is that a meme or did you accidentally butcher the term “ponzi scheme” which is something entirely different? not saying insurances aren’t often a scam. just a different kind.

Musk pretending he cares about rail while in reality his worst recurring night mare is him being in public transport with poor people. Classic.

and so it begins

So I can’t speak Russian? That’s rough. I guess I’d try to stare everyone down until they get nervous and leave. Sometimes nod when people talk to me, sometimes just walk away from them. Oh no, he’s giving me the silent treatment they’ll think. Better not make him mad. Let them worry about the windows. Meanwhile I plan my escape through South America to LA where I live as a not-Putin impersonator. Hide in plain sight.

When I was an intern in IT in the olden days a manager once decided to send an apology gift to every single employee for his botched project. It was a switch from analog phones to VoIP with Skype that really wasn’t so complicated but left a bunch of people without working phones for days. The gift? A snickers bar in a big paper bag with a sticker on it. I had to put three hundred stickers on those bags and then hand them to people who were very confused to find a tiny snickers in them. Now they told me to hand it out with a smile and tell them we’re really sorry but I’d hand them out with my best I’d-really-rather-be-somewhere-else-face and say “trust me, nobody finds this more stupid than me.”

It was when his (step)Mamaw got stuck in the washer that he truly learned he wasn’t gay.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies. A blanket term for anything protecting your identity (Onion, VPN, etc.) I feel like the people asking for this either have a very limited technical understanding of it or completely different motives. You can’t ban encryption. What they could do is ban VPN services from officially operating or certain protocols but that would mostly hit your regular user.

Sign or not this is pretty much how cyclists are supposed to cross most big intersections and the inconvenience of it is the reason so many of them break the rules. If you make rules that are too complicated, counterintuitive or inconvenient people will break them.

High availability and security are the bane of IT infrastructure jobs. It makes me anxious to think about my MSP days when I’d sit on my couch on a Saturday fully aware that I’m one phone call away from having my day, weekend or even the next two weeks ruined because some customer CEO has full domain admin rights and would give them to anyone who’d ask on the phone or via email.

Same here when it comes to food/taste. I criticised vegan mortadella(mostly water and oil) at some point and people absolutely lost it. Got some angry DMs by vegans explaining the concept of enjoyment to me. Not doing that again.

The amount of bullshit jobs that exist is insane. So many people in offices that either don’t do anything or barely anything. Then even more who could easily get all work done in half a work day. Then a gigantic amount that could easily do their work in 4 instead of 5 days or 6 instead of 8 hours. I’m typing this at work because of all the downtime I have and I still believe I get more work done then most of my colleagues.

I think the idea would be to have machines replace people wherever possible and then have multiple people split the work time where it isn’t. Why does one farmer have to work 24/7 if two could split the work and actually have a life outside of work?

The dumbest thing is the mentality between workers sometimes. “Don’t be a pussy” some will say when you ask for masks/goggles/ear plugs/etc but none of them will be there when you eventually get injured or sick. None of them will congratulate you, hand you a tough-guy-trophy and pay your medical bills + pension.

Alright how about this: mandatory health insurance for pets. This could have multiple positive effects. People wouldn’t carelessly get pets without considering the costs as often. Any insurance would ask for very high rates for any of the incredibly defective breeds people keep buying. I know people find that flat faced pug funny/cute but they literally can’t breathe ffs. This might lead to less demand and less breeding. Vets and their customers wouldn’t have to worry about costs so much which would take a lot of the stress out and make many currently difficult decisions a lot easier. As a responsible per owner you have these costs either way.

Oh you rascal, you know we can’t stay mad at you.

When I was in 7th grade I was given the honor of “paper duty”. The fuck is that you ask? Well, our school was giving out free paper-anything (think notebooks, folders, anything a kid could need to write stuff for school) to every student because no student should suffer from his poor family background and a lack of writing utensils. Fantastic concept if you ask me but it had an issue back then. The unlimited power of the paper kid. As such your job would be to hand out paperproducts to those who needed them for the entire school year. How this hasn’t been abused until shithead teenage me came along is a mystery to me. I took a lot and I handed it out to friends, filled up a closet at home and would slip notebooks to kids for personal favors. The corruption was absolute. If I liked you a simple nod would be enough to get some juicy paper ware. If I didn’t care about you, you’d have to show me your full old notebook to get a new one as was protocol. If I didn’t like you I’d give you some anyway but not before breaking your balls for a bit. I was drunk on paper power and loving every second of it. In hindsight I feel very bad about abusing a social system intended to help kids like myself who didn’t have wealthy parents but with 13, growing up poor as fuck I’d take everything I could get. Anyway, at the end of the school year they noticed how many supplies had vanished despite no increase in students but they couldn’t tell who had taken more because guess who had the responsibility to fill up the paper closet with new paper from the unsupervised storage room? They just handed us all the keys and let us do our thing. My thing happened to be paper embezzlement. End of the story was an overhaul of the paper duty concept. From that year onwards it was done in teams of 2 who had to promise not to take anything and keep a detailed inventory spreadsheet that was checked once a month. Additionally only the teacher had the key to the storage room. The moral of the story is that no 13 year old should wield that much raw power.

There are plenty of games like this from the last few years. Elden Ring, Zelda, TLOU2, GoW2 just to name some AAA titles. Many indie games too. It just got a bit more annoying to filter out the cash grabs.

My parents would watch a channel that had little pro Russia news segments thrown into commercials. The damage this constant little poking with misinformation does is not easily undone. They didn’t even notice how their opinion was formed by those few lines in-between their favorite shows. Then suddenly they had issues with their satellite dish and when I fixed it somehow, for some totally unknown reason that channel was no longer there. Woops. They found other shows to watch and don’t support the war anymore.