I had a pretty fucked up childhood and hadn't spoken to most of my family since 12-13 aside from funerals. My wife got an invite to the family Christmas party of Facebook and decided it would be good to go. The night before my mom called and told me that one of my uncles was trying find my other uncle so he could kill him, which is pretty par for the course.
We go to this Christmas party, I'm nervous and playing out all the ways it could go horribly wrong. What do you know, no one is drunk, there's games for the kids, almost everyone there got gifts for my son and we even got gifts for our second on the way. Not a single altercation that I saw, not even a casual "fuck you". All of the alcoholic, mentally ill, rage filled relatives that I remember are now old, properly medicated and mostly sober.
I felt like I was in the twilight zone. My wife came up to me at one point and said everyone's so nice especially that guy and I had to tell her he once beat the shit out of me with a bat, breaking my leg and cut my shoes up with a knife all because I left them in the middle of the floor and he tripped over them.
It was absolutely wild but not in the way I thought it would be.
This is how my job is. If something goes horribly wrong after hours we get a text, but if I'm not at home doing nothing already then it has to wait and I'll get to it when I can, and that's expected.
In exchange we get to sort of do what we want and leave early whenever. Yesterday I took off at lunch and went sledding with the family. I only ever use my PTO for actual vacations or days where I'll be completely unavailable.
I personally love it, I would love on call pay too but that freedom to take my son sledding on a snow day without having to lose pay is incredible. There's only ever been 1 emergency issue in the past 2 years that I've had to hop on after hours to take care of.
My first Christmas living here when the fireworks we're going off in the middle of the night I called the cops for the first time in my life. Turns out Joe used to be a cop in the next town over and all my neighbors already knew he was basically immune. I ended up getting a noise complaint because of my dogs, as the fireworks were still going off on the street behind me.
I for the life of me don't even care about 4k. 1080p to me is as good as it gets, sometimes I watch shows in 720p and occasionally even 480p if it's a significantly smaller file.
Every holiday with fireworks I have to stay up ridiculously late to keep the dogs calm and soothe my toddler back to sleep multiple times.
We had a crazy thunderstorm until about 11:30 that kept my son up extra late. I hate thunderstoms but thought at least there won't be fireworks. 11:31 ole reliable firework Joe around the corner was out there doing his thing and it seems like he doesn't plan on stopping soon.
Also firework Joe sets off a ridiculous amount of stuff at 12am on Christmas eve.
A few years ago I went to visit my mom around Christmas, I picked her up and we were heading over to my grandmas. On the way, while my 1 year old is screaming in the back seat, she asked if she could run into a store on the way.
When we got to my grandmas she gave me the bag that she had just bought, store logo on it and everything, no hiding a thing, that contained 1 roll of camouflage themed duct tape, and a pack of trash bags.
I had told her earlier in the year that I was using trash bags and duct tape to block the windows in my garage while I was doing some renovations in there, and so she got me trash bags and duct tape, almost a year later...
I still appreciate that she got me anything at all and there was at least a thought behind it even if I don't understand that thought.
I don't think an uprising is going to break out tomorrow as an immediate reaction to his actions.
But at the very least he got a lot of people talking and thinking. People who a year or two ago would call someone "complaining" about the health conglomerates and the way we're getting fucked crazy.
I was that person called crazy, and now my whole family, neighbors, friends, coworkers are fucking pissed and finally waking up. People who I never thought would.
It certainly doesn't stop at health insurance, we're getting killed from 100 different angles. But he got people talking.
Might be an unpopular opinion but, this sounds really exciting to me. I hate fidgeting with my phone and always have been super interested in a true AI type assistant type thing.
It's a shame no one should ever trust this, regardless of what company makes it.
That's interesting to hear. I started out as a web dev and made quite a few transitions until I got the title software engineer, bounced around a few companies until I settled at my current job and since I got that first salary job have never been asked. I even did a short stint of security work a company that had a decent amount of government contracts when I was desperate.
I honestly didn't think they were still a thing outside of maybe directly in government positions.
Not your main point but for the past few years I've spent half of the months sick. I got a cold 3 weeks ago, everyone else in the house is better, my throat is still halfway swollen shut, my nose is a broken faucet, my heads still filled with helium. I'll start feeling better just in time for the Christmas party where I'm almost certain to get sick again.
I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me and got a bunch of test done, got a nice ~$800 bill and haven't been able to get in touch with the doctor since. I missed 2 calls from them about a week after my tests and since has been calling in a couple times a month to find out if there's something up but I keep getting "the doctor will call you back later".
I would like to assume the fact that no one is calling me back means I'm don't have anything seriously wrong, but I still would like to know for certain.
I highly doubt it, if the store is too busy they'll likely either do nothing because why would they or if it's really bad add some robots who can handle the workload so they can get rid of those pesky employees.
In the past few years almost all of the fast food places in the closest plaza to me have been working on a skeleton crew. Lines wrapped around the building, 2 miserable employees, upset customers, but the money is still coming in.
Most people can't just leave their job, even a days wage can crush a lot of people.
That worker doesn't want to be there, that's likely one of 3 jobs they need to barely scrape by.
You holding them up from doing other tasks they need to do to keep a job that barely feeds them is doing nothing but making their day a little harder. It affects the company 0%. The company is faceless and doesn't care how much you abuse the worker bees as long as they get your money.
I don't know what the answer is aside from not patronizing the company at all, but I know that's not it.
I did a thing once where everyone brought a gift and some game was played and if you won your round you got to pick the gift you got, or something like that.
The person who picked before me got 2 crisp $100 bills, the person after me got airpods. I got... A painted rock, I was so excited. It was the only gift that someone put actual effort into and wasn't just a quick buy.
Not that I would've been upset with $200 but I still have that rock sitting in my garden
That's always a possibility especially when every company under the sun is making smart things on a whim for as cheap as possible. I don't trust any of them as far as I can throw an oven.
I have a few random smart things, but before I connect them to the internet I make sure they have a decent api that I can use, block external access from the router and set up a little interface so that I can VPN into my home and control stuff if I need to. So in order for anything to be compromised my whole network would have to be owned. Which is still possible but I trust that a lot more than letting 20 different apps for each device have access to anything in my home.
I can totally see a point in some of the features.
The other day my wife and I got 20 minutes from home before I said "oh shit I don't know if I turned the oven off". Turns out I did, but we had to drive home to check. I would have loved to pull up an app that told me it was actually off, or even if I was on be able to turn it off from there.
With that said, it's not worth all the extra bullshit in my opinion.
I had a pretty fucked up childhood and hadn't spoken to most of my family since 12-13 aside from funerals. My wife got an invite to the family Christmas party of Facebook and decided it would be good to go. The night before my mom called and told me that one of my uncles was trying find my other uncle so he could kill him, which is pretty par for the course.
We go to this Christmas party, I'm nervous and playing out all the ways it could go horribly wrong. What do you know, no one is drunk, there's games for the kids, almost everyone there got gifts for my son and we even got gifts for our second on the way. Not a single altercation that I saw, not even a casual "fuck you". All of the alcoholic, mentally ill, rage filled relatives that I remember are now old, properly medicated and mostly sober.
I felt like I was in the twilight zone. My wife came up to me at one point and said everyone's so nice especially that guy and I had to tell her he once beat the shit out of me with a bat, breaking my leg and cut my shoes up with a knife all because I left them in the middle of the floor and he tripped over them.
It was absolutely wild but not in the way I thought it would be.