The one area where gift cards are nice is when you for sure know that someone is going to be shopping somewhere and will use it up. My husband and I recently gained two nephews through his brother’s fiancee’s previous marriage. There’s a local game store that the boys love, so we got them gift cards paired with an outing to the store and lunch. My brother-in-law and his fiancee just had a baby, our niece, so it’s also a way to give them a little bit of a break. It wouldn’t have been existing for them if it had just been cash.
I used it on an old potato chip of a Pentium 4 (this was nearly 20 years ago). It took days to compile what I wanted, which was a basic system plus KDE. I don’t know what was going through my 17 year old brain. But hey, it walked me through some details of a Linux system that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Now I would recommend Linux From Scratch for learning and a nice, stable distro with a large, supportive community for a daily driver.
I’m not going to blame this on insecurity, but I think ego is a bit more accurate. I was working under a senior software engineer in maybe his 50’s in my first real job out of college. A big part of our time went to maintaining a build system that was fairly large, maybe on the order of tens of thousands of lines of Ant code.
The bone that I have to pick looking back is that I got the blame when I had trouble organizing myself. Our team didn’t use any sort of issue tracker. There was absolutely zero collaboration tools beyond verbally issued instructions in meetings and email. Looking back, I realize it was madness. As an experienced developer, my manager should have had known that an issue tracker would be a high priority. Yet instead I was blamed.
Now fairy tales, that’s where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of “The Death of the Little Hen” collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, “and then everyone was dead”. Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.
Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let’s not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.
Ever wonder why this thing can only go 55 MPH? Yup, my Magnum dong! Nothing slows down a truck like moving around that hunk of meat, let me tell you! Now about our date.
Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know?
This is why aggressive estate taxes are so incredibly critical. People shouldn’t be professional descendants. And of course welfare provides both ladder and safety net. The fools who are trying to abolish one or both are working against social mobility.