I think it was just more that his job was incredibly stressful and unfulfilling and he was sick of it.

Another time he pulled me aside and said something to ge effect of, “you need to get the hell out of here and go make something of yourself. You do NOT want to do this for the rest of your life. Trust me.”

There was plenty of wisdom I ignored during my teen years but I heard that little nugget loud and clear and I actually listened to it.

When I was a kid, my first real job was at a well known big box store. One time a customer stops me and asks where something is in a department that I’m not familiar with. Back then there were no handheld computers for easily searching inventory.

Customer becomes angry when I can’t find what he’s looking for so I call the assistant store manager on duty for help. Manager comes over and the customer proceeds to tell him just exactly how stupid he thinks I am.

The manager – whom I will call “J” – was a miserable, gruff, chain smoking SOB who is like 6 months from the end of his 36 year career. But he stops the customer mid-tirade and says, “Now wait just a minute. We’re happy to help you find what you need but JubilationTCornpone is a fine young man and one of our best associates and I am not going to stand here and listen to you talk about him like that.”

The customer leaves in a huff. “J” looks at me and says, “Just because the ‘customer is always right’ doesn’t mean they get to treat you like shit. He can go to hell. We don’t need his money.”

I never really liked “J” because he was a pain in the ass but he earned my respect for that.

Past poor decisions have taught me this:

Don’t do anything you’re going to have to lie about. If you do, don’t lie about it. If you do, make it right as soon as possible.

I have plenty of problems in my life but a guilty conscience isn’t one of them.

On December 15, 1953, led by Paul Hahn, the head of American Tobacco, the six major tobacco companies (American Tobacco Co., R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, Benson & Hedges, U.S. Tobacco Co., and Brown & Williamson) met with public relations company Hill & Knowlton in New York City to create an advertisement that would assuage the public’s fears and create a false sense of security in order to regain the public’s confidence in the tobacco industry.[12] Hill and Knowlton’s president, John W. Hill, realized that simply denying the health risks would not be enough to convince the public. Instead, a more effective method would be to create a major scientific controversy in which the scientifically established link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer would appear not to be conclusively known.[13]

The tobacco companies fought against the emerging science by producing their own science, which suggested that existing science was incomplete and that the industry was not motivated by self-interest.[11] With the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, headed by accomplished scientist C.C. Little, the tobacco companies manufactured doubt and turned scientific findings into a topic of debate. The recruitment of credentialed scientists like Little who were skeptics was a crucial aspect of the tobacco companies’ social engineering plan to establish credibility against anti-smoking reports. By amplifying the voices of a few skeptical scientists, the industry created an illusion that the larger scientific community had not reached a conclusive agreement on the link between smoking and cancer.[11]

Internal documents released through whistleblowers and litigation, such as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, reveal that while advertisements like A Frank Statement made tobacco companies appear to be responsible and concerned for the health of their consumers, in reality, they were deceiving the public into believing that smoking did not have health risks. The whole project was aimed at protecting the tobacco companies’ images of glamour and all-American individualism at the cost of the public’s health.[14]

A Frank Statement

Putting aside all the late stage capitalism going on here, I still can’t get over the fact that Alphabet (Google) spent billions of dollars developing self driving car technology only to arrive at, “Oh shit. Someone left the car door open. What do we do now?”

Eons ago, I had a guy bring me a non functioning Compaq desktop and say, “Wull the fan was makin’ a lotta racket so I greased it.”

What he actually meant was, “I sprayed the entire motherboard with WD-40 because I don’t know shit about computers OR lubricants.”

I gave it a bath in electronics cleaner and it actually fired right up after that.

You forgot the incredibly expensive scam that is American “healthcare”.

Back in the days before cell phones, when landlines were ubiquitous, people in more rural areas had what they called “party lines.” It was a single telephone line shared between multiple houses. You knew which house an incoming call was for based on the ring pattern. Your neighbors could also pick up the receiver, very quietly, and listen in on your phone calls if they wanted too.

Party lines are long gone but Internet communications have their own ways of being “listened in on.” A lot of traffic transmitted over the Internet is encrypted; with TLS for instance. But, some of it isn’t. If you use traditional DNS – UDP over port 53 – everyone in between you and the DNS server can see which websites you’re visiting.

I’m not concerned about my privacy because I have something to hide. I’m concerned about it because my personal business is my business. Not anyone else’s.

You’re not still living high on the hog with your stimulus funds?

/s

When it’s the right tool, it’s incredibly useful. When it’s the wrong tool, and it often is, it racks up tech debt at an incredible rate.

Don’t even need to spend that much. Trump accepts fake peace prizes.

I’ve been seriously thinking I need to go back to therapy. Thanks for the motivation!

Honestly? The last few years have been like a slow motion Trainwreck. My wife developed serious chronic health issues a few years ago and I’ve been unemployed for almost a year and a half. We’ve gone from being in a very good financial position to being virtually bankrupt. It has not been a good time.

The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.

Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.

Oh, they’re pissed. But they would still vote for him again. Because at least he’s not a DuMbOcRaT.

I once worked with an SVP at a huge corporation that liked to engage in “bike shedding”. This guy is like seven rungs above me on the ladder and is trying to tell me what fields each SQL table should have.

Then we got a new department director who was very good at keeping upper management distracted and off our backs. Lots of people in middle management don’t justify their own salaries but I would argue that he sure did.

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Only if it can also be a microservice.

I’m all for corporations and the wealthy paying their fair share of taxes, which they often don’t.

However, revenue is not income and gains on investments are unrealized gains until you sell your shares and withdraw the cash.

If I’m reading Tesla’s income statement correctly, they expect to pay something like $1.4B in taxes on $5.2B in income for 2025. Figures calculated using fuzzy pre-coffee math in my head and may not reflect any reasonable accounting standards

Just because someone collects data doesn’t mean that they’re using it for a particular purpose. I’ve worked at orgs that archived gobs of data - not necessarily user data - “in case we find a use for it.” Possession of data does not guarantee possession of a particular insight.

I’m not saying that no one at Google knew. Just that it’s far from impossible.