gperkins978

It is worth a try. I have had really good luck with the US Postal Service. People do not get much mail, so if you send it, someone might actually see it. That will never happen with email or any electronic tools.

I used to buy laptops, and the external quality peaked at different times for different brands (the Asus all aluminum was wonderful, but Sony made some nice stuff twenty years ago as well), but for the actual guts-PCB, power supply, ..., they all seem like the same old sh^t. The monitors get better, but I swear all laptops slow down with age. The only solution is to re-install windows and start over.

I personally prefer desktop workstations. They are better.

If you want to get REALLY angry, go to school in poor neighborhoods and watch teachers "teach" children how to search the web. Computers in schools was a mistake. If there were to be computers, they should all be Unix or Linux or BSD distros run from the command line.

There are key phrases that a school is scam central. Any time they try to say "X percent of students went off to college" that school is a scam. If they speak of creating "computer literate" or "technology literate" students, the school is a scam.

Check out how easy many of the reading and math tests are, then you will know how horrible it is when schools only have 20-30% of students getting to their grade level. It has been a bizarre transformation where schools went from being oriented around student learning to being oriented around teacher wellness and teacher preferences.

We should be hiring teachers from Singapore and Hong Kong to fix our schools. Instead we hire creepy education consultants that get rich peddling idiocy. It iw a crime against children.

For many business-type courses they like you to be able to quickly get an IRR or NPV value. One could solve that by hand, but the exams would be long and require manual grading. According to my older colleagues when I started my career, they used to bring their HP calculators to client meetings before laptops were a thing. They would sit around and do estimated calculations. If you look at old photos, your can see the HP calculators in them and paper with written calculations. When I started my career in 2000, laptops were already ubiquitous. There were still old timers with the RPN calculators from HP. Excel is better for finance. For real analysis and simulation stuff like Mathmatica and Maple are better, with SAS, SPSS and R for statistics, although SAS is used a ton in finance, insurance as well as government.

My thought exactly, or Maple, if you are one of THOSE people.

I used the TI-85 back when dinosaurs walked the earth. I still have that and the TI-92, the best FAT calculator ever. This thing will tie your shoes and help fight off depression. I strongly recommend the TI-92. It is not allowed on any standardized tests though.

I do know that even my TI-85 was programmable. I made a few different functions with it. If you try anything too sophisticated, there really is not sufficient space for it, but it was the first device I ever wrote any kind of program on. I used that through university, but for work I had the HP 12c with reverse Polish notation. Now that was useless. I could never understand why old men preferred that to Excel. Excel is better in every way, and one can write pretty sophisticated functions and simulations in Excel VBA. I spent years doing so.

Overall, I do not see the point in bringing out new calculators. I do think the existing ones should have more RAM and storage with a bit more computational heft, but only 1-3% of owners are ever going to use that, but it will make them so much better.

I can assure you that no one writing such comments on the internet is winning anything.

As a lover and admirer of all things porcine, I am deeply offended by that comment. Although pigs do enjoy a good wrestle, they are a fine animal with a great spirit and refined wisdom. If you think I am joking, I am wearing a solid gold pig pendent right now, surrounded by pave diamonds. I genuinely adore these creatures. They have been unfairly maligned in our culture.

This is what happens when people are anonymous. I assume these are all 12-year-old victims of bullying with a lot of pain and no where to get it out. They spit venom wherever they go. I assume they grow out of it.

Frankly, I would recommend you think on why you are so sensitive to random criticism? That is not healthy. I had the privilege of growing up in a rough place where ridicule was the norm, so I was rather immune to insults by around age 14. I mean, it would hurt if it came from someone I respected, but not a drug dealer or bum on the street. That is what internet commenters are, homeless junkies throwing insults out of powerless rage. They do not matter.

I do not know you, so I will not provide the tough love I would give to a friend or relative, but you should not care what unimportant people say about you. Such insecurities are dangerous and counter-productive. If some crack head on the street pointed out your deepest insecurity, it should not bother you. He is a crackhead. He does not matter. You do. You need to let that shit go. It will eat you up inside. If you have legitimate insecurities, fix them. If you are bothered by silly stuff (appearance, ethnicity,...), you need to shake that off. No one should be able to use that against you. That is giving others too much power over you. It is an insane submission for no benefit. Let it go.

So my advice is to let it go. Choose to stop reacting to these comments. You CHOOSE to react. The comments are irrelevant. The problem is that you are letting yourself react negatively. You need to stop that. There exist evil people who will use that weakness to control you. PLEASE fix it before you meet someone of that nature. Insults are like cockroaches. You do not need to fear them, but you should never let them into your home.

I think the easiest distinction is the high part. I assume you have never crushed up Ritalin and/or Adderall to snort (I have). The guys taking it non-medicinally get a clear high, and tolerance demands higher doses. The best/worst one is desoxyn. That stuff is heavenly, but so addictive. After scoring a bottle of it I decided that I was never going to take any amphetamine ever again.

From what I understand, ADHD folks do not get the high part, so the addiction risk is not there.

I take provigil as well. I was wise enough to stop taking Adderall and Dexedrine when I ended my schooling. I never had a prescription, but these were easy enough to find. Provigil is not an every day tool for me, only once and a while, but it gets the job done.

What are you doing to change this? Are you trying to make the situation better? California has been run into the ground for the last thirty years intentionally. Many residents love having mentally ill people die in the streets. They have created an entire system to support this. Money has been drained away from roads and schools to pay for ever growing "programs" to employ rich white ladies so they can brag to their friends about their incredible virtue.

You are free to leave. There are plenty of low-tax countries. If you want to live in the US, Europe, Japan,..., then you must pay to be part of our reindeer games.

That said, PLEASE get involved and try to direct public funding and attention towards core activities (roads, schools, infrastructure) instead of ever more ridiculous programs to employ Berkeley graduates in virtuous-looking jobs. Utah does a great job at this sort of thing. Instead of learning from them, our political elite degrade them and insult them for their religious beliefs. I once repeated a colleague's obscene jokes, only I stated that he said them about Muslims instead of Mormons. He lost his mind trying to correct me. It was amusing.

The state of nature has no schools, no water, no sewer and no police. If one is going to live in a civilized nation, he should pay his share of taxes. Capital gains is 15%. That is not an outrageous amount. Everyone should pay because everyone benefits. One is free to leave and live in tax shelter principality or Sultanate.

There is a problem with high taxes on earned income, but anyone complaining about the 15% capital gains tax has problems. The estate tax only applies to this who are very, very fortunate. These are not even earned. Again, if one hates his country, he can move to Dubai, Bermuda or the Glorious Sultanate of Brunei and enjoy their lifestyle.

I do understand that people in California get angry because the state is so poorly run, but most of the US has easily avoided the self-created problems of California and New York city.

My biggest regret is not staying with my first job out of college. I loved it, and had I stayed my options at the age of 26 would be worth over $10m now. I left that job for a woman. I feel so stupid about it. I am good at math and bad at life. I should have stayed with that job. I was recruited out of university by men like me, who looked out for us.

I have found my peace, but large company nerd divisions are great for brilliant wierdo's.