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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

    Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

    The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

    There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.









  • Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

    When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.






  • About 15 years ago I was giving a presentation at a technical conference. This was me giving a presentation in front of a room full of about 50 other engineers. At this point in my career this was still pretty new to me, so I was nervous. It was getting time for my presentation and I needed to do a last minute nervous pee before I did my presentation.

    I went to the bathroom, peed in a urinal, and then went to wash my hands. I pushed down the bathroom faucet and it exploded sending up a geyser of water about air a foot or two into the air. Now had I really been on a TV show, my pants would have been soaked in the crotch area, but luckily in real life I stepped back and didn’t get wet. However, this was the perfect setup for a young nervous engineer giving a technical presentation to be thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily I’m either not on a TV show, or I’m not the main character.


  • Spent $800k on a house remodel. We gutted it and rebuilt it.

    I did all the plans myself, I got them approved by the city, I made all the interior design decisions (my wife had veto power but left 90% of it all to me). In theory, in my area, the house has gone up in value by equal to or more than what we spent… but realistically I overspent. The amount I pay for loans is enough to make my very hefty salary seem low, but I don’t regret spending the money (It didn’t help that interest rates went up right before we pulled a $500k loan!). The house is awesome and it’s MY/OUR house since I did the design myself and I worked with the contractors throughout the entire process. I know every trade off we made and I can tell you why we made every decision. Doing this was a bucket-list item… but yeah… I overspent.




  • Hilary lost because she sucked major ass. I didn’t vote in 2016 because fuck political dynasties, and the DNC did everything it could to prevent Bernie from getting the nomination, which unfortunately worked. Being less young and stupid, I probably would have voted for her if I were in 2016 again. I would have hated it though, just as I would have hated voting for Biden but would have done so. I’m not particularly excited about Kamala but she’s definitely a lot more palatable with SO much more appeal than Hillary or Biden had.

    The stupid thing was that they didn’t need to do their dirty tricks. The things like what DWS in Arizona were well after Bernie was mathematically out of the running. I’m a Bernie fan and I voted for him in the primaries in California, but he lost on Super Tuesday (well before CA and AZ voted). He failed to capture the votes and was not really in contention.

    I think Hilary lost for three reasons. 1. Republicans had their smear machine running on her for over a decade. Propaganda works. 2. Her public speaking persona was bad. I heard her speak in a more normal conversation and she sounded smart, articulate, and hitting all the right points. I was impressed. But her speech giving persona was bad and came across as snobbish. 3. Sexism. It’s not THE reason she lost, but I think there was and is a vein of that running through America. “What if it’s her time of the month and she has her finger on the big red button?” “Blood coming out of her whatever”, etc.

    I think time has proven out that she would have been a 10x better president than Trump. Just like Gore would have been 10x better than Bush. So much less death, so much better policy. If they’d been elected, the world would be a different place today. (Stupid undemocratic electoral college system)