The bidet will pay for itself in 6 months.

You misspelled “the very first time you use it.” 😁

… and actually gets their company to support it. My previous employer would only use FOSS when possible (good). But they refused to financially contribute to those projects (BOO!).

I’ll settle for good tomatoes year-round, minus the coke. I mean, sure, coke tomatoes would totally supercharge everyone’s summer. But then the Big Dark of winter would suck so much more.

<gasp!> TIL, Parker Quink Blue Black is still being made! I thought they stopped making it because I couldn’t find it anymore. Nobody had seen any in a while (this was pre-Internet). So I moved onto Supershow Blue. Looks like it’s time to pick up a bottle of Quink!

Oh, your penmanship is beautiful too! Thanks for sharing.

I… feel like my entire life has been a hollow waste. 😆

We Americans really have a near total dearth of flavors in our processed foods. It’s been getting better over recent decades, but it’s still just industrial flavorings. The flavoring is just something Americans invented to cover up a lack of nutrients in our food. These processed foods have the added bonus of spurring us to eat more because the food is so nutritionally empty, yet tastes like it should be nutritive. Ref: “The Dorito Effect” by Mark Schatzker.

You need some acid to balance out that savory

Followed your instructions and now everything is melting, iridescent, and swirling.

I don’t quite get why the shitrag NYP thinks this is shocking. Okay, some people might be all concerned about their final disposition, but dead is dead. Piss on my corpse, use it for a punching bag and target practice, light me on fire on someone’s porch as a sick prank. IDGAF, because dead. Actually, it would be hilarious if someone got to do stupid, funny shit with my corpse. Too bad I wouldn’t know about it.

I’m mostly okay with these kinds of salary shenanigans, because those employers generally fuck themselves somewhere in the short to long terms. What grinds my gears is how employers think they get access to all of someone’s skills and their full work velocity despite deliberately underpaying. Almost invariably, this conversation comes up with one of my employers or contracts after they decided to cheap out.

“Oh, I recall that you have experience in [specific software engineering discipline].”

“That’s correct. I did that for [a bunch of] years.”

“So, we have this pro—”

“No.”

“No?! But you know this stuff. Also ‘other duties as assigned.’”

“And you’re not paying enough to get access to those skills.”

“That’s insubordination!”

“So fire me and see what you’ll have to pay to replace me AND get someone who will do [engineering thing].”

Gecko45 is such a legend! I, for one, am grateful that he is out there keeping us safe! 😁

His bit about “body armor to stop .338 Lapua” is probably my favorite.

A huge factor is occupancy rates, which directly affect commercial real estate values which in turn affect interest rates on the loans for a given property. Commercial real estate loans are reevaluated every ten years and a low occupancy rate results in higher interest rates because the property is determined to be lower value. For example, Amazon is pushing RTO so hard because the South Lake Union properties are coming up on their ten year mark. Even a tiny increase in interest rate would result in (IIRC) billions in interest payments over the next ten years. Corporations are willing to risk the unknown labor/skills carnage than face the known interest payments carnage.

The other factors are getting people to quit so that unemployment/severance don’t need to be paid and managers with control issues. It’s all contemptible, but that’s what’s going on there.

As an aside, I work in software. Even in compliance-intensive environments (think: auditing, national security), some forward-looking multinational corps are going remote-only. And the really nimble players are remote-first. They get their pick of top talent at lower pay rates. I gladly take ~50% less to work from wherever I want on a flexible schedule without ever sitting in traffic. I think we’re going to see a shakeup in the top ten companies because new entrants are going to get superlative talent.

How did they miss “Jedi Master” in their list of qualifications?

Armies?! Be serious. They were in the Gayroller 2000. Ref: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally

The scribble in the upper left is a Psychick Cross, the symbol of the Temple ov Psychick Youth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thee_Temple_ov_Psychick_Youth). Part Discordianism, part sex magic, part artist collective, lots of mind-expanding drugs. Lots of significance attributed to the number 23.

The really fun bit: in order to smell anything, you necessarily have to snort in molecules of that substance. It’s a happy little thought whenever passing a sewage treatment plant.

I don’t understand the joke. Would you be willing to add more context? TIA.

Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.

But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.

The Psychick Cross in the upper left… someone is missing a two.

The “consequences” for those involved in the Mỹ Lai Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre) paints a different picture.

That said, I have some close friends in the military, including one who is a Military Defense Counsel. Enforcement, when it happens, is quite strict.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted that the market doesn’t have much demand for discrete GPUs

Oh, I think the demand is sufficiently robust. The problem is cards that cost, say, $1000 for <100 FPS.