Punkie

This was also where “yo momma” insults were also invisible to me. Like, “You don’t even know my mother, you’re just saying that and it makes no sense.” It wasn’t a trigger for me like it was other kids. I saw it for what it was. I’d tell my friends, “they just say that to get you mad, don’t listen,” but they’d get mad anyway. It’s like they couldn’t help it. I think dares were in that headspace as well.

I wasn’t popular growing up. I was really awkward and non-athletic, so I didn’t bow to peer pressure as much as the other kids. I was going to be unpopular either way, so…

As a kid, I never got that concept because it seemed like being manipulated. “I dare you to do this dangerous thing for my amusement!” Uh. No? “Chicken!” Okay, whatever, dude.

This sounds kind of sad, but bear with me. This was c. 1976-1980.

My father was mostly absent, but I prefered his neglect to his abuse, so that was okay. He’d go on business trips a lot. My mom was an alcoholic, and sometimes she’d be passed out for days. I grew up an only child in a suburban home, and some weekends a year, I had the house to myself. From age 8-12, I had a few weekends here and there where fortune fell upon me and I’d be alone in the house with no real responsibilities. Friday night home from school to Monday morning going to school, all I had to do was check if my mother was still passed out, and if so, it was like one long vacation from my life to be myself. Bonus if there was still food in the house, which usually there was something I could cook myself.

I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, except sanctioned PBS shows, but we had a small B&W TV in the kitchen for my mom’s soap operas and cooking shows. I’d drag up all my Legos, pour them on the kitchen table, and watch “illegal TV” all weekend while building stuff with my Legos. Eating when I wanted to, or not, and I had free reign of pretty much anything there.

My positive childhood memories are scant and few, and most are just things like that. Like “sometimes the sun came out, if only for a brief time, before the storms returned.” I have a lot more as an adult.

This is something that influences a lot of culture. Like most people when they think of style and decor in the 1980s, are thinking of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The rest of America was not always neon pumps, leg warmers, and thin piano ties.

Not currently, but I did a few sides jobs in the last ten years.

I am a Linux systems administrator. Before I did full contract work, I did part time contract work (alongside my full time salary job) for a general contractor as a piecemeal basis. A job here, 20 hour support there. Some jobs I made $300, some $3000. It was sporadic and came in waves. I got this from a former contract job who recommended me when they folded.

I also did writing gigs. I optioned a few scripts and sold a few short stories. That’s still ongoing, but I haven’t sold anything for a few years.

MBAs who contract dev work out to India to make a quick buck without realizing how bad the code they’re going to get back usually is.

Ah, but some of them DO know what they are doing! In the IT world, I have seen where people say a job is about 2-3 years, show no loyalty to the company, and so on. But they don’t understand managers are doing this, too. Many KNOW these outsourcers are shitty (or don’t care because that’s not a metric they care about beyond selling points), but in a 2-3 year turnaround time, by the time it’s apparent they don’t work, the people who made those decisions are already gone. They ALSO thought ahead to the 2-3 year plan. Here’s how that goes:

Year 1: Make proposal based on costs. Find someone in Puna who will sell you some package with some bright, smiling, educated people who speak whatever language and accent that makes your pitch. Proposals are made, and attached to next year’s budget.

Year 2: Start the crossover. Puna Corp has swapped out the “demo people” for their core chum bucket. Sometimes, they don’t even change the names. How is an American gonna know that the Vivek Patel they saw in the demo is not the same guy named Vivek Patel who is working with your bitter employees who see the writing on the wall? Sadly to many who don’t care, “they all look/sound alike.” Puna is a product, their employees are a static pattern of commodity. Your people say they are shit, but, “oh, those grumbling employees. Your job is safe! We can’t fire you, you are too valuable!”

Year 3: The crossover has gone badly, but you are already looking for the next company to work for. The layoffs happen, and all the good folks are gone, and replaced by the Puna Corp folks. Things start to go badly, but you already got one foot out the door, charming your way into another company.

Year 4: You’re gone. Your legacy is that you saved a butt-ton of money. You are a success! The product is shit, but that’s not your problem. By the time the company realizes the tragedy, it’s middle manager versus middle manager, all backstabbing and jumping ship. Customers don’t matter, marketing covers up the satisfaction. “Wow,” you say. “Things sure when to shit THE MOMENT I LEFT.” You look fantastic! When you were there, you saved money! When you left, it all went downhill! You are a goddamn rockstar. Then repeat.

I have seen this happen since the 90s with a lot of tech folks. Everyone thinking short term for themselves. Only the customers get screwed via enshittification.

It would have been the 1990s by ADC, a street map company local to this area (and possibly other cities).

In the late 1980s, I had a roommate who graduated with a business degree and got recruited for a government contractor right out of college. She packed up her life and moved to the DC area. A month into her new job, the contract was pulled. But because she had a clause in the recruitment contract, they couldn’t fire her. But they had no work for her, either. So she had to come to work every weekday, 9-5. She’d sit at her desk with nothing to do. They didn’t ask her to look busy, just present.

She read about 3-5 novels a week. Over the next few months, we watched her get more and more depressed. She’d complain about her situation, but it fell on deaf ears. “Must be nice,” people said in jealousy. “Get paid to do nothing.” She became despondent in the lack of people’s sympathy. “Nobody understands how much this sucks!”

Eventually, she got a new job. Her mood vastly improved.

I’ll never forget that lesson. People need to feel useful, productive. Sitting at a desk with nothing to do, no purpose, no validation. It will destroy you.

1. Things like CNC machines and proprietary interfaces to TOL equipment, like bus fare systems, message boards, etc.
2. Don’t connect them to the Internet (most can’t, anyway, but some systems use a run-of-the-mill PC, so…)
3. Don’t install anything on them that wasn’t supposed to be installed, even wallpaper as this could fuck up the resolution of a small 240 x 180 screen

I have not done this for Youtube, but I have done it for tech reviews as a ghost writer. Basically, a lot of those tech reviews done under a pseudonym in magazines. No, I won’t tell you which ones, I like getting paid. Anyway, I’d say about 40% I had to send back in a set amount of time, about 50% I am told to destroy or keep, and 10% they don’t tell me and won’t answer my queries. Reselling is almost always a huge no-no, and that also applies to giving stuff away.

Sounds fun, but some of this stuff is utter, unworkable crap. So many SBCs that never see the light of day, or have the most impotent release announcements on the planet. Like, “this is set for release Jan 3rd, 2024.” Then it’s not ever mentioned on any main page on their website, is listed as a .gz image in their repo (which is on gdrive), but only one release candidate and it’s the same one you reviewed where the wireless chip just randomly stops responding until you reboot. Maybe has a byline on their products page under “this power adapter works with [list of models, including the one they don’t have for sale on the same site].”

I have two HUD displays I got in 2022, which look amazing, but the screen never powered on (which is why I have 2, they sent me a replacement, which was broken the same way), and I am considering at this point making them some cosplay item or taking it to a rave, because it glows super sexy. But with no working LED screen, kinda useless.

The Silver Spring Transit Center. https://ggwash.org/view/30613/silver-spring-transit-center-is-unsafe-everyones-to-blame

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

They had a multimillion dollar transit project near where I loved, like $112 million to replace a train station, a subway stop, and a major bus terminal to combine them into a single entity near Washington DC. They projected 3 years from start to finish, but it took almost 7. They had to reroute the entire bus terminal to surrounding streets and parking garages, which was a traffic nightmare. People using the train station or subway had to reroute their walk sometimes up to a mile off their present walk. While doing demolition, they found that the previous bus terminal was on the site of an old gas station which had been improperly sealed off: they just filled the tanks with concrete. Underneath that, they found tons of the the natural mineral serpentine, which naturally contains asbestos. So now they had a biological hazard which they had spent the last few months blowing up with dynamite into the surrounding city. After that was cleaned up and sealed, The got underway.

There were a ton of other mistakes, but when it was completed, they found defects. The superstructure is made of concrete and thus construction specifications were replete with engineering criteria for the composition of the concrete, and its pouring, curing and tensioning. The Inspector General systematically examined 22 project management and control points from the time concrete was mixed until the time it was ready for final inspection. 14 of 22 control points that should have minimized defects were weak or ineffective. Those defects may require recurring engineering inspections, higher maintenance costs, and they could shorten the planned 50-year useful life. In addition, the IG described the risk of concrete falling onto transit-center patrons.

The entire thing was a huge boondoggle costing the downtown untold millions into the future.

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

Not just LinkedIn profiles: there was a case out here near DC a while ago where a well known company leased out their function space for training meetings. Using a compromised company account, a set of scammers set up some fake recruitment profiles, leased out the meeting space for “software training,” and did some “mass hiring” where 30 individuals had their credentials scanned and duplicated. The effect was someone from the recruiting company was contacting you, you had a face-to-face where you got offered an in-person, you showed up to their offices, and got a “job offer pending a background check,” with a date of hire in official-looking emails. You sent in your SSN, copies of your passport and driver’s licence, and after a few weeks, they tell you to show up for orientation. Only, the day these people showed up, the company was confused and had never heard of you. The people you supposedly spoke to had never heard of you. And your identity was stolen, and huge loans and charges started showing up in your credit report.

Yikes.

No mention of external dimensions, so I am going to assume that it exists in the abstract since you mention teleportation. Like you just think about it and teleport there, not carry it upon your person like a portable hole in D&D.

Like others mentioned, a living space of some kind. I’d worry at first where I teleport inside, like hopefully not inside my mattress. Also, when I teleport back out, where is that? Where I teleported in? What if that gets replaced, like say I popped out while in an empty parking garage, but popped back in and a car is now parked where I left off? Might be nice if I pop back out anywhere I choose. Pop in while in New York, pop out in London.

Man, I’d save so much on rent. Or at least storage.

There’s almost always one guy who is “the omega worker,” like the lowest person on the totem pole that everyone uses like a bar one can’t cross. There has to be a “well, at least I am not THAT guy!” Opposite of the Alpha pack leader, this person is the other end. Yes, it’s abusive in toxic environments, but it’s nothing compared to the chaos that follows when that person leaves. The scramble to “not be at the bottom.”

Your fever makes you warm. Warm is comfortable, like long forgotten warm rocks on the plains of the ancient Senengeti on cool days.

Been a long time. The last time I got affected was via a Shockwave/Flash banner ad for the movie “Moulin Rouge,” which dates this story. It’s not so much that I clicked on it, but it was on a forum banner ad. I didn’t get a virus as much as I got “VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC MOI!!” screaming from my speakers from out of nowhere with no warning.

While the head of our Canadian operations was in my office.

Who, of course, spoke French.

Thankfully, she just teased me about it and I didn’t get fired.

Been using an ad blocker ever since.

Jesus was a famous lute player. Like, that’s why he traveled and what he was most famous for. A crooner, a lover, and a huge fan base. The ladies went crazy for the guy. His teachings were just ancillary.

You have Paul to thank for that. He was a bitter, failed musician. Just went on about how great Jesus was, yet somehow skipped all of his musical numbers.