Jan. 15th, 2023

walkitout: (Default)
Once upon a time, I used to be a programmer and I worked in a compiler group. Because the compiler was for C and C++, I had to learn about exception handling and I wrote a bunch of tests to make sure that the compiler was generating code that implemented exceptions correctly, whatever that meant at the time. Let’s Not Get Into the Details, okay?

Oddly, the tests I wrote at the time were still in use decades later. Which is so weird. But I digress.

Understanding in some detail exception handling has really influenced how I think about people. If you interrupt people in the middle of a task, some people handle that more gracefully than others. Lots of people are hard to interrupt, hard to keep on the new task (the interruption), hard to return to the pre-interruption task, etc. I, personally, get pretty cranky when I get interrupted. Again, a bit of a digression.

I recently had a text exchange with my sister that started at 7:15 and continued for about an hour and a half. She ended it by saying she really hated long text convos, so I said I love you and good night. I also said I wouldn’t call or text altho she could call or text me. There were a couple possible abortive brief texts that were confusing and then a thank you for understanding. It hadn’t been a particularly wonderful interaction and I had never intended to have a long text convo — I sent her a longish text that was intended as a followup to an earlier conversation in which I was pretty negative on the prospects of single payer. I wanted to clarify that it’s not like I didn’t like the idea of single payer — it’s that I thought it had no chance at all, and I really wanted to solve very real problems with confusing and incorrect and insanely huge bills, and not take on war against a sector of the economy. I probably could have been clearer and it likely would have made no difference. She just went right back to how we need to kick insurance companies asses and ration care and control prices, without ever addressing what it would be like to try to grow the federal bureaucracy to administer all that, never mind the impossibility of actually getting it passed into law in the first place. Also, imagine if your health care was subject to debt ceiling votes. Fun!

But I got to thinking. As near as I can tell, the most dedicated to taking the pandemic seriously folks are all basically on board with We Are Living With Covid. That means different things to different people, but all activities, thoughts, goals, wtf, that were put on hold for covid, can now be resumed. And for many people, the covid hiatus was a hiatus on top of a hiatus that started sometime in the summer of 2015, when Trump started running for President and then won in November 2016.

Basically: middle-aged people are waking up, bleary eyed, and resuming things last contemplated in the summer of 2015. ACA had only come into effect in 2014, and was subject to many court challenges for years thereafter. My sister is returning to a kind of political discourse and thought process _from 2015_.

I bet she’s not alone. If there is one thing conversations with my sister has taught me, it’s that whatever she is saying, _everyone else will be muttering about over the next two weeks_.

Meanwhile, Gen-Z can’t remember 2015. How are we going to merge these two timelines?

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