The year isn’t quite done yet. It’s a high bar to clear, but with the incidence of bullshit this year, a bigger turd may yet come along.

I mean, I don’t think any US politician could do so without it being career suicide. I don’t know Hochul’s policies, but she probably didn’t get the governorship by being an anticapitalist.

For state level charges, it would have to be the governor, right? Maybe the governor of NY could do him a solid.

You throw out large amounts of table scraps and leftovers daily.

But of course you make sure to poison them so the dog can’t eat it

You’re probably not. Even in the event that Hell is real and the Christian god exists, he probably has a sense of humour, and possibly quite a twisted one.

Also, I’m sure you’ve done worse things in his eyes.

Hear me out before you rage:

In theory? I believe that killings warrant investigation, prosecution and trial, no matter their intention, though the intention should factor into the result of the process. I want him to be prosecuted with the same intensity as any other killing would be, and if found, given a fair trial, convicted for whatever charge applies, as would be proper for a functioning judicial system. But then I’d want to see him pardoned as political expression of his popular support (and the fact that his victim was part of a deeply inhuman complex of exploitation).

In practice? I hope they never find him. Appropriate intensity of investigation? Orderly arrest? Fair treatment as prisoner? Fair trial? Fair charges? Fair conviction? Fat chance. Pardoned? Not even a chance.

I want him to go without punishment more than I want to hope for a fair process, and I couldn’t believe in the latter in any case.

Bitch, my boss is doing more for my healthcare.

Spontaneous Home Office because I caught a cold? If you mark it on your time sheet, I might have to reprimand you, so just don’t.

Doctor’s appointment with awkward scheduling? If it interferes with important meetings, we’ll have to see if we can make it work, otherwise just mark it in your calendar so I know when you’re unavailable, catch up the hours whenever.

Granted, it’s an office job and I’m doing good work, so he has little reason to object, but that puts him above Thompson already.

One of my two major projects is a long-term reporting system on a sustainability initiative to help managers figure out whether their unit is compliant (definitely not for control, of course, nooo… though they are expected to talk to their respective subordinates if their results deviate too much, which probably filters up the chain when a given higher level breaks down their subordinate units’ figures).

Probably a PR push (I swear, if I ever see a figure calculated by my model in the newspaper, my impostor syndrome is gonna thoroughly shit my pants for me), maybe a move to get ahead of competitors in the face of legal stuff I’m not in the loop about, but doing the right thing for selfish reasons is still the right thing.

The other project… Well, I’m trying to push for measures that prevent user-level evaluations, but it’s a kind of corporate limbo right now. I’m doing my best, but that’s not a whole lot in this case.

healthcare providers

I know this is indirect speech how they’d spin it, not your own words, but I fucking hate the way these vampires are spun as “providers” - they don’t provice jack shit except the rare case of “I provide the wealth to shoulder large financial burdens at once” (but we all know the fine print on that).

The actual providers, on the other hand, have to watch a mother’s entire world collapse when she’s told her child is gonna die because the treatment isn’t affordable and the insurance that made her come all this way to find an in-network doctor in the first place decided the kid should try Yoga or whatever bullshit.

What else do you suggest?

I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.

There’s a general argument - not strictly applicable to you, I don’t know you - to be made that a natural-born citizen of a given country is more likely to be loyal to that country than a “foreigner”, for lack of a better word, and more familiar with its culture and society. It makes sense then that a country would want to restrict their higher public offices to “their own people”. (How much those people actually care for the wider body of constituents is a different question, of course.)

Voting on local politics that influence you more directly isn’t the same as participating in federal politics. Musk is essentially a foreign actor, he shouldn’t have such influence over the government of a different people.

(He shouldn’t have any influence at all, actually, but I’m just talking about the “try to change the law so he can run for president” concern you responded to)

Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of “We can’t migrate where there’s nowhere to go” with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It’s not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow… and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.

Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don’t think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.

Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.

I use Linux privately, and haven’t had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I’m all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won’t work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.

But I’m both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that “industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing” would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.

And that’s not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we’re still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.

Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they’d start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I’d very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.

Like .ml admins cracking down on people suggesting that Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was catastrophe because it forced a political will ignorant of economic reality on a society violently robbed of the ability to resist, even terrorised into meeting their quotas at any cost? Or the fact that purging and suppressing all dissidents in the first place was cruel and authoritarian, a brutal abuse of power of the same kind as Stalin’s and (in this one aspect, at least) Hitler’s?

I’m a leftist to the bone, I recognise that a revolution without bloodshed wouldn’t have been possible at the time (and maybe never will be) and that a hard hand forcing fundamental changes to the political and educational system may well be required, but .ml has a well-known Tankie problem and they’re all too eager to follow in the steps of the boots they so love to lick.

Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.

(inb4 “Switch to Linux”: several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)

Anyone convinced they’re immune to propaganda, bias or plain human error is extremely vulnerable to being wrong and never realising it.

Relatedly: One of the easiest mistakes to make regarding fields you’re no expert in is to underestimate just how much there is to know that you don’t (or maybe nobody does). I’m very prone to that one, personally.

48% of those who voted?

Had one guy apply for a job in my field saying “My experiences in different field> will help me as <job title>.”

There is very little overlap in hard skills (soft ones obviously do help). Not like that matters a whole lot - their actual list of past jobs and skills would have landed them an interview at least, because we already expect it to be a learn-as-you-go type of deal. Bro would have been better off leaving it out and I would have just assumed they’re trying to strike out in a different direction.

(I told HR to invite them for an interview anyway, because fuck cover letters - I’m not gonna hold anyone to a higher standard there than I’d like to be held to)

The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.