Her Complications Are More Fascinating Than Yours

Much longer than that, though the frequency has increased a little.
I only searched your URL for “instalanch”, which I guess was not good enough.

Gods of beer and wine
Also: John 2:1-11

Never has human society had to adapt so quickly to such incredible changes in virtually every aspect of life
I can’t agree (and I work in software). As Mark Steyn has pointed out, the pace of technological innovation in the first half of the twentieth century was vastly greater than the second half. Someone born in 1900 emerged into a world where heavier than air flight was impossible. By the end of his life, that person would have seen men walking on the Moon. Someone born in 1962 would largely recognize the world of 2021.
I have been told, by researchers who used the internet from the beginning, that it was at originally a very civil “place”.
Prior to Eternal September, the only way to get access to Usenet fora was to be affiliated with a military, university, or research institution. Such people generally didn’t have all day to f*ck around sh*tposting on Usenet newsgroups, got killfiled when they did, and if they weren’t undergrads would catch a stern talking to by their supervisor for abusing organizational resources as well as time.
So, she changes her pronouns several times a day? Pffffffffft
I’m going to write a pronoun-rotation algorithm based on TKIP. Thousands of unique pronouns per second. Deal with that, you blue-haired clowns.

I’m something of a German purist when it comes to beer, no doubt due to helping my simple German father produce and consume a lot of the stuff over the past 30 years or so. (We joke that Belgium produces 3,000 beers, and 40 of them are pretty good!)
His philosophy is centered on balance: the bitterness of the hops should be balanced by the sweetness of the malt. I’ve nothing against a good hoppy beer, so long as it shows some attempt at balance. Any fool can pour a kilogram of hops into a kettle and never give a second thought to traditional flavo(u)rs or textures.
Unfortunately, the last fifteen years of brewing have been an escalating dick-measuring contest between dudebros competing to see who can pour the most hops into their brew. As a result, I attend happy hours with cow-orkers who honestly believe that all beer is supposed to taste like acne medicine, because it’s all they’ve ever known. And now it looks like having run the bitterness axis as far as it can go, they’re switching to sours (which can be wonderful when done perfectly, but unlike IPAs they are really unforgiving to the mediocre brewer).
Like WTP, I’ve noticed that every brewpub has a dozen choices on tap, and ten of those will be __IPA’s (they add letters to the front almost as frequently as the “complicated” add letters to the end of LGBTQWERTY+) or fruit sours. But that generally means that you’ll have a pilsner or dunkel or stout or cream ale that is often quite tasty. I like to think of it as letting the hipsters underwrite my honest hardworking beers by shelling out top dollar for their Clearasil.
De gustibust est and all that, but sometimes I wish the younger guys knew what they were missing.

Woke, Lysenkoist biology: “The trauma of white supremacy accumulates over centuries and is passed down and stored in the bodies of black and Indigenous peoples across generations.”

I’m not really a beer drinker, but I did try a local beer and a cider last time I was in London. Very good. And no lint-covered sausages anywhere.

About 4/5 of the people I’ve talked to about it share my distaste for the trendy IPAs, the drinking of which increasingly resembles french-kissing a pine tree. Making the dubious assumption that my anecdotal data are representative, the question then becomes, why do they make so many of them?

Someone born in 1900 emerged into a world where heavier than air flight was impossible. By the end of his life, that person would have seen men walking on the Moon. Someone born in 1962 would largely recognize the world of 2021.
Well this sort of argument can go on ad nauseum (don’t you hate those things?) but without surrendering the rate of tech change part of the argument I would say that computers and iPhones and such got into the hands of a lot broader sampling of third world citizens and a hell of a lot faster than electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, or TV.
the only way to get access to Usenet fora was to be affiliated with a military, university, or research institution. Such people generally didn’t have all day to f*ck around sh*tposting on Usenet newsgroups, got killfiled when they did, and if they weren’t undergrads would catch a stern talking to by their supervisor for abusing organizational resources as well as time.
Dude. It’s been 30 years, let it go. I keeeeed. No, really. Usenet wasn’t everything. Long before that went public were the bulletin boards and list servers and such that served similar purposes. I don’t specifically recall using any bulletin boards, I wasn’t much of a gamer because I didn’t have all day to f*ck around with them, but I got regular, unfortunately totally unsolicited, reports from a co-worker/friend about what went on on some of those boards. Possibly did use them in college but I do recall using LISTSERV a good bit. It was how I initially learned how the broader internet worked. Unless I’m confusing/conflating the two.
I’m something of a German purist when it comes to beer, no doubt due to helping my simple German father produce and consume a lot of the stuff over the past 30 years or so.
As a person of mostly German ethnicity (I blame my German toilet training for most of my personality disorders…no, really…no, I keeeed…), I must confess that I believed such until a trip to Prague. That was beer heaven.
As for the stouts….I fear they may start ruining those as well. I get the same feeling when the IPA’s and such first came out. Only with stouts it seems there’s a race between the coffee lovers and the chocolate lovers. Right now I’m at the “Gee, that’s interesting. OK, that was good too” stage, but if this goes on much longer…well, there will always be a Guinness. Please God. Don’t take that one away. After a visit to the Guinness brewery in Dublin, I felt that they were missing out on the coffee market. I’ve wanted to slip some of that roasted barely in with my coffee beans but I haven’t run across any. I suppose that’s what the internet is for but…meh.

A couple of years ago, I met a guy who sold distilling equipment and supplies. He was working his way across the Twin Cities looking for anyone interested in starting up a craft distillery. When I asked him “Why Minnesota?” he explained that he looks for markets that are oversaturated with microbreweries, as they are ripe for introducing the “next step” for those who want to stand out from the crowd. Looking at the density of brew pubs in a five-mile radius, I certainly couldn’t fault his logic!
The upshot of this is that I don’t lack for options, for as long as they can stay in operation. My locals have a nice variety of pilsner, cream ale, dunkel, Kentucky common, and if all else fails, one can almost always find a Summit or a Nordeast. I guess I’m lucky I haven’t been overwhelmed with silly stouts yet.
What’s been chapping me of late is the supply/distribution problems keeping the Merlin from reliably carrying Belhaven. When a man needs a pint of Wee Heavy, he shouldn’t be told to try again in a few weeks!

I would say that computers and iPhones and such got into the hands of a lot broader sampling of third world citizens and a hell of a lot faster than electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, or TV
I worked for a financial services. In 1997 we introduce a mutual fund that invested exclusively in Brazil. The fund managers strategy was a simple one. Brazil was a second world country with vast untapped resources that desperately wanted to become a first world country. He argued that all you had to do to make money was invest in basic infrastructure type stocks and wait patiently. So the fund was loaded with companies like Petrobras and Telebras. Telebras (the phone company) had something like a 20 or 30 per cent market penetration at the time. He felt even if they only doubled that penetration the fund value would increase significantly. Today I don’t think the number of land lines has increased much. Everyone went straight to cell phones.

If this doesn’t say “An administration to be taken seriously”, nothing does.

If this doesn’t say “An administration to be taken seriously”, nothing does.

*I realised*
Stupid Soviet era phone…

When I worked on the shuttle program one of my coworkers shelled out for one of those space pens. As I recall, it sucked in 1G. I often wondered how many of them they took on each flight. I mean it’s not like a regular office where there’s always a pen somewhere. Maybe they did work better in zero-G. Though most likely what they sold us rubes on the ground, which was likely exactly what they sold in the gift shop at the Welcome Center, was a much cheaper piece of crap.

Well this sort of argument can go on ad nauseum (don’t you hate those things?) but without surrendering the rate of tech change part of the argument I would say that computers and iPhones and such got into the hands of a lot broader sampling of third world citizens and a hell of a lot faster than electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, or TV.

Well, what takes the absolute minimum infrastructure cost to create and maintain?
Anything requiring insulated copper (or optical fiber) strung over long distances are right out. So, land line telephone might possibly be installed for what the government thought was essential, but they might decide that 2 way AM radio was cheaper in the long run.
I’d opine that radio (particularly AM radio) was the cheapest way to broadcast information one way over a very large area. I remember listening to WLS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLS_(AM)#The_WLS_Musicradio_era) when I lived slightly north of the Tennessee/Alabama border. That radio station was ~470 miles away. I have personally seen 2-way communications over a 500 mile AM radio link. (I was the Signal Officer for an MLRS battalion in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and we set up a directional antenna to link with a battery that was deployed at Fort Bliss for training purposes.)
IF you have electricity (which is one reason why China is building coal-fired electrical generation facilities at a breakneck pace and deciding that it was worth building the 3 Gorges Dam, despite it being an obvious target for any future conflict), you can do all sorts of interesting things. Indoor plumbing requires a lot of infrastructure. Putting up a cell tower takes much less infrastructure.
As one joker put it: Most of the drag is at the leading edge of the wing; all the lift is after it. There can be advantages of being late to the game, especially if earlier versions of the game produced things that would be completely thrown away.
I didn’t want to spend the time to write less; sorry.

I’ve little doubt that if the entirety of Instapundit’s peanut gallery showed up here and started arguing, our voices would be drowned out so quickly that nobody would ever know what the old days were like.
I noticed about a year ago that I visit a variety of different blogs or discussion groups. What they all have in common is that they all have a group of commenters, who write comprehensible English. So the amount of trolling is low (although I remember Minnow) and i dont have to put up with people who have never learnt any grammer of spelling and who cant punctuate and right really long rambling sentances that drive you insane because they are to dammed lazy to right properly.
Once a group gets so big that I no longer recognise most of the commenters, and thus can put their comments into perspective, I tend to leave.

What they all have in common is that they all have a group of commenters, who write comprehensible English.
Of course, there are some commenters at Instapundit that I wish were incomprehensible.

There’s some interesting research that suggests that the “health” (by which they mean a combination of longevity and activity) of an online community is determined primarily by turnover rather than size, growth rate, posting frequency, etc. Seems counter-intuitive to me but the r-value’s pretty high.

For anyone still reading here, I’ll recommend the Archdruid for not only his commentary (he’s a real druid, for certain values of druiditry), but he polices his comment section rigorously, and the result is some pretty interesting discussions, not all of them about magic.
https://www.ecosophia.net/