I am 51 years old. I have lived in San Jose CA, IN, OH, Fairfield CA, Wichita Falls, TX, U.P Michigan, Bossier City, LA, Tampa FL, Athens Greece, CA again, The Dalles, OR, Klamath Falls, OR, Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, Virginia Beach, VA, Sasebo, Japan, San Diego, CA... While in the Navy, I was able to visit all over Asia, Australia, and Western Africa. I finally settled in OC. I am fortunate that I have a varied life experience. I come from nothing and have done alright for myself. I can appreciate more than most.

There are different paths to meet those goals in each environment. $6 a gallon gas may not be a big burden for someone who lives in NYC with public transportation but to a farmer in Nebraska or rancher in Colorado, or lumberjack in Wyoming, that is the difference between putting food on the table and going hungry if you get what I'm saying. Those two positions have not been represented well in our federal government and it is a driving factor behind the divisiveness in my opinion. There are people who are in great anxiety right now over Biden's election because it may very well mean the end of their ability to provide for their families or a drastic decline in their standard of living (not to mention the moral and cultural implications).

@linuxace, you just advanced to level 6!

Hmm. Military?

AF Brat and Navy

That's great. I also traveled all over the world. I was also lucky in that I grew up working on ranches and in the Colorado working as a lumberjack, joined the military, now work for a French company in a bigger city doing white collar work. I know many people who have lived in the same 5 mile radius of NYC or SF and some people who have grown and lived in the same town with a population of 3,000 or their whole lives. Those two groups do not understand each other.

@TaLoN132 I was an Army brat (dad was a Russian linguist). 33. Went to Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Spain. Lived in Syracuse NY, Houston TX, now Living near Seattle.

I did training in the AF at Wichita Falls TX so I recognized that as a military town. I would have guessed Navy from the other locations.

Air Force, Germany, Norway, France, Texas, California, Spain, Qatar, Iraq for me.

Shephard AFB... My Dad was in officer's training school there.

Those last two I could have done without but the rest was great. I appreciate now as I am getting older how valuable the experience of traveling and seeing different ways of doing things has been.

We were at Travis, KI Sawyer, Grissom, Barksdale, Athens, and MacDill.

Oh yeah, and Wright Pat for a while, too.

Was in Hanau? Can't remember the base name

Near Frankfurt

Those are all places where I was not stationed. Offutt, Shephard, Lackland, Edwards, Vandenberg, and Spangdahlem.

It was just Hanau Army Airfield when I was there.

In Germany, I never it made it to the base but we had people come over to Spangdahlem for NCO training.

I can totally appreciate where you are coming from regarding differences and fully understand. Progressives have done a horrible job communicating their positions. As with most people, they assume that what is evident to them must be evident to others and treat others that think differently in a condescending manner. It sucks.

Eh, I'm pretty patronizing to them. Comes from being a software engineer dealing with idiot PMs.

Again, I honestly think that was the biggest driver behind the election of Trump. Terrible move for the Republican party but I understand why it happened. Still rather see Trump in office than Biden (Harris really) but that's more because I think some of the most radical left positions are going to be pushed and it's going to cause big problem. I probably would have voted for Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang over Trump but they seem half way reasonable to me.

Tulsi for sure. Yang..... ehhh.... maybe

Honestly #1 priority for me is stop bombing and selling bombs to people bombing.

I would say progressives have done a horrible job representing everybody fairly, mostly because they are ignorant of how many Americans live.

I'll accept any number of progressive policies if that's the result

Well, that was something that Trump actually did well overall minus the whole Solemani incident.

exactly

I also think conservatives have been pretty bad at communicating as well.

I've never liked Trump, but I do appreciate the good things he has done. He would have been much better off to not say really anything at all after he was elected. Many of his policy decisions have been good.

That's a far point.

*fair

I agree that there are things that he did well. As a SW architect/engineer myself, I appreciate his recognizing that we don't need to bring cheap foreign engineers here to work for less.

I think that bringing manufacturing back here is really important.

Ex SW architect and developer. Security architect and hacker (penetration tester and red team member) now.

Also used to be an aircraft mechanic.

I just think the tariff approach is not the right way.

That's one of the things he didn't do so well. I was very happy he was addressing trade deficits but that was handled poorly. On the other hand, I haven't heard any better approaches either. I personally would have probably left that one alone over cause the problems to American businesses that it did.

I have worked in just about every environment. My specialty is relational database development for very large dataset processing. I have done a lot with the Entertainment and Aerospace industries here in SoCal.

@TaLoN132, you just advanced to level 11!

So, Oracle, SQL, Hadoop, NoSQL?

I spent so much time in school learning relational models and as soon as I got out everyone started denormalizing and moving to things like elastic search and Mongo. That was fun.