I know that tech companies and social media platforms have oodles of coders that are out to justify their collective existences, but more should be done to prevent them from fixing what’s not broken.

If you’ve attempted to use WordPress lately, you might have had issues with widgets. That’s not as big a deal for me as the fact that the numerous tools used to edit a post have vanished into a non-intuitive interface, assuming that you can still access the media you’ve uploaded through all that mess.

What really stinks of turgid ethics is that to access the classic editor, you have to install it as a plugin. All that would take from you is $300 per year for their Business Plan.

It seems as though it’s not enough for WordPress to intersperse our content with gross-out ads, now they want us to pay to use an editor that we’ve been accustomed to for years.

I’m curious about who is desperate enough for the older, better editor that they’re willing to reward WordPress financially in spite of the fact that WordPress 5.5 is breaking sites.

Let’s consider some of the biggest mistakes that a person can make: In many cases it involves committing a crime. Or it might be investing too much in the wrong stock. Or hurriedly marrying someone only to find out that they’re abusive. Or buying a house in a crime-riddled neighborhood.

Those are some big mistakes, but here’s a whopper: majoring in Electronics Engineering Technology (EET).

If you’re planning on becoming an EET major, here’s an idea of what you can look forward to:

As you get into it, you might have the idea that you’re joining “the winning side”. It’s not like majoring in English or some other elective, you might tell yourself. This is STEM we’re talking about, which all the science people speak of as guaranteeing a bright future. Once they have you believing that, they have you indoctrinated, to the point that it will be hard to change your mind.

For example, if you’re considering an EET degree, you might see someone attempting to warn you against it and you might dismiss them as being someone who made some bad choices.

Once you begin the program, it might actually be the fight of your life. Most college programs flood their students with assignments, but your EET coursework will easily eclipse your rudie-poo electives in terms of difficulty and perhaps even volume. You’ll really be in for it if you have a professor who likes the idea of “weed-out courses” which are filled with arbitrarily advanced material early on in an effort to process out the less-serious students.

In a 25-student class, you’ll likely see a couple students drop in the first week. By the end of the first semester, the class is likely to have been reduced to nearly half, and usually only around eight or nine students make it to second year. Most of the ones left usually graduate.

In case you’re curious, the students that carry on typically make fun of the ones that don’t make it, in some cases as far as a year after they drop.

Considering the challenge involved, and how few students who attempt it actually graduate, one might imagine that there’d be a bright and sunny future awaiting the student that overcomes the hurdles. If that’s what you think, consider the following number:

17

That’s how much money that you could expect to make, in dollars per hour, putting an EET degree to use.

Are you in disbelief? I’ve held three jobs since graduation that paid about the same rate, and I’ve seen another student from my class in the same position, so it seems like that particular rate isn’t extraordinary for EET grads. For comparison, I met an auto mechanic in the 90’s who made more than that even before accounting for inflation. To make the matter hurt more, a grocery store near one of the places I worked at had advertised a non-managerial position that started at about $15/hr.

With that kind of money, you can pick between a car or a one-bedroom apartment. You might even be able to squeak by with both if the apartment is a slum and the car is used. But you’d probably find yourself doing as I’ve done: using the company’s free coffee as an appetite-suppressant so you’ll feel less tempted to spend more money on food.

While this is going on, your dad might wonder why you’re not buying a house, your mom might wonder when she’s getting grandkids out of you, you might feel tempted to convince your friends that everything’s fine, everything’s just fine, and you yourself might be struggling to make sense of what’s going on.

At that point, you’ll realize that you weren’t on the winning side. STEM majors don’t guarantee success, hard work doesn’t always lead to a desirable outcome, and it is possible to work yourself raw for years and have little to show for it. Kind of like with most degrees.

If you’re considering majoring in EET, don’t do it. If you love your children, don’t sign them up for it. As for me, I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I know that I thought EET was a great idea in the past, but sometimes a person’s opinion changes over time and when presented with more information. Obviously, my opinion is different, now.

“What society does to its children, so will its children do to society.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

Two is a natural counting number, and is placed between the numbers one and three on a directly-incrementing number line composed solely of successive integers.

Two is the lowest-value prime number; it is the first in the sequence of natural numbers that cannot be divided by a natural number to achieve a quotient that is also a natural number.

An integer is considered to be “even” if the quotient of dividing it by two would be an integer. Two is the only even prime number.

Two holds the third position on the Fibonacci Sequence, the previous two positions on the sequence being two occurrences of the number one.

It is also the number achieved when adding the multiplicative identity number, one, to itself.

In algebra, an exponent of two is used when a term consisting of a combination of variables and constants is to be multiplied by itself. This is of practical application when finding the area of a square when the value of the length and width are determined to be equal.

In trigonometry, the square root of two is the length of the hypotenuse when the opposite and adjacent lengths of a right triangle are both equal to one.

Interestingly, two is the only non-zero number where the sum of adding it to itself is the same as the product of multiplying it by itself.

Two is the base number of the binary numbering system, wherein each significant digit has two possible values (zero and one), which is of foundational importance in computer science, where the smallest element of data storage has two permutations, a high state (represented by a 1), and a low state (represented by a 0). Machine code uses the base-2 number system, whereas the base-8 (octal) and base-16 (hexadecimal) number systems are used as shorthand ways to represent binary numbers. The base numbers of these number systems are powers of two.

Remember: 2 + 2 = 4

In a legendary move of ideological checkmate, House Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) decided to ride the recent tide of anti-racism by introducing a resolution that would ban any political party that has historically supported the confederacy or slavery in the U.S.. Getting behind the resolution are GOP Reps Andy Biggs (R-Arizona), Andy Harris (R-Maryland), Jody Hice (R-Georgia), and Randy Weber (R-Texas).

“Wow, what are so many Republicans doing getting behind a bill that would dissolve a political party with a racist history?” you might be asking. And, for that matter, why wouldn’t every single Democrat get right behind it? After all, if the Democrats are anti-slavery and always have been, their votes should be magnetically drawn to any bill that wipes out any party with a history of slavery. Right?

Right?

You may even feel an impetus to look into the history of both the Democrat and Republican parties, and their respective histories with slavery and the confederacy. And you may have even come to some shocking realizations.

Which was probably one of the things the resolution was designed to do.

“A great portion of the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism and hatred. Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols, and reminders of the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past, and consider changing their party name to something that isn’t so blatantly and offensively tied to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and the Ku Klux Klan,”
-Rep. Gohmert

Ooh, snap! The sharp end of cancel culture has just been skillfully turned on it’s wielder! If the left can justify changing street names due to the connection of the names to pro-slavery figures in the past, the same justification could be used to change the name of the Democrat party! As for what to call them from here on, you could probably think of some suggestions.

Gohmert gave some solid examples of racism tied directly to Democrats. But you might be wondering, what about Republicans? At the time of the Civil War, the Republican party was freshly-founded by Abraham Lincoln shortly after the collapse of the Whig party. Republicans were a northern party that was strongly opposed to slavery, with black Republican Fredrick Douglass (whose statue was among those recently knocked down) being a key figure in the Underground Railroad, which freed slaves.

If you think Douglass was passionate, you’d get a kick out of Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican congressman who was so anti-slavery, that he wanted to revoke the voting rights of slave owners! He was a driving force behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which today are used as foundations for civil rights legislation. Not only that, he pursued the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, a racist president. Johnson’s impeachment failed by only one vote, but reduced the racist president to being a mere figurehead for the remainder of his term. By the way, the racist Andrew Johnson was a Democrat.

While there are some racist people who call themselves Republican today, their racist stances aren’t officially held by the party, and the rest of the Republican party regards them as outliers.

So, this particular resolution puts Democrats in a pretty bad spot. They are notorious when it comes to virtue signalling on race issues, apparently due to guilt over the skeletons in their closets. Therefore, one might expect them to vote in favor of the resolution. But if they do, they’d be voting for the dissolution of their own party! But if they vote against it, they’d be disappointing their constituency, and would risk losing minority voters, on top of the many voters who would have learned something about them, in light of this resolution.

This is trolling on a scale never before seen. If Rep. Louie Gohmert were one of the bad guys, he’d be an Avengers-level threat.