I was working on the assumption that 'you want to fuck your mother' syndrome was a specific reference to analysts, rather than all the various flavors of psychological talk therapy in general(which, as you say, are very much present).
Arguably, (at least in cases analogous to this one), it isn't so much about bad judges; but about not enough good ones.
Prenda's undoing came about, in no small part, because a Serious Judge(Federal District Judge, lifetime-appointment-by-the-president-confirmed-by-the-senate, etc.) became very, very, very displeased with how they were messing with the court and refused to either rubber-stamp them or let them drop the case and quietly run away to a safer venue.
Wright appears to have put nontrivial time and effort into familiarizing himself with the case, asking the requisite hard questions, calling parties in for serious beatdowns, and so on. Given the (relatively) small scale of Prenda's scamming business, compared to some of the other shenanigans that end up in federal court, they probably got substantially more attention than they could have expected going in, or that most of their slimy little peers get(though hopefully this case will serve to raise the profile of such piracy-extortion operations).
The trouble isn't that other judges are cackling evilly and conspiring with Prenda types, it's just that Prenda's "push hard against the weak, quietly drop the case and walk away if resistance is met" strategy merely requires a judge with a full docket to not follow up on them too closely. In this case, they were screwed because the judge didn't accept their surrender, and chose to take a significant personal role in chasing them down.
As opposed to good ol' fashion psychology? Aka the "you want to fuck your mother" syndrome. No thanks. I'll take the happy pills. It worked for Neo.
Psychoanalysts have been mostly confined to the English/contemporary lit departments for quite some time now. Talk therapy is still very much a thing; but old-school analysts are pretty thin on the ground these days.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that the quality of mental health care is deeply uneven(with the limited exception of scheduled substances, where the DEA may end up knocking on your door) if it's FDA approved, any doctor can prescribe it, so there are a lot of drugs being handed out either by dubiously qualified generalists, or by the wrong flavor of specialist. My point was just that, since our knowledge of the brain is so poor(and our methods for sampling an in-vivo brain so... crude) the list of objective chemical markers dwindles alarmingly swiftly once you get past a relatively short list of endocrine issues.
So are the vast majority of dental health conditions... Psychiatry is what happens when you may have some fancy reason for your mental health condition; but that isn't exactly going to get you out of waking up and punching the clock tomorrow morning... Unless you are independently wealthy, or possess a very indulgent family, the amount of leisure time you have to take off from the daily grind of modernity and nurse your psychological woes is very, very, limited indeed. Plus, being mentally diseased makes you a cost center, just as physical disease does, plus it carries a nontrival social stigma! The efficacy may not be so hot; but there's a reason why the demand for pills that will paper over the problem as quickly and quietly as possible is as large as it is. (Oh, and, um, incidentally, a milligram of clonazepam and a pint of beer reduce anxiety about the same amount; but only one is blatantly obvious on your breath and difficult to take without drawing attention to yourself at work... Just, an, um, theoretical observation).
I had internal infections misdiagnosed as depression for over 4 years before physical symptoms appeared. This is a good thing to avoid these kind of errors in the future. How the hell can a doctor prescribe SSRI without measuring the actual levels first?
Levels of what?
In my experience, it's reasonably common for psychological complaints to get some bloodwork; but mostly for known endocrine issues with fairly blatant psych manifestations. This isn't to say that instances of 'your thyroid is just phoning it in-itis' aren't missed; but that is something that they look for, especially if the SSRI of the month doesn't get results.
Beyond the endocrine markers you can get from a blood draw, though, the invasiveness of sampling goes up fast and the quality of baseline data to compare you against goes down fast.
I was semi-joking; but it is actually a serious question. (To the best of my understanding) a quantum-encrypted network provides rock-solid assurance that nobody is physically tapping your lines. Depending on your site, your level of paranoia, and your value as a target, this may be a worthwhile investment compared to classically-encrypted tunnels, or guys with guns keeping people away from your fiber. However, it has no effect whatsoever on the (easier and more common) purely electronic attacks on vulnerable systems. A quantum-encrypted network will just as happily protect packets being sent back home by a keyloggger as it will anything else, and it has no particular ability to detect the evil bit.
This doesn't make it useless; but it's really quite a different animal from classical encryption, or from good system security, and the present state of average system security is so dreadful that it rather overshadows physically tapping lines. If you can get a zero-day for $50k, it starts to become difficult to justify even sending a legitimate contractor out to dig up and splice a bunch of fiber, much less some l33t covert ops fiber modding operation.
Even if they managed to, it'd probably come down to the demographics:
All but the frothiest ideologues know that fucking with old people(whose voter turnout rates are consistently excellent, and who tend to be closer to where the GOP is most comfortable on a variety of issues) is a bad plan. Unless it's to further expand it(with some serious sweetheart deals for team pharma) as with Medicare Part D, 'keep your government hands off my medicare!' is standard procedure. Indeed, one of the major attack lines against Obama's implementation of Romneycare was that it was going to mess with your medicare and send granny off to the death panels.
That's the way it's going to end anyway. At least this way you save time, money, hassle, and the anguish of actually thinking they give a shit about your success.
VC: "Ideas are like assholes, everybody has one and I'm going to get as much money out of selling yours as I can."
Dubai is a shining paragon of cooperation between east and west! A city where the venerable traditions of enlightened liberalism and individula rights of the middle east can come together with the honesty and fundamental decency of the west's finest financial services providers. Truly, a model for us all.
but after Egypt, I'm not entirely sure another MB dominated country in the ME is a good outcome for the West.
what say you?
I suspect that the ship has largely sailed on that sort of thing. When you prop up regimes that (while secular and at least semi-docile) provide governance of absolutely dreadful quality, while generally cracking down on civil-society types, that increasingly leaves you with a 'puppet tyrant or religious nutjobs' situation that can be expensive, even impossible, to maintain for the puppet tyrant(y hello there, Iran, we were just talking about you, and I think I see Pakistan heading up the driveway to join us!). It's somewhat similar to all those CIA-backed-Latin-American-Fascists who, once they eventually collapsed, were largely replaced by semi-hostile populist socialists. No shit the locals were looking to change brands after the delightsome performance of their previous government provider.
I'd say that the locals are making a mistake, descending into theocratic insanity tends to put you among the ranks of some really shitty places; but it's not as though secular liberal democracy has been putting on a very impressive show...
I hate to correct you but a gun is treated as always loaded.
I was always given the impression that that rule was bent pretty substantially for cleaning and stripping operations; but I'm certainly not the expert, just the observer.
If they hadn't also supplied him with ammo, they might as well have bought him a stick.
I find the enthusiasm around guns faintly baffling, and everything I know about deadly weapons comes from video games or hardware that became obsolete once gunpowder started sucking; but there is no reason why a five year old can't use a rifle safely(contempory manufacturing quality, along with relatively low-pressure rounds, means minimal operator risk) So long as somebody is supervising kiddo, and impressing on him in no uncertain terms that this is serious shit, at any time he has access to both the firearm and the ammunition.
Apparently, they weren't up to that particular challenge, and (unfortunately) didn't recognize their unsuitability ahead of time.
Don't get me wrong, I hardly think that procedural generation is an intractable problem, or that the AAAs are on the leading edge of good game design(though it is worth noting that some have actually retreated from doing procedural generation, rather than merely not embraced it: TES II: Daggerfall was enormous, ~2x the size of Britain and the thick end of a million NPCs, TES III: Morrowind, moved to a teeny hand-built environment because TES II was judged as having a rather... lifeless... and barren feel despite being so large. TES IV: Oblivion was more aggressive about automating scenery and foliage, and clutter; but still mostly handbuilt. TES V added a few additional tools for this 'hybrid' arrangement; but still remained largely handbuilt, or at least hand-verified-and-tweaked) However, something like Dwarf Fortress is actually a pretty good example of its power and its issues.
Can dwarf fortress build an impressively detailed world, including adherence to assorted laws of geology and a backstory and so on, from a seed? Indeed so, it's quite something to watch. Does the same system fairly routinely drop players into unwinnable or severely constrained scenarios(the Hammerer is rampaging around killing people for not building some glass widget; but there isn't any sand on the map, I burrowed into a nest of horrors while trying to get enough stone for my noob fortress,etc)? "Losing is Fun!"
I fully expect continued improvement in the ability of procedural tools to generate content that doesn't feel 'off' to humans, and a corresponding expansion further into the core gameplay(as opposed to a timesaving tool for the dev team to pre-populate a starting environment for human tweaking, or a tool consigned to randomizing foliage and beards for sweeping vistas and bit characters); but the challenges are nontrivial, and tend to become more pronounced as they get 'closer' to the core of the game.
Arguably, at least some branches of science and medicine have some major overlaps(though the timescale tends to be longer because reality is stubborn and complex, and just gets worse the deeper you go).
Major credit accrues to those who develop new models that render the old ones obsolete or deeply incomplete, and discover new phenomena that require a course of study distinct from the old ones.
And, while there isn't any major risk of them succeeding themselves out of business, Team Epidemiology is always trying to wipe out one pathogen or another. It doesn't have quite the same finality as 'the singularity'; but that's mostly because they are chasing a bunch of moving targets.
I see MMO expansions someday taking this route to expedite content generation. Players complain there's not enough content? Drag and drop your quest generator with a bit of human tweaking and you're good to go. I'm sure some of the systems in Eve were generated partly through random generation.
It turns out that procedural generation is conceptually pretty easy; but making it good is much harder. Early videogames(from the era where memory and storage constraints were Serious Business) and demoscene stuff(where the constraints are wholly artificial; but that's the point of the exercise) are pretty much forced to rely on it heavily because they simply didn't have the option of storing canned content.
Today, though, you see games with substantially greater amounts of (not inexpensive) artists and designers thrown at them, and gigabytes of art assets, with hand-tweaking especially evident in places where the player is likely to look closely(eg. generic NPCs will be thrown together from parts, giving the world a varied population without requiring the art people to hand-model 10,000 different 'bandit' characters; but the risk of output that just looks a little off, or hit a few branches of the ugly tree on the way down, means that those critical NPCs that follow you around for half the game had their appearance nailed down precisely). The fact that artists are slow and expensive has created a demand for procedural generation tools, and quite a few exist(I'll just mention SpeedTree, purely because the phrase "SpeedTree for Games has been the gaming industry's premier vegetation solution since 2002" amuses me); but the problem of creating really good environments continues to be vexing enough that titles that can afford it throw a lot of humans at the problem.
Even the gun-nuttiest people I know subscribe to the 'Don't point a loaded gun at something you wouldn't be happy shooting. If you haven't verified that a gun is unloaded, it is loaded.' theory... One or both of those parents must have fucked up pretty seriously.
Lead is cheap and dense, which is very nice indeed(I can't think of anything offhand that comes terribly close on the cost/density graph, certainly not any nonmetals); but at least a few centuries of firearms survived without the luxury of rifling that actually worked.
Smoothbore muskets used cloth or paper wadding to, er, paper over the dubious fit between a round projectile and the barrel, some modern bullets with jackets hard enough to be a risk to the barrel use polymers.
It wasn't until Minie balls that 'engaging the rifling' became a feature that you tuned your lead alloy for.
Given that the muzzle velocity on something like this is probably pretty dreadful, the density issue would be a real problem; but a smoothbore design with polymer wadding would be doable enough, suckitude aside.
A surprising number of 3d printing projects seem to have been born of the fact that the gutting of domestic blue-collar production means that we currently have a massive glut of geeks who want to make things; but who never had wood shop(and certainly not metal shop, heaven forfend!) in school, and whose fathers pushed paper for a living and weren't in a position to teach them anything about manufacturing...
There are, undoubtedly, applications for which 3d printed materials cannot be matched by any conventional technique(some of the 'sure, let's just print a highly detailed collagen matrix to build a replacement organ' stuff, or some of the single-piece geometry you can get, along with anything that rewards rapid turnaround on very small runs); but there are a lot of 3d printed objects that are essentially really bad plastic versions of something that could have been knocked together with the machine tools of 50 years ago, never mind fancy CNC gear.
(And lest anybody think that I'm criticizing from the outside, I'm actually in a pretty similar boat. My grandfather was a mechanical engineer, did it at work, had a pretty serious setup in his basement. We didn't live at all close to that side of the family, so I only really saw it when doing logistics after the funeral. Dad was mostly a white-collar numbers guy, with a little bit of hobby carpentry that tapered off after he had kids. My own education was strictly college prep, and my only machine-tool time was through a university, plus the online services.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was working on the assumption that 'you want to fuck your mother' syndrome was a specific reference to analysts, rather than all the various flavors of psychological talk therapy in general(which, as you say, are very much present).
Arguably, (at least in cases analogous to this one), it isn't so much about bad judges; but about not enough good ones.
Prenda's undoing came about, in no small part, because a Serious Judge(Federal District Judge, lifetime-appointment-by-the-president-confirmed-by-the-senate, etc.) became very, very, very displeased with how they were messing with the court and refused to either rubber-stamp them or let them drop the case and quietly run away to a safer venue.
Wright appears to have put nontrivial time and effort into familiarizing himself with the case, asking the requisite hard questions, calling parties in for serious beatdowns, and so on. Given the (relatively) small scale of Prenda's scamming business, compared to some of the other shenanigans that end up in federal court, they probably got substantially more attention than they could have expected going in, or that most of their slimy little peers get(though hopefully this case will serve to raise the profile of such piracy-extortion operations).
The trouble isn't that other judges are cackling evilly and conspiring with Prenda types, it's just that Prenda's "push hard against the weak, quietly drop the case and walk away if resistance is met" strategy merely requires a judge with a full docket to not follow up on them too closely. In this case, they were screwed because the judge didn't accept their surrender, and chose to take a significant personal role in chasing them down.
It's just the thetans.
As opposed to good ol' fashion psychology? Aka the "you want to fuck your mother" syndrome. No thanks. I'll take the happy pills. It worked for Neo.
Psychoanalysts have been mostly confined to the English/contemporary lit departments for quite some time now. Talk therapy is still very much a thing; but old-school analysts are pretty thin on the ground these days.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that the quality of mental health care is deeply uneven(with the limited exception of scheduled substances, where the DEA may end up knocking on your door) if it's FDA approved, any doctor can prescribe it, so there are a lot of drugs being handed out either by dubiously qualified generalists, or by the wrong flavor of specialist. My point was just that, since our knowledge of the brain is so poor(and our methods for sampling an in-vivo brain so... crude) the list of objective chemical markers dwindles alarmingly swiftly once you get past a relatively short list of endocrine issues.
So are the vast majority of dental health conditions... Psychiatry is what happens when you may have some fancy reason for your mental health condition; but that isn't exactly going to get you out of waking up and punching the clock tomorrow morning... Unless you are independently wealthy, or possess a very indulgent family, the amount of leisure time you have to take off from the daily grind of modernity and nurse your psychological woes is very, very, limited indeed. Plus, being mentally diseased makes you a cost center, just as physical disease does, plus it carries a nontrival social stigma! The efficacy may not be so hot; but there's a reason why the demand for pills that will paper over the problem as quickly and quietly as possible is as large as it is. (Oh, and, um, incidentally, a milligram of clonazepam and a pint of beer reduce anxiety about the same amount; but only one is blatantly obvious on your breath and difficult to take without drawing attention to yourself at work... Just, an, um, theoretical observation).
I had internal infections misdiagnosed as depression for over 4 years before physical symptoms appeared. This is a good thing to avoid these kind of errors in the future. How the hell can a doctor prescribe SSRI without measuring the actual levels first?
Levels of what?
In my experience, it's reasonably common for psychological complaints to get some bloodwork; but mostly for known endocrine issues with fairly blatant psych manifestations. This isn't to say that instances of 'your thyroid is just phoning it in-itis' aren't missed; but that is something that they look for, especially if the SSRI of the month doesn't get results.
Beyond the endocrine markers you can get from a blood draw, though, the invasiveness of sampling goes up fast and the quality of baseline data to compare you against goes down fast.
I'd ask the bot owners, I don't think anyone at Los Alamos is likely to know for sure.
I would; but my Mandarin is totally dreadful.
I was semi-joking; but it is actually a serious question. (To the best of my understanding) a quantum-encrypted network provides rock-solid assurance that nobody is physically tapping your lines. Depending on your site, your level of paranoia, and your value as a target, this may be a worthwhile investment compared to classically-encrypted tunnels, or guys with guns keeping people away from your fiber. However, it has no effect whatsoever on the (easier and more common) purely electronic attacks on vulnerable systems. A quantum-encrypted network will just as happily protect packets being sent back home by a keyloggger as it will anything else, and it has no particular ability to detect the evil bit.
This doesn't make it useless; but it's really quite a different animal from classical encryption, or from good system security, and the present state of average system security is so dreadful that it rather overshadows physically tapping lines. If you can get a zero-day for $50k, it starts to become difficult to justify even sending a legitimate contractor out to dig up and splice a bunch of fiber, much less some l33t covert ops fiber modding operation.
Drones were the only vehicles they could find that wouldn't be carjacked by the time they reached their destination, no?
Any word on what percentage of the quantum-encrypted traffic is flowing between classically-compromised systems?
Even if they managed to, it'd probably come down to the demographics:
All but the frothiest ideologues know that fucking with old people(whose voter turnout rates are consistently excellent, and who tend to be closer to where the GOP is most comfortable on a variety of issues) is a bad plan. Unless it's to further expand it(with some serious sweetheart deals for team pharma) as with Medicare Part D, 'keep your government hands off my medicare!' is standard procedure. Indeed, one of the major attack lines against Obama's implementation of Romneycare was that it was going to mess with your medicare and send granny off to the death panels.
That's the way it's going to end anyway. At least this way you save time, money, hassle, and the anguish of actually thinking they give a shit about your success.
VC: "Ideas are like assholes, everybody has one and I'm going to get as much money out of selling yours as I can."
Anonymous Coward, I'm disappointed in you.
Dubai is a shining paragon of cooperation between east and west! A city where the venerable traditions of enlightened liberalism and individula rights of the middle east can come together with the honesty and fundamental decency of the west's finest financial services providers. Truly, a model for us all.
but after Egypt, I'm not entirely sure another MB dominated country in the ME is a good outcome for the West.
what say you?
I suspect that the ship has largely sailed on that sort of thing. When you prop up regimes that (while secular and at least semi-docile) provide governance of absolutely dreadful quality, while generally cracking down on civil-society types, that increasingly leaves you with a 'puppet tyrant or religious nutjobs' situation that can be expensive, even impossible, to maintain for the puppet tyrant(y hello there, Iran, we were just talking about you, and I think I see Pakistan heading up the driveway to join us!). It's somewhat similar to all those CIA-backed-Latin-American-Fascists who, once they eventually collapsed, were largely replaced by semi-hostile populist socialists. No shit the locals were looking to change brands after the delightsome performance of their previous government provider.
I'd say that the locals are making a mistake, descending into theocratic insanity tends to put you among the ranks of some really shitty places; but it's not as though secular liberal democracy has been putting on a very impressive show...
I hate to correct you but a gun is treated as always loaded.
I was always given the impression that that rule was bent pretty substantially for cleaning and stripping operations; but I'm certainly not the expert, just the observer.
Yes. They bought a five year old a rifle.
If they hadn't also supplied him with ammo, they might as well have bought him a stick.
I find the enthusiasm around guns faintly baffling, and everything I know about deadly weapons comes from video games or hardware that became obsolete once gunpowder started sucking; but there is no reason why a five year old can't use a rifle safely(contempory manufacturing quality, along with relatively low-pressure rounds, means minimal operator risk) So long as somebody is supervising kiddo, and impressing on him in no uncertain terms that this is serious shit, at any time he has access to both the firearm and the ammunition.
Apparently, they weren't up to that particular challenge, and (unfortunately) didn't recognize their unsuitability ahead of time.
2) ...at which point the individuals who actually succeeded would be extremely wealthy (and really so would the human race)
Except for the ones who get fed into the matter decompilers to produce more computronium...
Don't get me wrong, I hardly think that procedural generation is an intractable problem, or that the AAAs are on the leading edge of good game design(though it is worth noting that some have actually retreated from doing procedural generation, rather than merely not embraced it: TES II: Daggerfall was enormous, ~2x the size of Britain and the thick end of a million NPCs, TES III: Morrowind, moved to a teeny hand-built environment because TES II was judged as having a rather... lifeless... and barren feel despite being so large. TES IV: Oblivion was more aggressive about automating scenery and foliage, and clutter; but still mostly handbuilt. TES V added a few additional tools for this 'hybrid' arrangement; but still remained largely handbuilt, or at least hand-verified-and-tweaked) However, something like Dwarf Fortress is actually a pretty good example of its power and its issues.
Can dwarf fortress build an impressively detailed world, including adherence to assorted laws of geology and a backstory and so on, from a seed? Indeed so, it's quite something to watch. Does the same system fairly routinely drop players into unwinnable or severely constrained scenarios(the Hammerer is rampaging around killing people for not building some glass widget; but there isn't any sand on the map, I burrowed into a nest of horrors while trying to get enough stone for my noob fortress,etc)? "Losing is Fun!"
I fully expect continued improvement in the ability of procedural tools to generate content that doesn't feel 'off' to humans, and a corresponding expansion further into the core gameplay(as opposed to a timesaving tool for the dev team to pre-populate a starting environment for human tweaking, or a tool consigned to randomizing foliage and beards for sweeping vistas and bit characters); but the challenges are nontrivial, and tend to become more pronounced as they get 'closer' to the core of the game.
Arguably, at least some branches of science and medicine have some major overlaps(though the timescale tends to be longer because reality is stubborn and complex, and just gets worse the deeper you go).
Major credit accrues to those who develop new models that render the old ones obsolete or deeply incomplete, and discover new phenomena that require a course of study distinct from the old ones.
And, while there isn't any major risk of them succeeding themselves out of business, Team Epidemiology is always trying to wipe out one pathogen or another. It doesn't have quite the same finality as 'the singularity'; but that's mostly because they are chasing a bunch of moving targets.
I see MMO expansions someday taking this route to expedite content generation. Players complain there's not enough content? Drag and drop your quest generator with a bit of human tweaking and you're good to go. I'm sure some of the systems in Eve were generated partly through random generation.
It turns out that procedural generation is conceptually pretty easy; but making it good is much harder. Early videogames(from the era where memory and storage constraints were Serious Business) and demoscene stuff(where the constraints are wholly artificial; but that's the point of the exercise) are pretty much forced to rely on it heavily because they simply didn't have the option of storing canned content.
Today, though, you see games with substantially greater amounts of (not inexpensive) artists and designers thrown at them, and gigabytes of art assets, with hand-tweaking especially evident in places where the player is likely to look closely(eg. generic NPCs will be thrown together from parts, giving the world a varied population without requiring the art people to hand-model 10,000 different 'bandit' characters; but the risk of output that just looks a little off, or hit a few branches of the ugly tree on the way down, means that those critical NPCs that follow you around for half the game had their appearance nailed down precisely). The fact that artists are slow and expensive has created a demand for procedural generation tools, and quite a few exist(I'll just mention SpeedTree, purely because the phrase "SpeedTree for Games has been the gaming industry's premier vegetation solution since 2002" amuses me); but the problem of creating really good environments continues to be vexing enough that titles that can afford it throw a lot of humans at the problem.
Even the gun-nuttiest people I know subscribe to the 'Don't point a loaded gun at something you wouldn't be happy shooting. If you haven't verified that a gun is unloaded, it is loaded.' theory... One or both of those parents must have fucked up pretty seriously.
Lead is cheap and dense, which is very nice indeed(I can't think of anything offhand that comes terribly close on the cost/density graph, certainly not any nonmetals); but at least a few centuries of firearms survived without the luxury of rifling that actually worked.
Smoothbore muskets used cloth or paper wadding to, er, paper over the dubious fit between a round projectile and the barrel, some modern bullets with jackets hard enough to be a risk to the barrel use polymers.
It wasn't until Minie balls that 'engaging the rifling' became a feature that you tuned your lead alloy for.
Given that the muzzle velocity on something like this is probably pretty dreadful, the density issue would be a real problem; but a smoothbore design with polymer wadding would be doable enough, suckitude aside.
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave..."
A surprising number of 3d printing projects seem to have been born of the fact that the gutting of domestic blue-collar production means that we currently have a massive glut of geeks who want to make things; but who never had wood shop(and certainly not metal shop, heaven forfend!) in school, and whose fathers pushed paper for a living and weren't in a position to teach them anything about manufacturing...
There are, undoubtedly, applications for which 3d printed materials cannot be matched by any conventional technique(some of the 'sure, let's just print a highly detailed collagen matrix to build a replacement organ' stuff, or some of the single-piece geometry you can get, along with anything that rewards rapid turnaround on very small runs); but there are a lot of 3d printed objects that are essentially really bad plastic versions of something that could have been knocked together with the machine tools of 50 years ago, never mind fancy CNC gear.
(And lest anybody think that I'm criticizing from the outside, I'm actually in a pretty similar boat. My grandfather was a mechanical engineer, did it at work, had a pretty serious setup in his basement. We didn't live at all close to that side of the family, so I only really saw it when doing logistics after the funeral. Dad was mostly a white-collar numbers guy, with a little bit of hobby carpentry that tapered off after he had kids. My own education was strictly college prep, and my only machine-tool time was through a university, plus the online services.)