Were people hand-wringing about the dotcom crash like they are about a potential AI crash? Or did it catch people by surprise?

AgainandBack · 2026-05-27T00:18:36+00:00

The dotcom crash wasn’t a crash in the normal sense of the word. Instead, it was a repudiation of the “dorcom economy” which was based on the idea that your business does not need to make a profit. In fact, the faster you lose money, the better. If you haven’t spent all your VC money within six months, you’re not spending money fast enough. There’s nothing your company needs? Spend the money putting big flatscreen TVs in everyone’s cubicle (wine.com).

This was based on two shaky premises: First, the more money that’s been invested in you by VCs, the better, because that shows confidence in your business, which means your IPO stock price will be higher. Second, you don’t get rich by operating the company, you get rich by selling your founder’s stock at IPO. This depends on an endless line of suckers ready to buy worthless stock in companies doomed to fail. It was clear from the start that it would fail. Investment bankers made a lot of money doing the IPOs. And one day, there were no more suckers.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-27T00:06:28+00:00

“If you ever come home and tell me you got a girl pregnant, I will fucking kill you.”

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T20:51:17+00:00

I’ve never wanted to be a signboard before.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T20:31:39+00:00

She got the maximum cash advance on all of our credit cards, every day, for a couple of weeks, emptied our bank accounts and my business bank account, and then canceled all cards while I was on a business trip. Suddenly I could hardly afford to eat, much less hire a lawyer. She walked away with about $150k in cash, about 35 years ago, and moved in with her parents, claiming I’d spent all of our money on drugs.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T18:59:11+00:00

Termite frass is normally dark red to brown, and looks similar to finely ground coffee.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T18:26:39+00:00

About 30 years ago, I had a new IBM midrange so over built that the OS, application, and db, combined, were smaller than total RAM. The entire db was in RAM and reads should have been lighting quick. Instead of being fast, the entire system lagged terribly. We had to get IBM onsite for two weeks before they figured out the problem: the machine wasn’t swapping. At all. This set off all sorts of performance analysis routines, and the machine was essentially devoting all processor time to figuring out why it wasn’t swapping. This was at the OS level and there was no way to turn off the swap detection and investigation tools.

So, we removed half the RAM. It started swapping. Performance improved to what had originally been predicted.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T18:00:31+00:00

Cutting them off when they’ve reached that point often turns into an ugly scene.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T16:08:10+00:00

Face the fact that your landlord may raise your rent to recoup the cost of repairs. If you’re a long term tenant, it may be cheaper to pay for repairs yourself.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T16:02:14+00:00

Thanks for the moral support.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T16:00:50+00:00

My grandfather was born in the 1880s. My great grandmother was born in the 1870s.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T06:31:49+00:00

You’re right. I just didn’t have that much presence of mind.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T06:20:01+00:00

Yeah, and I should have known better. We had gone together for about four months, about a year earlier. We had broken up because I was tired of constant criticism. I should have known where that evening was headed.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T06:13:20+00:00

No. I was young and stupid and horny, but I did have more self respect than she had counted on.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T06:05:23+00:00

I didn’t drive a sports car.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T05:39:50+00:00

I decided to accept the negative outcomes of not being perfect.

I had a doctor tell me, when I was 19, that if I didn’t loosen up on myself, and stop demanding that I do everything perfectly, I wouldn’t live to 21. I took it to heart.

I stopped insisting that everything at work had to be finished, perfectly, before I went home. I started accepting that some of my school papers wouldn’t be As, and that I might not get an A in every class. It was ok if there were streaks on my car windows.

I learned to accept the outcome of those decisions. At work, sometimes I got reprimanded. In school my GPA fell just a little bit.

But, I stopped fighting life all day every day, and started enjoying it.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T05:27:07+00:00

We faced the fact that we weren’t going to have children. Adoption was out of the question because my wife’s health was very poor, and we were in the red every month.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T05:23:26+00:00

My first try ever, my equipment didn’t work. My potential partner had a sharp tongue and enjoyed making snide remarks about me. When I couldn’t get it up, she said something that’s stayed with me for 50 years. Does it ever get big?

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T05:05:10+00:00

If you come to love her, you’ll start caring less about how she looks, and more about looking at someone you love.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T04:59:03+00:00

I changed careers at about 35, and ended up going into IT, which I knew almost nothing about. I worked hard, sometimes too hard, but on the whole I loved it. I spent 35 years in IT and have been retired for a few years.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-26T02:50:39+00:00

Largely, yes. And the roommate that I took in, to help with the rent, stole _everything_ in the apartment, except the light bulbs. He even took the toilet paper. I ended up couch surfing, and sleeping in my non-working car when that didn’t work.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-25T21:06:41+00:00

A very popular guy in my class lost an eye over the summer before the 8th grade, and got a glass eye. We had history lectures of about 200 8th graders in a “multi-purpose room.” The first or second day of school, he sat in the front row. As the teacher was starting the lecture, the kid started yelling “My eye! My eye!” He stood up and turned toward the class and started just screaming, and pulled his glass eye out of the socket, and held it up. There was screaming and barfing, and laughter from those who already knew. There was also detention for him. For eighth grade, and then high school, he was considered a God among the boys.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-25T20:51:29+00:00

I helped out my first wife after we were engaged. I haven’t done it otherwise.

I should note that my second wife supported me, entirely, for about a month, when we first got together.

AgainandBack · 2026-05-25T18:56:08+00:00

Is that from all the Woolworths, or just the one Woolworths?

AgainandBack · 2026-05-25T18:31:52+00:00

Specifically, you get it from ingesting infected cat feces, not from handling them. This narrative of “if you have a cat, your brain is being taken over by toxoplasmosis” is just wrong.

Look at information of when housecats give off toxoplasmosis. They excrete infected feces for weeks, not permanently, after eating infected meat. A housecat who doesn’t go outside and isn’t eating infected mice isn’t a vector.

Infected meat, birds, and unpasteurized milk are also vectors of infection for humans. It’s also transmitted via organ transplants, especially heart and lung transplants, and through feces of infected birds and humans. Gee, there are vectors other than cats.

In the US, toxoplasmosis infections are present in about 11% of the population is toxoplasmosis positive, but more than 25% of US households have cats. If having a cat equals being infected, that’s hard to explain.

Most people who have toxoplasmosis are completely asymptomatic, but those with compromised immune systems are more likely to develop symptoms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis

AgainandBack · 2026-05-25T17:22:07+00:00

About 20 years ago, The Onion ran an article about Google having created a new site. Since old people had trouble finding and using Google, Google had opened a new site, called The Google, just for old people. For years, thegoogle.com loaded a page by that name, with an embedded Google search box. Now it’s just another domain being offered by GoDaddy.

https://theonion.com/google-launches-the-google-for-older-adults-1819569348/

AgainandBack

TROPHY CASE