Yes, yes you can. Initiatives are neat, that way… the sword cuts both ways.

Yes.

Kind of.

Its… why they spent that decade making Proton, and now basically have an OS based off of it.

Well… I’ve…

… never licked a spark plug

and I’ve never sniffed a stinkbug

and I’ve never painted daisies on a big red rubber ball

and I’ve never bathed in yogurt

and I don’t look good in leggings

and I’ve never been to Boston in the fall

I uh, don’t know what to tell you…

I don’t do anything.

‘Power Tripping Bastard/Bitch’

‘Fascist Personality Disorder’

‘Manipulative Egomaniacal Bully’

‘Malignant Sociopath’

Well, gotta say I’ve never seen anyone with an actual leech as a pet before.

Honestly, probably a pretty chill, low maintenance, aquarium/terrarium style pet, if you’re down with literally being its food source.

I mean, it really is as simple as you’d think it is.

They’re entitled, vain, and incompetent.

Gigantocorporate structures… do that to themselves and their constituents.

They have a whole other kind of ‘social norms’, just like any particularly culturally different group or economic class of people have noticably different expectations and behavior patterns.

The corporation values ass kissing and gaslighting more than anything else, it takes an extreme and constant, consistent effort inside the company to make that not happen, like pushing a boulder up a hill.

You can place varying degrees of blame on management or devs, on specifically full of themselves and insufferable people…

… but the ultimate reason this happens is because shareholders say line must go up, and the social dynamics that occur in an organization that is rabidly aiming for that goal… produce narcissists that are full of themselves.

Because a mass shakeup, an attempt to reset that via resetting people… well that means downtime, that means ‘a rebuilding year’… but that line needs to keep going up NOW. And firing all your top leadership is a near guaranteed way to tank your stock value.

So, the most influential people with the most wrongheaded ideas fail upward, untill the money printer breaks, and then, at that point… shareholders are okay with firing leadership, because the bad thing, the line go down, that already happened.

Reticulated sp(l)ine.

“Fortunately”, writing absurd, innacurate, vapid and mislesding job descriptions, as well as sussing out emotional weight of interview responses and asking a canned battery of questions…

Well, LLMs actually can do that about as well as most HR and recruiters can.

Yep, as with this one, they wanted someone with a chronologically impossible amount of experience.

Like, they want someone to have been in presumably a bootstrap paradox time loop for 3 or 4 of those 10 years.

If your HR is this stupid… you’re not gonna get good candidates.

Which is apparently the point, they’re just advertising that they are incompetent and have absurd expectations, they just want someone who can lie well.

They… they broke the recycle bin, eh?

So you’re just not allowed to delete files anymore?

… I guess that would give them more AI training data and also make people need even more storage so… sure, fuck it, why not.

I guarantee any game made by Valve, on GoldSource or Source or ‘Source2’ will be capable of hitting 4K 60fps on this thing.

Tim Sweeney continues to be a whiny jealous entitled bitch, more at 11.

I basically agree with what you’re saying here, yeah, basically a bunch of totally unquailified PTA-like organizations are actually responsible for a surprising amount of norms and standards in the US, which are treated as if they are very smart and good rules, made by very smart and good people.

I think the stylistic quibble here is… what you in your example call ‘not a conspiracy’, I call ‘a conspiracy’.

A conspiracy doesn’t need to be secret or well hidden or non obvious, non mundane.

A conspiracy is literally just when a bunch of people decide to do something, and then do things toward that goal.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy

Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal. Most U.S. jurisdictions also require an overt act toward furthering the agreement.

But, we as a culture have a rather hysterical relationship with the word conspiracy, because it is so often used by people promoting … basically either extremely racist, or convoluted/incoherent, or sci-fi nonsense level plots.

But but, taking the very literal and basic concept of what the word means… and just replacing ‘illegal’ with ‘immoral’ or ‘devious’ or somesuch… people conspire very often and frequently, and its usually extremely straightforward with little to no significant attempt to ‘hide’ the conspiracy at all.

Nah, just Irish.

Black as midnight, on a moonless night.

I mean, this has been well established by various psychological studies for like 30 years now, at least.

You don’t have a belief, you have an accurate understanding of reality.

Higher ups in most hierarchichal organizations are significantly more narcissistic than average people.

I have a motivational quote for them!

“Everybody has a plan, untill they get punched in the mouth.”

Wow, are we going to learn that sunny days tend to be warm, and the sky tends to be blue, next?

I’ve been saying this since the Return to Office shit started: A huge part of it is narcissist management that need the narcissistic supply of being able to excercise power and judgement over others, in person.

… the other part is that if you don’t actually need all that office space, well, then all the fraud and money laundering in commercial real estate gets significantly harder to hide.

https://www.ecofoil.com/collections/bubble-foil-insulation

Just one brand, there are more than this, but basically… NASA invented fancy-pants aluminum bubble foil, literally to protect astronauts and equipment from 100% unadulterated sunshine.

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/node/9314

It is stupidly cheap for how well it works.

They basically open sourced the patent, but, the industry that makes insulation stuffing for your attic is extremely not fond of this stuff, as… you basically only need 10% of their product, if you line the inside of your attic with radiantbarrier.

I got like a 10’ x 4’ sheet of it, put it between the two panes of my south facing window. Definitely works, makes the AC’s job significantly easier.