Your phone doesn’t have a LED for flash?

[UK] I carry phone and keys. I pay for everything with my phone. Twerking on street corners as a Gen X for cash isn’t profitable anymore.

If I know I need ID, eg. Costco, I have my old fashioned wallet in my jacket pocket. I keep meaning to set up the Costco ID on my phone. Doesn’t happen.

The number of times I open or reach for my wallet is maybe twice a month. Frigging barber still wants to be paid in cash, and all the 20th century banks and their ATMs are closing … [so now they have 20th century tech and no way to interact efficiently with the public. Haha!].

I’m very increasingly anarchist as I get into my sixth decade - UK 2020s feels like 1970s again so screw the useless thieving politicians - so I should be actively pro-cash but I’m actually more pro-crypto pro-barter (especially pro barter) in the real world. Long ago l learned that if I have physical cash, I piss it up the wall, but I’m careful with credit card cash. No idea why. I never have more than £30 in notes on me; that’s enough money to buy a Costa coffee for you yanks.

Sadly, that means I can’t give cash to the odd homeless. Not too many homeless with contactless readers. Maybe that’ll be rabbit-in-headlights Kier’s big thing: contactless readers for the destitute veterans that the armed services and government abandoned (I came of age around Falkland conflict).

Has to be something including RCS. For all Google’s faults, I like Messages.

That said, I haven’t tried to back them up in a while to a straight text file. Eeek! That was back in the days when I used Signal to handle SMS for me.

Damn. Another task.

Greetings fellow traveler! [I’m an early model X - late sixties].

Are you taking about the Michael Fish, ‘There isn’t going to be a hurricane.’ blunder? Sevenoakes became Oneoak! 1987 perhaps? I really don’t remember that, would you remind me, please?

I’m talking about the 1970s strikes which cut power to the whole country for sets of three or four days; Ted Heath being reacquainted with the role of the electorate before they all became Tony Blair-esque dopey smiling useless clones in 1992 ish (until we found out about Major-Curry (hehe!)). Going shopping with candles on trolleys, thawing food in the freezers.

One in three is not one-in-ten one might expect. And it’s not hundreds it’s thousands of women making false claims for money against male victims.

We don’t have population (in the statistical sense) data to know for sure. Maybe the passport biometric data will eventually let us know for sure.

However, there are other individuals involved, usually in the act of conception, not just women.

“I’m on the pill/implant/coil … you don’t have to wear a condom. Take the condom off.”. A female paedophile teacher has just been jailed here because the baby made it kind-of obvious she was lying. Apparently she got pregnant whilst she was on bail with the same child.

My mom was like that. 🤣😂

The publicly available children maintenance service data (UK) suggests that one in three people are calling the wrong person dad (about a third of challenged women claiming child maintenance from a random dude will be shown to be wrong by DNA).

Mum will try to deny it. Then DNA became a thing for pennies. Join an genealogy fb group and support the broken kids looking for their now-dead fathers.

(try to) Filling up the car with petrol. #fail. That’s the first thing that I thought of that £78 might almost buy.

Or

Three pizzas.

Or

One bed flat energy bill for the month.

Or

Single person’s grocery bill for maybe a fortnight.

Gen X. The generation that couldn’t be arsed to programme the video recorder or cooker digital time-clock, but knew how to.

There were a lot of power cuts in our (UK) youth and we remember saying to ourselves, “Ok, so that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?!”. Still kicking arse and taking names.

We were the grown-up’s TV remote control, with our 1200 bits per second magnetic tape storage for BBC B home computers (from the later ARM boys), before we got 360kB 5" floppy disks.

Tech doesn’t phase us (yet); AI is a better average conversation than a spouse.

I think most of his cabinet colleagues wishes he would be.

My parents were too but they were anything but. 1920s and 1940s.

Irony.

In the early days, too much Metformin.

I think the human rights of the assailant always outweigh those of the victim in these situations. Neither of them goes to prison.

Everyone does it. Every year of so we gather everyone we know together to commemorate.

Black bears of Surrey. (UK).

Before the ArchLinux wiki became as good as it is, people like me used the Gentoo and LFS wikis as documentation for Linux.

There isn’t quite enough time in the world for me to be able to use LFS in anger as much I would wish. We make do with source distros with source managers like Gentoo (surprise!), Funtoo and others which give the source distros users just enough helping hands of dependency management.

Real tears would be shed were for LFS to disappear.

Don’t put parental controls on it. What do you want to control? Maybe put controls on the website that they can visit, but that goes on the DNS or router. Most kids will go to a mate’s house that doesn’t have any or as harsh parental controls anyway if they are particularly keen on seeing something that they ‘shouldn’t’. Parental controls are a fix for parents who can’t talk to their kids; they make the parents feel safer but just send the issues underground. Gen X will have been writing code for a while at your child’s age. I was. There was no choice if you needed to unlock a game you could’ve afford. At that time GUIs were a bad overlay over MS-DOS or DR-DOS. You had to know what you were doing to get the best out of it. Your kid will be fine with any distribution of Linux. If your kid is technically inquisitive likely to be good at maths/science, get them installing Arch. If not and they just want to use a browser, install one of the top five popular distributions from distrowatch.com. The Office suite for Linux is called LibreOffice. If you use Chrome as your browser you’ll easily tell if your child has been on bad sites because your timeline will be filled with adverts for unsavoury impotence remedies. Enjoy.

PS printers are still bastards in Linux. Happily they’re less bastardish in Linux (and Mac, because Linux and iOS use the same printing software) than Windows. If you like your life buy a decent Laser from anyone but HP - my generation bought the last decent HP printers they made.

Mostly in times of economic growth and very positive sentiment. It’s the antidote to the catch-22 that you can’t get a particular job without the experience but can’t get the experience without the job.

Simply put ‘fake it until’ applies when you can put experience you don’t (quite) have on a CV; get the job and acquire the experience before it is ever tested in any meaningful way. That only really happens in a period of rapid economic expansion (whether that be in your (their) business, sector, or country wide). In such cases no-one really knows what they’re doing.

I don’t have much experience of celeb or influencer culture FITYMI - finding someones parked Lamborghini or private plane and dancing in front of it for a TikTok pretending that is yours.

That’s an amazing set of references to throw my way. Thank-you. I’ll read through them in a while. My assertion was based on talking to real people: I’m only just not-Russian myself.

I don’t really think you’ve captured communism: Cuba isn’t. China has been moving away from communism for decades. Russia rejected the Communists for the Bolsheviks shortly after the revolution. There’s a huge difference between socialism and communism.

The West is in somewhat of a hard time. There’s a left shift going on since my golden days (as Gen X). Young people (Gen Z) rightly feel hard done by and the social mobility seems to have been damaged. It feels like the sodding seventies again here in Blighty ( I hadn’t even become a teenager when they ended but remember the mood and despair. Candles lighting the supermarket visits. Dead bodies of the unburied and the rats).

They already tax alcohol everywhere as far as know. Maybe you’re in the 'Mercan mountains and you’re a moonshine master; but noting the instance and name probably not!

Hullo to Deutschland!

Answered my own question: Yes. I’ve put the various anti Reddit spam in ublock so not really necessary.