Aging from a useful man to something considerably less

Your situation sounds so much like my husband's. He is still able to do woodworking, which is a hobby he started several years ago. His mind is always going - thinking, planning. I have to start putting restrictions on what he can do - no more ladders, etc. He is starting to understand he is not indestructible. He has rheumatoid arthritis, which is making everyday things more difficult and painful. It breaks my heart to see his decline, but it is just the way of life (he is 71). As long as he stays busy with his hobbies, and keeps his mind busy, he is happy. I wish I was more like him.....

@doccharlie I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the ChatGPT part? Any technician, engineer, or scientist worth listening to has been writing reports and analysis their entire career. I suspect that, for most of us, submitting our stories to AI manipulation and dumbing down would be an insult. Otherwise, I think you have a pretty good idea.

When I retired and we moved to the small Minnesota town I had some wild hopes that I might be able to make contributions to the local education system, volunteer to organizations here, and keep making the kinds of contributions I had made through work. Rural Minnesota, like rural everywhere, is proud of its ignorance and desperate to disprove its total reliance on urban areas for financial support and infrastructure. So, rural decline will continue on an accelerated basis. And I am trying to convince my wife we need to move to a more urban area before our property values here collapse entirely. Just looking at the opportunities to make the kind of contribution you are suggesting back in the Twin Cities, which we might not be able to afford, or in Rochester, which is very affordable, is making my palms itch

@pkg Thanks for the suggestion. In our location, the fir needles just go through the gutter guard. After a full year, I'd have to lift the gutter guards, or remove them, and then do the job anyway. The local HD sells the product, but I know of nobody in the Valley who has the product because those who have tried them say they don't stop the pine, fir, and spruce needles from finding their way down through those slits.

@mikead63 bless her for giving people a reason for tomorrow.

@gloaming Hi,
when I installed the leaf guards I overlapped each piece an inch or so.
When you butt them end to end it does leave a slit.
Im thinking thats must be the slit you mentioned?
The leaf guard does has a pretty small screen but I can see where the fir needles might end up sticking up.

@twday67 Thanks for your reply. Having been an R&D manager at Bell Labs and then Kodak for 25 years, I have found that most researchers are very poor at explaining their work to even the sponsors of that work let alone to the general public. In the on-the-job training I learned how to do an elevator talk to the Verizon CEO ( making my point in the time it takes the elevator to get to the top floor). We need to be able to convince a significant element of the general public that R&D is important and why. We need for more of the public to be outraged when 60% of the Phds that have been inventing their future are foreign born and heading back to their home countries. Most people don't understand how this will affect the lives of their children and grandchildren until it is too late. ChatGPT is capable of taking the same data and creating stories aimed at different constituencies without lying or stretching the truth or inventing facts and data that don't exist. In a way it gives us nerds the same communication tools that politicians pay mega millions for.

That is definitely a different perspective from my own. I struggled with stuttering for almost my whole life, almost all the way to retirement. To get around that problem, I learned to anticipate what people were going to say, well into the conversation yet to come, and plan and practice in my head what my responses would be. I worked with CEOs from a half dozen different large corporations and I have never been in the room with one who surprised me with their response, questions, or insights. Their minds were as predictable as most Hollywood plots. So, based on what I've seen from AI "creativity," I suspect what you were describing is what many of us would just call "dumbing it down."

The last 13 years of my career, I ran three very different one-man consulting businesses and taught technology classes at a music college. I felt more than prepared for the consulting jobs, but standing in front of a dozen to a hundred young college students, presenting a coherent lecture on a variety of technology subjects, and fielding questions scared the crap out of me. Almost from day one, I discovered that, unlike corporate executives, I could never predict what a kid was going to say or ask. I kind of wish I had video recordings of my first year's classes. But what I learned in that first year was that kids didn't care about the stuttering, they only cared about the answers. The answers didn't have to be put in terms simple enough for a CEO to understand and I didn't have to worry about offending them by assuming they didn't know much about the subject. I really feel lucky for having stumbled into that amazing experience.

@doccharlie sorry, I got distracted by a side issue there. To your point, I totally agree but research and technology is getting an incredibly short end of the stick in this country and, if we find a way to recover from that, it will take several generations and we will be way behind the curve then. I just read an article about all of the top academic scientists who have been poached from US universities by Canadian research companies, universities, and companies. These were, for the most part, scientists who had been DOGE'd and felt that they were more appreciated in Canada (and a lot more highly paid). It's like that don't just take active scientists out of the mix, they degrade the quality of the education that incoming scientist will receive.

@doccharlie
I don't understand why I should be outraged by PhD's returning to their home country.

You have always been very resourceful and I see that it hurts when that changes, no question…I’m willing to bet that you will seek and find new outlets for fulfillment…..as a now retired performer, i had to do that, and Covid gave me a head start on arranging and editing music…remaining open to any possibility that comes with each day is key for me…even the simplest things matter….wishing you a renewed sense of purpose and new joys in your life, even with the physical challenges.