I serve on my HOA and our President just called me and essentially cussed me out because I'm having a Q&A for people who want to run to be on the board because, in her words, "You could have just told people to come to me" and "You didnt ask for anyone else's input" despite the fact that I did and she just never responded to my email about the idea.
@BlackAzizAnansi I know a guy who got fined $400 for leaving his trash cans out too long. (He's a professor who was at an international conference.) He appealed the fine to the board at an in person meeting. He put costume eyes, nose, and mouth on the can and brought it to he meeting with him. He said he had nothing to say but the can did. He proceeded to do a ventriloquist routine where the can thanked the board for punishing the man who left him on the street for so long.
Climate change is making the symptoms of certain brain conditions worse.
Conditions that can worsen as temperature and humidity rise include stroke, migraines, meningitis, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s. #ClimateChange
@PadreWil@ClimateNewsNow People in the US with enough money and who are in more "educated" circles are taking as many as half a dozen overseas trips a year because they know that it will end soon. The abject selfishness of it all...
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think college graduations are a total waste of money and time. The real world doesn't GAF about if you took a long time to finish a project. The speeches are almost always forgettable pablum.
Our #aurora generating magnetosphere, a geophysical #UBI, an environmental, ecological, economic UBI we don’t even think of that billionaires and their pet economists say they are competent to substitute for.
Consider the enormity of their egotistical folly.
Even Star Fleet would choose a 7C warmer Earth or an irradiated nuked Earth over a Mars. Technology has nothing to do with it. Wisdom does.
The heat index that kills. I fear this year will be the year where heat index will cause food crises or derail the world’s factory for months. Not only the phones, tvs, toasters, ans washing machines, but the manufacturing machines and all their components in production and maintenance.
Will it be a trigger point that causes a major shutdown of the world economy for months on end?
@GhostOnTheHalfShell It's important to distinguish between heat waves and wet bulb events. A while back there was a heat wave in Europe. Tens of thousands died. The world treated it as no big deal. In 2022, it happened again. Again, no big deal.
In a wet bulb event, the heat index rises to where no person can survive. This is estimated to happen at somewhere between 30-35C. Not just the old, the sick, the young, the weak, but everyone will die without access to air conditioning.
"Writing something like this should be socially equivalent to soiling yourself in public, and yet a number of higher-ups in the SV/VC space (plus plenty or regular techies) seem to support this guy. It is truly disturbing."
@mekkaokereke Maybe some of the people who are against those things are against them because they know if women have those things, the women will not choose to reproduce with them or their sons.
@futurebird I didn't want to be on the jury because of the commute but when I heard so many other jurors trying to weasel out of it, I wanted to be on the case. I think they saw that and did not pick me.
People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.
You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿♂️
Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person
@mekkaokereke Over the years I watered my vocabulary down so that I could communicate with more people. Now I regret it because my own children will get fewer words. I have been "corrected" by people who are wrong so many times it would take days to list all of the cases I even remember.
Note to all people who read books: You are in a very tiny minority.
I love those videos where a guy cooks a big meal -- bread, steak, veggies, tea -- in the wilderness, with nothing but a knife, tea kettle, and a big flat rock.
... And the $50,000 vehicle that brought him to the wilderness, and ten grand of video editing equipment, and an entire global trade system that brought him his spices and oils and meats and veggies...
People watching that thing thinking, I'll be ok when civilization fails, I know where there's a flat rock.
@davidaugust The Free Market is better than communism because in communism everything falls apart, people have mental health problems, the population is apathetic and there is no money to help take care of people. Also, people feel an oppressive weight on them all the time. There is little opportunity to get ahead and only people with connections to the powerful can do well. Education and healthcare is rationed. The environment is destroyed to grow the economy.
Did I get the narrative right?
Writing a thread on onboarding here, because I don't want to write it in the other place.
Context:
Good engineer onboarding is DEI. Teams that have great onboarding, tend to be more diverse and inclusive. Teams that have poor onboarding, tend to be more homogeneous and less diverse.
That's because poor onboarding makes life harder for junior employees and remote employees. Underrepresented groups benefit disproportionately from remote work options. Junior employees are a more diverse group.
I read that 80% of those with imposter syndrome are women.
Managers can smell imposter syndrome a mile away. They then use it to manipulate the worker into stakhanovite levels of labor so the syndrome sufferer can feel they will not be fired the next day.
@harasurya@carnage4life When Douglas and McDonnell Douglas were still around, it was "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going." Boeing bought McD and the McD managerial culture took over Boeing, resulting in the slogan you posted.
@mina Yale law Professor Daniel Markovits discusses the management issue in his book The Meritocracy Trap. Once Upon a Time corporations promoted workers to management since they knew the work. Then, management became abstract and based upon "principles". Only people from high ranked MBA programs are worthy of being managers now. One of the CEO's of McDonald's started on the grill as a teenager. Those things do not happen now.
@mina Another book with a great perspective on this issue is David Graeber's BS Jobs. Basically, our society has evolved into managerial feudalism. Asking why managers need to make more than workers is like asking why the feudal lord should be able to take the peasant's crops. The whole point of a peasant is to serve the feudal lord. The whole point of a corporation is to provide managers with BS jobs. The workers, products, etc. are just there as window dressing for the real action.
@mina Another point. Look at the salary disparity in the US military. The world's most powerful and effective military force has generals making a relatively small multiple of what a private makes. Somehow they can deploy all over the world, operate billions of dollars of equipment, etc.
@pluralistic I am about to finish Red Team Blues but I can't wait to post this. It is a great novel. The best part is when Marty is taking the lives of people he does not know into his plans. He really cares about others. This is in stark contrast to other fiction where people are related as NPCs. When I first started watching TV I would see bystanders being affected and worry about them. I was told to ignore them because the show is about the main character.
@pluralistic Looking back, this was damaging to my development as a person. Everyone matters, not just some people.
I also like the dialog. The characters talk like real people who are very concerned for each other. This is also important because someone who is experiencing life through fiction because they are not able to experience enough real life due to circumstances needs to see how real people who are good would interact rather than fake fictional tough guys.
@pluralistic I am terrible at literary analysis but even I knew there was something about everyone telling Marty he cannot play on the Blue Team. I pondered it and eventually figured it has something to do with how we protect our rights and build a just or even just a livable world.
“In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away”
@pvonhellermannn This is happening in Southern California as well. The Palos Verdes peninsula and south to San Diego has huge numbers of very expensive houses. The cliffs they rest on are succumbing to physics. The residents and politicians seem to think that physics will be stopped by taxpayer money.
@luckytran "In the long run, we are all dead."
-John Maynard Keynes
He meant it in a different context but since the long run is now defined as anything anything beyond the next quarter, the quote works for COVID and the economy.
@GossiTheDog A great way to get ahold of classified military technical information is start a dispute about a system like a plane, tank, ship, or missile being over or under modeled in an online video game. The dispute rages until someone gets the real data and posts it. James Bond is now on the dole because his work has been outsourced to raging gamers.