I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better
The_v @ The_v @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 539Joined 2 yr. ago
I have a friend who grew up on the coast and her family always sailed for fun.
When she got divorced she bought a sailboat and traveled for a bit in it. She then parked it at a marina and lived in it for so many years close to her kids and grandkids. She paid $100K for boat and her marina fees were $300/month. The boat was paid off with the divorce settlement.
The cheapest 1 bedroom apartment to rent nearby was $3500/month for less square footage than her boat. The cheapest small house was around $1,000,000 or around $6000/ month at the time. The homes around the marina were all priced at several million dollars.
It will grow up to be a magnificent steed to ride into battle with. Ask the Mormons about them the next time you see them.
He would never admit to it (I met him several times early in my career), but he was a very much a Shiva character to history.
His work destroyed thousands of years of landraces. The genetic pool that we desperately need in our race against the evolution of pests and diseases.
His work also hurt impoverished farmers in third world countries even more. As high yields drove down commodity prices. Industrialized nations subsidized their farmers to ensure supply further depressing global price.
His work fed billions and has been instrumental in reducing early childhood fatality rates.
His work also freed up massive amounts of income to spend on other things. As food prices fell other industries developed rapidly. Poverty and hunger are no longer causes by not producing enough food but from the greed and selfishness of the parasitic top wealthy people.
Made from a completely different species.
Sinapsis alba regular mustard.
Brassica juncea spicy mustard
Mustard the condiments is from the seeds of different species. There are two types, oriental Brassica juncea and white mustard _Sinapsis alba _ that can be used.
Brassica juncea has been cultivated for a long time. With lots of different cultivars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OR6A2
It's likely linked to OR6A2.
I had a coworker who had this gene and TAS2R38, the one that makes people taste bitter stronger.
We ended up on several multi-country business trips together every year. So we were eating all sorts of local cuisine.
I always tried to sit where I could see her face during any meal. It was comedy gold at times.
The place was a toxic cesspool at the time. An investment group had purchased 7 different companies and forced merged them in the space of 3 years and went on a massive hiring spree. The company I started with was 350 people. The company I left was over 4,000 people
It was an illegal layoff that I could taken them to court over. However the in-house lawyer knew what was going on and made them give me one hell of a severance package to stop me from suing them. I basically got everything I reasonably would have gotten if I sued.
That ended up being the most profitable year of my life.
My boss ended up CEO for a few years. It didn't go well. They have 1/2 the number of employees now and 50% less market share.
I am on my 3rd layoff in 10 years.
First one I had all sort of dirt on my boss who was kissing ass to climb the corporate ladder. I was a massive liability as I knew what a waste of space he was. They laid me off with some really week excuses and a years wage/benefits to keep me quiet.
Second one we got a new CEO who decided to make massive changes to the company "to make it more profitable". It hasn't shown a profit since and the layoffs are a yearly tradition now.
The last one was this past fall. Smaller company over-invested when times where good. Then the market turned around and they are in trouble. One of those small "family" businesses, me and 20 others got kicked out of the family.
So as of now I have my own business. I am on track to make 100% more than I ever have before working for someone else.
Just for shits and giggles I also have an interview tomorrow for a C-suite position in a tropical country. It's too fucking cold here.
Write a series of single query per e-mail.
Set then up on delayed delivery every hour through their workday.
It only takes once or twice until people read your entire e-mails.
My son's group in middle school hosted their own proxy overseas. They then pirated a whole bunch of educational videos that the teachers liked to use and made nice clean interface. The games pages had no direct links on the educational videos screens. They had to type in the the page directly in the URL.
So the teachers all loved the site and gave the official "approved for all students" bypass on the districts Chromebooks. The kids had uninterrupted access to all their games.
The kids were smart enough to keep the location of the games to students with a B or higher GPA. Most of the teachers turned a blind eye to them playing games when they did get caught. The games pages also had a home button that sent the students screens to a random educational video. I was truly impressed with their clever approach.
The IT department either never caught on or enjoyed the games themselves because its still up and they are all in highschool now.
Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20's at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It's not a generational thing, it's an aptitude and interest thing.
Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
Then use the library for the rest of the series if needed. :-).
How dare you suggest that we've all pushed out bad updates! I have never pushed a bad update out......
Of course I have never done any updates at all as I am not a programmer. However I have strong feelings on the subject.
I'll have to write a negative review, about a free app, that I use daily, and gives me all sorts of functionality, from an unpaid developer, who keeps it functioning as a hobby when he really should be doing something about touching some grass etc instead.
/S in case it wasn't obvious.
Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.
It started when the company I worked for had a policy against supplying dual sim phones. I have had my personal number for close to 20 years so I am not letting it up. So I carried two phones. At first I was annoyed but over time I got used to talking on one phone and using the other for notes and reference.
Now that I am self employed having the two phones is a habit with how I work.
I hit the point in my professional life when I just stopped asking for time off.
I started using phrases like "I will be out from July 15th to August 9.", "I won't be in that day.", "Sorry that conflicts with my schedule.".
For a while I kept getting random calls for stuff while I was on vacation. That's about the time I started carrying 2 phones. The work phone and laptop got left at home.
This is not that new.
Android auto would allow apps to play ads when the car was in park.
After using the ad support version of Pandora for most of a decade, when the full screen video ad popped up on my 2016 work truck, it was immediately and permanently uninstalled. I used 128gb microSD in my phone instead.
I've never used a streaming service for music again.
Tech tends to goes through stages:
A need or idea is created. Usually by a small independent entity.
A proof of concept is developed and starts to gain ground.
Investors pour money into the concept to an extreme degree. Tech grows in functionality, matures and develops into a useful tool.
The the investors demand a return on the investment and the money dries up.
Company either goes bankrupt or their product goes to shit.