• 2 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • I had to read up on that to know what it was about. While I’m all in on unions and collective bargaining, I’m not keen on Communism as a political approach. the original idea was a plausible answer to the woes of the struggle between groups of people, but it does not acknowledge that the problem is human behavior. Specifically, a portion of the population that will always seek dominance, regardless of the means or declared ideology. This is what happened with Communism. The assassination of the white revolution in order to insert the red revolution is class 101 in that fact. The United States’ founders understood this, which is why I’m still behind the checks and balances approach to power.

    Yes, it eventually is subverted and must be re-established (sometimes forcefully) but it is as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the rest.



  • Aha, okay. It would have been redundant to put that in there since we had just gone through that process together. I’d also mentioned my reservations in earlier emails.

    Thanks for explaining it, it didn’t occur to me. You are right though about alternatives. He’d actually offered to seek another way, but I was emotionally unable to accept that at the time due to all the effort already sunk. For me it was cutting my losses, and I might have done myself a disservice there.


  • It comes from knowing how the tools work. AARP has job campaign workshops where they help redesign resumes to first be successfully read, and then include the exact keywords the seek. Then it is up to you to carefully study the job description to modify your resume to match the needs, while remaining honest, of course.

    This, you do for every job. Basically, it’s okay for businesses to lean on AI and automation, but applicants are cheating when they do that. Hypocrisy at its most pure.




  • In some respects, I feel ADHD works well with software engineering and hyperfocus can be a superpower. However, increasingly the barriers to entry explicitly require behavior that disqualifies ADHD at the door.

    Asking me to give a concise, accurate, and confident answer in something I haven’t thought about in a year, under pressure, generally results in spectacular failure. Ten minutes after the meeting, however, I can recite nuances on the topic most people never consider. Too bad there’s nobody to hear it.


  • You are channeling my feelings. In this case, the instructions said Firefox or Chrome, but it had to be Google chrome, since that’s the most invasive and Firefox was not working. It’s when he said try Chrome that I finally said to myself, “what the fuck am I doing?” And ended it.

    I hate cloudfare. I use vpn so about 30% of the time I’m banned because some asshole use that IP for bad behavior. Usually fixed with a reconnect. However, the other 70% of the time I have to “prove I am human”. It’s exhausting.

    I was eager to try Qubes a few years ago, and toyed with it. At the time it was not playing well with windows and setting up the is templates looked a bit annoying, so I dropped it with intent to revisit after a major version or two. I think now is a good time to pick it up.












  • Old enough to be unemployed due to ageism. I started saving for retirement from my very first post college job. It still isn’t enough. Not because the math doesn’t work, but because other factors like two divorces and two houses “lost” along with years dealing with one spouse who didn’t understand money and another who embezzled $100k with no consequences cost me dearly.

    I’m close enough I can go for a few years and take a lower paying job to bridge until social security… except that’s only paying out 60% starting the year before I am eligible. So, yeah… GEN X: Ignored, forgotten, and screwed over. Just another day.


  • If they had me go somewhere to use their equipment, which is pre-verified and working, I’d have done that, but I’d still feel the sense of low-level disrespect. I get it, though. Lots of bad actors out there. I learned recently about all the North Korean spies trying to become remote software engineers and being caught (eventually? Not sure the timeline). So I do understand the concern on the business side. They just need to deal with it humanely. We went for at least 200 years with in-person interviews and did just fine. If one can’t trust the remote process, then they should come to grips with it and hire locally. At least the multinationals have offices all over the world so they could do it.