You’ve managed to entirely avoid A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens?

If you can learn to write a business proposal, you don’t have to be able to afford it. A bank will practically shit themselves to give people loans that can show that an initial investment of less than $500,000 to $750,000 (for a 150 acre farm) will produce an average of $1,200,000- $1,500,000 per year every year for the next 25 years.

Edit: the previous reply in this chain wasn’t me. I appreciate their support though.

Edit 2: if you don’t know how to write a business proposal, librarians can and will help with that.

Buy a corn farm and change the crop from corn to solar. Between 25% and 48% of the corn in the US is turned into ethanol for cars. You’d be doing double duty combating climate change, and living the capitalists wet dream of one time investment with constant return.

Every individual civilization has followed that pattern with a few exceptions. Overall, however the previous view is correct historically speaking. As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.

Homer Simpson energy, as well. “The worst day of your life so far.”

There was a virtual swap space program that I downloaded in the Windows 95-98 era that did something similar. Worked reasonably well, if slowly, but everything was slower back then with computers.

Can’t help with the rest, but Sing Sing Sing is a famous Benny Goodman song

https://youtu.be/r2S1I_ien6A

8833052,

Edit: but I originally got the Internet in my house in Aug of 1986. I was almost 6 years old. I’ve been on the Internet since before it was the World Wide Web. Back in the days of BBSs, and MUDs. By the time I got that UIN, I was already 15, and heading to university.

I’m reasonably certain that I may be among a few hundred people that never went backwards on our connection speed, and had 24 h access to ISDN by 1996, and never have lost Internet access since 1986.

Us IT nerds at university made a makeshift vaporizer out of an end table, an air mattress compressor, a steel ashtray, a soldering iron, some sort of wire mesh, a large glass bowl, and some aquarium tubing.

THEY FUCKING BETTER NOT! All those rivers are Source rivers. They ALL run off into the Mississippi, or The Great Lakes, and St. Lawrence.

Ohio is practically the heart of the midwestern, eastern, and Great lakes river watershed

Well to be totally honest, there was a decade and a half that I didn’t touch the thing. Took me a few days of practicing for about an hour to get the skills back, but that also could be because while I wasn’t playing strings for that decade and a half, I was still tooting around on my woodwinds and brass. Love a French Horn. I should see if I can find a used one.

I have most of an orchestra in my spare room. I still need a good xylophone to round out my percussion, a French Horn and a Sousaphone to fill out my brass, a Bass Flute for my winds and a harp for a complete string set.

Once you learn, your fingers never forget. I haven’t had a lesson in almost 3 decades at this point. I pick mine up and practice once a month or so, but I can still just whip out songs at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately I never learned to sight read, and only play by ear. I can “read” music, slowly. I just can’t read it at tempo.

Not sure you need to know how to play them, to sell them. Heck, I had a bow re-stringing apprenticeship under a guy named Howard Needham. He can repair any damage done to any violin. He doesn’t play a lick. He ensures that at least one of his apprentices can properly play a scale to test the instruments. Or he used to anyway. Haven’t talked to him in a couple decades, so he may not be with us anymore as he was in his late 60s back in '99-'00

We don’t have an official base, but we use Jebel Ali Port as a naval layover port.(Refueling)

Kkk isn’t widespread, organized, and in leadership everywhere anymore. Not even two generations back, this was not true, and even today there are pockets of holdouts.

Al Dhafra Air Base is near Abu Dhabi, also the navy uses one of their ports

I thought they were specifically targeting countries with US bases?

There are tons of contracts in the USN that absolutely guarantee that you will never see anywhere close to combat. All Nukes only serve on Carriers and Subs. Corpsmen (Navy Doctors and nurses) tend the wounded. You KNOW what you are signing up to do before they ever even send you to MEPS for medical testing. The only people that might not have specifically signed up for firing a weapon is whoever launches the missiles that we shoot from our frigates. I don’t know if “Gunner” is still a job, but I would assume it is since the Navy has all the big guns.

I can’t speak to what happens in the fleet. I went to Navy Nuke school, learned to operate power plants, and they gave me a new extremely lucrative contract to stay there and teach other people to operate power plants.

I also cannot speak for The Army, Air Force, or Marines. Though with the first and third, it’s hard to imagine that one wouldn’t know that they are signing up to potentially kill people.

Not true for the USN. They hand you a contract that you sign. You only have to do what is contained in that contract. To change your job they have to get you to sign a new contract. I was never close to combat, and neither would any other Navy Nuke, though they actually left the school for the fleet. I skipped that step. There are tons of non-combat jobs in the US military that will never be anywhere close to combat. Logistics is why our military works.

That being said, it’s worse than you are making it out to be. A lot of the people who signed up for combat roles were looking to kill people before they ever signed the contract.