For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers

His parents were employees, not business owners.

Amazon: people like books; people like next day delivery of stuff; people and companies like making stuff and running stuff in Amazon web services

Minecraft: Marcus Persson owned the game studio (and wrote quite a bit of the game) that made Minecraft, lots of people like it, Microsoft was willing to buy it for billions

Kiran Mazumdan-Shaw made beer, people like beer. They then used beer making processes to make biotech medicines - people like being alive and will pay a lot to stay alive, or even just a bit healthier

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk’s family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software “zip2” which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk’s money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX’s incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion’s drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster

Having listened to ‘good bad billionaire’ for several episodes the formula is

1. Create or inherit a company
2. Do good at it
3. Float it on the stock exchange
4. Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

1. Make an insanely popular game
2. Sell it to Microsoft

Or

1. Be the child of someone who did one of the above

Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis

That’s “parent” not “adult”

I with no kids at home have excellent sleep

Teens are the ones (after new mothers) who suffer the most, with natural sleep cycles starting around midnight or in the early morning and wake times in the late morning or early afternoon, but school schedules that force them to be active at school from 9am

My sister got told off regularly for reading after lights out

As adults my mother told me that after they found books for me I liked they pretended to never notice the light leaking through my doona, they were just happy to see I was reading

It’s not like the US manufacturers anything anymore, and Hollywood has forgotten how to make movies

It’s like you don’t even try to export your culture anymore, when I was a kid everyone watched Sesame Street, now all the kids in all the English speaking world are watching Bluey

Gen X here. I agree torrents are for legit uses only

Usenet is the best for piracy

I live in a suburb in a town designed as a car based place. We have a parkway, even.

We do have local shops - I’m about as far from one as you can be, so I have two in opposite directions each 20 minutes walk away

The local government is trying to densify the suburbs and allow us to build multiple residences on our block, but they limit the number of residences by the size of the block

So even though some houses right by the shops got rebuilt recently they are each 2 individual residences, where that place and its public transport links could easily support as many as would fit

If they really wanted us to increase density they’d let those people build four or five floors of apartments, they’d let me build a quadplex

I think in 2001 I was making a Linux from scratch system having not gotten enough from red hat and Debian with home configured and compiled kernels

Fun times and no, nothing like the commercial home operating systems back then

Are you talking Not Just Bikes? If so, I agree

I’m reading the Robert Caro biography of Robert Moses - the New York highway builder. By 1950 newspapers were saying “building these highways is a terrible idea, we need mass transit to move all the people that need to be moved unless you paved the entire city so no one could live here”

Most people think it’s best to upgrade 4 houses to a hotel

realistic

Has anyone personally known to you become randomly wealthy?

Keeping in mind Monopoly dollars are big enough to buy streets, utilities, houses and hotels

English has so many dick words

The system in question is capitalism. It’s been around longer than any of the named generations. It was tamed a little before the first world war (it enabled the first world war to be a world war). It needs to be more restricted

What you wrote was fine. Some people don’t like that sentence structure for stupid reasons