After seeing multiple doctors in the USA (where I no longer live thankfully) for a chronic mouth ulcer problem an allergist prescribed me colchicine which seemed to cure them. These ulcers lasted over 15 years and colchicine seemed to be the only thing to eradicate them.
Insurance wouldn’t cover the cost and colchicine cost me $500 a month for a bottle. In the UK I can pay 10 pounds. Crazy drug and crazy price for something 3000 years old
We should spend more time and energy improving pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and stop the growth of urban sprawl which makes you incorrectly think you need to solve this problem. A great book on this topic - Carmageddon
I once walked home after an evening of some friends and beer.
As I came up to my house it was dark but I clearly saw a little person walking through my back garden. About 3 foot tall, at the most, it seemed. And they were holding the hand of a smaller person half their height. Walking together, no hurry at all.
I just froze and watched them walking away, and turn a corner.
The feelings of disbelief, but wanting to believe were crazy.
I came out of my shock. Ran the length of my home and managed to see mother and child raccoons now walking on all fours.
They must have walked 20 feet on their back legs together, holding hands.
For a minute of my life I was actually Alice in Wonderland and there were tiny people who walked gardens at night.
This comment kind of nails it. I don’t have any social media at all and often my friends tell me I live under a rock for not knowing the latest meme. The decision is trivial, I just don’t have social media (except Hackernews which does waste a disgusting amount of time).
Anyways - people gravitate toward the simple and assume the difficult is impossible. I’m training for a marathon with some friends and some are already making excuses to do as much as possible that _does not_ involve running (weight lifting, biking). I think humans just do the easy thing and complain about their situation because it’s.. well easy.
Very well said "people gravitate toward the simple and assume the difficult is impossible." I often get grief for saying people are lazy - I will use your careful tone
100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop.
These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.
If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products).
Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.
I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.
