"Murphy was an optimist!"
Were there any children or elderly in the movie idiocracy? November 30, 2023 7:51 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : AI Artificial Intelligence, TechnologyThe wife asked this question so I posed it to claude.ai and this was the amazing answer:
add a commentNo, there were no children or elderly shown in the 2006 satirical sci-fi movie Idiocracy.
The movie depicts a dystopian future society populated entirely by young and middle-aged adults who behave in crude, anti-intellectual, and hyper-commercialized ways.
In the beginning of Idiocracy, the main character Corporal Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson) takes part in a military hibernation experiment along with a prostitute named Rita (played by Maya Rudolph). They wake up 500 years later to find that society has become incredibly lazy and stupid.
The movie shows Bauers and Rita exploring this world of the future where commercialism and instant gratification reign supreme. All the people they encounter appear to be under age 50 or so. No children or elderly people are ever shown or mentioned.
The underlying message of the film is that higher birth rates among less intelligent people combined with a lack of intellectualism has resulted in this youth-obsessed, crass culture. So the total absence of young kids and senior citizens emphasizes how extreme and monolithic this future society portrayed in Idiocracy has become.
So in short – no, there is no sign or mention of children or the elderly in the over-the-top fictional world depicted in Mike Judge’s movie. Just an overly consumeristic youth culture run amok.
Death comes for the wealthy too November 29, 2023 9:11 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeCharlie Munger dies proving even old men with money cannot avoid death
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-28/charles-munger-who-helped-buffett-build-berkshire-dies-at-99
add a commentWho am I? November 28, 2023 3:26 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeDoes it really matter anymore?
Water is evil November 20, 2023 1:01 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI swear for the number of times I’ve had to rent a plumbing auger I could have bought one.
add a commentSo you want to be a programmer? November 14, 2023 7:52 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Programming, TechnologyIn programming, you do a lot a writing. Probably as much writing as some best selling book authors but your books will never be read per se. Let’s use books as an analogy.
If you write a program from scratch, you are the author much like Stephen King. You plot and plan the story. You define the characters and their backstories. You write biographies of these characters that will never make it into the book but these details are important. In programming you do much of this same detail of work in project planning, database architecting, creating or choosing a programming framework, meetings and discussions with clients (book publishers) as well as your team, deciding what external resources will be used and so forth. You are Stephen King.
If you don’t write a program from scratch but instead work to modify a program that someone else wrote, you have to get into the head of that person. Much like if you were going to modify or edit one of Stephen King’s works, you’d have to get into his head, figure out the back stories, and really analyze the writing. With code, you have to figure out what the other programmer was thinking all without the documentation and backstories that were created during their process. You have to become Stephen King.
The people who use your program or the modified version of someone else’s program do not have to get as intimate with the works. They use it. Or in Stephen King’s case, they read it.
add a commentWell it’s early November 14, 2023 6:28 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeWho in their right mind schedules vet appointments for 7am?!
add a commentSome days you just need a new fountain pen November 9, 2023 9:56 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeWoke up this morning thinking, “I need a dedicated fountain pen for red ink.” Now, I have a dedicated fountain pen for red ink. It is a Knox Galileo I bought from Birmingham Pens and is an amazing pen. The nib is great. The weight is perfect. And it writes well. Unfortunately, the ink evaporates from the pen pretty quickly so I basically don’t use it any more.
I recently purchased a TWSBI Eco as a dedicated pen for my invisible ink. I’m a big fan of the TWSBI Diamond 580 ALs so my expectation was higher than the Eco. Don’t get me wrong. The Eco is a great step up from a Pilot Metropolitan or a Lamy Safari…Hmm.. Perhaps the Eco is on par with the Lamy Safari. You know, right up until this moment I’ve always placed the Pilot Metropolitan and Lamy Safari on the same level as starter pens but honestly I have to put the Lamy Safari on a higher bar. Yes, the Lamy Safari and TWSBI Eco are pretty much in the same class. I probably won’t buy another Eco. But I could see buying a TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with an extra fine nib as a dedicated red pen.
Now… what should we do about purple?
add a commentFound my motivation November 7, 2023 6:57 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI’ve decided to prioritize health and exercise again. Rowed 2000m on a ERG, lifted dumbbells, and meditated. I’m hoping to do some rucking a couple times a week and generally want to see how fit I can make this body.
I’m planning on making this a come back story that will deserve an 80s esthetic and a personal videographer to document my return to grace. I’ll be an inspiration to a younger generation and help them coalesce into a cohesive team inspired by the old man’s prowess and endurance then I’ll fade into oblivion and the new generation will have the next trilogy of stories but they’ll never quite live up to the legacy. We will stir the entire pot of emotions. It shall be epic and bodacious!
add a commentBeing human November 5, 2023 10:16 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeBrain: “ow! Hot grease is on my finger.”
Muscles: “Quick! Put finger in mouth!”
add a commentProtected: I live one miracle to the next November 3, 2023 12:27 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeApplying Vimes’ Boot Theory whenever possible November 3, 2023 12:27 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI just renewed my bookmarking service for ten years. I was a huge fan of del.icio.us before Yahoo, destroyer of all things Internet, trashed it. I moved onto https://pinboard.in/ and have been using the service since January 18, 2010. It’s like having my own focused search engine. And it archives the site that I bookmark so if the site ever goes away, I still have a copy of it similar to the way https://archive.org/ works. What does 13 years of curating bookmarks look like?
Bookmark archiving is on. It will expire on November 2, 2033. 34960 of your bookmarks have been archived, representing 91% of your collection.
This consumes 75.35 G of disk space.
3122 bookmarks have not been stored due to errors:
not found 699 bad request 1503 forbidden 18 gone 1 server error 741
Pinboard also used to automatically record all my Tweets. Of course, Muskrat ruined that as it would now cost Pinboard over $40,000 per month for access to the API.
What’s is Vimes’ Boot Theory?
The Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items. The term was popularized by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
While not wealthy, I am trying to apply Vimes’ Boots Theory where I can. For instance, LinkedIn’s annual billing will save you 50% over monthly billing. Cancelling LinkedIn’s paid service will save you 100% but that’s a different topic. If using the Boots Theory saves you $6 per year on a bookmarking service you may wonder if it is worth it. The answer is yes because 1) I now don’t have to worry about a bill from Pinboard for a decade. I just go into OmniFocus to my Finance project and under the Pinboard.in task I put the deadline as “10 years” and OmniFocus automatically calculates the next due date. And 2) while only $6 if I did the same for 10 services then that’s $60 per year savings. The truth is using this approach is similar to snowballing debt. The little numbers add up to thousands very quickly. It’s like the small differences in the grocery stores. A person on a very tight budget may have to purchase the smaller bottle of ketchup which has a higher price per ounce than a larger bottle of ketchup. We nickel and dime the poor to death.
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