Canada. The answer is Canada.

because they enthusiastically participate in war crimes

When someone says “begs the question”, this is what they mean.

just keep heading north until you get to Canada

Careful. We take refugees and skilled people first, and without a need or a needful skill you may have a bad go at it.

Healthcare ain’t free for real, but since it’s already paid for with taxes it seems it. It’s just massively-discounted before tax money buys it thanks to a reverse monopoly single-payer thing. You knew that, but it’s fun to show how a system the GoP should like is one they instead revile.

Dude. Don’t text and drive.

If you must, try to pull over and proof-read before hitting that send button.

Wow. You went from “hurricane” to “cops sniping citizens” in record time. Are #AmericanCopsAreBastards nuts the new Vegan at a Party ? Lasers don’t have that unwavering focus. Kindergartners talking about dinosaurs don’t have that focus.

I didnt found out till this morning

This statement is garbled. You were using a farm tilling device, or was it a cash-drawer?

Witness the horror replacing it

Natural selection is dead.

more than 1 string for a set of blinds

Small differences in rolling behaviour for each string as they’re collected on the roll can cause tuning problems and so need tiny adjustment periodically.

Just tie a knot. Avoid the overhand - do a climber’s figure-8 instead - if you want to untie it later for tuning ever.

After 30 years coding in college and professionally, this is the ordering:

• anything else
• sed -i
• vi

It’s the worst vietnam-era throwback mess I’ve ever seen. And in 30 years, I’ve seen some serious crap.

good time to make some moves

To where? Google? Azure? There’s a reason we call them Frugal and Unsure at my side job. If AWS sucks in the next year, that’ll barely bring it down to their level. Hell, if AWS sucks ALL NEXT YEAR with a clown-car style outage every week, then maybe.

Imagine

Glad you got that head start

“I’m at the grocery, back in 20”

The policy around remote workers in my unionized heavy-privacy job is that when you’re away from the desk it’s fine; no one wanted to know your bathroom schedule when you were in the office, and no one wants to know now. Grabbing lunch, getting coffee, anything that can occur at the office without leaving, no on cares.

For fire safety and especially for the “bad things happen while you’re by yourself” policy that started after someone fainted in a small windowless basement office long ago, when you’re actually stepping out you must announce the punch-out and punch-in after. It’s a pain, because they do watch and bitch, but meh:

Meghan: grabbing lunch.  back in 10
Dave:  yeah, me too
Meghan:  back
Roger:  Off to the doc
Millie:  where's Dave?  
Robert: do we gotta start the Wellness Check?
Allison: nah, but I'll call him in a sec.  Policy.
Dave:  wait.  I'm back.  Don't call the cops.
Allison:  Dude.  
Dave:  Sorry.  I'll pay the doughnut penalty
Allison:  ha!  Okay, going for a walk while the sun's out
Millie:  Enjoy! 
Millie:  Grabbing the mail.  5 min
Millie:  back
Allison: back.  Beautiful out there.
Roger:  back

Etc. our ‘social’ channel is a lot of that shit. And yeah, the policy says an escalating wellness check after a reasonable time.

Keep in mind, this is a Union job. It’s an IT job but the subject matter is heavy-privacy and heavy-policy. Think like a gov HMO or similar deal where we have a lot of accountability and massive protocols. The day before covid they were a “fuck no you’ll never work from home, come in if you have a patch run at 0500 Saturday, hippie” kind of place where they derived value from seeing your ass in a chair. On covid day one it was “run for the hills, go now, take what you can justify needing (keyboards, laptops, screens) and don’t come back onsite unless you have paperwork. Just fuck off, right now”, a complete about-face that’s now enshrined in the contract.

In short, we did it; and if that group of dysfunctional stuffyshirt managers can cope with remote workers - some couldn’t, and like a reverse Dead Sea Effect, the worst of the bunch bailed and the good managers stayed - then I hold out hope that a lot of our sector of desk-and-screen workers can migrate en-masse home and stay there. They came a long way from where they were, and they hammered out a union-compatible workflow for remote work that actually makes sense. Maybe it’s a unicorn, and I hope it’s got legs, as we’re generally happier. And while union shit always has lower pay for the same work - sorry but true - the perks of choosing your environment makes it better.

I will now accept questions.

“have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway)

For us at the current job it becomes “hey, I need help with the Pinske file; throw me a call or a meeting when you can, please? Thanks!” and soon enough they or their meeting-req will pop up. And yeah, we’ll set a 15-min meeting for 8 minutes from now because it’s easy.

have a group chat and never use DMs so people can see and chime in

Can confirm - the group chat sucked, especially for us (2002 skype) when it was voice chat, so we often kept non-crucial stuff to the tail end of work hour too, so there was 45 min out of an hour for work before a burst of chatter. That’s supposed to have jibed with some kind of workflow pattern, and it worked … well enough.

That, and you need some watercooler time. The current job has it only once a week, but we all come to meetings early and chat for 10 min while everyone else files in. Get some human time in.

So essentially you’re saying that communication falls apart and you don’t have the correct tools for remote work.

I worked remotely starting in 2002, as I relocated from the NYC area shortly after 9/11 to get out of the region. My doc said “breathing issues in the tri-state area? World Trade Center Syndrome. Can you just move?” and I was done. I was on an H1B anyway, so I had no established ties. I was the youngest of a small group of remote coders, and they reallocated my time so that I worked on the same work as an existing remote team. Work was work.

In 2002, our ‘correct tools’ was a pair of headphones and skype: we ran skype all day. It was on, it was connected in a conf call, but all mics were muted among the 7 of us who were in the work group. Have a question, you’d either type it out or just unmute, ask the group - yeah, nothing more granular - and discuss it, and then go back on mute.

(I actually had a TV running in the office for background noise, as I couldn’t do the silence; and even the w98se sound system mixed it well enough to hide the background slush of the call)

It worked well. The existing remotes had a good culture and allowed for a water cooler around a coffee time and lunch time so you could stay and be social, and everyone adapted to the equivalent of someone gophering periodically and chatting over the partition. The company had a strong policy against open pit environments, and they actually worried there’d be too many on the call, but the team was great.

We were working on AT&T Fucking Unix. Tell me again how you didn’t have the tools when Skype and a 2002 USA broadband connection was the only thing we added to our workflow and we coded a secure OS for secure workloads. When I abandoned my visa/PR efforts and moved back home, I did it over a couple days off and had a rudimentary office ready to go in my home country immediately after.

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Did the people collating stats forget to take into account your hobbies? I feel like there was nothing forcing you to drive aimlessly around the burbs more than you would have normally outside of work, shopping and errands taking the same time as normal.

Pretty LEDs make it go faster. Everyone knows that.

A cat that goes outside more than 0.0% has a drastically-reduced lifespan. Feeding it encourages bad habits that may get it killed.

Ultimately it’s not yours and you have no idea its status, needs, allergies or history. There’s a risk to you (rabies, roundworms, heartstrings) but the risk to the cat is way more severe.

If it has a shaved patch then it’s seen a vet recently.

Leave it alone.

rightaway

Not a word. Spell-check should have told you.

Twice.