I believe in nature, humans are regarded as persistence hunters. Which is to say we have incredible stamina and perseverance while hunting. Other creatures can run faster than us, but only for short stints, relatively speaking, as long as we can keep track of them, we can continue to pursue prey for hours or days without significant external assistance (food, water, rest, help from others, etc).
So regardless of what we may be trying to kill, if we continue to keep our focus on it, we can absolutely find and kill it, given a long enough timeframe.
This also explains marathons, quite frankly. I don’t see too many animals just running for dozens of kilometers without a reason to do so. Many can’t run that far, and those that could, generally never would… Unless they’re running from us, I suppose.
Something like the cheetah, is very very fast in short duration, but after a few minutes of running at full speed, it’s thermal regulation tends to fail and it is biologically required to stop or it will overheat and die.
Add to that our intellectual capacity for planning, the creation of tools to assist us, strategy, teamwork, and all the things that are associated with intelligence and we’re basically a killing machine, if we choose to be…
Amazingly, we’re also the only species that we know to exist that feels bad about eating our prey. I’ve never seen a lion have an existential breakdown after killing off a gazelle so it can eat, yet there’s entire subcultures of people who refuse to cause any harm to their food. Have you people not understood the “circle of life”? Did you not watch the lion king?
I had an existential crisis in my early 20’s based entirely around how futile existence is. We live, and work and make babies, so that the next generation can live and work and make babies… Etc. What’s the point? There’s no long term plot line of humans that I know enough about or care enough about that I’d willingly subject myself, or my offspring to a life of existence in this, just to further.
Nearly decided to off myself right then and there.
Last year, finally purchased a house, with help from the resulting life savings of my father (may he rest in peace) and with my brother and his wife. Four fully grown adults in one house, just to afford to live. The only cherry from the whole thing is that interest rates skyrocketed immediately after we signed our fixed mortgage, so we dodged that bullet and we have two more years (as of now) for them to come down before we need to arrange for renewal or something.
But we all eat, sleep, work, repeat. That’s it. The only nice thing I have going for me in all this is that we now have a definite timeframe for when our housing will be ours and costs will finally taper off. In another 24 years. I’ll be 64. If I manage to get underpaid little enough, who knows, I might have some retirement savings by then. Freedom 75.
The corporations have turned multiple generations of people into wage slaves, jacking up the prices for consumer goods while keeping wages stagnant or even reducing wages. It’s fucking disgusting, on top of that, they’ve not so slowly destroyed the planet with pollution. The entire time acting as though they’re the victims and getting bailed out with our tax dollars for mismanaging their respective organizations, prioritizing CEO pay and dividends and stock prices over employee health (especially mental health), employee pay and livable wages. They get all the benefits from automation, computerization and mechanisation and what did we get? Nothing. This fancy machine does the work of 20 workers and will do so forever, and only needs 2 people to run, and only costs 10 people’s salary for one year to pay for, and one person’s salary to maintain, where did the extra money go? Well, the CEOs third yacht isn’t going to pay for itself.
I work in IT support, and I have for longer than I’d like to admit. I’m on the very early edge of millennial. I was born a few years after the generation “started”. My older brother was on the transition between millennial and gen X and my oldest sibling was very gen X. My parents were part of the prior two generations (boomers etc), and I tend to work along side and for all sorts of people from all of these generations.
Earlier than gen X, eg boomers and older, are usually technology adverse, they don’t like change. I find many are kind of “set in their ways”. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but they seem to be fairly rare. They like to do things using methods that are tried and true, but often reluctantly agree to use computers instead of paper because that’s what others are doing. Even so, they’re fairly adverse to updates and changes that modify how things get done. They have money, and you can’t have any of it. Often, they have little understanding of the problems faced with current generations, likely because they did not have the same challenges, and despite their stories of “back in my day” about how hard things were for them, they actually had it rather easy in terms of cashflow and buying power. They made less, sure, but when they were able to buy a mid sized, single family, fully detached home for the same dollar value as a “cheap” car costs now, their money went much farther (around $20k).
Gen X is kind of lost. What I mean is that they don’t really have too many traits that stand out. As far as I can see, they’re hyper independent, mostly riding the coat tails of the bombers economically, so, while they didn’t have it quite as easy as boomers did (despite what boomers might think/say), it also wasn’t significantly harder for them. They were mostly able to follow a fairly typical life path, get an education (HS/college/uni), get a career, buy a house, have a family (if desired). Politically, from what I’ve seen, gen X is the most diverse group and they’re usually following along with whatever is regionally popular. Not because it’s popular, but because they’re surrounded by it. From what I’ve seen this group is the most adaptable to their neighboring community, mostly just trying to fit in and not be bothered. Right now they’re a large part of working professionals.
Millennials are usually post college, debt laden individuals that are just tired. They were trying to kick-start their lives in some of the craziest times imaginable. Many early millennials who were able to quickly move through the education system, and immediately get into a career and the housing market follow more along the lines of gen X. If you were held back for any reason or you were caught up in a situation that held you back, you shared fate with many of the later millennials. The majority of millennials were caught up in every economic crisis short of a complete collapse of the money system during the years that they should have been starting their careers. Homes rose in price swiftly and vehicles didn’t lag far behind. Driven by sheer determination to succeed, many accrued significant debt that they just want to balance out. This group is the most technically malleable and can adapt to most technology changes in the shortest time. Growing up on landlines and home PC’s/consoles/electronics that all significantly changed their designs, capabilities and interfaces every 4-5 years. Many seem to be problem solvers and want to be helpful/useful. Many have, and some still do, hold onto the ideal that their contribution should be impactful. Most just want to be acknowledged and told they’re doing well, while making enough to pay their bills and debts. For many the dream of owning a home is dying or dead. Renters, car owners, debt holders. They’re growing rather jaded about it as they get older.
Gen Z have their own language. Millennials did too but mostly in cultural memes, with the zoomers, it’s less cultural reference and more of a short hand derived from cultural references. Things that on their own, don’t make any sense and are not even full sentences in any way shape or form. They follow in the aftermath of the economic crisises of millennials and have many of the same economic challenges. Many of those challenges are simply more severe. Prices are higher than ever, buying power is at an all time low. Surrounded by toxic “hustle” culture and many seem to want nothing to do with that. Many find humor in randomness and unexpected happenstance rather than traditional subversion of expectation as humor. They’re quickly becoming the most socially aware and active generation, and want change. Technologically growing up on iPhones and Androids rather than home PC’s, many are not very adaptable to changes in technology though zoomers are one of the highest use groups for the technology. They use it, they don’t really understand it very well, so when things break, even if they’re only non fictional in their current state, things are replaced rather than fixed. Eg, if their iPhone is too slow, rather than trying to find out why or trying to fix the issue, better to simply upgrade to whatever apple is currently pushing. Due to this, they needlessly spend more money than their older generation counterparts. This is by design by the actions of corporations, fostering a single use, replace, not repair mentality. They’re not lazy or lacking in motivation at all, despite appearances that may show a lack of success, instead the lack of success is driven by an inability to find adequate employment that will pay enough to allow them to prosper. The majority will be “held back” from the “typical” life path of education > career > home ownership > family, because of their inability to prosper due to high prices and low wages.
Overall, through the generations there has been a decline in community as a function of geography, and an increase in community as a function of shared interest, mainly due to the growing and universal access to the internet. The internet has allowed both good and bad to be accessible at a moment’s notice. This has shortened the tolerance to delays and given a sense of urgency to even the most trivial and mundane of requests. With the immediate response available from growing internet connectivity, demand for more frequent, more detailed updates from everything has grown significantly, eroding confidence in others to fulfill their obligations unless they communicate that “we’re doing things” (so to speak). Even something as simple as ordering take out or having things shipped, if there is no tracking and reporting, then it might as well not be happening.
Over all, IMO, the problems faced by the current generations tend to be more centered around artificial issues created by corporations. They want to pay less, earn more, and overall turn a larger and larger profit. This is neither surprising, nor helpful to most. It does however explain the single use, replace rather than fix, nature of things that has been growing. The rise in rental vs ownership has increased the cost of living and is on track to build a service-based lifestyle where personal ownership doesn’t happen. Everything is provided for a “low” recurring fee, which has so significantly outpaced any rise in wage that most will be unable to accrue any amount of savings.
For me, all of this has made it very clear what future we’re in store for, and bluntly, it’s not very pleasant. Perpetual home rental, no personal ownership of vehicles (you simply tap a button on your phone and if one is available, it will arrive for you to use, little more than a taxi service), video, audio and other media will be rental only, streaming over the internet, which is a monthly service fee. This leads to near zero ability for customization of your lifestyle. You have no choice in terms of the appliances and devices you use, the car you drive, your home’s design… The list goes on. So if you want or need something different, you’re completely out of luck. Conform or die.
IDK man, I’m just anti-war and anti-warmongering. Anyone who desires war or actively engages in it is kind of a bad person.
Nothing against soldiers, most of them are just trying to do their duty, usually oblivious to the real reasons behind their orders. They’re just the fodder for someone’s desire for conquest and power.
With all the amazing communication technology we have, so many still have so much difficulty actually communicating with others in a reasonable way. We’re all humans, and the vast majority just want to live their lives. The minority want everyone different to become like them.
20.04 and 22.04 were LTS versions, aka, long term support.
Any application that requires stability should run on LTS versions. Combined with Ubuntu being one of the most popular distros, makes 20.04 and 22.04 the most popular choices for anything in a home lab and many smaller business needs.
Whether you’re building a server for home DNS, or a time server for a small business, then you’re probably using Ubuntu as the base.
I think the next LTS version will be 24.04, so things might shift sometime after that.
As someone who works in IT support, I have yet to find any significant number of support people who can’t troubleshoot process issues. What I have found in spades is management making it impossible to make any meaningful process improvements.
There’s a nontrivial number of management type folks that just want it done a specific way, regardless of how that impacts worker performance or how difficult it makes my job.
The number of times I’ve suggested improvements only to be told that the existing methodology works, is too damn high.
One point here: the government doesn’t pay out a large chunk of it’s earnings to people who did nothing to ensure that the product or service was delivered.
They got paid a large percentage of revenue because they’re shareholders.
Tell me again why taking a big pile of money from customers, who are very likely not wealthy (at least for the majority), and giving it to wealthy people, is “more efficient” than the government doing the same job and just, not doing that?
If you cut out the profit, the “business” runs more lean, no matter which way you arrange the numbers. I would argue that a more lean business model is simply more efficient. The dollars going in simply result in more output per dollar. IMO, that’s efficient.
This is literally the situation with my mother in law.
My SO is an only child and I would describe her mom as having more money than sense (at least when it comes to her kid), so we’re careful about mentioning anything that we need to go and buy or anything like that around her, or we’re going to get a month’s supply of that thing, every time we visit for the next six months.
I’m pretty sure we said little more than “we should pick up toilet paper on the way home”… Next time we were there, my trunk was filled with the stuff.
So we’re rather careful about what we mention around her. She means well, but I don’t have the space to support her filling up my home with toiletries on the mention of having to buy it.
I appreciate that she cares but we take care of ourselves in that respect.
I like you. You have the right mindset. The main motivator for working IT support is helping people. The tech usually takes a back seat to soft skills.
On top of that, you’ll figure out that, as long as you know the fundamentals of how things work, all the details are something you can google. Figure out the fundamentals and you’ll be able to work on anything. Convincing prospective employers of this skillset is a bit more difficult.
I wish you luck and I hope I have the pleasure of working with you some day.