Famous song by Gordon Lightfoot.

No, she/we didn’t eat it all at once, but none of the rest of it made it into the oven, either.

Thanks for sharing that. I was repeating things trans people in my personal life have said, but as you point out, there’s no single universal experience.

Really glad to hear you’re happier now. It very much sucks that society (and individuals in society) made you feel badly for being who you are.

A week or two ago, I made my wife some peanut butter cookies, because she really likes those. I decided to keep half the dough in the fridge so I could make more fresh. The next day I grabbed a nice dark chocolate square from a bowl we keep on the counter and thought, “I wonder how the league butter dough would be on this.” Oh my god, it was like the best Reese’s peanut butter cup you’ve ever had. Truly amazing.

However I feel in no way that I am in the wrong body.

I’m not trans, but I believe that’s the key. You said “turn out trans,” but I believe most trans folks never really felt like they were in the right body, ever, though they might not have realized what it was that was wrong earlier. It’s not like people wake up one day and think, “oh shit, I’m trans!”

Oh, well, that’s pretty well documented. Most of those guys started companies and worked giant amounts of time.

What are you disagreeing with?

And I in no way was saying that the wealth inequity wasn’t absurd.

What are you basing that on? Here’s a list - most are workaholics.

Yeah, that’s mostly the case. There’s a lot of people here just making a lot of assumptions, but there’s quite a bit of information on billionaires as individuals. For instance, there’s this Forbes list, where you can click each one to get a summary of how they got rich.

There isn’t one type. There are the ones like Bezos and Dell, who got rich by growing one or more businesses, and are still at it. They likely don’t work normal hours, but they likely work more than 40. Some of those, like Gates, get older and move on to other things like foundation work, but not an actual job. Hard to say what kind of hours they work. Then there are the ones like Christy Walton, who inherited their wealth and don’t really ever work.

Bill is a treasure, and Martin Short is so fast.

Are you saying that she’s a bot or a troll?

That is a bit of a worry. A big issue is that I really like to read. I already read kind of a stupid number of books. I have to not let that escalate too much when I’m not working 40+ hours a week.

Yeah, I thought about it. I’m a manager at my company, and my actual software development skills are pretty antiquated. Could probably do requirements and architecture, but they don’t need me for that (certainly not at my pay level). I can’t be a part time manager. I’m guessing there are a couple things they’ll ask me back for, weird niche experience I have, but those things don’t happen every year.

I’ll probably be fine. I’m don’t get bored very easily. We’re planning to relocate when I retire, so settling in and exploring will soak up a lot of time for a while. Should be fine.

Do you have a game plan for what you’d do? Not rhetorical, I’m curious.

I worked with a guy who I thought would really love retirement. He and his wife traveled a lot, and he had a couple hobbies he was passionate about. I met him for lunch a couple years later, and he was morose and said he regretted retirement. He said he still loved traveling, but it was something they only wanted to do two, maybe three trips a year. He was excited about doing his hobbies more, but doing them all day felt like it was his job and sucked some of the fun out of them. So he ended up sitting on the couch watching TV all day.

Meanwhile, the place we work has way more than a normal cross section of brilliant people, and we do super interesting stuff. He said he loved talking with friends and family, but he desperately missed solving problems with literal rocket scientists.

I’m still going to retire next year, but stories like that give me pause.

I started at the place I’m working at now right out of college, and there was a pension that was intended to provide 85% of your final salary from retirement to the end of your life; I would have had all my retirement points at 55. Then like 15+ years ago, the company was sold and the pension was frozen. Still a great thing, but nothing close to what it was supposed to be.

When I turned 55, I was pretty pissed off about it - I should have been able to retire. Then I realized that I could easily live another 30 years. That’s an awfully long time. Sure, the money would have been nice, but I don’t think I would have wanted to retire then. I’m getting close to it now, and still it seems like a long time potentially.

I always liked this one. And I always get this one in my head whenever I encounter any of the words.

Not my favorite one, but I really liked Kliban. Very surreal sometimes.

If I’m understanding this right, they used a machine learning algorithm to identify some markers in the blood of Parkinson’s patients, and now they’re testing for those markers. The AI in question is ML, and isn’t involved in the actual testing.

It isn’t. We really do have a two party system. Voting for a third party that’s closer to your ideology just takes a vote away from the major party candidate that’s the closest to it. We have several examples in the past where a third party candidate cost an election for the closest major party candidate, and zero examples where a third party candidate came close to winning. Roosevelt came by far the closest when he ran independent in 1912 and got 27% (which is why Wilson win).