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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I’m in business operations, downstream from you guys. Reading posts like these are helping me understand better what you all are going through.

    We had several of our systems “upgraded” and broke a lot of our tools. The dev team vanished off to work on the next shiny bullshit “upgrade” and turned my 15 minute tickets into 3-4 hour tickets.

    My manager was telling me to ping someone and let them know. After nothing happened there, I started opening tickets. After about 140 in 2 weeks, I finally got someone’s attention and we’re grudgingly getting a couple devs assigned to start repairing the automation that broke.

    I am sorry to have to do that, but our entire team was drowning and pinging someone on teams with API errors wasn’t getting anything done.








  • It’s really hard to accept help sometimes.

    Our family went through the ringer the first half of this year and we had an outpouring of people offering support and help. It’s not that I didn’t need it, I just didn’t think I needed it at the time. Looking back on even 6 months ago, I was pretty dumb for not delegating some things that would have taken a lot off my plate that I didn’t need to deal with at all.

    If you’re in a new place around new people, one way I’ve found that works sometimes is just asking someone for help with something really trivial, but not something that could easily be done yourself. Something that could just use another set of hands. It’s kind of an ice breaker and the other person might feel more inclined to be able to ask for some help next time.

    Anyway, you seem like good people, I wish you were my neighbor. Don’t let people stop you from continuing to be a good person.


  • I’m basing this reply on the assumption that you do not know why the government shutdown is happening.

    If the US Congress cannot pass a budget, the TLDR is basically that the government shuts down and many government workers end up working without getting paid, and many less fortunate and underprivileged citizens will lose access to the SNAP benefits and other various social safety nets that provides them with the basic necessities to survive.

    One of the main reasons the budget bill is not passing is because the Trump administration and the Republicans want to strip the federal subsidies tied to the ACA (affordable care act). If the Democrats cave and help pass the bill, it will increase health insurance costs by an order of magnitude for most people in this country, and for about 40 million people, make health insurance completely unaffordable. So Trump directly said that those same 40 million people will face malnutrition or starve, because he wants to take those subsidies and put them in a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy. The same ultra-wealthy people that couldn’t spend the fortunes they currently possess over the next thousand years, even if they tried.

    And they’re willing to let people starve and die, so that they can have more.

    Edit to add: by “ultra-wealthy”, there are about 300-500 families in the entire country. So they would benefit, while 40 million people will starve.


  • Ah yes. “Make America Great Again”.

    “We’ll starve you out if you don’t let us strip away your health insurance coverage”

    “Both sides are the same.”

    Yeah one side passed the affordable care act, and the other side wants to cancel subsidies for it so they can give incredibly, unimaginably wealthy people even more money that they’ll never get to spend before the world burns. But sure, both sides are the same.

    I’m doing ok, but I live in a community where a lot of people aren’t. I’m gonna go spend a boatload of money to feed my neighborhood, because fuck the right, they can’t win this fight. If they win, not only do 40 million people go without affordable health insurance, but all of the rest of us with health insurance will see those costs skyrocket literally overnight, as most people have to elect their health coverage at work between now and the end of November.

    Check on your neighbors in need. Make sure they have food. If you can afford to, help them out.


  • If Canadians do what we did with travel, but apply it to US cars, they’ll be in a world of hurt.

    (And whiskey/spirits, but you guys have already done a great job there)

    Seriously, you’re 100% right. The more you fine folks of the north stop buying our shit, the more pain you’ll inflict. And our corpos need pain inflicted. If I could suggest, avoiding products from our red states would mean even more than blue states, but that’s a minor distinction at this point.

    I wish it was easier for you and the EU to move away from big tech, because that would really start getting attention more than anything else.





  • If you’re in Europe, you can cross multiple countries in 3 hours. A 3 hour drive in any direction barely gets me out of my own state.

    So I can understand why OP’s asking Americans. We’re pretty much secluded over here on our own plot with Canada and Mexico. Madrid to Moscow is about 4000 km as I understand it. Or 800 km less than it is from NYC to LA.

    I’ve been to 44 States, Canada, Mexico and two other continents. Bad shit can happen anywhere. I will say that the best times I’ve had were hanging out with complete strangers from completely different backgrounds than mine and trading stories with them about home.