I’m the parent of a trans kid, I am not trans myself. We moved from a deep red state to Minnesota a few years ago, for reasons like yours, my sister and her wife made the move as well.

I can’t tell you what the experience has been like for my son. I can tell you what it felt like from my perspective. The state we lived in is where our friends and family lived and mostly all still live. The state government was constantly coming up with new threats. Attempting to criminalize medical treatment for our kid. The school was… “Tolerant” but all of the actors didn’t act when presented with the harassment my kid dealt with.

Everyone around us went about their lives as though nothing was happening, as my spouse and I felt the weight of a state government that ignored us at best and at worst seemed actively malicious.

The weight we didn’t realize we were carrying constantly was enormous and it lifted quite quickly.

It was hard on all of us, making new friends as an adult (and in a relatively rural community) feels impossible at times. But I don’t fear our state government.

There are resources in the cities for transplants, even if you make the choice willingly it’s still a traumatic experience. You have to decide if it’s worth it.

"Through crime and crusade, our labour, it’s been stolen

We’ve been robbed of our freedom, we’ve been held down and beholden

To the bosses and the bankers, who never gave their share

Of any blood, of any sweat, of any tears"

My primary issue with windows is that teams and outlook are getting less usable, and their “updates” regularly break my workflow and/or toolchains.

It’s done nothing but get worse and feel more predatory, there’s ads in the start menu now. This wasn’t a thing like 5 years ago.

So I take umbrage with the sentiment that there’s nothing functionally wrong with windows.

I talked to a mn guardsman I know this morning about it. He said that the way they do the activations is in phases starting with MPs.

My understanding is that it’s basically a warning and a plan for where you’re at on the list of getting called up, so you know what to expect as the situation changes.

I’m a dad of a 17 yo trans masc son.

It has been something like 5+ years now since he came out.

Some things I’ve dealt with, that may or may not be part of your and your family’s journey:

I felt loss for awhile. Like, I felt like I had somehow lost the child that I had, and though I’d gained a new son, it was still hard. I felt so guilty. I wanted to be supportive, I didn’t understand, but I wanted to be supportive and grieving didn’t feel like support. So I did my best to keep that to myself because as he became more himself he became more joyful.

Eventually I realized that I was suddenly seeing a kid I hadn’t seen in years, he had been very depressed even self harming at times, but with therapy, and gender affirming care it was like we got the kid we had lost back.

There will be people, especially online, who doubt your story, will openly call you a liar, or in some cases a child abuser.

Our home state, where most of our family lives, started aggressively pursuing legislation to criminalize us and the lengthy and thoughtful process we went through with our sons transition.

He dealt with violent threats from other students at school, to the point where kids threatend him on the school bus with baseball bats, even chasing him from the bus stop.

We moved across the country to try and find safety, even that is not guaranteed.

All that said, you will have moments of joy and moments of sadness in a world that is at best imperfect and at worst actively seeking to harm you and your loved ones.

Our jobs, as parents from my point of view, is to build our kids up and give them the tools and confidence to be successful when we’re not there for them anymore. The world will give them plenty of hate and tribulation, we should give them acceptance and love.

Do what you can to protect and accept your kid. Use their name and preferred pronouns. When others have been brought into that circle keep them accountable, don’t let them slip. You will see those acting in good faith and in bad, give grace where it’s deserved and be prepared to protect your child from people you may have thought you could trust with your life.

Beyond that, remember they’re still your kid lol, you’re still gonna deal with the same old teenager/parent relationship as usual. Honestly, besides the name change, the only real issues we have come from the outside.

I live in a fairly conservative area that’s working class.

People intuitively understand when you describe how much capitalism sucks because they’re living it.

If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.

If you can do that, you’ll find that they’re primed to reject capitalism, they just don’t know it yet.

“These rich fuckers don’t give a shit about us, but they have no problems helping each other out.”

“Everybody’s boss is the same, they want you to work harder, more hours, and do it all for less money. They want us to be able to barely survive.”

“The only way we can make them change is to all work together. They’ll screw over each one of us individually, but if we’re together they’ll know it’s actually them who needs us.”

It’s almost like the entire economic system requires every business to exploit their workers as much as possible to remain competitive.

If you find yourself thinking “I agree, things are really bad, but outright conflict would be so much worse!”

You might be right, in the short term perhaps.

But if you think about the staggering body count that has already built up, from police killing people and walking away without punishment, from our money supplying tools to murder countless children overseas, our governments overall mindless support of business and money over people?

I don’t want any sort of conflict, I don’t want any lives to be lost, but it seems like they’re intent on killing us regardless of how we feel about them.

5 people were killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre.

How many people have been killed by DHS/ICE, just this year already?

Boston sparked an uprising against an authoritarian state, oppressing the regular working people who were just trying to live their lives.

What’s the number for oppressive regimes today?

This is a shitty leader.

Praise in public. Correct in private.

Not that I even agree correction was warranted.

I believe you and I’m sure they were fine.

I wrote an XML parser in LabVIEW once. Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do lol.

That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows its best to write modern bootloaders in Matlab.

Programming languages, much like the jackass in the middle, are tools. Different tools are for different things. The right tool for the job can make your day. The wrong tool can make you question your entire career.

“We have decided that we will use deck screws to build our deck, it’s the right pattern and architecture for the job. Now get started with this hammer, the tool you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s functional as a tool. If it’s not working well that’s an optimization problem because you’re bad at your job.”

I generally don’t do GUIs for C. But I’m also an embedded C person.

When I have I’ll generate DLLs for the C portion then just pull them into a python based interface or something with easier to deal with gui implementations.

Programming languages are tools. Would you use a wrench to drive a nail? You could. But it would be painful, you’re gonna miss and whack your hand at least once.

If it’s a learning exercise, go for the C implementation, why not? I’ve written an XML parser in LabVIEW. (I never stopped to ask whether I should…) Is that the right tool for the job? Fuck no.

If this is an exercise in software engineering be an engineer and use the 99% already built and verified system to do the job it’s meant to.

Or you can write an entire theme park simulator in assembly because you like pain or something.

I’d rather let a junior engineer loose in my codebase. At least I know their intent and where they live.

The business school people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do. This is the goal of capital, maximum extraction, minimum outlay. These contradictions are inherent to the very economic system, not simply the result of individual ghouls.

Some of us turned down Lockheed and Raytheon.

Incredible art. Any time I see marble look like cloth, it blows my mind.

As to the physics, the amount of material holding up the hammock is likely much more significant than it appears. Not to say it isn’t delicate, I’m sure much side to side movement would break it quite easily, but the vertical strength is probably significantly more than it seems, it’s sort of like a bridge with a truck on it…

I live in the us, so been denied coverage for all kinds of things.

Waited months for permission to get a new medication after going through 5 or 6 rounds of prior authorization.

Paid more in premiums every year.

Gotten less for said premiums every year.

Had to pray I could remember all my ailments when I started a new job.

Had to prove that I’d had insurance coverage the entire time I’d had said ailments.

Those last two finally aren’t a thing anymore.

So yeah, all kinds of cool shit.