Nope, this isn’t real, I’m high as balls and back a decade ago when AdultSwim did the SmartPipe joke informercial, I’m just hallucinacting being in 2025.

Yep.

Just really high right now, certainly not living in the pedophile toilet future timeline.

… wha?

Is this thing basically Navi, but broken containment, broken through the 4th wall?

Well I won’t be having any kids… never wanted them, can’t affors them anyway…

…but if I did have kids, who lived with me and supported me in my old age, I’d be humble and grateful for their help, and recognize that declining cognitive ability is just a thing that happens as you get older.

I’d call it reaping what you sow.

I had the feeling man (don’t know your gender but I mean it as a term of solidarity)…

I had the feeling that your situation was significantly worse than just IT problems.

I’ve managed to be in basically the situation you are in, once with a family member, another time with a partner.

Definitely look into how the formal process for being declared her caretaker works in your state/county.

Theres a good chance that there’s some kind of non profit group in your county, or pro bono lawyer or some kind of legitimate body that can help you through the particulars of how that works.

Definitely get as many relevant, official ‘i am her caretaker’ statuses and/or required evidence of such lined up before you try to start with the power of attorney stuff.

Getting durable power of attorney / living will / whatever your particular locale calls it, that’ll be much easier if you are already her caretaker.

… But yeah.

You’re not screaming into the void on this one…

I hear you.

Don’t try to do a million things at once, don’t completely do a 180 overnight and start bossing her around right off the bat… take the time to move through all the red tape correctly.

3, full, deep breaths, all the way in, hold for 20 seconds, all the way out.

I’d give you a hug if I could.

Tell her you’ll fix it if she gives you power of attorney.

No, I’m not joking.

If you are having to spend 8 hours to figure out how to help her manage her basic affairs, if you are constantly teaching her how to use a password manager and she cannot figure it out, she has diminished cognitive capacity.

If she has already delegated you to be in charge of all her account logins, she’s basically already given you de facto control over them, already acknowledged she isn’t capable of of managing her own affairs.

Gather a bunch of other evidence that she has trouble with basic tasks, can’t reliably perform basic household activities, manage finances, whatever, approach a lawyer and get the power of attorney document(s) drawn up.

EDIT: // Holy shit, just saw your other comment:

Well I also cook everything, grocery shop and fix everything (basic electrical, plumbing, woodworking, installations, etc).

Yeah, you are already functionally her caretaker.

Depending on the state you’re in (assuming you are in the US) you might be able to actually get yourself certified as her caretaker without much or any actual input from her, before you pursue power of attorney. //

This solves the cut out problem.

…

After that, explain your solution:

Print out a big list of all those passwords and logins for her.

Meanwhile, you’ve got them all as well, presumably you can just use her password manager and have access to it.

If she resets a password and can’t figure out how to log back in, fix it back to something you know, but don’t let her use this account for one week.

After a week, print out a new list for her with the new password you’ve set.

If she resets another password while in a 7 day timeout period, well now it’ll be two weeks for both passwords to become available to her, etc.

This may sound like too much, but she’s a cognitively diminished entitled brat, who has already conditioned you into being a doormat who is expected to waste a seemingly endless amount of time and effort to solve problems she creates, problems that people without a live-in technical support agent pay hundreds of dollars to solve.

She will not learn if she has no impetus to. She’s obviously used the ‘tough love’ model on you, use it back on her.

If she complains about this, doesn’t matter, you have power of attorney, send her to an old folks home, sell the house and move to an apartment, or rent a room out if it or something.

Yep.

I have been expected to solve tech problems constantly, constantly blamed for when further problems arise due to others undoing what I fixed or not following my instructions, expected to undertake large tech oriented projects or research that take up significant amounts of my time, for no benefit to myself.

And when I am unavailable for whatever reason, my family members and friends would pay an hourly wage to other tech savvy family members or friends to do what I was negged into doing for free… and of course they would usually do it in a far sloppier, less efficient, more expensive way or even fail completely, yet still be paid.

… along with many other instances like this, I eventually realized that basically everyone I used to know was actually a gaslighting, narcissistic, exploitative piece of shit with insanely hypocritical double standards, and just fucking ghosted everyone and moved halfway across the country.

Woops!

Turns out I have CPTSD!

As seen on the back of the New Orleans rampager’s blood spattered carnage truck.

‘Affirmative Voice’ is not really a thing, as far as codified English grammar goes.

They may mean active voice:

Active Voice: The soldiers shot the man.

Passive Voice: The man was injured by the soldiers’s gunfire.

Or they may mean to simply be affirmative, as in, polite, reassuring, informative, non-confrontational, etc?

Or, if you take ‘voice’ to be the more technical definition within the realm of phonetics, they could mean that you should be pronouncing consonants and vowels in a manner that they personally find affirmative…?

Anyone who is telling you to ‘use an affirmative voice’ is ironically being vague and not really demonstrating a great understanding of English themselves.

It would be less confusing if they said something along the lines of ‘phrase your questions in a non-hostile, affirmative manner.’

English does not have a formally defined ‘affirmative voice’ the way that it does with ‘active voice’, ‘passive voice’, ‘reflexive voice’, ‘reciprocal voice’, etc.

Its one of the US’s three main social credit score companies, that determines your ability to rent or buy a home or car or get a job by selling your credit data to companies that perform background checks on you, background credit checks which you pay for.

I mean DUH, obviously it is impossible to have any objective morality without appealling to my own personal, internally inconsistently defined God whose written word I am certainly interpreting correctly after being filtered through tens of thousands of writers and editors and translators through thousands of years, whose objectivity morality also ‘works in mysterious ways’ whenever it seems contradictory!

Its simple!

Who are you to challenge God’s word?

Is the C stick actually a second analog stick, or is it basically just an 8 way pad with a stick on top?

But this isn’t a small improvement.

The DEI policy was already in place.

When that got enacted was the improvement.

This is just not a step backward.

A step forward would be something like… we’ve restructered into a democratically run co-op, in a tri cameral structure, your costco membership now grants you a vote in something approximating the US House of Representatives, employees now all get votes in some higher authority body approximating the Senate, and then the board of directors acts as a multi person executive branch.

They marketed the headset as being able to replace the functions of basically everything an average person uses a laptop/pc, cellphone, and tv for.

People routinely use computers and tvs for many hours at a time.

People routinely spend hours on their phone and basically always have them in their pocket or nearby.

They showed people wearing the things in planes, to watch 2-3 hour movies.

Sitting down in their (strangely TV-less) living rooms to watch 2-3 hour movies.

Doing … some kind of work you’d do on a laptop, but easily being able to keep the things on, kick a ball around with your kid, and then seamlessly go back to working.

Wearing the headset as you are unpacking at a hotel, and then taking a video phone call with them.

Not the thing ringing, you putting the headset on, and then taking a call.

No, you’re just already wearing the headset, having just arrived in a hotel, implying you just had them on as you took your luggage up to your motel, like a hat.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IY4x85zqoJM

Taken as a montage, you certainly get the impression that you’re encouraged to just wear the thing all the time, anywhere, that its an ‘all-device’ that replaces a whole bunch of other devices, and is easily used/worn in many settings for long periods of time.

Sorry, no.

I mean, you’re right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.

Not sure if you’ve somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.

Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software… mandated their employees return to office.

There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:

1. Middle managers and up basically realize that their lifestyle suffers if they don’t have the ability to micromanage people in person.

Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.

2. Commercial real estate.

If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.

This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.

Can’t have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash… in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.

… We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.

It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.

Those things don’t make C Suite see line go up next quarter.

… git?

Like… git hub, git commit?

???

Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?

I don’t think so.

That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.

We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…

…but we are not.

So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.

Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…

But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…

All vehicles become more expensive.

If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…

The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.

So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.

So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.

No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.

They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.

Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.

In the US and Canada?

Car dependency / Car centrism.

Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.

But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.

The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.

Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.

Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.

Similar stuff has happened to me.

Here’s a rough template of an input questionaire in MSFT Forms, its not actually ready yet as we haven’t set up the actual place the inputs will be recorded, nor set up a way to mirror it into our actual database that our entire intranet uses.

Come back after the weekend, dummy questionaire has replaced the front end of our old system, meaning we’ve just functionally not logged about 72 hours of requests for assistance from the homeless, during a blizzard, and COVID.

After this, our webmaster / marketing director, this woman who earns a quarter mil a year… straight up told me, in an email, she does not actually read anything I write in my emails to her that requires scrolling.

She’s very busy, you see.

When she asked me, unprompted, in an in person meeting, if I could ‘implement the blockchain’ in our (PostGres, not that she knows what that is) database, for ‘security benefits’, I wanted to strangle her to death, but settled on collapsing my head into my hands, then looking up and saying no, that would make everything extremely inefficient and make it much more insecure.

She says, oh really, are you sure about that?

Yes.

Ok then well I guess that wraps up this meeting (shit eating grin) keep up the good work!

… I no longer work in the tech industry.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/kamala-harris-tax-plan