You may be right, but I think you can have those examinations and comparisons without necessarily falling into complacency. I think that only happens if the forces driving you are mostly external.
716 karma · joined August 21, 2021
My point was more just being aware of how we sound to others who don't even have the opportunity we have. But maybe our vocal opposition can inspire them. I don't know. This is a very emotionally charged subject and maybe I should have kept my attempt at nuance to myself.
I'm not. I have repeatedly and continue to voice my opposition to RTO specifically, even directly to the VP. I can do this because if I get let go, I can easily find other work, and some of my coworkers can't due to restrictions on their lives.
Elon Musk is a slimy snake that seems to be dead set on becoming a fascist dictator. No fan of him. Actively avoid his products.
But it's odd that merely advocating for taking a moment and considering how we sound to others and maybe that their situation is different gets me lumped in with Musk. I didn't say "we all need to go back in the office in solidarity with the security guards." I was just saying I feel weird complaining about it around them.
Yes, some minimum wage workers are there because they chose to be, but I don't believe for a second all people living a more difficult low-wage life are doing it because they failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as someone in a different comment said. America does everything it can to remove those bootstraps for less privileged people, and I'm just saying I think it's wise to consider that.
We should all be working together against the corporate overlords and fight for better rights for all, up and down the chain. Let's just not think we deserve so much more than others while we do it.
So I've always been concerned for them. But I understand your point.
I would argue that you, as the intellectual elite, are only leaning into and confirming their bias, and that perhaps a good way to begin to help reform the anti-intellectualism of America would be to try to have compassion for the people far beneath you, like the security guard. Otherwise, those people could have even greater anti-intellectual mindsets.
It's also a little odd to me to be willing to persecute or punish through inaction adults for their actions as children.
But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.
It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.
There are tiny little condos being built next to my office in northeast ATL that are going for a STARTING rate of over a million.
I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.
I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.
One of the nice things about Openstreetmap is that it doesn't do that weird behind the scenes manipulation.
I guess this is just offloading the liability and responsibility.
I refused to do it because I didn't like where I saw it going, but another coworker did. Unsurprisingly, the person who got the most email and sent the most email was the Sysadmin whose email account was set as sender for all the automated emails from the various servers, as he would literally email himself hundreds of alert emails a day, on top of all the crap newsletters and digests he subscribed to.
On the other hand, all of your coworkers asking you to not do something that could potentially impact their jobs, and you do it anyway as a hobby project? Sounds like kind of a jerk move.
I drank a ton of soda when I was a teenager. I got a job at 15, and realized that we lived close enough to a grocery store that I could easily walk there, so I would buy several two liters of soda, a few bags of chips, and then I would stay up until 3 AM playing Age of Empires 2 or Red Alert 2.
I put on 60 pounds doing that over three years and I've never been able to shed it.
I cut out soda for my twenties, but I have started drinking ginger ales again because I used to have a cup of coffee at 3 PM to help with the afternoon slump, but I wasn't sleeping well. It's not a hard choice, even knowing how bad this pure sugar water is for you. Stressed, overworked, exhausted, your body craves quickly available energy. People need a vice.
But I still hate that I'm drinking them, and I still blame soda companies for the weight gain.
Constantly moving around and tugging on the charging port seems like asking for a port replacement in a year. Is there a reason people who want to have their mouse plugged in while it's charging don't just use a wired mouse? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious.)
I know I sound like the oldest gamer here, but I miss the ratchet and clank style games. Long enough to be engaging, very replayable, but not a full-time job.
Now, if I waste $60 and four hours on an abysmal game, it's $60 that I could have used to take my kids to the movies, get takeout for my wife and I, or any number of other things. Same with the time. Five hours is time I could have spent cleaning the house, working on my side projects, etc.
I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
That said, not all new games are terrible. Dredge is a game made last year that was absolutely phenomenal in my mind, and well worth the cost and time. Spent way too many late nights fishing in that game.
On a more serious note, I'm really feeling like it's safer to buy dlc and updates for old games than new ones. I was one of the people who freaking preordered Kerbal Space Program 2, thinking it would be amazing and so excited for a new KSP. And then it was such a dumpster fire, I haven't played it more than a dozen hours. From a pure ROI in playtime vs cost, I've gotten literally nine times the value from Factorio then I have from KSP 2, and twenty times the value for KSP 1 (my most played game). And I still play both of them regularly.
Why risk wasting $60 when I know these old games are still good?
I moved to Bitwarden years ago (as a paid subscriber) from LastPass after their breaches and everything went to hell there.
And Bitwarden HAS innovated, or at least evolved with the times. They support passkeys now. They've had security key support for a while. They allow you to save your OTPs (though the wisdom of having your OTPs for MFA and your password in the same entity is questionable). I use their secure file send every other day. Password managers don't have to stagnate any more than any other applications.
I'd say this guy should just install Keepass or Passwordsafe on his PC.
It sucks that Bitwarden is apparently moving away from open source, but I'll probably stick with them for now. LastPass and their competitors aren't even pretending to be friendly to the open source community.
I also keep a backup of my Bitwarden vault in KeePass on my PC, and a plaintext version on an encrypted drive, just in case.