing "a shitty lager or a pissy ale". If I want that stuff, I can buy it off the shelf for less money than what I typically spend on ingredients for a batch. (not to mention time and effort.)

I live in a tiny, little hick town. It's a 45 minute drive to the nearest town with a population over 1000.

My cable Internet gives me 100Mbps with a 2TB monthly cap,

See, there's where you get off track.

I would expect something as simple as a thermostat to be "not complex" in the first place.

Why focus on "gun deaths"? That's stupid.

I would take all of you gun control freaks much more seriously if you simply wanted to lower the murder rate as a whole.

Focusing on just one kind of murder betrays your true agenda, which has nothing to do with saving lives, and everything to do with denying people their constitutional rights.

How am I part of the problem? Simply because I am more concerned about damage to my body than I am about damage to a useful hunk of steel?

If a gun gets destroyed, I can simply get another one. If my body gets destroyed, not so much.

I've lived around gun owners my entire life. I've known hundreds of gun owners. I can't honestly say I've ever met a "gun nut".

But, to answer your question, a "nut" of any sort is pretty much crazy in the first place by definition. That's what "nut" means.

This statement is just so obviously wrong that I suspect you're just trolling.

Yeah, nobody around here does that, either.

How about this idea?

Face reality. The world is not a safe place, and cannot ever be. It was dangerous long before humans walked the Earth, and will continue to be dangerous long after we're gone.

If somebody really wants to be safe, then they should probably go commit some horrendous crime. An isolation cell in a supermax prison is pretty much the safest place I can think of.

But even there, if some psychotic asshole with resources and motivation wants you dead, he could make it happen.