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 You had a good education. I never heard that term (1st principles) until Elon Musk started saying it. McKenna and Alan Watts were my two best friends while in China - for three years, I listened to them every night. Recordings of them on YouTube was literally the only reason I needed a VPN.  
 yeah, i think i was born on that boundary between Gen X and Boomer, literally a few months before the release of the first Star Wars movie... changes were under way by the time i got to my 5th year of highschool that totally rugged me of my CS degree because i was so pissed off that an english teacher was using it to downgrade my social credit score over me not handing in stupid book review assignments especially after that fateful day in my first attempt at my last year of highschool where he said "we won't do 1984 because you asked for it" and nobody else had an opinion and i had just read it already and had a lot of things to say about it 
 and yes, i consider that time, from 1988 onwards, to be when modern civilization started to fall into the abyss 
 That teacher was a dickhead... 
 just also note that my school introduced a social credit score in 1992

long before i ever heard about this concept about 25 years later, which the chinese communists are busy refining

they called it the "discipline" or "levels" system and me and my best bud in highschool at the time we put together a screed parodying the shit out of it and inserted our little text into every locker we could gain access to, and we had a little group of friends at the time who helped out make the operation as fast as possible

it was so impactful that the whole school was talking about it and they pinned it all on me

hilarious because it wasn't my idea, but my buddy, who did all the graphics and writing for it

pretty sure they trashed me realising i was a passionate libertarian already at age 16 and made sure that my english teacher kept me as riled up as possible