As. Mexican, I agree with you. The conquistadores weren’t people of the highest caliber, and while the catholic monks were better, their mission was evangelizing at any cost, even if it meant killing people who didn’t want to. Even prehispanic people could be brutal.

The main difference between colonial Mexico and USA was that slavery wasn’t a thing here, because the evangelized became full-fledged catholics, having a saved soul and all. Something unthinkable for the slavers, who justified their acts because blacks “didn’t have souls”.

Mexican creoles, the hacendados, found a loophole: Catholics could still be exploited by crushing, multigenerational debt. That’s why we had a century of turmoil after the revolution(s), right after the century of turmoil after our independence from Spain.

Guess my point is: by the time USA invaded and forcefully took half our country, we didn’t have slavers (the hacendado’s loophole was gone), and definitely didn’t trade humans as things. Your south brought back evils that were gone at the time.

What if this is karma for invading and taking half of Mexico? There weren’t slavers or shittier-that-usual people in the region before that.

Yup. OP, allow yourself to smile or chuckle. You might find that it was nervousness that made you so anxious to laugh in what you perceive as an inappropriate situation. Relax.

Of course not, if I was chatting with you I’d feel like I was bothering you.

• “How are you?”
• “Listening to music”
• “What band?”
• “It’s on shuffle, I think it’s Metallica”
• “What song from them? I love Metallica”
• “IDK, let me check. It’s ‘Sad But True’. I think it’s actually good”.

—-

• “What are you up to today?”
• “Watching TV”
• “What show?”
• “It’s Rick and Morty, but don’t tell anyone”
• “Why?”
• “I’m afraid others will think I’m an incel or something”

My mom and mother-in-law are in their 80s, and they’re not great texters but you can tell they’re making an effort, and that counts a lot. It’s not about caring about how well you text, but how a series of dry answers might make your friends feel like a nuisance.

You need to “groom” others to care about you so they tolerate antisocial behaviors, but not all people can be groomed this way.

I hate to ask this from such a dangerous mind, but… but, does Captain Planet have private parts? Front and back?

If he doesn’t reproduce, he doesn’t need genitals, and he doesn’t need a digestive system if he’s going to dissolve in half an hour.

I almost choked with my tongue!

Socialization is a skill, not a gift. If you want to become strong, you have to work out at the gym, if you want to socialize, you have to interact more with people.

Very few people are bad at socializing, they’re bad at making an effort to socialize, because it’s painful at the beginning, like working out.

May be due to a traumatic experience, a pernicious or sheltered environment, even plain laziness; but we are not set in stone, we can change if we want to, and are grown ups enough to live with the consequences if we don’t.

It seems both suck at handling our Bluetooth headphones.

Well, I have this weird issue when playing Fallout 76 through Steam on Ubuntu 24.04.

If I use my Bluetooth headphones to play, journalctl shows periodic streams of pipewire errors (not near my laptop or I would paste the errors), and after one or two hours audio will become silent. I can recover stopping the game, reconnecting the headphones, and starting the game.

It seems like a problem with the game, as other games, including the other Fallouts, work flawlessly. Still shouldn’t overwhelm pipewire IMO.

TBH the last audio quirk I had on Linux was two years ago, it wouldn’t remember the volume of my headphones, and it was solved on its own after an update.

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My last COBOL work was in a bank that replaced COBOL with Java and minicomputers with the indies servers in a misguided effort to modernize. Before that we had five mainframe programmers, after Java we had a dozen more and no one was really sure how many layers that Java onion had. People kept piling abstractions on it in another misguided effort to make it simple.

I worked with COBOL for a good part of a decade. It’s a joy to see structured and well-commented code from pros, the consistency is such that there’s a point after a few months when you “get it”, and the code base becomes like putty in your hands.

Never have felt that way with modern platforms, with the exception of maybe Python. Old-school structured programming can be beautiful, and the tooling is super straightforward. Development these days has taken a turn for the worse in terms of sheer complexity for even simple tasks.

TL;DR: If if pays well in your market, don’t be afraid of COBOL if you’re a capable software developer. You will get it faster than you think.

Right. Thirsty marketers ruin everything.

A language from and for assholes, very human.