Thanks, I’m usually better about that. Fixed in my comment as well.

https://youtu.be/5rQklSmI_F0?si=MGewvvfGrK7HVRiY

I think you’re the first person I’ve seen correctly attribute this to the New Yorker instead of a 4chan green text or copy pasta.

I’ve been seriously considering picking up a trumpet and starting a ska band with some of my other middle aged friends just for shits and giggles. Seems like a lot of fun.

This describes my CISO to a fucking tee.

That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.

I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who’s only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn’t go on.

Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.

Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn’t know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.

Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.

I saw a quote years ago about “common sense” that really changed the way I thought about it. I wish I could remember now where it came from.

“The problem with common sense is that it is common, not good.”

Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.

You’re thinking of American Samoa which is different from the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa and a sovereign nation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoa

Well that just solved the question of “what should I watch tonight?”

I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this. This is an issue that’s deeply personal to me.

When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, she was severely preeclamptic going into the third trimester. She ended up having to stay in the hospital for five weeks with her blood pressure being constantly monitored and nurses ready to pump her full of medications anytime it went too high. It was so severe that when she was being discharged a doctor told us that there was a good chance she would have died had she been admitted to another hospital less equipped to deal with it.

Our insurance tried to stick us with a bill that was hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying that the whole thing “medically unnecessary.” Thankfully we had an amazing patient advocate that handled all of that for us and I heard from her later that my wife’s OBGYN (who is an amazing, kind hearted, and soft spoken man) had called up the insurance and absolutely ripped them a new one.

Private insurance is a parasite on society. The goals of a private medical insurance company are at odds with providing good care to people and they leach resources better spent elsewhere.

For those wondering, wife and baby thankfully ended up happy and healthy in the end.

Sorry for the rant, this kind of shit gets me absolutely inflamed.

Until you find out those were also built by a junior using an llm to help 🙃

They actually have a fairly comprehensive training program setup through their “University.” They also mix in foreign contractors, usually from China.

I almost did before the outage. Their pay was pretty low compared to similar positions at other companies though.

They’re about raising the sarcophagus. Those things can be heavy.

One of my favorite T-shirts. https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo

(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)

Magic carpet 2, the Netherworlds is one I played a ton and think of from time to time. I wonder what I modern remake would be like.

It’s the first game I remember playing with deformable terrain.

I worked at a grocery store in 2003 in California for a short time. I joined just after a major strike had ended. As always, the company was pushing for lower wages and benefits, the union wanted higher. They came to an agreement with a two tiered system, tenured employees got to stick with a pay scale and benefits slightly better than what they’d had before.

New employees got fucked.

A couple months in I was promoted to cashier from bagger and got to see the two tiers. I was starting at $18 per hour, the original tier started at more than double that and went up pretty high.

Not really related to your comment, but I’m a little drunk after a rough day and seeing those amounts just really fucking pisses me off. My numbers are not adjusted for inflation and wages have gone down for the job I did in the last 20 years. It’s fucking maddening.

“my spoon is too big”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W7JyjZI3LUM