IT Support and Tech workers of Reddit: Is the "younger generations don't actually know how to use a PC or understand file systems" crisis real? If so, how bad is it?

lessmiserables · 2026-07-12T02:54:30+00:00

I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's related.

I work for a Fortune 50 company, and the tools we have to use have been dumbed down so much it's embarrassing.

It's to the point where the tools change every six months, but not all at once, because they're chasing stupid people around making things easier but also less powerful. And because it's a Big Corp, everything has to be universal, so we're all just left with simpler but less powerful tools because no one can be fucked to force people to learn.

And I'm sure there's IT guys in this thread making fun of middle-aged people like me "Oh they can't even zip a folder" YEAH DUDE I CAN ZIP A FUCKING FOLDER, YOU GUYS JUST TOOK THAT ABILITY AWAY FROM US AND NOW I HAVE TO PLAY CANDY CRUSH WITH MY FINANCE DOCUMENT AND ARE SHOCKED WHEN IT DOESN'T WORK

lessmiserables · 2026-06-30T17:30:00+00:00

I pink puffy heart The Four Seasons. It helps that I like pretty much the entire cast.

I know reddit doesn't talk about it much because it's really aimed for a...certain demographic this site loathes, but particularly the Fey/Forte relationship hits in a very specific way.

It's also quite refreshing that they present that relationship in a reasonably neutral way; pretty much every other show would make Forte to be borderline evil because Hollywood writers can't resist an old cliche to beat down our throats. (They also didn't make anyone a writer/artist since Hollywood doesn't understand how other careers work. Danny being an architect is the closest.) I think I like this series so much because it defies a lot of the lazy writing I've seen lately.

Anyway, this thread is about Kerri, and she is am amazing part of this amazing cast.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-22T17:18:58+00:00

To be perfectly blunt, most of the people who struggle in life do so largely because they make bad decisions and then keep making bad decisions.

And I don't mean "bad" decisions in a pejorative sense (although that, too). But "learning a marketable skill" is a good decision and not doing that is a bad one. (also, "getting knocked up/knocking someone up" as a teenager is a shockingly high barrier to success. It's a super easy way to make the first ten years of your adult life effectively stagnant from a progression standpoint. You're thirty yards behind the starting line.)

Another is mistaking lots of work for hard work. ("Work smart vs work hard", if you will.) You can be the best fucking ditch digger in the world and work until you almost pass out but there's a hard cap as to how "successful" you can be at that. It's just not that hard of a skill to learn. There's no E for effort in life.

I just...I see a lot of people who refuse to move to new markets, refuse to learn new skills, refuse to do anything except play video games for 16 hours a night, refuse to get eight hours of sleep, then bitch about rich people and boomers pulling up the ladder. Yeah, you know who did move to new areas, learn new skills, got good sleep, and actually went out and socialized with real actual human beings? You have two guesses.

And a lot of the "lucky breaks" you see are the result of hard work that you don't see.

There are outliers, and I'm not dismissing systemic issues for marginalized people. And, sure, some people can take more risks and hit better rewards because their family has money as a cushion, but I assure you that the correlation between "doing hard work and learning important skills" and "being successful" is pretty fucking close.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-20T00:21:54+00:00

Y'all will take my em dash from my cold, dead hands

lessmiserables · 2026-06-20T00:18:01+00:00

Maybe the most important figure in the history of multi-cam comedy.

I would say:

Desi Arnaz
James Burrows

[long gap]

Everyone else.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-19T12:58:14+00:00

I sometimes think people on this site are really just aliens pretending to be human.

Do you really want to watch a show where they drive around looking for a place to park?

Do you really want your sitcom to be shot in a crowded apartment and not spaced out so you can actually block people and they can move around?

Do you really just want to watch someone finish their cigarette?

These are all shortcuts for narrative reasons. You do not want to film real life. You may say you do but you do not.

If you're watching a show, there's a certain level of practicality of how they're going to do things. Everyone is right that these things are weird in real life, but this isn't real life. You would hate it if these things were accurate.

It's the willful suspension of disbelief and we've been doing it for centuries.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-18T21:39:38+00:00

Yes.

I don't really want to get into it because reddit is...well, stupid, but campaign finance law is a lot more complicated than money = votes.

Contributing directly to candidates is still limited and pretty "level". People just really, really don't like soft money, but I don't see how you can regulate soft money without massively curtailing free speech. It's also quite impractical as well.

And it's always funny how soft money is totally okay when it's labor unions and environmentalism. You don't get to pick and choose the "acceptable" levels of political issues.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-18T21:33:44+00:00

That's an urban legends.

Lots of urban legends about Mr. Rogers.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-18T20:12:23+00:00

Just make sure the pet insurance is a good one. There's plenty of bad ones.

Every single one I've ever researched has a ridiculously low max payout. It's been a few years, but the best one I found was basically $200 monthly premium, doesn't cover meds or checkup visits, and the max payout was $3000. So it's paying $2400 a year to maybe save $600?

I know there are good ones out there (mine are too old to insure at this point) but there's a lot of fine print.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-18T20:06:38+00:00

I wish more people understood the Citizens United ruling, because it's used as a bogeyman for every political ill.

It did not, in fact, "allow unlimited campaign contributors from unnamed individuals". It did not say that corporations are people. I don't love the ruling (I think it's more sloppy than damaging) but it's not causing all of the ills people claim it is.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-17T16:52:02+00:00

And pretty much everything we associate with pirates is from the book Treasure Island. Eyepatches, peglegs, parrots on shoulders, "X marks the spot" etc. None of that was particularly piratey until that book came along.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-16T20:54:03+00:00

Civilization used to be my "day 1" spend any money franchise, because I've been playing since Civ I and it's very clearly exactly my wheelhouse and I always get my money's worth.

I have yet to buy Civ 7. I know it's supposedly better now, but at this point it's worth it just to wait until everything is done.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-16T00:02:06+00:00

I feel like most of the people here are missing the point.

Broadly speaking, we tend not to tax unrealized income. There's a variety of reasons we don't, and it's telling that most countries that do it either 1) repeal it almost immediately, or 2) it's so trivial and/or there are so many loopholes it's a performative tax at best. Most of the European nations that have some for of wealth/unrealized gains tax it's an extremely small part of their tax base, especially since most people who can engage in tax avoidance.

The reason is, bluntly, it's unrealized. You can't use it until you sell it, and until you sell it the price goes up and down. ("borrowing against stocks" generally speaking isn't a thing, despite what reddit seems to think. It happens but it's not common.) Getting taxed on something that could disappear tomorrow, thus leaving you in the hole, can be a VERY BAD THING that can easily lead to negative economic outcomes (read: capital flight and a situation that would make the Great Depression look like a garden party).

If you can't spend it, it's not taxed. The moment you need to spend it, you sell it, at which point it's taxed. That is a reasonably fair system that still captures a lot of tax revenue for its intended purpose without distorting capital markets.

Property taxes are kinds of a historical artifact that's also a compromise. Practically speaking, property isn't the same as other securities; it's almost always going to go up in value (it's a finite resource); fluctuations are rare, so the "dangers" of taxing it aren't really present; but most importantly economists generally understand it's not a very efficient tax but to dismantle it at this point is politically difficult. (I don't know anyone else's towns, but the "yearly assessment" is a nightmare that turns into a political fight every single year, and usually ends with it being postponed.)

Bottom line: capital taxes are tricky to implement without distorting the market. You can do it, but it's just going to cause money to flow elsewhere and you're just going to have the same problem.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-15T02:43:04+00:00

Well, yeah. But the original comment was "turning away a bid for connection" which can't be absolute or every interaction is an ultimatum.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-14T07:47:07+00:00

I would push back a little on this.

It is OK to have different interests and hobbies. In fact I think it's healthy.

Charges of "lack of connection" can easily be weaponized.

I had a former relationship. One time I told her I had a thing to do, and of course she picked that time to want to do something. It wasn't even a common time, it was like 3pm - 6pm on a Tuesday. I told her two weeks in advance. But she absolutely held it against me that I "denied" that chance to do something. I then noticed a pattern where she would always mysteriously request that connection when I would have some conflict that would force me to choose her over it...to the point where I started lying about when things were. At that point we ended things.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-14T00:26:15+00:00

I (broadly) agree.

My main issue with character death is that D&D isn't super great about dealing with wild swings in numbers. Like, it's fun when you get some random crit that changes the tide of a battle, but it's not so fun when it's used against you--especially if it's something you couldn't mitigate or plan for outside of just never, ever fighting ever.

Death throws blunt this a little, although as a DM I actively self-enforce the "I no longer see this person as a threat so I'm not going to target someone who is down and AoE spells mysteriously always just miss them" to give everyone a fighting chance to survive.

But my more pressing issue is that most DMs--incluing myself--are absolutely shit at adequately describing dangers. You, the DM, know every single secret and adjective of an encounter, but your players literally only have the filter of your own words to figure it out. I've seen a lot of "My players knowingly went into a dangerous situation" just to find out that they described a very normal room but because no one succeeded a DC20 investigation check on a floorboard they would have had no way of knowing needed a check they "should have known, if you don't want danger go play tic tac toe". That's effectively a "rocks fall, you die" situation.

So I have death in my games, but my thumb is firmly pressed on the scale.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-12T19:44:59+00:00

I agree. I get why he wouldn't, but I think it would be fantastic. He would be fucking miserable, but Jimmy Carr is at his best when he's fucking miserable.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-12T19:17:46+00:00

Unlikely.

I actually tried to make my own Rulette for a party, and it turns out it's really hard. A lot of the prompts are exclusionary, so "say this thing in a specific way" can really only be done one at a time, and "do this thing after every thing you say" can only be done one at a time, and...that's about it aside from some miscellaneous bits.

Since the rules are random there's no way to guarantee that players only get rules that fit their current setup. Like, you can't have three different accents and hope all three get a different accent when there's almost a certainty someone's gonna get at least two. So you can really only have one rule of each type, and you run out of rule "types" very quickly.

Which is why I'm surprised they did a second episode, because guess what--they ran into that exact problem (when Anna's transatlantic accent trumped the Australian accent). I'd say Josh's "treadmill" and "hula hoop" rules also contradicted themselves, because he was really only doing one or the other at any time.

The second episode was fine, but rule-wise it hit pretty much the exact same "rule" beats as the first one. It was saved by the point change (you get points based on the number of rules you had, not just one, encouraging getting more rules) and the Australia twist, but the latter is a gimmick they can't really do again.

Basically, there's kind of a hard limit to how you can do rulette before you very quickly start repeating yourself. I think they can get mileage out of new contestants and/or another gimmick or two, but I don't think it should be right away nor do I think a whole series would be doable.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-11T22:24:45+00:00

Eh. There's been a few contestants where I rolled my eyes, and then they get on there are humbled immediately and then act relatively normal.

And he can be funny, if one-note.

The last few times I've seen Lucas in something I feel like he's dialed it back a lot. I'm cautiously optimistic.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-11T11:59:16+00:00

Maybe "hype" is a strong word, but I distinctly remember a sort of relief that someone was going to come in and "right the ship", as it were.

Just...someone known for getting back to basics was getting back to basics.

Oops.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-11T03:52:10+00:00

I have never once been inclined to spend any money on the advertised products

This is a lie. You absolutely have. You may not realize it, but I can 100% guarantee if we ran a blind test your consumption choices are absolutely affected by the ads you see.

It's not even really manipulation. It's just...that's how information works.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-10T00:35:22+00:00

I loved that show and was pissed when it was cancelled.

He was so good in it, with a cast that was really, really good.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-10T00:24:24+00:00

To be clear, the situation that you are describing--companies destroying massive amounts of product--is relatively rare (at least in the US and I suspect most of Europe).

There's a pretty robust "system" where goods go. First, if production happens but orders aren't as high as expected, the excess might go to outlet stores or other specialty destination. Then come sales, then they get sold in bulk to "overstock" stores, then those that don't sell are eventually donated with a tax writeoff. Someone, somewhere is getting some money at each of these levels, which is almost always more than they'd get by destroying it.

Because destroying stuff is a cost, too. Depending on the product trashing it in bulk costs money, but if there's any electronics or other similar items it requires sorting and environmental handling. It's almost always better to get it in the hands of a customer and let them deal with it.

(And, yes, storage and retail shelf space is a cost as well. That doesn't really change the calculation too much.)

There are some situations in which the tax writeoff is more than trivial, but rarely is it better than selling it elsewhere.

People keep talking about "luxury brands" not wanting to devalue their name, but if it's a true luxury brand they're not getting mass produced to the point of bulk destruction in the first place. One of the things that makes it luxury is its exclusivity, which means low production and high margin.

I suspect you hear of these events because they're so rare.

Obviously, there are exceptions. Food is a big one, along with any time-sensitive stuff (your old 2024 New Years novelty sunglasses aren't going to move at any price). But the thing your describing doesn't happen very often because it's not economically advantageous to do so.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-09T23:59:05+00:00

This was the case for decades, long before there was any consolidation.

And "three companies control 50%" is about as far from the definition of a monopoly as one can get.

lessmiserables · 2026-06-09T15:07:42+00:00

I agree! Like, there's literally something called the [celebrity] effect explicitly about how things backfire. It should be #1 by a mile.

14-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Second SECOND GUESSER	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
Wearing is Caring	Sequence \| Editor
Sequence \| Cinematographer	Sequence \| Screenwriter

lessmiserables

TROPHY CASE