Updated «Today» with Part F manuscript

005/codex-005.tex

@@ -179,10 +179,41 @@ If you want to donate financial support for the creation of this zine (and all t
 
 \tableofcontents
 
+
 \chapter{The Salad Days Are Over}
 
 \section{Yesterday}
 
+My early experiences with computers were on TRS-80s (aka, ``Trash-80s'') and Commodore machines, and in those days if you wanted a computer to do something you had to write that program yourself or copy it laboriously line-by-line out of a magazine like \textit{Byte}. If you were lucky, a friend might have a program on a floppy disk and could make a copy for you—if you had a blank floppy disk. A 5\nicefrac{1}{4} inch floppy disk cost around \$1.50 in 1980, which is roughly \$6.00 today. While I might have been able to scrape together \$1.50 once or twice back then, I couldn't do it on a regular basis. As a result, I type really fast. 
+
+By the time I got to college, the computer labs were mainly just terminals that would allow you to access the mainframes that may as well been in Narnia for all we knew. The concept of a computer was still fairly abstract to a lot of people back then. Families that actually had a computer were still quite rare, and as the potential uses for them were still quite limited in those days, few people saw value in owning one. They were not the absolute necessity that they are now. They were more like a toy, a plaything, something that you used two or three times a week and then went back to your normal life.
+
+Before I went back to college in 2008, I had been working on an ancient Macintosh. I had managed to inherit a series of used Macintoshes or purchase some that had been deacquisitioned by our local university.\footnote{If you like bargains, your local college's or university's suplus sales are your new best friend.} Thanks to a billing error, my parents came into a small amount of money and bought me a Mac Mini.
+
+Anyway, I went back to college with that Mac Mini, a dial-up internet connection, and Microsoft Word. Oddly, that was enough in 2008.
+
+Well, not quite. I lived in the boondocks and things were well enough along at that point that the internet was an absolute necessity. The lack of high-speed internet (and of a laptop) meant that I either spent ridiculous amount of time at home trying to do research, or that I spent of bunch of time on campus in the computer lab doing research and putting a bunch of downloaded pdfs on a jump drive.
+
+But made it work. I managed to get my English degree, pick up some honors along the way, pick up a scholarship that allowed me to take just one more class, and I did it. It could be done then. I'm not so sure about now.
+
+It was a lot more work than it should have been, though. Computers were supposed to be the great equalizer, and when they failed to achieve that, then the Internet (which was always spelled with a capital letter for a while) was supposed to be the great equalizer. But it was not. As Wiliam Gibson said, ``The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.''
+
+Could have I have done better or done more with high-speed internet and a laptop. I have no doubt that I could have.
+
+But this not the question that haunts my days and nights. I'm fairly good in the classroom, but I'm a fair to middlin' scholar. No doubt there are far better scholars than myself. But while I made due with dial-up internet, they may not have had internet at all, or even a computer. 
+
+I always think that the person may have discovered a cure for cancer could quite possibly have shit their guts out and died at the age of five in some third-world country simply because some first-world millionaire couldn't figure out how to make a profit out of feeding them or providing them with health care. But had this person grown old enough to develop this cure, there is no doubt that a hell of a lot of first world companies would have been lining  up at the door to exploit that cure for profit.
+
+There is a philosophical word for this position: hypocrisy.
+
+There is also a biological word for this position: parasitism.
+
+But there is also the philosophical position that this person who may have started WWII could also have shit their guts out and died at the age of five in some backwater central European village and nobody bothered to provide them with food or healthcare, and so the greed of capitalism has averted a massive disaster. \textit{Qué será, será} and all that.
+
+But all of that is hypothetical. It's all what might have been. It's an interesting intellectual experiment (which I hesitate to describe as ``fun to think about'' but that's the English language for you. The denotations are the same, but the connotations could not be more different. It's kind of the difference between ``have a nice day'' and ``enjoy the next 24 hours as much as you can.'')
+
+So let's talk about what's not hypothetical, but about what's actually possible. But wait, that's not a yesterday thought—that's a tomorrow thought.
+
 I emerged from college with an English degree and a newly refreshed teaching certificate. My grades were good enough that I managed to earn a place in Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.\footnote{\kref{https://www.english.org/}{https://www.english.org/}} I had a website, and had recently installed a Wordpress blog to talk about books.\footnote{\kref{https://bookblog.kjodle.net/}{https://bookblog.kjodle.net/}} ``Web 2.0'' was a buzzword and we still thought that social media could transform the world for the better.
 
 We were wrong. Social media is a great way to make the world better. It's also a great way for nut jobs and conspiracy theorists and racists and fascists to connect with each other and increase their levels of hate and ignorance exponentially. What have we done?
@@ -224,8 +255,6 @@ The problem was that the magazine employed a faulty polling technique, and so di
 At the height of the Great Depression, most people couldn't afford a magazine subscription, much less an automobile or a telephone, and these people tended to vote for Democratic candidates. The inaccuracy of the poll ruined the magazine's reputation, and it ceased publication two years later. (In point of fact, they not only failed to find a random sample, they relied solely on people who responded to their poll, and such people responded because they were vehemently opposed to Roosevelt. This is an example of ``non-response bias'' or ``participation bias'' but the point is the still the same—they failed to select a random group of people to poll.)
 \kdive{-1}
 
-And this is what comes after.
-
 \section{Today}
 
 I am in a very different place now than I ever thought I would be. I'm not on Plan A or Plan B. In fact, I've pretty much run out of alphabet to describe exactly where I am now.
@@ -882,7 +911,7 @@ While it's easy enough to include those in a \texttt{verbatim} environment, I'm
 
 The easy way around this is to write up those code samples in an independent \texttt{.tex} file, and then use the \texttt{input} command to add them at the appropriate point in my story. That keeps the source code in my GUI nice and clean looking, and means that the text highlighting actually means something. 
 
-The (\texttt{include}) works in a similar way, but adds a pagebreak before and after the included text. This is pretty handy if you are working on a longer document. For more information, see \kref{https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/246/when-should-i-use-input-vs-include}{https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/246/when-should-i-use-\\input-vs-include}.
+The \texttt{include} command works in a similar way, but adds a pagebreak before and after the included text. This is pretty handy if you are working on a longer document.\footnote{For more about the distinction between the two, see \kref{https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/246/when-should-i-use-input-vs-include}{https://tex.stackexchange.co\\m/questions/246/when-should-i-use-input-vs-include}.}
 
 \subsection{Ligatures and \LaTeX{} }