it’s manifested in our reality; only the liberal branch of leftism is permitted (particularly in the united states) while the other branches are openly denigrated by moderates and rightists alike and persecuted by our governments and militias.
i used to have dreams about that handshake. lol
they somehow find me “charming” so i would have to record myself at least twice, with each time recording one half of a conversation; not that, that’s a bad thing since some small part of me has been looking for a new hobby and video editing might prove to be as lucrative as my last passionate hobby with linux programming. lol
i’ve learned recently that there’s a surprisingly large number of people that find me attractive despite my size and age; i would 100% create an only fans page with my duplicate to capitalize on this fact. lol
add to this that the internet forced so many of us to become technically & technologically proficient because it was a necessary step to get us online.
that further spurred on knowledge of things that laymen wouldn’t have cared about otherwise like cpu architectures or clock frequencies; operating systems internals with things like linux or bsd; knowledge of basic networking fundamentals; html/css/javascript for geocities & myspace pages; etc.
as the enshitification turns the internet into walled gardens and people continue to use smart phones that “just work”; they are no longer able to repair their own devices like we had to do, which spares them from having to learn the nuts and bolts of the technology that enables our lives.
yet you’re likely drinking treated water for a sewage based water treatment plant and eating grain based foods with allowable percentages of fecal matter and insect chunks. lol
my 7th grade biology teacher dedicated a lesson to why evolution was false and her base argument was that she never evolved in her entire life, therefore evolution was false.
i suspect that a majority of the students agreed w her.
san francisco was never that warm. lol
i occupy a different sort of middle ground in that i’m at the right generation to get those well paying technical jobs simply because i had to monkey around with off-the-shelf hardware and linux when they were both new to most people; but i also don’t get as many requests for technical help as i once did from family.
however, in my case, it’s been because the entire younger generations of my family have gone with iphones along with apple’s walled garden so they’ve never had to struggle with something like getting winsock working on windows 3.11 just to get internet porn. lol
somehow, it’s only the other older & leftist in my family that insist on diy implementations with linux and foss hardware, including de-googled androids; while the moderates and conservatives alike just buy iphones and never learn because of it.
like in your case; they see that technical skillset as mildly useful at best even though it underpins their own technology choices. worst of it all to me is that i get to witness them struggling to afford another iphone or its fees simply because they refuse to go with “poor people androids” or they don’t want to deal with the frustration of getting things to work without apple’s walled garden; some prioritize it over food or rent simply due to the exorbitant costs.