As a kid, I never got that concept because it seemed like being manipulated. “I dare you to do this dangerous thing for my amusement!” Uh. No? “Chicken!” Okay, whatever, dude.

I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.

This sounds kind of sad, but bear with me. This was c. 1976-1980.

My father was mostly absent, but I prefered his neglect to his abuse, so that was okay. He’d go on business trips a lot. My mom was an alcoholic, and sometimes she’d be passed out for days. I grew up an only child in a suburban home, and some weekends a year, I had the house to myself. From age 8-12, I had a few weekends here and there where fortune fell upon me and I’d be alone in the house with no real responsibilities. Friday night home from school to Monday morning going to school, all I had to do was check if my mother was still passed out, and if so, it was like one long vacation from my life to be myself. Bonus if there was still food in the house, which usually there was something I could cook myself.

I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, except sanctioned PBS shows, but we had a small B&W TV in the kitchen for my mom’s soap operas and cooking shows. I’d drag up all my Legos, pour them on the kitchen table, and watch “illegal TV” all weekend while building stuff with my Legos. Eating when I wanted to, or not, and I had free reign of pretty much anything there.

My positive childhood memories are scant and few, and most are just things like that. Like “sometimes the sun came out, if only for a brief time, before the storms returned.” I have a lot more as an adult.

This is something that influences a lot of culture. Like most people when they think of style and decor in the 1980s, are thinking of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The rest of America was not always neon pumps, leg warmers, and thin piano ties.

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

We had a case not too long ago where someone “recruiting” for one of the GAFAM who was stealing PII by “accepting” applicants, getting their IDs and personal info for supposed employment, and when these people showed up for work, the real company had never heard of them. I think they got 30 people last time.

Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.

“Decline.”

Working in IT, I have learned that a lot of meetings are by people who gain “respect and notoriety” by having large meetings. It doesn’t matter who shows up, it’s the number, that makes them seem popular. “Get the engineers in here, this is serious business!” You begin to learn which PMs do this, and can respond (or not) accordingly. If they ping you “where are you?” you can say, “I am in an [client] audit call. I cannot leave this call while the audit is taking place.” Or whatever your industry equivalent is. YMMV, some toxic environments I have been in, this was not possible.

I remember one PM was frozen in indecision. I had to tell him, “I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one.”

“Well, both–”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“I need you in this meeting!”

“When we explain to the customer that the fix was delayed by an hour, I can use YOUR name, as having a meeting about it instead of fixing it, correct?”

“The meeting is to be about fixing it!”

“No. I can fix the problem, or having a meeting about it. Pick one or the other.”

“… we can have the meeting in your office, then.”

Eventually, my boss shooed him away.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

In the late 1980s, I had a roommate who graduated with a business degree and got recruited for a government contractor right out of college. She packed up her life and moved to the DC area. A month into her new job, the contract was pulled. But because she had a clause in the recruitment contract, they couldn’t fire her. But they had no work for her, either. So she had to come to work every weekday, 9-5. She’d sit at her desk with nothing to do. They didn’t ask her to look busy, just present.

She read about 3-5 novels a week. Over the next few months, we watched her get more and more depressed. She’d complain about her situation, but it fell on deaf ears. “Must be nice,” people said in jealousy. “Get paid to do nothing.” She became despondent in the lack of people’s sympathy. “Nobody understands how much this sucks!”

Eventually, she got a new job. Her mood vastly improved.

I’ll never forget that lesson. People need to feel useful, productive. Sitting at a desk with nothing to do, no purpose, no validation. It will destroy you.

I have not done this for Youtube, but I have done it for tech reviews as a ghost writer. Basically, a lot of those tech reviews done under a pseudonym in magazines. No, I won’t tell you which ones, I like getting paid. Anyway, I’d say about 40% I had to send back in a set amount of time, about 50% I am told to destroy or keep, and 10% they don’t tell me and won’t answer my queries. Reselling is almost always a huge no-no, and that also applies to giving stuff away.

Sounds fun, but some of this stuff is utter, unworkable crap. So many SBCs that never see the light of day, or have the most impotent release announcements on the planet. Like, “this is set for release Jan 3rd, 2024.” Then it’s not ever mentioned on any main page on their website, is listed as a .gz image in their repo (which is on gdrive), but only one release candidate and it’s the same one you reviewed where the wireless chip just randomly stops responding until you reboot. Maybe has a byline on their products page under “this power adapter works with [list of models, including the one they don’t have for sale on the same site].”

I have two HUD displays I got in 2022, which look amazing, but the screen never powered on (which is why I have 2, they sent me a replacement, which was broken the same way), and I am considering at this point making them some cosplay item or taking it to a rave, because it glows super sexy. But with no working LED screen, kinda useless.

The Silver Spring Transit Center. https://ggwash.org/view/30613/silver-spring-transit-center-is-unsafe-everyones-to-blame

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

They had a multimillion dollar transit project near where I loved, like $112 million to replace a train station, a subway stop, and a major bus terminal to combine them into a single entity near Washington DC. They projected 3 years from start to finish, but it took almost 7. They had to reroute the entire bus terminal to surrounding streets and parking garages, which was a traffic nightmare. People using the train station or subway had to reroute their walk sometimes up to a mile off their present walk. While doing demolition, they found that the previous bus terminal was on the site of an old gas station which had been improperly sealed off: they just filled the tanks with concrete. Underneath that, they found tons of the the natural mineral serpentine, which naturally contains asbestos. So now they had a biological hazard which they had spent the last few months blowing up with dynamite into the surrounding city. After that was cleaned up and sealed, The got underway.

There were a ton of other mistakes, but when it was completed, they found defects. The superstructure is made of concrete and thus construction specifications were replete with engineering criteria for the composition of the concrete, and its pouring, curing and tensioning. The Inspector General systematically examined 22 project management and control points from the time concrete was mixed until the time it was ready for final inspection. 14 of 22 control points that should have minimized defects were weak or ineffective. Those defects may require recurring engineering inspections, higher maintenance costs, and they could shorten the planned 50-year useful life. In addition, the IG described the risk of concrete falling onto transit-center patrons.

The entire thing was a huge boondoggle costing the downtown untold millions into the future.

Correction: he has a great deal of coffee cups. It might be an issue where he doesn’t use a trash can.

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

Watson and Crick ends with the breach at 23andMe

• The grandson of an amateur naturalist rejects the church, and hooks up with a Southern Chicago native, resulting in a breach of intricate personal human data the scope of which could be disastrous.
• A boy nicks a ticket punch from a bus operator, and now I have to attend mandatory training on social engineering.
• Someone figured out how to store electricity in rocks, and now democracy is being threatened by liars

Man, so many of my friends, who were high-functioning illectuals nerds like me, ended up is really terrible situations: bad marriages, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and they never grew out of the ideation of a teenage mindset OR they became really bitter victims of their own prison. Now they are in their 50s, and nothing’s changed. For the few friends I managed to keep all this time they ended up “doing okay” or better, I am grateful. Hell, a lot of my punk and goth friends did better on average than my science fiction nerd friends.

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”