Back in the day, I used to grab any piece of paper, and then walk around the entire office with a slightly angry and urgent look on my face as if I was going to talk to someone important. Do a lap. Back to your desk. Job done.

Dell Latitude 5000 series are usually bought by corporations for employees. They are made of sturdy metal, and have features like backlit keyboards and physical trackpad buttons. Then, after 2-3 years, or if they have some minor problem, they end up in a giant stack that either never gets diagnosed, or just gets sent to recycling.

I have had fantastic luck getting a couple of these either direct from the company I'm working for, or from ebay or a company that recycles laptops. They usually don't actually have a problem, and if they do, parts are readily available on ebay. You can end up with a high-spec laptop from just a few years ago for practically nothing.

I got an idea.

Aggressively develop and move everything to non-fossil fuel technology. Share that technology with the rest of the world. Then, boom: Iran loses 70% of it's GDP, and everyone wins without any shots fired.

This was happening to some extent 10-12 years ago when I first signed up for Facebook. There would be an ad for Target and it would say "Your friend Jimmy Smith likes Target". And then I'd ask Jimmy if he follows the Target account on Facebook, and he'd say hell no.

This always seemed shady as fuck, and that was before Facebook got much much worse.

Americans continuing to buy things that they can't afford is why prices keep going up. If people buy it, it tells the seller that the price is correct.

So many of my iPhone fan friends have said "Oh, you finally made the switch, you're going to love it" after I recently bought my first iPhone.

It's a phone. It did not magically transform my user experience. It's 95% similar to what I had on a Pixel. Better low-effort privacy. Better direct hardware access for music and video. Significantly more lag, app freezups, and fragility and some baffling user experience decisions.

I would switch back again, or not, doesn't matter.

I talked to a business leader yesterday who said that their outsourced overseas developers were not performing well, so they were planning to directly contract some overseas developers, because then they would be "captive". And he proceed to refer to them as "captive developers" for the rest of the conversation.

Sir, you should not refer to people who work for you as "captive". That has a very negative connotation, and I'm shocked you don't hear it. Please at least notice everyone else's reaction when you say it.

I heard that motherfucker had like… 30 god damned dicks.

I did a tandem jump at my local skydiving place, and we hit the ground much much harder than I would have expected. I was bruised up for a month.

My tandem partner said: "Sorry about that. They gave us the worst parachute."

(⊙＿⊙')

That checks out. I live near a college town where for 2-3 years there was a rash of "college riots" where police tear-gassed everyone in the streets when they felt it was getting out of hand. The solution to keeping the students from rioting ended up being... stop sending cops out there. Everything was fine.

Show

Yeah, don't do this, and you should be fine.

Oh no!

Anyway...

From the Description:

Jan - Google fired 12,000 staff including their head of health and wellbeing

Feb - Google said employees must come back to the office and share desks. Bard (Chat GPT competitor) launches.

March - Google gave data to the police to help prosecute abortion seekers after Roe vs Wade was overturned. And they fired multiple staff after giving birth.

April - Google announces cost-cutting measures including cutting back on staplers. Google, Meta and X propose an alliance to combat misinformation.

May - South Korea fined Google for anti-competitive practices and Google continued to sell climate disinformation ads (after promising to stop).

June - Google replaces it's fired workers with "low-paid foreign workers" and donated to an anti-abortion Republican Committee

July - Google uses our data to train Bard and increases the cost of YouTube Premium.

Aug - Google offers staff an on-campus hotel room for $99 a night. And YouTube ads may have led to the online tracking of children.

Sept - Google Pixel Watches have no parts or repair program and Google Maps led a dad to his death over a collapsed bridge.

Oct - Google's AI consumes as much electricity as Ireland and Alphabet hired an underqualified man (who didn't even apply for the job) over a woman.

Nov - Google backs out of building affordable housing in the Bay Area and spent $26 billion to be your default search engine.

Dec - Google caught putting ads on adult websites 🌽 and McDonalds is using Google AI to test if your fries are fresh.

This may be unpopular to hear... but most of the justifications for not having roommates are like the ones in this thread. People say they can't have roommates because they have social anxiety or other people are just jerks.

To an older person it sounds like "My generation can't have roommates because we don't get along with other people, and they don't get along with us." That's not an economic problem.

It's actually far far more worrying than that. What happens to a generation that has no ability to coexist with other people? What happens to the world when they are in charge of it?

Surprised to not see anyone in here mention Movies with Mikey (on YouTube under FilmJoy). He does really thoughtful movie analysis with great audio and video production. He's one of my favorite creators.

He's also on Nebula for people who'd rather see a video edit that can employ fair use without being taken down automatically.

https://www.youtube.com/@filmjoy

I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.

Not to pick on you specifically, but I've never understood the modern generations' seeming aversion to housemates.

I had housemates from after college until 7 years later when I had a wife, starting in the mid-90s. My mom had housemates in the 60s after college (my dad had the GI bill, which afforded flexibility, but had other drawbacks).

It seems weird to me that people these days seem to think that's unacceptable. That's how people do it when they are just getting started. Either that, or they live somewhere less desirable, far from cities, small, old, crappy. Personally I did both... housemates in a rural area in a shitty place. :)

In January, I thought I was going to be asked to leave my job. In June they gave me a huge promotion.

I also just joined in the past month. You're welcome

I did because I was on a different Fediverse link-aggregating forum that was pretty quiet and getting quieter, and all the communities and threads I saw over there came from this instance. It just made sense to join directly so I could post and get proper notifications.

The supernova from Rexxit sent a lot of small pieces flying out everywhere, but things will start to aggregate back down to a few winners over time. I went to Squabbles, Kbin.social, and then Discuit... but now I'm just here and Discuit. I like Discuit's look and feel and users, but it's not super active.

I appreciate your advice here. I should have mentioned that I'm not really interested in maintaining a server myself.

I don't know enough about security to trust myself, and I don't want to troubleshoot things in my free time. I'd rather just pay someone to worry about all that, and I'm willing to take on the cost.