Pokepokalypse

In my study, (n=2), I can attest, indeed, that both of my dogs will willingly give up roaming outside in the wild for snacks, scritches, and belly-rubs.

I have long ago lost my enthusiasm for this stuff, and now I just do it because I need a paycheck.

Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..."

If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.

I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.

back in the 1990s, they used to hold open house tours.

I've lost too many friends to mass-layoffs over the years. I just can't do that shit anymore.

Modern homes have much better insulation and energy efficiency (like LED bulbs), etc. But I think it's also true that a lot of builders can get away with cutting corners, and the materials that go into homebuilding are also often of lesser quality (like wallboard from China that outgasses toxic sulfur fumes). Modern plumbing is mostly snap-fit plastic tubing rather than copper pipes. It's a LOT cheaper to install. Supposedly lasts as long or longer, but it's still shitty plastic.

Shitty wildcat builders throwing down entire subdivisions of deeply defective homes is a serious problem in the Phoenix area, I know that for a fact.

"teaching is the highest form of mastery"

-- (don't know who said this quote)

lol. that's me; only I start by writing out the problem as an email to ask someone for help. 90% of the time, I find that I didn't have a complete understanding of the problem to begin with, and I usually end up solving it before hitting "send".

Then I'll have this odd memory of - "I discussed this with you, I told you all abo- oh wait, I didn't send it."

Pretty amazing to think that since this life evolved here, a lot of it thrives on methane. Therefore: I think there's a high likelihood of similar life on Titan. (which has a mostly-methane atmosphere)

yes. Dr. Gerard O'Neil figured this out in like 1978.

Then, OPEC decided to demonstrate just how temporarily infeasible they could make it, by manipulating global oil prices (far from the first time).

warmer atmosphere == higher capacity to hold water vapor.

CO2 plus H2O (water vapor is also a highly potent greenhouse gas).

We sold my daughter's condo 2 years ago, and we're still getting email solititations to buy it. Apparently there's a company sitting behind about a half-dozen shell companies, and they're trying to buy up enough units that they can sit on the association board, and convert the whole complex to rentals; forcing the remaining owners to sell.

I'm glad I got her out of there 2 years ago. The rising crime problem there was the motivating factor.

It does cost a lot, but in most cases you're going to get more bang for your buck. (and you can also forgo features you don't like or need: like a homeowner's association; or pre-existing utility connections you don't want).

The other thing about building a home - particularly if you're in a high-demand area, the appreciation in the first 2 years is pretty insane.

Here is exactly why:

In America, this is basically the ONLY way "normal people" can make money (or at least used to be - those of us who didn't "get on the bus" in time have missed out).

Unless you create valuable intellectual property (ie. inventor, etc), or unless you're a doctor or lawyer, you're mostly just barely getting by. Those of us who were able to invest in housing, and take that ride, might actually have enough economic security to retire on.

So why does it have to be that way?

Because the politician who tries to change this system, will get voted out of office.

I don't want to say bad things about democracy. I love democracy, and I think it's one of the most important human innovations of the past 2000 years.

But the way we practice it in the USA; we're basically voting for our own extinction.

tell that to the bitcoin bros.

amateur

yeah - there's not going to be a shortage of aluminum any time soon.

So how about that pressure-treated lumber that they make the playground equipment with? Filled with Arsenic.

Ultimately, marketers market themselves. They may be good at it or bad at it, but at the end of the day, if they're dishonest about it, they can be successful also.

I don't know. Let's keep burning oil for energy and find out!

It's a warning to turbulent priests everywhere.

yah - our weekly 'all hands' seems to basically be: The Marketing Team marketing the marketing team to the rest of the company.

It's frustrating; and worse, we've had our CEO several times send group messages to scold people for having their camera off, or worse (my sin), camera on, but obviously doing work and not paying attention. It's pretty gross.

but mostly not so much if the person has an MBA.

Sure, it's a gross generalization, but after 25+ years in this industry, I stand by this bigotry.

I tend to really like working startups.

Massive corporations are usually very risk-averse, and you end up just mostly being a ticket-monkey. The problems you're tending to solve are mostly pretty boring - unless you're a rock-star and they've hired you to do cutting edge R&D (and in this case, can be the coolest and most rewarding gig out there).

But at startups, there's always a shit ton of interesting problems to solve (usually too many by too few people - depending on the stage). This frees me up to be creative, and also to pick and choose my priorities.

As far as your specific complaints: - 'I can't bare (sic) the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked'; IMO this depends on personal disposition, and also team culture, and sadly, it's hard to find a place to work where they don't try to force people to burn out one way or another. This does kind of suck when you've got team members that do this and kind of fuck things up for everyone else.

- 'I can't bare (sic) the endless meetings, constant micromanagement'; Again, this is mostly team culture, and how teams are organized, and there are ways to fix this, but in my 25+ years of experience, once an organization heads down this path, it's very difficult to fix. It's the route to becoming ineffective as a group, and it is soul-crushing to be a part of this. I'd encourage anyone in this situation to get out of it ASAP. Complaining will never ever fix it. Micromanagement, of course, is 100% just incompetent managers. Which is also difficult to fix.

- 'bringing the stress home to my family'; I think this is more of a personality issue with the individual. 10 years of therapy, and I wasn't able to make headway on this. Some jobs were absolutely worse than others. Personally, when I've had management who goes out of their way to compliment my work verbally, this goes a long way to relieving my anxiety and stress. It's very helpful and costs the company next to nothing. But at the end of the day, even those companies, I've had to deal with either company failure or layoffs (which is a form of company failure), and that just validates why I'm stressed. So it comes down to how you deal with that stress, and the only way I can see it is to be independently wealthy so you don't need to work in the first place. That's just my internal rationalization though.

And trust me, confidently believing in fiction is much much worse for effective planning

Absolutely TRUE - and this becomes a political problem in some organizations, depending on whether you're around people who can handle hearing the truth (whether they just don't want to hear bad news, or whether they don't understand complex webs of interdependencies that can cause time estimates to be wrong).

Oh, yes, that book was great. The helicopter one is pretty unique, and there was another one that is VERY simple to make, and you end up making a flying-ring, and that plane actually performed beautifully. It flew straight and fast; wasn't much for long slow glides, but it never failed to impress people - especially with it's simplicity of construction.

The problem was; he also used very thick impasto-style brushstrokes. With Oil Paint, this often takes a long time to dry (and leaves a physical texture which will be visible if you overpaint that).

Some of Van Gogh's paintings are so thick, that underneath an outer layer of dried paint, there's still liquid paint trapped underneath, which may not dry for another hundred years.

But yeah, he was known for re-using canvases, as were many impressionist and post-impressionist school painters.

As a former dub-head; that Yaris is a fun little go-kart. And almost as un-killable as the legendary Hilux.

Really wish we could have gotten a decent GT version in the US. But Toyota is what Toyota is.

Somehow, I think 20 years from now, they'll discover that VW's EV's were programmed to cheat on emissions tests.