Elder millennial here

Yeah. But she wanted to carry a really small purse that wouldn’t be able to hold the foldable :(

After an impromptu upscale bar/lounge crawl with the wifey the other day…

A shoe that can easily go back and forth from high heel/wedge to comfortable flats w/o much, if any, tooling or carrying around extra parts. She also brought a clutch purse

Wifey was dead the next day from foot pain of walking between places.

It is a religious practice for Jews … I completely agree with your point of it being a “health fad” for non-jews though.

This is going to sound stereotypical, and I don’t smoke often. But last time I had a good high going, the Grateful Dead album, “American Beauty”, came on my music album shuffle and just instantly got me in the right mood.

Yeah … I wasn’t sure when I wrote it and didn’t think it’d matter tbh

Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It’s easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.

Thank you, exactly

Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI

For phone calls that’s just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.

There’s an old saying in computing. “you improve usability by taking away options and features” apple didn’t necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it “popular” by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they’ve made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn’t want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn’t want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn’t invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn’t invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They’ve done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

“Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows”

It basically copies the best of every other messaging platform. I was at my in-laws where everyone on my wife’s side has an iPhone and we’re talking about a LOT of the features.

• can tell if notifications are turned off on phone
• read receipts
• higher quality limit on video/pictures sent
• messaging that can be done in wifi-only areas (imagine having a few group threads/people you CANT talk to while at home because you live in a dead zone)

Any other big feature of any other messaging app I was able to think of (Signal/Whatsapp, discord, slack) is all there (except public chatrooms and private servers obvs), WITH OS integration

I still like my pixel, but I get it now.

Still holding out hope that Google allows for RCS features to come to Google voice.

Right, I get that. I’m just thinking that the song isn’t about racism. Other than the fact that he’s black and has the black man’s blues. If the song was talking about his life as a black man or how he ended up a bum that would be different. But it’s the way a child sees a black guy with killer guitar playing skills. Very innocent

Call me naive, but I always thought Curtis Lowe was about society not respecting bums who play good music for beer/wine money aka the starving artist. Even though the protagonist loved him as a mentor/entertainer.

Racism or the fact that he was black wasn’t the main factor in the issues the protagonist is singing about, just that he happened to be black… though I’m betting it didn’t help the way people/protagonist’s mom viewed the two of them spending so much time together

I always say him as an inspiration to Bleeding Gums Murphy and Lisa in the Simpsons.

Just my 2 cents. I agree with the rest of your list though.

The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.

I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.

I end up just pirating it myself.

Not after we demonstrate the power of raising prices princess!

Hmmmmm. Let’s see here.

People don’t like cable, because it’s too expensive and inconvenient

People start pirating

People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.

People don’t like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.

People start pirating again…

I wonder what happened?!?!

Similar. MacBook pro from mid 2014 for personal stuff

Life well lived for me is the following.

1. My life ends in a comfy bed surrounded by friends and family having died before becoming a burden on them.
2. I’ve made a positive impact on those around me
3. I’ve left my children/family in better financial shape than I was born into (which, frankly, was pretty good already)
4. I traveled and saw what the world has to offer

Yeah, life is meaningless, and we’re one small speck in a universe so big it breaks our brains to think about and we only last a similar amount of time in regard to the vastness of time itself. . … so I might as well make myself and the people around me feel good

As far as the short term? Have a good conversation with friends/family, go for a walk through a nearby forest.

I was 14 and just got a cable modem when Napster came out. I just got introduced to modern music, had no way to pay for it other than asking my folks. Let’s jump on the pirate ship!

Now I’ll let you do the math on my age, I have very stable income, and a fair amount of disposable savings, and I still pirate pretty much my ears will be hearing. Plex has equal or better tools for watching/listening than every other service I’ve tried (shuffling episodes is my favorite)

I go to concerts, watch movies in the theatre, read physical books and support creatives in other ways… so I feel different about that…

I also started noticing this when itunes came out. You could only listen to music YOU PAID FOR on devices you’ve authorized. Then soon after I saw this, a friend was down on his luck but had a very good and varied cd collection. He started selling them to second hand shops and his friends.

I ended up seeing this dichotomy and thought to myself… this sucks. Let’s just pirate it…

I should note the amount of physical unread books I have on my shell are similarly rationed to the amount of music I haven’t listened to or movies I haven’t watched yet that I’ve also pirated