That's a very good point, but that's still not okay...

If you had a twin brother, would you be okay with him having sex with your wife just because she couldn't tell the two of you apart? I mean, I guess SOME people are okay with it because, let's face it, people are freaky, yo... But that doesn't mean it's okay for everyone.

I am ALL FOR screwing the news media out of money, don't get me wrong. They built an industry where it's okay -- even respected and admired -- to lie to their consumers, then they make it cost-prohibitive to try and learn both sides of any given story by locking their users into an ever-deeper echo chamber of whatever half-assed slop they decide to barf up. If you replaced all the reporters with AI algorithms that were trained on the words "Trump is Hitler" or "Hunter Biden's laptop", it would take a year before anyone noticed. I'm not approaching this from a moral standpoint, just a legal one.

Laws frequently favor the morally reprehensible.

Just look at my ex-wife!

Stabbing people is a feature of a knife. That doesn't mean you won't get in trouble for doing it...

"Sorry, officer. It's a well-documented feature of knives that they are good for stabbing people. It's Bob's fault for not having stab-proof skin! His skin failed to protect his insides from becoming his outsides. It's really his fault if you think about it!"

The point is, for me anyway, that I don't have to do the typing!

I *am* a good programmer, but there's a lot of boilerplate that sucks when you have to type it all out (or copy/paste from an old project or example then customize to fit the current project). I can tell it HOW to make a program work and get it to do all the boring parts. Sure, it's just going out there and copy/pasting whatever, but it's also doing a search and replace for me.

The only time I've had trouble with AI programming is when I ask it to do something clever. It doesn't do clever very well. But if I give it my "clever" code and ask it to do something boring and mundane with it? It does a great job with that.

Some notes:

You can join a union in any state. Source: I'm in Alabama, and both parents were union members. My mom was a teacher and my dad was a member of IBEW. What you probably meant was "states without right-to-work laws", which exist in more than half of the states.

My ex-wife stayed in college. She got a doctorate in "comparative humanities"! And because the only thing that qualifies her to do is make more doctors of comparative humanities, she went into politics.

Adjusted for inflation, she makes (roughly) the same amount now as mayor of a small town that I made in my first job working help desk 26 years ago.

I dropped out of school to get married, supported her through her first doctorate (which she didn't finish because she abandoned me and our two kids, but she was ABD at that point), and went into IT. She tried to remain in academia, but she could only find work as an adjunct teacher so she made less than the national poverty line. I wasn't employed the whole time I was a single dad, but I was able to save enough while I was employed to make it through the times between jobs.

Stay in college, but only if you're going to be doing the kind of work that requires a college degree.

There has never been an emergency situation in the history of man where somebody screamed, "Is there a doctor of comparative humanities in the house?"

Quora is fairly useless for people looking for technical information. Quora is *great* for people looking to connect to one another on a shared topic of interest. Usually that topic is a narcissistic ex-partner, but that's beside the point...

I started writing on Quora six years or so ago to help me deal with the struggles and heartache of a divorce and sudden single-parenthood of two recently adopted children that my ex-wife decided she no longer wanted, apparently. My answers tended to be formulaic (open with a joke, make a point, close with a callback) but they gained a small, loyal following. I even had a few plagiarized! (Word-for-word, even when I talked about myself in the third person... But this was when Quora Moderation was still a thing and someone was assigned to care.)

I saw people hurting the same way I was -- maybe not exactly, but the situations were similar enough that I felt I had good advice that would help. Writing helped me process my feelings about the divorce, and let me put a positive spin on it to give hope to other people facing similar problems.

I still see that today. There are good people who are clearly going through a lot of crap, but who manage it with their heads held high (probably so they don't get any of that crap in their mouths) and use their experiences to help others. It takes work. You have to train the algorithm, but it can be done.

A recent update took away the ability to see, at a glance, how many questions a person has answered. That's not good. I used it as a metric for whether or not I should take someone seriously. If they answer thousands of questions but only have a small number of views, it's probably because they are utter reprobates with nothing nice to say to anyone, ever.

Eventually my answers branched out into time travel or trying to determine whether or not one's wife is putting live mice in the toilet, but I still occasionally answer questions from people that are hurting. I even answer the junk spam questions if they are amusing enough.

I want people to laugh, sure, but I also want them to think. Then I want them to think about why they laughed. Then I want them to laugh a little more, perhaps introspectively. Occasionally I want to invent new words, but only if I can do so in a humorous manner.

I had a hamburger from Wendy's the other day. There wasn't much originality in it. Two pieces of bread, some meat in the middle with ketchup and mustard? They totally stole that from Burger King. The only reason people go to Wendy's is because the mascot is a girl...

This movie was made by people who CLEARLY loved the source material. Blue Beetle is a legacy character going back 84 years -- the same year that Batman was created, by the way -- and the history of the character is woven throughout the story. The original Dan Garret version of the character was a rip-off of police stories and Captain Marvel (the Shazam one). The Dan Garrett version was a rip-off of Hawkman and pulp heroes (with a little Shazam mixed in). Ted Kord was a rip-off of Batman and Spider-Man (the latter of which is understandable since he was created by Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man). Jaime Reyes is a rip-off of Venom, Iron Man, and Spider-Man.

But who cares?

Have other movies done the same thing? Sure. But not everybody likes Burger King. Some people like McDonald's. Some people like Wendy's. Some people actually have the ability to appreciate the things each fast food joint does well and treat them as separate entities even though it's basically all the same stuff!

The movie isn't rooted in the DCEU. They mention other heroes and cities in passing, but it's otherwise completely (refreshingly) self-contained. I sincerely hope Gunn picks it up and runs with it, because the sequel they set up could be something REALLY good.

(And the more you know about the stories that inspired the background for the movie, the funnier "Batman is a fascist" line gets!)

True story: I got an old keypad safe from a company I used to work for. Nobody knew the combination or had the backup key, so it was just dead weight. When I got it home, I started running through all the possibilities that I could think of to come up with a device to crack it. Would I use an Arduino? LEGO robot? Manually push buttons until I figured it out? Nope. I just opened the battery compartment. Actually, I removed the keypad housing, too. I found a header of some sort that I thought I'd try wiring something up to, until I noticed that there were only two wires going from the inside of the safe to the outside of the safe. "Surely," I thought, "it wouldn't be THAT easy..." I attached the two wires to the positive and negative leads on the battery pack and heard a "click". The safe opened right up! I thought about doing something "cool" with it like bypass the keypad entirely with a magnetic reed switch and a special ring, but life happened and I never went back to the it. Just goes to show that locks are only there to keep honest people out!