And the synthesizers in the eighties were nothing like moogs

Irrelevant I guess. I was casually reliving a memory from when I was a child, but there’s always got to be a pedant to further solidify my general withdrawal from society because I’m clearly not satisfactorily intelligent enough for it.

George Bush the first called Dan “potatoe” Quayle the Jose Canseco of politics.

JD is making him look like it in comparison.

They existed and were more of a new wave instrument at the time, but not heavily used in rock like that.

I was unaware of Brownsville Station when I was eleven.

Sorry to have failed your class professor.

We couldn’t all be Jack Black in high fidelity at that age.

I believe I was in sixth grade when that album came out.

First of all, it used a whole lot of synthesizers, which were pretty new technology at the time, and I felt like I was living in the future when I heard it.

As to the album cover, it somehow didn’t register with my that it was a baby smoking.

Rather, it made me think of teenagers smoking in the high school bathroom.

Motley Crue’s Smokin in the Boys Room came out a year later, so I don’t think that influenced my mental image.

Weren’t they just throwing a collective temper tantrum about paper straws and how you could pry their plastic straws out of their cold dead lips?

This sounds like a brand new record! For 1990!

Ted’s wife is a bigwig with Sachs. I wonder if she had input with this.

Combination of being salaried plus industry culture.

Mostly yes.

You get people selling off companies or several depreciated rental properties, and they get hit with the tax and can’t get out of it.

There are some circumstances that they can manipulate though. When the stock market crashed in 2008, people sold off at enormous realized losses, sat on the cash for thirty days to avoid the wash rule, and bought right back in at the same low prices.

That created years worth of carried over losses that enabled them to recognize capital gains at zero tax.

It’s a reasonably common strategy called loss harvesting.

Certain flavors of stock options appear to be tax free at time of sale, but this is because the initial grant was deemed W-2 wages and was taxed when it was issued at ordinary income rates.

It’s been years since I’ve eaten food away from my desk. And God forbid I should forget to bring food and need to run downstairs for sixteen seconds to purchase something. That’s truly one of the seven deadly sins.

The pervasive, loud, aggressive “America is full of stupid yokels and has no culture herp derp” sentiment seems to have really ramped up in recent years. I really wonder if it’s a side effect of recent politicians pushing increasingly bizarre and oppressive agendas, and actually getting elected.

Maybe we deserve the disdain.

A very long time ago, and much less technologically advanced:

I went to boarding school. We had a little bit of a propensity for sneaking out of the dorm at night.

New dean comes in our senior year and installs alarms on all the exits.

Our senior year time capsule contains the controlling keypad to that alarm system that wasn’t even functional for twenty four hours.

I’ve no doubt that today’s teens possess the ingenuity to bypass if not completely disable this thing.

Going by the memory of my 1980 edition of the Guinness book of world records, it was the number of hairpin turns that made it the crookedest street. There could also be a difference between a street and a road.

The entire scam of unlimited PTO is that the company doesn’t have to pay out any unused time when you leave.

It certainly doesn’t increase the time off you get while still at the company. Studies show people take less time when it’s unlimited.

Fucking Adobe PDF is becoming damn near unusable because of this. Frustrating because I absolutely have to use it all day every day.

I get to listen to clients go off on meandering rants about illegals, socialists, woke culture, the gays, the trans groomers, etc on a daily basis.

I go Joe Friday mode and stick to “just the facts” of what we’re working on and I move on to the next crazy.

Am man.

I enjoy living alone.

I enjoy owning my house and keeping it clean and maintained.

I enjoy cooking at a pretty high level.

I don’t particularly enjoy doing my laundry, but it doesn’t hinder me.

I do not enjoy yardwork, so I outsource it to a landscaper.

I enjoyed being a single dad.

I enjoy watching my daughter making her way in the world.

I enjoy it when my daughter calls me to regale me with tales of her life. I enjoy it even more when she calls me for advice.

I enjoy stability.

I enjoy the silence.

I enjoy the autonomy.

I’m pretty boring.

Age has definitely begun to take its toll on my youthful looks, especially as all my remaining teeth seem to be rebelling all at once.

I do not adapt well to changes in my daily routine or my domestic environment.

I save money. I don’t much spend it.

But I enjoy traveling whenever I feel like it to wherever I feel like to see whichever friends I please.

I do not own a bidet or an electric kettle, just a dystopian stovetop kettle.

Life has repeatedly, loudly, aggressively taught me that all of this is woefully insufficient.

I am not a desirable adult.

Please, take the bear and leave me be.

I believe that’s the European Union free trade zone for bidets and electric kettles. Metric cash only, please.

I don’t know. Some people who experience abuse and escape it become far worse abusers when they’re in position to do so.

I’ve never heard of this so did a little digging. I’m not sure this fits the bill of state sanctioned since the “owners” were pretty much immediately prosecuted via joint efforts of the local sheriff and the FBI then convicted of violating federal law.

While looking through this, I learned of peonage where Mae Louise Miller was released escaped from slavery in 1961. I don’t see any legal repercussions for her “owners”.

I wouldn’t say state sanctioned in her case either. Maybe state turning a blind eye.

Nonetheless, whether or not state sanctioned applies in either situation, it doesn’t diminish the horrible reality that people were being kept as chattel well into the twentieth century.

Thanks for informing me of this. I really had no idea it existed.