icouldntresist

Heh, "Eunuchs 69."

This gives me hope! I was reading some of Dianna Kennedy's ("The Julia Child of Mexico") books and she goes into some detail of the loss of heirloom varieties of different crops in Mexico due to cheap imports. The peppers were especially affected; the local Mexican industry was inundated by imports from China, which were often not even the pepper which it was advertised to be. This had a severe impact on the local pepper production, many of which depended on local microclimates for cultivation and are not available outside that particular region of Mexico.

Warning: ill-formed rant below

I'm in my mid-30's and I feel like I've seen the change in my time. Some parents of kids my age were of the helicopter variety, but that was more of an exception.

Most parents I know now have kids that would have been considered stunted or even developmentally challenged when I was their kid's age. I don't know how to describe it except to say that they lack any sort of agency and act about half their age (this may say more about my expectations). I think there are a lot of factors that go into this, like having a 24/7 tether to your parents with a smartphone (and parents that encourage this), social media and news cycles that emphasize fear and anger (that affects both the parents and the child), the "safetyism" of post-Columbine-and-9/11 America, growing authoritarianism across the political spectrum, slight deviations from behavioral norms being medicalized and requiring adjustment, and children generally being deprived of autonomy and responsibility at nearly every opportunity by removing almost any potential for things to go wrong or get difficult (IMO, dealing with these situations may be the fundamental life skill).

Most kids these days have no grit and they shut down at the slightest whiff of adversity, it's like learned helplessness, except I don't think they ever learned to help themselves in the first place because their parents prevented it. They need some sort of authority figure and to be told what they're supposed to do, think, and feel.

I know some people in my age group that are like this. They had helicopter parents, and it's like they completely stopped developing as a person in their teens. They practically can't wipe their own ass without calling their parents and asking how.

That looks like it, but I heard it in 2022 or 2023, might have been a re-run.

I can't listen to it right now, but I remember in the program he was talking about publishing some of his books describing his experiences with illegal substances and he had his publisher agree to pay all potential legal costs on top of paying his regular salary to his wife in case of incarceration.

I've actually been cutting out caffeine after listening to Michael Pollan talk about drugs and society on NPR.

Turns out the half life is typically long enough that using caffeine every day long term will lead to cognitive decline because of sleep deprivation. It's good for an occasional boost, but you're really burning the candle at both ends.

> Kids these days rarely have patience for this sort of thing, at least my kid doesn't.

It's not just your kid, I know some long-time K-12 teachers and they would agree with you, to say the least. This is something they've been complaining about since before covid.

I usually lurk, then make an account with a random password if the urge to comment comes upon me. I'll use the account until I clear my cookies and repeat the whole process. Part of this is to dodge textual analysis by ML, part of it is because I don't like feeling too attached.

Thank you!

I've been noticing a lot of Christians on HN lately. I'm not saying it's a coordinated effort, but I've seen more in the past 2 weeks than I've seen in the past decade.

Funny how we're coming back around to pop-ups, except they're called "modals" now.

I had to use a browser without ublock a little while back, and I honestly don't know how people use the web anymore if they don't have an ad blocker. The ads are literally trying to prevent you from accessing the content for as long as possible so you spend a few more seconds staring at their garbage.

I'd be interested in seeing this if anyone could link me.

Speaking of other invoicing software, does anyone know what generates those ASCII invoices you'll receive occasionally? The 80-column ones that look like a shell script that got piped to lpr? Just wondering if there was a common piece of software that was getting used for these or if everyone's IT dept hacked something together that produced approximately the same output.

This brings something up which I don't understand about US tax code. Why can't I be taxed on income which I've already earned instead of having to estimate to within ~5% (IIRC) what I should earn? I'm sure there are reasons for this, but this seems broken.