wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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514

Joined

2 yr. ago

1. The Office (US) could have ended at the proposal in the rain.
2. The Office should have ended at the wedding in Niagara.
3. Dear god why didn't The Office end when Michael left?

The headline is more breathless than the story (what else is new?).

The prototype was put together by ELO, an Apple value added reseller focused on informational and ordering kiosks. No one would have expected this to be usable for general PC stuff.

Yeah the article touches on that, as well as the fact that some degrees have you making less (though possibly in a position that is less demanding of your time and/or physicality) than many people without a degree. It also specifically mentions that the benefits are now small enough that the chances of making more have to be weighed against the costs of not finishing or of taking on too much debt for the bump. It then goes into all the ways that the elite schools quietly keep up social barriers (Equestrian scholarships, anyone?). The other big thing is that a sizeable percentage of Republican-leaning people now dismiss college as being nothing more than an indoctrination camp, so that skews the numbers in a weird way. But then, as you say, it remains a basic hurdle to most office jobs or of course to graduate study, hence the rise of nonsense like Liberty University and the continued existence of the University of Phoenix.

We were fortunate enough to be able to invest in a college savings plan for our daughter (yay privilege!), but if we were starting from scratch, I would tell her to try to knock it out of the park in Community College for two years, then apply to a three-tiered set of schools: 2-3 elite places that will open doors (likely off the table when transferring in from CC, but worth it if you can pull it off), the 2-3 best public schools in our state, and 2-3 reputable schools that will be cheapest due to whatever combination of aid, proximity, and in-state tuition brings the bill down. Even with our plan, I'm going to strongly encourage her to use it at a place where it will cover total cost (e.g. 4 years at options 2 and 3 above, no private schools). There is just no more room for romance in choosing your college. Taking out massive debt to go to any place other than those networking factories is just not a prudent economic choice.

While their financial models are a million times more sensible, this is kind of how Europe works already. I'm exaggerating a bit, but if you don't get into Ox-bridge or the Sorbonne or l'Ecole Polytechnique, then you go to class in an office building somewhere near your flat and you get on with life without carrying crippling levels of debt into the workforce. There's no pining for the hallowed halls of Oglethorpe University or Siena College.

Now, it's been years since I wasn't WFH, but I've had an office, a cube, a right to park in a dying office's flexspace cube, and occasionally worked in bullpen open-plan stuff. That's also the order of preference: WFH, office, assigned cube (unless yours sucks), flex cube, punching yourself in the face, "open" plan.

Let's take the last vestige of personal space or signifier that your job is anything other than a knowledge worker assembly line and do away with it in the name of "collaboration." You will have no place for your red stapler or "Do it for Her" note, and you will be forced to do your work, which may be sensitive or may involve some trial and error, as well as putting any down-time you choose to take, on display for every asshole in the office who knows nothing about your productivity (as dangerous for the dedicated or ambitious as it is for the slacker). I didn't even like it when it was complete strangers at a coworking space.

Mostly agreed. It's also a label that conservatives who are not evangelical Christians and/or like drugs will apply to themselves. In that one sense, they can sometimes be easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis, but their entire political mindest is still a variation on "I got mine, fuck everybody else."

There's usually a healthy added spice of "and particularly fuck anybody who thinks studying a lot in college and putting in long hours at a finance-bro job where everybody looks like me means anything other than I'm a self-made man."

The digital signage/business displays are still at a premium, but the upcharge is doesn't have to hit 8x, though you'll have to supply a source of course, plus also a bracket or stand for the VESA mount. Maybe $200 premium to deshittify?

The interface is super dated for today’s standards but I miss it so much.

I still remember "AOL for DOS," which was really just the core functionality of the Windows alternative "GEOS," nerfed to only allow the AOL app to run. Teenage me had a guild on Neverwinter Nights and everything. Topped out at 8 people, IIRC.

Sure it was marketing speak, but Usenet's eternal September started in late 1993, and that's also about when AOL opened up their email to the internet. By late 94 there was a functional browser and they were effectively an ISP with extra stuff (that no one wanted anymore). In some ways, the "AOL is the Internet" angle was an admission that "the Internet" was what people wanted, and AOL itself was redundant. It probably did cause people to spend more on internet service than they needed, but it was already a rear-guard action, whether AOL knew it or not.

There is an undeniable tabloidy/car-crash element to the Murdaugh story, but it also says a lot about privilege and entitlement in American society.

Good suggestion, particularly for folks around here, but it's not exactly the same product category as a consumer offering. :-)

I read this in some other article, but it seems like the margins are slim for their hardware because while (IMHO) the interface is still best in a very poor class, almost everybody else does it more or less adequately, so they can't charge much of a premium. They've been making more money on their ad-supported streaming, both on-demand and their collection of all the free linear streams that you use to convince your rerun-loving gramma not make you climb into the attic to install an OTA antenna. The SAG and WGA strikes have done a number on how much advertisers are buying and at what prices. While I always wonder if there aren't other places to cut first (coughexecutivecompensationcough) I don't doubt that they're in a way worse place than they were a year ago.

True, but there's a certain set of STEM students who resent that their BS degrees are not simply technical certifications. The idea of college is supposed to be that you come out a well rounded person who had exposure to a lot of fields of human endeavor at a sophisticated level compared to high school.

Now, can we argue that not everyone qualified to pursue a technical subject needs a well-rounded education? Sure, but I don't want to work with or for those people. Even for someone who rolled their eyes through English Comp 101, you can expect that they've been taught how to write a damn paragraph and how to engage with a narrative beyond the surface level.

...for the most part, the teachers in the geneds did not give two fucks about what they were teaching...

...I had already learned enough that wasn’t directly relevant to my interests when it was free.

Chicken, meet egg.

That gag is cute, and I'm aware I'm killing the joke here, but it would have been funnier if it weren't for the fact that underpinning the "economic factors, both foreign and domestic" was just more slavery. The South was utterly dependent on it for their economic security and social identity, and it informed every decision their leaders made.

My mom (RIP) was a boomer born and raised in Georgia. In our house, we were taught that General Sherman was in hell right alongside Napoleon and Hitler.

If he is, it's for his handling of the Native Americans and bison and not for how he prosecuted the March to the Sea. The Confederacy was a boil that needed popping.

The squishy humanities version of this, in America at least, goes as follows:

In grade school you learn that the Civil War was about slavery.

In high school you learn that the Civil War was about a lot of complicated things.

In college you learn that the Civil War was about slavery.

GTFO! Clearly a drawing of a sanitary door hook. This is war!

Book purists in general are at least the definition of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think my "favorite" group is Halo fans. For some of them, you'd think their multiplayer centric FPS franchise and work-for-hire pulp tie-in novels were some glorious combination of Frank Herbert and James Joyce. The show was a bit silly and the plotline on the desert planet took WAY too long to say only a little, but it's a perfectly acceptable space opera show that took the aesthetics and basic setting of Halo and kept it completely recognizable.

I think you've confused my 12-year-old self with someone who knew or cared about nutrition or food science.

You could just feel the electrolytes being replenished, LOL. Plastic bottles are still fine, but it's not quite the same.