Barcode X

Note: This is a bit of a rant, and a bit of my opinion. First, I do want to recognize that I am in a very privileged position and I am endlessly grateful for that. The rest of this post expresses some of the frustration I have felt nevertheless.

Back in Bozeman, a lot of people that attended my school were wealthy. At the very least, almost nobody was straight-up poor. And I remember overhearing one conversation very vividly, because it enraged me. I made no face, said not a thing, but hearing it just completely shocked me. In my debate coach's classroom, the seniors were discussing their college options. One of them mentioned that they were getting somewhat unfairly disadvantaged when it came to federal student aid. They complained that while reporting their family's assets, they had to report their second home in California or some other state. (This was a few years ago, so my memory is getting fuzzy). They were upset, sarcastically asking, "does the government expect our family to sell our second house to finance my college education? No way!" As I was sitting on a table by the side, working on my debate paper, I was just completely shocked. Yes. Yes, of course you having a second F*ing house in California would make you less eligible for aid. YOU HAVE A SECOND HOUSE!!!!!!!! jeezus I don't even have a SINGLE house! We're on the university's budget housing, and this person was complaining that they couldn't get aid because of their second house. bro. (Sidenote here, of course, I know I'm doing the exact same thing right now. I'm complaining about financial matters while I'm in a better place than many others in the US and the world). ugh. Anyway, Bozeman had a lot of other pretty interesting people too. Some people had *supposedly* visited the Yellowstone club, one of my peer's parents had an oscar award, other people had stupid big houses, etc. yadi yada. it is what it is.

This is much more recent, in the present: I also just saw a youtube video of a MIT maker portfolio. And just wow. First, just to be clear, I have my deepest respects for this dude. What he created is super cool and it must have taken a ton of hard work. But, come on - what he created was only possible because his family is financially well off. He has a soldering iron, a 3d printer, a microscope, half a workshop, and a mini wood CNC machine. He basically has all the equipment as my robotics team. Over the last few years, he made a quadruped robot from scratch. Nice. But he had the time and money to design everything, do test 3d prints, try again, design PCBs, fricking get the custom PCBs made, etc, like bruh. All his equipment must easily surpass a thousand dollars. And he just had that kind of money lying around??? He could afford to just buy filament and get custom boards printed?? Like come on, how am I supposed to compete with this. I can't realize my "full potential" if other people have the money to pull this crap off. I barely had the money to upgrade my old dell optiplex to use as my main computer. This guy has an entire electronics shop in his house. What have I been able to make, a few programming projects here and there? I suppose that's the benefit with software - there's no ongoing cost - but that's never going to be as impressive as: I built a walking 4-legged robot from scratch just like Boston dynamics hur hur HUR!! It's literally not equal. It's not like I have a solution for this inequality either -  there's only so much you can do at school and at community maker shops (if your community is even wealthy enough to have those), but it just frustrates me. Complaining with no solution - that's the definition of a rant, isn't it? Oh well, a rant it is then.

As for the title of the post; when you get a food item from my local food bank, they used a sharpie to put a shiny black X through the barcode. It was to indicate that the food was donated and not to be resold. You know, I didn't know that until it was almost time for us to move out of Montana. My parents did a wonderful job at hiding how much we were struggling financially. Both parents juggling jobs, going from one short-term thing to another, studying for one occupation then having to drop it on the turn of a dime so we would still qualify for university housing... Heck, even when my father suddenly became unemployed (tldr: boss just abandoned the lab), life didn't seem to change much. He was just home more. Oh, and the peanut butter jars had an X through their barcode.