You’re always gonna need to be ready or at least able to stop and ask yourself, were the favors that big, or did they just tell you they were? It’s the middle of the weekend and you’re fretting over this instead of spending your own time how you see fit or coding for profit.
A company that’s asking you to figure this stuff out for them isn’t necessarilly going to sign-off on anything too reasonable, but I’ll agree my advice was more suited for after that happens.
Real serious reply right there. I don’t have time for your non-sense, let alone to engage with it by way of an alt. This Orange man method of confession-by-way-of-accussation is pathetic.
“My lawyer will need to talk to your legal department, he charges $xxx per hour…” If you think I’m being snarky, I’m really not. Your entitled client is hoping to force you to, or let you, do something stupid so they can hang you out to dry or wring you out for free or discount labor, maybe even a “small guy like you should be willing to pay us for the oportunity to do this work”.
I’m not saying to pretend you are a lawyer, I’m saying to get one, and if its all above-board, things will work-out. If it ends up a “missed opportunity”, then it was never really an opportunity in the first place.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’ve always made double or triple the $$-per-hour as a contractor than I have as a W2. Some “clients”, head-hunters, and would-be “lead-finding services” would try to interact with me as though being a contractor just meant I was jobless, which, maybe they would have been right, in a world where I had or made the time to interact with people set on wasting it like so…
Read that last sentence again; By entertaining their non-sense, their assumptions about how they can get-away with exploiting you become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hire a lawyer or become one. You can be out some money paying the lawyer(which becomes overhead expense to factor-into what money the client should owe you, in beautiful black-and-white contract/invoice form that let’s you sleep at night), or you can be out time, near-infinite amounts of time, doing your client’s homework on-top-of the programming they ostensibly are paying you for. Everything you care about suffers in the second version, including your code quality.
… and now we’re talking about your previous comment getting more positive traction than it deserved. Seriously though, you don’t think the meddling in Oceania involves China? I gotta see this…
That’s the thing that’s got me wondering what the problem could be here. Oh no, they might switch-out their ICBM launch rockets and use the old ones for boosters to get other payloads to orbit? THE HORROR
People like you just demand to be lied to and will never admit when things are contrary to what they expect. Thinking you’re really more truthful than others is just huffing your own farts.
I don’t gaslight people - I come clean and what’s this? I’m never called-out on things I’ve actually lied about - for anything that matters I was almost-always just wrong about something, genuinely confused, but good luck getting me to help you lie to yourself in a way that hurts people. Can you claim any of that with a straight face? Do you even own your mistakes, like ever? Doubt.
Nah, my wife is much more like you, and it’s often exhausting, although she’s learned a bit across the decades.
You’re a little old to be equating the capacity to lie to get by, doing even the bare minimum to preserve your own and others’ dignity, and feelings, with “being shitty”. As if euphemism and metaphore are just “cool story-telling tricks we developed for some reason”, or human recall doesn’t make AI hallucinations look almost par for the course of actual intelligence.
No wonder you’re single.
You don’t build on the bullshit and lies, but around it. It’s a pain-in-the-ass, but so is dealing with a snitch who is incapable of lying. Personally, I tell my wife and kids to throw me under the bus as needed to get them out of awkward conversations and commitments they don’t want to make. “My dad won’t let me do that” works a treat. The latest was “my dad won’t let me commit insurance fraud”(like I particularly care about insurance fraud, but my limits are surprisingly more restrictive than some we know who would never admit it).
Home (at least somewhere they are welcome to stay, and comfortable staying…)
Income (Don’t budge on this one)
Vehicle (or at least used to public transit/walking/biking enough to not treat you as a chaufer)
… all anyone needs to bring to the table on a material level. People will tell you about their standards all day long, but most are hypocrites - they are more flexible than they’ll let-on and/or are probing for push-back, checking to see who will “wear the pants” in a relationship.
If you’re inflexible your-self, with zero tolerance for bullshit or even a sense of humor about it, you’re going to have a bad time.
People say “single people are single for a reason”, but almost always pretend its unique to their age group or dating pool/whatever, but really its just-about equally true at all ages, and always applicable to onesself. Hardly anyone is single just-because their shitty ex was so shitty - shitty people attract shitty people, and its easier to make a new lover into a shitty person than to un-fuck what previous relationships and they have done to themselves, trying to hold-on to what they saw in so-and-so to the point that when its over they can’t let go of all the bad “surprises” that awaited them.
Don’t think of yourself or your experiences as so different from theirs. If you’ve had fewer, longer-term relationships than they, you still likely had many events where you and previous SO’s fell in-and-out of love - you just happened to work through them until you didn’t. In many cases, by most people’s criteria, maybe you shouldn’t have, and in just-as many, maybe your partner “should have” walked-away - its when “should have” wins-out over attachment that the relationship is dead, even if it doesn’t know it yet.
That said, if someone demands to be treated like a pet, that’s between you and them, and no, I’m not referring to furries or people who are self-aware, but the “don’t you dare shatter my fantasies”-types. I don’t have the patience to constantly pretend I am also surprised that the inevitable happened, but I’ve seen plenty who do. The ones that realize it aren’t always so-bad off, unless its “I gotta pretend for th kid’s sake”. Generally, don’t have kids with the poor, the disrespectful, OR the crazy, yeah?
Still better to not have to face it out-in-the-open this side of (recognized/recognizable)change for the better. Don’t see where I said anything about you, but you didn’t hold back about me, did you? Am I supposed to thank you?
I’m talking about friends that are to be rightly missed. Still close-by and friendly, but not like it once was. Anyone remotely like you’ve described in my life moved-away or died. They rarely-offered and more importantly never-accepted help in the first-place.
I’m more afraid of being thought of as one of them than worried about bothering to ditch anyone like-so.
Up-skirt photos are the one area where this gets me caught-up; Either a hypocrite or a shitty person. For the sake of consistency, I tend towards shittiness - the only real reason there’s anything like an expectation of privacy in public is so shitty (powerful)people can get-away with shitty things, when really, being in-public is being on-display.
Then there’s my stance on getting “caught” having sex on a park bench in a secluded forest by way of a trail-cam. I’m far from convinced that video evidence should count as evidence of an otherwise truly private, victemless, “crime” that otherwise wouldn’t be. We should only be jailing public officials caught-out in conflicts of interest/corruption like-so, and almost never the camera-man.
Instead, its the opposite. We are surprisingly far into all of this deep-fake and leaked-video shit for the average person to have any qualms about saying “whether that video is real or not is none of your business”, as if significant resources will be spent validating all but the highest-profile of images, but I get there are people who are generally embarassed and not just wrapped-up in their personal “sin” of having been portrayed or caught in a compromising position.
None of it upsets me so much as former strippers or adult film stars losing their jobs over shit that’s years-behind them, while genuine pedos escape notice for decades. I’ll say it again: society and the law are laser-focused on the wrong shit, and from the wrong-end of the turd at that.
They think they are shooting you down, when really they are shoving you out of the way of the bullet that is themselves. “You know where to find me when you grow up" is a line I had worn-out by the end of my teens, yet I never get to leave it out of my repertoir for long.
The world is swimming in children of all ages. The only “favor” having them young migh do is forcing them to grow up a little earlier, and only if you’re very lucky, they are still whole enough to both resent you for it and forgive you. People think their adult children still idolizing them is a good result, but those children are NOT grown.
Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.
Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.
Are people confusing Telegram for offering anything like privacy or anonymity now? It’s been wide-open five ways from Sunday since inception, by the standards of this community. I am NOT watching a goddamned video about it in 2026!!!
Not one mention of AI, let alone performance. Are we certain they evaluated the card on a task its really meant for?
College educated couples who got married after the age of 30 are exactly the sort to buy a house before having kids. They’ll also have locked-in friends and family who they can count-on, and likely owe them favors. Other than grandparents and single people, these ARE the society you want in your corner.
As someone who did it in the reverse order, I promise you, you’re gonna burn a friendship or familial relation or three out of need, ones that otherwise would have lasted generations, and know as its happenning you’ll be living with that regret the rest of your life. You may be able to pay them back, but almost certainly neither in-kind or in any way, or on any time-scale, that makes the relationship what it once was.
As you get older, relationships ossify - it takes life-changing events to have any chance to undo extinction events or straight “I’m burned-out on their shit”.
So yeah, I have a lot of people who know that I, and my kids know, our family owes them and I will do anything in my power to do whatever I can to help them should they ever ask. They even would likely still help with whatever I asked for, even non-sense(“we’re square”)…
… BUT, they stopped coming to fun “note-worthy” things we invite them to many years-ago. Any sharing in our modest successes(or just relief that x milestone was reached) is tainted by all the dirty-dirty of all the sausage they’ve helped us make to get to here.
Any company that sent me this far-into the weeds for them ghosted me or replied with un-reasonable terms when I came up with something appropriate. Usually they replied with a whole boiler-plate they had on-hand, but apparently wanted to pretend it was a negotiation, until they didn’t. A couple times, the legal department on the other end got shitty with everyone and tried to act like their company had never and would never interact with a contractor who hadn’t already signed terms I found exploitative and walked-away from when they wouldn’t budge.
There are plenty of licenses out there that would work, but when you’re two-companies removed from the legal offices of the company with the ultimate say, its never as simple as trusting your friend. That said, my limitted experiences with similar situations never involved an insider I was close with, so I mean it when I say I wish you the best of luck.