I hate this concept, making it illegal for some of the population, but not all of it is a really strange way to handle this. Honestly, I don't smoke, but if the government tried to tell me I couldn't, I would probably seek out doing it.

I remember having the impression he was an atheist too for some reason, maybe it was some next level PR trying to make him seem like a super logical tech bro with big dreams and the means to achieve them.

People are saying that didn't happen, but I genuinely remember when I would constantly see sentiment that he would save the human race back in like, 2012?

It was a majority opinion in tech and liberal circles.

American propaganda is wild.

This comes from review guides, so yeah, they are literally sent by the company with a set of talking points and things to mention.

I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.

Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn't think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.

The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.

It's a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.

Yes, that's the implication, and it's certainly intentional for you to think of it like that.

Attitudes about gays and transgenders actually got worse coming from the 1960s into the 1980s. The sexual revolution actually created a generation far more open and accepting, and the culture that lead to things like the Satanic panic, war on drugs, and resurgence of patriotism and religiosity in the United States actually made things worse for gay and trans.

I literally remember when sites like Reddit, Amazon, and even Google went down. We're so used to crazy uptimes that it's easy to forget that real servers and infrastructure have real problems.

It shows a bias to monotheistic religions. I don't understand how that's justifiably neutral enough.

Completely disagree, but if you haven't been around for at least a couple of sets of twenty years I can see why you would think this.

Someone else gave a great set of things that were different, but really, twenty years ago was almost completely different in nearly every dimension of life I can remember.

In 2003 not only was gay marriage not legal, gay sex and relationships were illegal where I live, and was punishable by prison time.

In 2003 most of the country wasn't online, pagers were more common than cell phones, and 3DFX VooDoo graphics cards were still a thing.

In 2003 I used to smoke inside my community college's cafeteria, where people ate because it was the designated smoking area.

In 2003 minimum wage was $5.15 nationwide, and gas was just a little over a dollar.

In 2003 people didn't use laptops in school and electronics were confiscated on site, sometimes teachers would 'lose' them and you never got it back, and somehow that was an expected outcome - I lost a laser pointer that way.

In 2003 casual homophobia was mainstream, all your friends, and probably you would be making gay jokes, and transphobia was not a concept. I thought transgender people were the same thing as intersex, I didn't know gender transition was possible.

American society was post 9/11 and highly patriotic, even liberal people were unusually patriotic, and politics were probably the most 'neutral' that I've ever seen, it was nothing like they are now, but in general things trended towards cultural conservatism.

I remember being an outcast because I didn't believe in God, and people would casually tell me I was going to go to Hell.

Nah, 20 years is an entirely different cultural paradigm.