I always had my day brightened at an old job by emails from this guy in Master Data. His email signature was just MC Hammer lyrics disguised as Bible verses, something like Hammerlonious, 4:16-24. Nobody ever asked him to change it or gave him grief about it, since rather than implement something normal like SAP, the company had decided to roll their own in-house ERP system, and he was the only one who actually knew how a good chunk of it worked.
shikitohno
joined 1 year ago
You can go the nuclear option. My mother used to complain constantly that her computer was slow, and could I take a look at it. This developed into a fortnightly ritual where I would remove the Internet Explorer toolbars she'd added that took up a full third of her laptop's screen, then run an antivirus scan for 5 hours or so to remove the malware she kept re-installing. Eventually, I got tired of it and told her I would either install something she couldn't mess up as easily, or she could fix her own problems going forward. She agreed to trying something new, and her laptop got a nice Linux Mint install. I guess she really loved her malware, as she soon lost interest in the laptop, despite offers to show her how to do what she wanted to, which really weren't more elaborate than opening Firefox and going to her email, facebook, etc, but I guess a new desktop icon and no toolbars was a bridge too far for her.
The Irish are cool most everywhere tho.
Lol, get the Irish started on the Travelers, and it'll come out for them, too. The amount of times I hear "They're knackers, they're just scumbags," or similar when one of them shows up was pretty surprising, initially.
See, that's the fun thing, advice won't help at all. This is just the ruling class trying to shift the blame for the current situation onto a lack of paternal figures in Gen Z's life, or broken families, or some other moral panic BS to make peoples' suffering their own fault, rather than having to point out that this is the inevitable outcome of our chosen economic/political system.
No amount of advice is going to convince a younger adult that they were mistaken when they looked around and accurately noted they're stuck in a world that is quite rapidly going downhill, with no realistic prospect of it improving in the near future. They're stuck with crap jobs that are constantly trying to overload them more and more, for ever less pay. Between ghouls of the older generation and those who failed to amass enough wealth in their younger years to be able to leave work, positions throughout the career ladder are still being occupied by people who ought to have retired long ago, meaning that there's little prospect of any significant career growth. In other words, they can't even push through all the shit for a light at the end of the tunnel, where they'll get theirs and finally find some stability in later years if they just put their heads down and grind through it.
Even if older relatives have some sage financial advice to give, most people and their families simply aren't in the position to provide the sort of real, material support that is necessary to alleviate this, nor should they have to. These things should rightly fall to the government, either in the case of regulations to prevent companies from pushing so many into such precarious positions in the pursuit of making the line go up for another quarter, or as a social safety net to help the inevitable number of people who fall on hard times no matter what.
Just more gaslighting nonsense from the powers that be to deflect from systemic failures of our society.
I mean, they kind of have to be pretty good to entice you into the walled garden to begin with. Get people in the door with a smooth, super-polished experience, and then you've already got plenty of them pretty well won over. You'll lose some users with previous experience with another OS to "It doesn't work the way it did on $ancient_version of $OS, I hate it," that go back, some just get tired of the same thing and want to try something new, and others that hit the walls of the garden and decide they want out. If it was straight garbage and restrictive, on top of being expensive, nobody would hang around until they got comfortable enough that overcoming the friction of changing was a real obstacle to switching.
There's just a disproportionate representation of folks like myself in tech communities versus the general population who are opposed to any walled garden, no matter how polished, when there exist a free alternative.
Japan also has a problem much like exists elsewhere, that older voters are the ones who vote most, so their interests and views get disproportionately represented in election results. I'm sure that's only exaggerated in a country that's so lopsided in its age distribution as Japan is. I also wouldn't be surprised at all if it were to turn out that elderly voters tended to be more xenophobic and resistant to changes in immigration policy.
Japan really needs to get it sorted out soon, though, as they are desperately in need of work in all sorts of fields, but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn't seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan, do a few years of work and go back with enough money to buy yourself a home. Like, I looked into it for a laugh a month or two ago, and I actually have work experience that would qualify me for a visa as a skilled worker, but there's no way I would consider going. You could only use it for a maximum of 5 years, it cannot be renewed, as far as I could tell, it also cannot be reapplied for, and it's ineligible to serve in any capacity for establishing residency. You also cannot bring your family with you. That's a pretty hard sell for all but the most desperate of people to uproot their lives for, even before you get into Japan's famously terrible work culture.
I do understand a certain reluctance towards migration that doesn't result in cultural assimilation to a fair extent, especially considering how big of an export Japan's cultural products are, but xenophobic reactions to any possibility of change are going to back Japan into a corner where they have to pick between collapsing as a society, or just opening the floodgates to immigration in a way that will leave them way more susceptible to the sort of massive cultural shift that so many Japanese voters seem to fear. In my layman's opinion, they would do far better to go about massive work culture reform and allow much more immigration with an immense amount of support for people learning the language and culture, and assistance in integrating into the community. It'll probably be painful for all involved, but the result of kicking this can down the road perpetually will be far more painful, and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves.
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
I have a risk mitigation strategy for them which ought not to be novel, but sadly seems to be, which could probably bring this risk down to statistically insignificant for most of these people. Don't build your business on amassing obscene amounts of wealth via trampling the rights and dignity of millions of people who are only one bad week away from destitution and having all they've struggled their entire lives to build stripped from them, who have literally nothing to lose when it all goes pear shaped. Consider not only the financial, but the social costs of your actions.
The executive and financial elites of this world seem to have forgotten that humans are animals, and an animal backed into a corner is at its most dangerous, prone to lashing out in unpredictable ways.
Since folks have left me the easy ones, a fair number of things ending in "wurst," like Weißwurst.
And where exactly did I call for that? I said "Fuck you" to them, and made some disparaging, yet accurate, comments regarding their character. I didn't call for any sort of action against them. Where on earth are you getting that I'm asking someone to harm them in any way by cursing them out on the internet?
Who said anything about hurting them? They did a shitty thing, I'll call them out for being shitty. It does them no harm, and if they have half a brain, might even lead to some reflection on their actions.
Get lost with your misplaced concern for a straw man.
It may have a large part to do with where in the UK you were coming from, and where in the US you wound up, in fairness. Bog-standard eggs are $8/dozen just outside a major metro on the East Coast, while less than half that for posters in other regions. Last week, I was in Manchester, and a 15-pack of eggs at the Lidl on Piccadily Gardens was about £3 or so, which would probably make $8/dozen seem pretty crazy in comparison. I think the lowest I saw while there, further from the city center, was £2.15 for 15 eggs.