weird, my single mom driving beaters could afford short driving trips (2 hours is short to me.) We did mostly go to a campground that was less than 15 minutes drive away from home though.

We heavily used food pantries though, literally every single week. No air conditioning, bunny ears on our simple tv, school bus rides to school. We even went a couple years without hot water when our hot water heater broke down just boiling water on the stove.

Everyone’s experience is different though. Though I was in one of the poorest families in my hometown. None of my aunts, uncles or parents own their own home today and they’re 50s and 60s now. The sacrifices of growing up in a wealthy middle class town will enable me to buy a house. Going to see an open house in 35 minutes!

Campgrounds are everywhere and one in under a 2 hour drive is very doable throughout your whole life for a family vacation. You won’t lose access to that.

Housing costs will swing back. We’re around the point where we were in the last housing market crash. Prices are at the edge of affordability for the middle class. Mortgages are higher than what can be rented. One market course correction and a ton of people lose their houses and the market collapses again.

They’re doing everything they can to try and stop the collapse but homes are still increasing in price way more quickly than wages. Just a matter of time.

People who work full-time jobs used to be middle class. Living wages, affordable housing, yearly vacations, etc.

When?

Do you call camping in a campground a “family vacation” ? because that’s as far as my family had growing up in a pensioned job. We never could afford air travel, fancy new TVs, new cars… our house was very basic, we always drove beaters, we spent years without one thing or another to make it work.

This isn’t the current generation, or the last one, this was even earlier.

Just trying to understand when this idea that anybody in any job could have the white picket fence and world class quality of life was somehow a reality. I don’t think that’s ever been the case for the poorest full time workers or even the bottom 50%.

I missed the hand crafted feel of previous Zelda games, where the majority of your time was spent dungeon delving in places packed with secrets and puzzles that weren’t just physics minigames.

This so much.

Shrines are not a good replacement for real dungeons. The “dungeons” we get are so minimal and the upgrades you get are so meh. At best you get mobility or more ways to cheese combat encounters. Gone are the days of unique equipment and things that fundamentally change how you interact with the world, metroidvania style.

I think the open world aspect of zelda is it’s weakest link, it’s just too big of a sacrifice. Korok seeds are not real content for anyone who isn’t obsessed with the ‘gotta collect them all’ mindset, it’s just a copy paste idea like what we’ve seen in gta and assassin’s creed. There’s no real reward for excessive open world exploration, you’re constantly just trying to get from point A to point B with no reason to really delve into the landscape except for more koroks. Combat is a chore where you’re just fighting to get equipment to fight more.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things going for the newer games, especially the controls. It’s just much less of what made the older titles great, and that’s fine. I keep having nostalgia for link to the past and that’s just not the kind of game this is.

Next you’re going to tell me I haven’t had my blinker fluid changed each year.

Is there a part of the US, Canada, Britain or EU that doesn’t have a law mandating working blinkers for a vehicle registration on a regular cadence?

This is like “I’m 16 and just got my car” level of YSK.

Fun Fact: in the dominican republic it’s very common for cars to never get any replacement bulbs whatsoever throughout the life of the vehicle. The amount of cars you find on the roads with no working lights is terrifying, just like how their drivers behave in traffic.

In the US there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on company computers and company networks and to reinforce this usually on day 1 of a job you sign documents explicitly stating they can and will monitor traffic on company systems.

Without monitoring traffic on all company systems there would be no way to know if your company was subjected to a breach. There is mandatory reporting for public companies and part of the reporting includes the capability to monitor for said breaches.

To that end I have to wonder where you are that information security is basically prohibited by law.

Overwhelming majority of workplaces won’t give a shit. There’s so many real issues to deal with and what games you have running on your phone is not one of them, that’s a management problem - not an IT one.

Some incredibly high security environments might think otherwise but they’d never let you use your phone for business, you’d certainly be given one from the company.