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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2025

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  • … they dont want thier back/body to be broken by the time they are 30s or 40s…

    Tell me you don’t understand the Trades, w/o telling me you don’t understand the trades.

    I’m 60 this year, went through menopause over 15 years ago and have no arthritis or back issues whatsoever. This isn’t 1850.

    In 45 years of being in the Trades, the heaviest thing I’ve had to lift has been 5 gallon buckets of paint.

    In the Trades, one doesn’t have to worry about lifing a person out of a bed either. I’ve known nurses that have fucked their backs doing just that.

    Anyone can be in the Trades, and the risk of AI building a house is far less than it is for AI to design some new molecule… and given that President Stephen Miller is chasing the undocumented construction labor out of the country, it’s a field ripe for women to enter into and make great coin, and have almost limitless work.

    Ask me how I know.



  • Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation… often employers don’t give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.

    Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it’s own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.

    A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.

    No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.

    Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they’re still paying off the loans. And they are.


  • You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.

    Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a “field house” built in the 40’s and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.

    60+ years later, it’s all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias “dining halls” now… and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.

    Thing is, it’s been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.

    The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.

    This is part of why I’ve been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen’s program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they’re 20.

    And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it’s gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.

    Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980…





  • Yup! Pull down a torrent of a current season broadcast TV show and check out how long it isn’t.

    52 minutes was the length of shows in the 60s and 70’s. This is why it’s almost impossible to see uncut episodes of the original Star Trek on a cable channel, let alone a broadcast one…

    It was already all but impossible to find when I cut the cord in '99.

    Looking at the commercial TV cable channels - I have the first 8 seasons of The Walking Dead… they run from 43 to 51 minutes in length (though the longer ones appeared in the 8th season (?) - was that when the channels started overlaying ads during the credit rolls? I know that’s a thing.)


  • I cut the cable TV cord in 1999. For whatever movies/TV we’ve wanted to watch, we’ve just gone to our public library to get DVDs and later on, streamed stuff.

    uBO in all the browsers as well.

    If you make a concerted effort, you can de-TV the household and it takes little time to find ways pick up on watching the things you like - w/o commercial interruption… I could not imagine watching an evening of broadcast TV.

    Given that the average show is now 40 minutes long - thats an hour of commercials between the 3 primetime hours of 8 and 11 pm.

    I’m not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.

    Fuck that shit.






  • I do my backups manually.

    As I have run unsuported Mac installs for the last 20 years, I started a long time ago, automatically partitioning my OS drives and making storage volumes to work off of.

    The storage volume in the computer will have subfolders for the type of data - music, video, photos, etc.

    When my storage volumes fill, I will pull my latest backup drive out of storage, hook it up then go into each storage subfolder, sort by date and add everything that’s newer than what’s in the backup drive. (which is actually how Apple’s Time Machine backups work - incrementally sorted by date - but I’ve had this method since the start, so I just stuck with it)

    I just make sure to take note of how many files/folders I’m adding to the backup drive and note what it has at the start, then at the end, as a double-check of it all, before I clear the storage drive on the computer. (I did not do this and lost almost a years worth of music rips, waay back in 2003. Rebuilt the music I lost then iTunes threw a wobbler and lost the library for me. FML…)

    The longest backup will ALWAYS be the initial one if you’re dealing with a first time backup. The rest, once you work out how to organize your files, is academic.

    What I’ve found is that your tastes will change, you grab content you think you’ll want to hold onto forever… and then years later, you realize it’s low-bitrate, low-resolution, too pixellated… whatever… and you decide to delete it.

    With the software doing the backups for you - it’s too easy to just let it rip and go have dinner while it works and you end up with files that you’d otherwise get rid of. Part of being a data hoarder is not keeping everything forever. There’s a ton of garbage online. Tastes change as you get older… You want to curate that shit so you can keep what’s most important - like family stuff.

    And really good porn.


  • Yikes. Before you dip into any of the self-hosting, take and get a WD Gold drive - from Western Digital directly (wd.com) - do NOT go through Amazon or NewEgg or any third party merchant. Send in the warranty that goes with it and register the drive (this is for covering the off chance it’s a DOA unit) Then get a good quality enclosure to pop the drive into and take your time and back up EVERYTHING onto that new HD.

    Don’t use an SSD.

    You want a spinning platter drive, as this is backup only, so once it’s full with all of your content, it gets dated and labeled and popped into a drawer for safe keeping. If you have countless terabytes of data, get more drives and swap them into the enclosure, date and incrementally fill. A fine tip sharpie to note what’s on the drive is fine, or if you’re obsessively anal about it, make a spreadsheet with that info… If your drives are kept dry and stored with care they will last for DECADES…

    The truth if being honest here - I’m a data hoarder and most of the stuff I’ve tucked away since I first came online (in 1999) is now on drives that I maybe spin up once a year. I used to have the notion that it was critical that all my shit was accessible all the time and I ended up dropping money on networked storage… and over time, realized that as long as I knew where the files were, DID have the most important stuff - family photos and scans - tucked away not only in long term storage, but on multiple drives in multiple machines, (home, work, laptop) it was okay not have it served up instantly.

    Just reading your post made me go cold inside - I can only imagine what you were going through until it got sorted. From a bonafide old school data hoarder… Please, back your shit up locally. Use enterprise drives.

    Then sort a self-hosting soultion.





  • I think it’s weird that a 21-23-year-old dating an older person is really weird and inappropriate…

    Honestly, often for younger women it’s a romp with somone that knows what they’re doing.

    The BEST lay of my 20 years old life - and i’m now married for 30+ years - was a 45 year old guy and we hit it off for a few glorious months of sex that was incredible. Man knew EXACTLY what he was doing and twisted me up into positions I couldn’t get into now if the husband and I tried…

    The whole idea that it’s unnatural or weird is an odd one. I worked for a ton of men that worked like slaves though their youth to get successful and in their 40’s finally found young women to start beautiful families with.