Punkie

I find them too windy and noisy half the time. They are also wet half the time, either from condensation or recent rain.

Cats can pant, I have seen it happen in times of extreme stress, and is often a bad sign. Like dogs, cats may pant if they are anxious or overheated. Strenuous exercise may be another reason, especially after a huge fight. Once your cat has had a chance to rest, calm down and cool down, this sort of painting should subside. However, even this type of panting is much more rarely seen in cats than in dogs. So, if you’re not 100% positive about why your cat is panting, it’s best to bring her to the vet.

A side note, however, I misread this as “since cat’s don’t like pants like dogs,” and wanted to point out that dogs also do not like to wear pants, before my anti-dyslexia medicine kicked in.

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.

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.”

Not just LinkedIn profiles: there was a case out here near DC a while ago where a well known company leased out their function space for training meetings. Using a compromised company account, a set of scammers set up some fake recruitment profiles, leased out the meeting space for “software training,” and did some “mass hiring” where 30 individuals had their credentials scanned and duplicated. The effect was someone from the recruiting company was contacting you, you had a face-to-face where you got offered an in-person, you showed up to their offices, and got a “job offer pending a background check,” with a date of hire in official-looking emails. You sent in your SSN, copies of your passport and driver’s licence, and after a few weeks, they tell you to show up for orientation. Only, the day these people showed up, the company was confused and had never heard of you. The people you supposedly spoke to had never heard of you. And your identity was stolen, and huge loans and charges started showing up in your credit report.

Yikes.

“… I was now… a fem-MAN!” [Orchestra music swells]

Hah! It’s so true.

Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles

In my rare cases, it’s been one of those issues where I didn’t know they were keeping it from someone BUT it’s something that should be obvious if you thought about it for a second, OR, they claim they told me it was a secret, but it was not obvious. And I have to say, “At no point did you tell me this was a secret.” Which, you know, makes them look WORSE because now it looks like it was not only a secret, but they were intentionally covering it up as well. And then somehow that’s my fault. It becomes a game of “he said, she said,” and I lost some friends over that over the decades. Was I right? Yeah, but that’s not the point.

The problem is people lie all the time. I do my best, but sometimes I don’t get those clues. And sometimes? I have had people lie FOR ME when there was no need to begin with. Like someone tried to “cover up” where I was some evening from my wife, when my wife knew where I was (a goth club). But then he claimed I was with him, and I wasn’t. So that started a whole mess. I had to explain, “I was still at the goth club, he thinks I was with him, because he thought you weren’t supposed to know I was at the goth club, and ‘was doing me a solid’ for no reason.” It got to the point I told everyone, “Never lie for me. Either I can stand on my own actions, or I deserve to get caught for being stupid. I am not someone who can keep track of things that actually happened, much less lies.” Lies make me panicky because, well, like I said earlier, I have accidentally exposed people.

I try not to. But I make mistakes.

I rarely get angry at anyone, which, sadly, means I didn’t gain the skills to deal with it very well. Thus, if someone DOES make me angry, it can linger for YEARS. The record so far is some 50 years with my parents’ abuse, followed by a few friends’ betrayal as a teen (separate incidents). I have about half a dozen incidents where I have been seriously fucked over by people I trusted, and hate my continued anger over it more than I hate the event itself.

I found, however, patience has its own reward. If you’re the type of person who really fucks me over, and it’s definitely not my fault, eventually your behavior will fuck yourself in other ways. I don’t “get revenge” like some cartoon, but years later, I’ll find out, “Yeah, that asshole? After her did that thing to you that took you years to get over, his super-special kid went to jail, his wife left him, his business tanked, and last anyone heard, he’s living with him mom (whom he despised) in his 50s with zero prospects for his future.” If you fucked me over, but it’s partially or wholly my fault, then, well, I deserved it. Sometimes I make mistakes, like screw someone’s lie over by revealing a secret I didn’t know was a secret. I try super super super hard not to do that, even if I hate their guts, or the lie needs to be told for some esoteric moral bullshit (like cheating on his wife I didn’t know he had). But I try to keep my nose clean. I try not to gossip when I can help it. This also helps to know “I did my best, given what I knew.”

Nope, came here to post the same.

Similar for me: when my hearing started to go in my 30s, the doctor said “you already know how to lip read.” I didn’t believe him until he showed me “am I saying ‘top’ or ‘cup’?” and if he had his mouth covered, I couldn’t tell which one he was saying.

I grew up with pretentiousness like this. Lot of upper middle class twits who wanted to be upper class. I used to get their goat with a kind of backhand kindness.

“You know about ABC?” Where ABC is a question about a topic he claims to be an expert in.

“If you don’t know how to ABC, you aren’t very educated.”

“Ah, I see you don’t know either.”

“I never SAID that! But I have neither the time nor patience to explain it to you.”

“Let me ask around, and we can find the answer together.”

“I KNOW the answer!!!”

“Not well enough to explain it, though. But that’s okay, we can learn that, too. Let’s ask this guy. Hey, my colleague and I were wondering if you could explain ABC…”

Oh my god, this makes their pompousness positively FUME with rage.

Well, they may like the attention and validation it brings. I knew someone who was asexual that had a lot of dotcom money. He loved to go to Vegas and gamble. He knew the house was stacked against him. He knew that the girls who sat on his lap only liked him for his money. He still loved the attention he got when he tipped big. I saw him tip a waiter $200 on a $150 meal. He LOVED it. And why?

“I used to be poor. I was a nobody. Now I make people happy with my money, and I feel good about myself.”

Can’t beat that.

I would rather deal with the (often exaggerated) care of a cast iron pan than deal with non-stick Teflon or similar. And have. But stainless steel is a comfortable favorite for common jobs like cooking soup or quickly frying an egg or two. Light, easy to clean, and practice usually means it won’t stick if you know how to grease a pan and keep the temperature right.

Doubtful it would be a pipeline exception in Jenkins

It did, and I was also doing that in some of our software in a previous job. Other terms we had to stop using were black sheep, white washing, and even gorilla.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dd3d/we-need-to-stop-saying-blacklist-and-whitelist

Because we made too much (over minimum wage, dual income household). I was making $13k as a sales manager, my wife was making $8k as an assistant manager, and minimum wage was $3.35/hr or just under $7k/year back then. After taxes, we made about $1200/mo, and our rent was $650 for a single bedroom apartment. No car, we took the bus, barely had enough for food and utilities.

But we were considered way too over the “poverty line,” which was I think less than $6k/year then. We had been using birth control but when they say some form of birth control is 99% effective, the DO mean 1% failed. I have no regrets our son was born, because it turned out we couldn’t have kids later when we tried. And then later my wife died when he was 22, so if we had kids later, I would have been a widow with younger kids.

I feel awful he grew up poor with us until he was about 10, though.

I can answer this: my son was born in 1990. We were extremely poor.

We had midwives help us out as best they could, to the tune of about $3200 at the time. The birth got complicated due to a variety of health factors, and both my son and wife almost died (not because of the midwives). Luckily the midwives had a direct line to Georgetown Hospital, and the cesarean was done there. The total hospital bill was $58,000, or $138k in today’s money, although hospital costs have rose much higher vs inflation, so maybe it would be in the $200k range now. She was in the ICU for a week, hospital for another week, our son for about 3 weeks.

My wife job didn’t have health insurance, because it wasn’t required back then. Because she was gone a week, her job fired her for an unexcused absence. Oddly enough, this made her unemployed and Washington DC had some law (or rule or something) that immediately dropped the hospital bills because of her unemployment. In the end, we had to pay $15k to about two dozen practices who individually sued us, which took 7 years to pay off and a lot of court visits and wage garnishments. It financially ruined us, pretty much. Both suffered a lot afterwards because we just couldn’t afford minimal care. It was hellish. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be today. We got evicted from our apartment, and lived in government housing for six years.

So, yeah. Don’t have a baby in America unless you can guarantee it will be healthy and you have a lot of money. Most of my friends don’t have kids, they simply can’t afford it and look at it like the previous generation looked at concepts like summer homes and yachts. Nice luxuries, but way out of affordabilty.

Not really. Part of my life’s adventures have just been showing up.

“Wasted” as in how? Who are you answering to? What standards are you judging by, and are they your standards, or the cultural standards pushed onto you by a capitalistic “must be productive” mindset? Or parents pushing their own hopes and dreams unrealized by the same mindset? Are these friends really successful?

Maybe I was cursed or blessed by having parents who really didn’t give a shit about me, were constantly “disappointed” by who I was, and not really caring about me as an individual person but how I made them look. My dad was a sociopath who never wanted children, and my mother was an alcoholic who wanted children to show that her marriage was successful and good unlike what all her relatives kept saying. Until she committed suicide and my dad threw me out while I was still a teen. Thankfully, I learned early on that my parents would NEVER be proud of me because it wasn’t about me at all. It was about them. The disappointment was their motivator with no real strategy behind it, and they set me up to impossible standards with bad examples, and frankly, lies they were trying to make into truth. So I stopped seeking their judgement, because I could predict it would always be disappointment.

Last time I spoke to my dad (1998), he asked what i was doing career wise, and I told him, and he dismissed it as “you have no idea what you are talking about,” as if I was making it up. The thing was, I was still making money. The money was real, his opinion of my success was worthless. He had to one-up me, and always will. I felt so free after that, and never spoke to him again. He never missed me because he does not love me or hate me. He just doesn’t think about me at all.

The expectation of others is a powerful drug, I won’t claim to be immune to it. But at a certain point, you have to ask who you are answering to when you determine your own success and failure.