I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

I hear this argument against unionization all the time:

During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

Ditto. I started my linux journey with Slackware 1.0 that I got in a book. I quickly got tired of dual booting so I picked up a used 486dx66 on Craigslist. It even came with a green on black 12" CRT! I took a class and started hacking on the kernel to learn the innards. I fixed a semaphore issue, improved the task scheduler for performance and constantly rebuilt the kernel for performance (before modularized drivers were a thing). I learned not to panic from a kernel panic.

Slackware’s “package manager” was a notepad next to the computer. I switched to debian later and loved the whole idea of a package manager. Mostly because it was a trove of free software, but also because it would handle all the dependencies for me and cleanly uninstall (at a time when disk space was valuable).

Those were the days! Long live apt & apt-get!

For those too lazy to click through to the article and don’t know what an Ai Pin is;

The Humane Ai Pin is a wearable, internet-connected AI device designed to offer a phone-free way to interact with an AI assistant from anywhere.

I’ve installed much tile and tend to notice these things. Uneven grout lines, one tile set higher than its neighbours, uncaulked gaps visible between the tile and wall or tub. I also notice, bad kerning (SFW).

I have the same policy with public toilets. If you flush at the start to verify that it’s working and flush at the end then it’s double the flushes. That’s why I only flush at the start. All my coworkers complain, but they’re not concerned with the environment like me! So wasteful!

They touch on it in the article. What if the goal is to trade globally in cryptocurrency?

While this has been historically true, it’s not working this time.

But the dollar not only failed to strengthen this time, it fell, puzzling economists and hurting consumers. The dollar lost more than 5% against the euro and pound, and 6% against the yen since early April.

As with most things happening under this US administration, he pushes things to the breaking point to see how it reacts. He’s stress testing the global economy. From there, I would guess that he’d back off just before the breaking point and move on to something else.

It’s the only reason I keep a windows VM around. Windows is getting so naggy though. Every time I boot it up, it wants me to update it, install virus scanner and ser up my user on microsoft vs local.

I’ve had the same thought. It’s defeatism. I was told that protests help bring like minded people together to organize, share ideas and implement plans to change things. A person can’t change things but many people can.

What if just being there helps you feel hope again?

What does this mean? I had a friend who disappeared and was told by my parents that he was committed. When I asked for more, the details were vague and left me with more questions. What happens? My only perspective is from movies and I’m sure that’s completely wrong.

When filing paperwork, like in those hanging file folders, the papers should be placed into the folder with the paper’s left margin up. This way, any stapled pages can be flipped through as a bunch rather than individual pages. Also, the most important text tends to be left justified, such as the return address. Apparently this goes counter to every accountant’s training, but I’m sticking to it.

Now, as with any politician, he’s made some moves that i don’t favor, like one year there was a tax surplus, so he gave it away instead of giving it back.

Tim Walz during covid.

I saw that small businesses like restaurants wanted to close for the safety of their employees but the national chains wanted to stay open for profits. If individual businesses would have closed, they would lose business possibly forever. They needed the statevto mandate a closure to protect their employees and their ability to keep their customers. Walz declared a closure. I’ve spoken with almost s dozen local businesses who all feel the same.

Conversely, Walz allowed chiropractors to stay open because the state saw that they took some of the load off of the already overloaded hospitals.

Looking at all the bumper stickers and yard signs, he is quite unpopular, but I feel that he looked at the evidence (not the politics) and made a hard decision at the potential expense of his career.

Bonus, during covid, he had the best ASL interpreter on the press releases.

Obsessively. I’ve been driving German autos since college, including BMW’s and most BMW owners are jerks. The only exception is when I hung out with the local BMW club one summer. They drive crazy fast, but are some of the most courteous drivers on the road.

How do you feel about mandated helmets for children?

I was hacked years ago. I was hosting a test instance of a phpbb for a local club. Work blocked SSH, so I opened up telnet. They either got in from telnet or a php flaw and installed password sniffers and replaced some tools (ps, top) with tools that would hide the sniffer service they installed.

After that, I changed my model. My time lab is for learning and having fun. I’m going to make mistakes and leave something exposed or vulnerable and hackers are going to get in. Under this new model, I need to be able to restore the system easily after a breach. I have a local backup and a remote backup and I have build scripts (ansible) so that I can restore the system if I need to. I’ve had to do this twice. Once from my own mistake and one from hardware failure.

Same. I have spent way more time troubleshooting a pipeline than it saves. I like the idea of automation but laziness prevails.

I’ve posted this elsewhere (skip to paragraph 21 for the meaty parts). The short version is that the US demanded that trade partners implement protections for US companies in exchange for trade deals. Those trade deals are no longer present, so why don’t the governments reverse the protections since the US isn’t holding up their end of the bargain anymore?

Same. I have a weird box hoarding problem now. I keep all the original boxes for stuff because when I move, it’s best to put the stuff back in the original box. I haven’t moved in almost 20 years, but I still have the boxes. Also, I need to keep all those “good sized” boxes for stuff that I’ve ordered. My spouse will look at me weird when I pick up a box and say, “this is a good box; we should keep it.”