CentipedeFarrier

How many members do you think the union actually has? You are probably dramatically over-estimating, cuz IT types seem allergic to the idea of unions for whatever dumb-fuck reason. considering people pay dues to be in unions, the more people, the greater chance of most members being employed and the less bad it is for everyone. And how many of those union people are single income households or otherwise unable to meet most of their needs from savings and stuff?

Cuz like this isn’t like unemployment, which most laid off people are already getting. This is literally a survival fund. Funds like these provide support to fill gaps to keep members from ending up homeless or dead. I’ve used similar, admittedly non-union, programs that I qualify for, and it’s not like a ton of money. You tell them what you need and why, and they give you exactly what you ask for and not a penny more. And every additional ask is a new request, usually, one that you have to justify.

Why would it need to cover their salary? It’s a survival fund, it helps you survive until you get a job again, so rent or mortgage and food, and probably not much else. Thats considerably less than what they were happy to work to make, so the fund can stretch much further. Im sure they are also hopeful that it won’t be needed by each person for an entire year. It appears to have been set up by a union, so they are also probably only supporting union members this way, which is fair imho, and they have an interest in helping them find work as quickly as possible, but it also means this probably isn’t the only emergency fund income source they have.

Your link in this comment doesn’t seem to be working. The prior one did though.

Actually, depending what the flies actually do inside that might indeed be relevant.

I live in the Midwest and I get these flies called cluster flies. They usually only come in in the fall when looking for somewhere warm to overwinter, but I’ve had them other times as well.

They aren’t like houseflies in that they wont really reproduce inside the house, they mostly hang out near windows. I wait for a lot of them to build up on the screen, close the window most of the way, crack the screen open a bit (storm window) and go outside to open the rest of the way.

But once everything is closed up for the year, any left behind just die.

If those are what you’ve got, you probably wont be able to stop them getting in without completely ruining the insulation and humidity profile of your place, especially if its an older place which aren’t neatly as airtight as newer ones. They will get in through any ducts going outside, cracks under your siding that aren’t sealed, you name it.

Best you can do is get rid of them when you get them.

Roku, in my experience, likes to break apps every 3 months to force you to reconnect and reinstall them, so pihole works, I’ve had one for years, but it didn’t work very well for Roku, unless adblocking is your one and only concern and tracking doesn’t matter to you. I assume it’s the window where they can still get fine-detail logs.

This might be out of date info; I have had mine off the internet for years at this point, but it’s because of that crap.

Based on getting progressively better each time I played through one of the horizon games even with months or years between them, I’d say yes.

When I first started, I was awful with aiming and stuff (shooters have never really been my thing, I’m trash at aiming, horizon is JUST far enough from a full-on shooter that it piqued my interest and held it solidly), now I’m playing actual FPS/TPS because my skill and muscle memory in that regard has improved substantially. Enough that I got platinum on both horizon games. :)

Local dude here stopped running for office due to death threats against them and their family… small, semi-rural, conservative town, the most important decision for which is… idk, tbh. Can’t honestly imagine why anyone would threaten someone here.

Which makes me want to run for that position instead. Fuck you people, I don’t have a family to worry about, and I’m not all that worried about dying myself. Solid chance I won’t even know about them since I don’t use social media, and barely check my mail… they’d have to actually act on the threats for it to rise to a level I’d notice, and boy oh boy would I love that. Talk about publicity for the campaign for doing nothing!

Were they, though?

Whats really sad is… genuinely every town I’ve -ever been to- had a train station. Most of them have been converted into other things, the rest torn down. But they were there.

We had the whole system of rail already spanning most of the country. And stopped maintaining it. 😭😭

I rode a train for the first time last year because it cut the worst part of the drive into/out of a big city off, and wasn’t -too- expensive. So instead of dealing with a car in a place I’m not comfortable driving, we parked where I was comfortable and took the train the rest of the way (appx 2 hrs, if there had been a closer station to board we’d have used it, but had to drive 1.5 hrs just to get to the train), then walked. Could have also used the local light rail once we got there but didn’t need to. I fucking loved everything about riding a train! From not driving, to not driving, to holy shit it’s a train, and even not driving! Best trip, and I wish it were practical to make all of them that way. I hate driving.

Horizon zero dawn future coming sooner than anticipated.

Stupid questions don’t bother me as much when I can be assured they who are asking them at least made an attempt to figure it out on their own first.

You know, I kinda low-key hate this. I get why it’s your thing because I’ve also worked various retail and service/hospitality jobs, but still. I usually go out of my way to avoid having to talk to employees, but sometimes I don’t have the time, or my pain flares up and I lack mental energy to do that. In especially the latter case, which is getting more frequent, I just ask someone rather than spending 45 minutes looking with pain-glazed eyes that pass right over what I’m looking for. Same thing if I go to huge places I don’t normally go to. It’s absolutely, no question, a gigantic waste of my time to even try to figure it out rather than just ask someone who works there to look up where it is and point for me, 3 minutes tops. They don’t know where it is either, what hope do I have to guess right?

This is one of those “you don’t really know what someone is dealing with/has experience with” things. And it sucks on both ends, but at least from my experience in those roles, it helps to remember that retailers of all types have a nasty habit of changing store layouts periodically with the specific goal of making regular/frequent customers wander around looking for things they used to be able to find, just so they can briefly make more money on impulse purchases. They’ve even done studies to see how often people are willing to tolerate these layout changes so they can maximize it further. Maybe retailers shouldn’t keep forcing customers to use their whole brain (remapping, which will take multiple trips at full brain power. The effort also fatigues a person, which reduces willpower to resist impulse buys) for what should be a minimal-brain activity (routine habits exist to decrease mental load), and you wouldn’t have people who don’t want to further engage their brain just to find the pie crusts that used to be right here, damnit. The frequency with which they do this encourages people to just ask rather than look because it happens so much they’ve learned it’s probably not worth the effort. A form of learned-helplessness.

I can feel the overwhelm set in whenever I walk into a store to discover a changed layout, sometimes months after it happened. Half the time I just leave because I’m not prepared for that much effort, and I have the luxury to do so because I’m the only one impacted. If I had kids to feed or something the entire equation shifts dramatically, and I’d be in there, zombied, asking annoying questions.

The brain stops developing at age 23.

No it doesn’t. The brain continues to develop and change throughout the lifetime of the organism.

No worries, those services are pretty hit or miss for me as well.

Thanks for the link, I’ll watch this later today :)

Do you have a link to it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, so idk what to look for.

The only windows pc I still have is my laptop, which has touchscreen and fingerprint scanner. I’m sure both of those things can be worked around (most distros seem capable of touch support at any rate) but I genuinely don’t know what I’m doing trying to make that happen so it stays for now. I use it for one and only one task, so it’s not the absolute worst but I’d like to be rid of it anyway because omfg why does it need updates every single time I go to use it??

My other three computers are on Ubuntu (gasp the horrors!) It’s what I started with back in 2018, and Debian is the only base I actually know any commands for even if it isn’t very many. Plus it’s stable and does what I want out of the box. Except it didn’t register the finger print scanner when I tried. Maybe it would with a bunch of tweaking, idk.

Depends who they define as “customers”, probably. The little people using the stuff aren’t customers, in their eyes.

I don’t know about this device specifically, since it seems a bit too specialized for plausible deniability and I’m not really sure what the regulations surrounding this specific market are, but a lot of times not being available through insurance is actually an effort to keep costs down for the uninsured and underinsured, as medical devices are regulated much more strictly than things which can be purchased by anyone who wants one, and meeting those regulations and undergoing testing and whatever else is super expensive.

All those weird “as seen on tv” gadgets are that sort of thing, where you go “who is that even for?” because they show able-bodied people using them so as not to imply the thing is a disability aid.

They still lock down features, as of like maybe 5 yrs ago. Idk about today specifically but I wouldn’t doubt it, if only because most people don’t realize that it’s locking something the OS can do by default.

For example, if you have a major brand phone (smaller brands that don’t have contracts with phone companies are unlikely to have this issue) with OEM OS, on a plan in which you pay separately for the WiFi hotspot feature, even though it’s built into your operating system, hotspot is locked and you can’t access it.

This is even true if you buy your own device, I discovered, and was very very very angry about. Enough that I switched providers, because fuck that nonsense.

Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!

I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.

The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus. It was one that used an escape key to exit because it was interactive. We didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place, but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers, and don’t even know what a BIOS is… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working… which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.

We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.

Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.

Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.

It never “just worked”.