Punkie

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

I think this is one of the extreme examples of revenge instead of rehabilitation. It’s a prime breeding ground for control freaks who want to punish those that break the rules, and will stop at nothing to try to accomplish this by dealing out damage via a morality defense. And I think a lot of parents know this, at some level, as revenge for not conforming to their definition of normalcy. “Retribution for being bad.” Like mob mentality.

In the bible you get permission to declare your teenager wayward, take them outside the city gates and stone them to death.

I was like, “Really…?” But sure enough:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them. Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

… k.

Wait, didn’t spot become pregnant with an unknown other ship cat? This would imply at least some kind of free roaming.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Spot

In 2370, Spot became pregnant by one of the twelve male cats aboard the Enterprise-D at that time. Data paid attention to her health, including bringing her to sickbay for a check-up just before giving birth. (TNG: “Genesis”)

I checked a transcript, and saw this line between him an Barclay, implying not only that Spot “escaped,” but that there are other cats also loose:

BARCLAY: I’m curious, sir. Who’s the father?

DATA: I am not certain. Spot has escaped from my quarters on several occasions and there are twelve male felines on board. I intend to run a full DNA analysis on the kittens once they [he is interrupted by Picard on speaker]

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

We had a case not too long ago where someone “recruiting” for one of the GAFAM who was stealing PII by “accepting” applicants, getting their IDs and personal info for supposed employment, and when these people showed up for work, the real company had never heard of them. I think they got 30 people last time.

Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.

“Decline.”

Working in IT, I have learned that a lot of meetings are by people who gain “respect and notoriety” by having large meetings. It doesn’t matter who shows up, it’s the number, that makes them seem popular. “Get the engineers in here, this is serious business!” You begin to learn which PMs do this, and can respond (or not) accordingly. If they ping you “where are you?” you can say, “I am in an [client] audit call. I cannot leave this call while the audit is taking place.” Or whatever your industry equivalent is. YMMV, some toxic environments I have been in, this was not possible.

I remember one PM was frozen in indecision. I had to tell him, “I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one.”

“Well, both–”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“I need you in this meeting!”

“When we explain to the customer that the fix was delayed by an hour, I can use YOUR name, as having a meeting about it instead of fixing it, correct?”

“The meeting is to be about fixing it!”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“… we can have the meeting in your office, then.”

Eventually, my boss shooed him away.

“Decline.”

Working in IT, I have learned that a lot of meetings are by people who gain “respect and notoriety” by having large meetings. It doesn’t matter who shows up, it’s the number, that makes them seem popular. “Get the engineers in here, this is serious business!” You begin to learn which PMs do this, and can respond (or not) accordingly. If they ping you “where are you?” you can say, “I am in an [client] audit call. I cannot leave this call while the audit is taking place.” Or whatever your industry equivalent is. YMMV, some toxic environments I have been in, this was not possible.

I remember one PM was frozen in indecision. I had to tell him, “I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one.”

“Well, both–”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“I need you in this meeting!”

“When we explain to the customer that the fix was delayed by an hour, I can use YOUR name, as having a meeting about it instead of fixing it, correct?”

“The meeting is to be about fixing it!”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“… we can have the meeting in your office, then.”

Eventually, my boss shooed him away.

I remember hearing that some Hollywood contracts require that if you sign up for some studio, you must make X amount of films. Big stars get to chose those films to some degree, but once in a while, they have to do “a stinker” to end the contract as “X amount of films done, okay?” or something. Contractual Obligation and all. This film feels like a dumping ground of a lot of those contractual obligation hires from the trailer alone.

The weird thing is this is the exact argument many people give for socialized medicine: the wait times. “Imagine if the hospitals were run with the efficiency of the DMV. A,trak, or the Post Office,” meant as a negative slant. “Imagine if FedEx was the only game in town, and to mail letter was $10, and to receive mail and packages was a $25/mo service charge, plus fees for every item delivered.”

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as “…” (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you’d never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of “[program] service is already running” errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little “helper” script for years.

Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.

So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.

Oof.

Having bridged both worlds, here’s how they are viewed as described by a few people that stuck with me all these years.

The first one I “go to thought” was more than one person is “awkward.” Some even describing them “out of step, socially.” Imagine a clock that is running fast or slow, but you have mentally compensated because generally, you can adapt depending on other clues. But they are always off, and you might have to warn others ahead of time.

Another comment was how autistic personalities are in that “uncanny valley of behavior” where people notice something is off, and it can be frightening but they are not sure why. Since autism is a spectrum of behaviors, which approach depends subjectively on the viewer. Kids, for example, can target autistic kids, and because they are developing socially, will group in “us” and “not us.” Autistic kids are “not us,” and the target of bullying. A lot of teachers know autistic kids just by how they are treated by others. “You’re too weird,” was something a lot of kids might say with developing language skills. The may not know WHY they hate a certain kid, but know that they DO. And “something is wrong.”

Personally, I see autism as some kind of evolutionary response to a civilization that is growing faster that humans can compensate. In order to get actual insight, one has to be “out of step,” lest they just end up trapped in the normal static of everyday compulsion. Like any other evolutionary advance, nature is “trying out” various things. Most will lead to dead ends. A few will adapt in other ways, and some will flourish in a new niche with new types of diversity. I have no proof of this, but I think it’s more than “well, we define autism differently now.” Yes, there were always people who were “touched by fae” or whatever convention was explained back in the day, but something has really changed. I personally think this and gender fluidity is a positive sign of things to come.

Disclosure: I work from home and enjoy it immensely. I never want to work in an office again.

So sorry rich people are going to make less money off of their real estate investments, boo fucking hoo, how about adapting to technological and cultural changes better?

There is that, and some rich people need to be boiled in their own pudding. But this affects all downtown businesses, even mom and pop shops. People will just flee like urban flight did when people went to the suburbs. What’s left? I hear about “well, turn office buildings into residential space,” but the logistics of that with fire codes, building codes, and urban planning are not drop in replacements. They can be done, but at great cost.

We’re looking at an urban decay beyond what we’ve planned for. Minneapolis is terrified to become another Detroit or Gary Indiana.

While still a stupid thing to say, I am concerned that this quote was mildly taken out of context. It was made at a business luncheon, where he was addressing downtown business owners. I believe “you” in “you become a loser” meant “if people work from home, you downtown business owners become the losers here.” But yeah, “nasty cat blanket” is a classist and elitist statement from someone who has a stereotype image in their head.

Link to that part of the speech, sorry it’s from a FOX affiliate.

https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-mayor-says-remote-work-turns-you-into-a-loser.amp

Having moderated forums back in the day, I can answer to some of that motivation.

First, some people are just bullies. A sense of tribalism forms around bullies, who feel the need to act out and repeat the abuses they have endured. Hazing stems from this, too. Cruelty masked as “you should know better,” advice. Given too late.

Some have a smug sense of superiority, and want to keep it that way. Less smart people means they stay king of the mountain. Others are scared their own lack of knowledge will cripple them if they don’t keep the potential competition down. Insecurities drown out any sense of empathy.

Some people hate themselves so they punish others in retaliation. Like, trying to erase past cringe by making others hurt to even the score.

A few are sick of “the same fucking newbie questions again and again and again,” but still hang out in newbie forums for some reason.

really just doesn’t do what I needed to do.

This has been my experience, or sort of does what I want it to do, but I have to rethink what I need it to do instead of something really simple. Like a “new type of shared file system” that replaces NFS/Windows sharing. So instead of files in a standard file system one can manage with a file browser, it has “indexed” your files in such a way that the actual files are renamed into data chunks, and one “finds” files by their non-intuitive search engine that can’t do even basic search engine tricks like “AND/OR” searches, wildcards, and the results are hit and miss. “But it’s faster and more elegant!” So how do you restore from backup when the system fails? “When the system does whatnow?”

Yeah, no thanks. I can recover files from a file system much easier than some proprietary encoded bullshit fronted with a bad search engine over a proprietary and buggy index.