Libra

No, I think I probably would have the same. All the internet did was make it easier to be exposed to more ideas, but I had been doing that in libraries from the time I was a teenager anyway.

I've noticed price increases in a few things, some small, some large.

Alright, I'm curious - why do you care what some crazy backwards rednecks in another country think about you?

This seems like asking someone to do your google homework for you. :P Just google that shit and get the specs yourself.

work is work: if your going to give me free time then let me go home."

This is it right here. I would much rather spend my time doing what I want than whatever it is you imagine I would enjoy. Because mostly what I would enjoy is - no offense - time away from you/coworkers/anyone else I don't choose to spend my time with. If you make it a work thing it feels compulsory and that will make it harder to enjoy no matter what it is. A better option would be to give everyone the day off and say 'By the way a few of us are going to ', that makes it optional and I can accept or not as I see fit. Although some people will still resent driving into work if you were just going to (effectively) tell them to go home again.

Except I was doing what's called 'speaking from experience', which means I was speaking about my experience. Which you then decided to weigh in on as if you know a damned thing about it, or me, or even pain in general compared to the four specialist doctors I've seen on the subject. So yeah, when you start slinging vague opinions and generalizations about something I have lived for 20 years I'm gonna have some shit to say and you're just going to have to accept that I speak in absolutes because I am the authority on my situation. If you have any actual experience or expertise to share on the subject then I'm all ears, but if all you want to do is whine because somebody knows more than you do about the nonsense you're talking than you do then I'm gonna go do something more productive with my day.

I take it you have some better approach than relying on medication when my back pain becomes incapacitating? Cause it's not fixable, I've seen numerous doctors about it over the years, not to mention chiropractors, physical therapists, etc. My choice is to take pain meds when things get bad or to just be incapacitated for the rest of the day whenever it flares up. So if you have a better approach I'm all ears, but just saying 'drugs are bad mkay?' isn't terribly convincing because so far my experience has been that not relying on drugs is all downside.

I don't even have wifi on the PC, I'm wired all the way to the fiber modem.

Interesting, that makes sense.

Yeah, that stuff is a big part of why I wanted to get away from windows. They've been steadily shoveling bloat into it since.. well, since Win95, but it's gotten particularly bad of late. I've been on Win10 because I refused to upgrade to 11 and now they're ending support for 10, so fuck it, I'm jumping ship.

Oh, yeah, probably. I only used it regularly for like a month or two, 3 pills a day, so it wasn't so bad for me.

TRS-80 Color Computer 2

For high school graduation I got an Apple IIe with all the bells and whistles - the color monitor, dual floppy, ram/80-column card, 1mb ram extension, even the 5mb hdd, it was great.

Depends on the back, and the pain, and the meds. No, they don't fix the underlying issue, but for circumstances where the underlying issue can't be fixed they make it a lot more tolerable.