This occurred about 20ish years ago.

Oooohhhhh…

Now that makes a lot more sense.

My own father has been using a computer since the 90s, initially just to track his own investments and finances, but later on to keep in touch with family back in the old country. So he’s got a bit more experience under his belt.

Still, he manages to suss out all scams that target him, and does a fair bit of his own troubleshooting. And while the latter is decreasing in effectiveness as of late… the fact that he can still do this with a 5th grade education while in the grips of dementia at 86 makes me proud AF. I have to swing by more and more these days, but he always has detailed notes of what he’s looked up and what he’s tried and didn’t work, so I can have a full roadmap of what has happened. Honestly, I have clients half his age that are far more useless, and that’s why I still jump when he calls for help.

My stepmother, however, once asked me if she needs to rewind a DVD before putting it away.

record scratch

…come again?

“are you typing the @ symbol, or are you typing the word at in the email address?”

…wut??

My father is 86, is fairly far down the slope of dementia, has a 5th grade education, has a hard time typing because he can’t really see the keys on the keyboard anymore, and still doesn’t do things like this.

…maybe I got lucky?

JFC, that white text is me to a T.

And my printer is a 1998 HP 4050DTN that could probably survive the apocalypse in fair shape.

Even my planned CCTV system will be completely hardlined with shielded cables, technically airgapped, E2E encrypted between the cameras and the server, and with a mechanically-driven RJ45 connector that will allow one-way backups to BackBlaze once a week through a specially configured Bastille server.

You describe capitalism as a finite system

No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system

and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.

I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.

For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.

These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.

Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.

Inside capitalism, people aren’t having children because captialism isn’t giving them the economic capability to do so.

The west’s population boom in the 50s to 80s only occurred because a single wage earner could, with a high school education and a wage just a little over minimum wage, be able to own a decent home, have a non-working SAH spouse, several kids, two cars in the driveway, and still have enough left over for a decent holiday once a year as well as save generously for retirement.

This all got stolen from these latest generations. What 90+% of the population was once capable of achieving is now only (largely) available to less than 20% of GenZ. A large proportion have given up on retirement, home ownership, or children. And this is WITH degrees and extensive career experience.

If you want to solve population crashes, start with income inequality: start taxing the wealthy and bring back a 90+% top tax rate. Get this money back into the hands of people who actually generate that wealth, and families will follow.

Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.

Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.

And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.

People should be able to build what they want, where they want

I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.

In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.

But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.

Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.