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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • My company switched up retirement plans and they held a seminar to explain them. The person running the seminar said that we should be putting 15% of our salaries into retirement.

    Nice idea, but if I put 15% of my salary into retirement, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. I’m not living extravagantly or anything (buying something for $20 for my enjoyment seems like a splurge to me). Still, whenever I seem to be getting on a better financial footing, life throws me a curve ball. Need new hearing aids ($3,600). New a new dryer ($750). Might need a new car soon.

    So either I need to be paid a lot more, I will be working until I’m 90, or I put away the money and go deep into debt but can retire. (Just kidding. I’m nearing 50. I likely won’t have enough to retire. Maybe when I’m 80.)


  • And his followers will excuse it in one of two ways:

    1. It’s all fake. They’ll claim that the Democrats swapped the real list for the released “fake” list and that the real list has Biden’s name, not Trump’s. Their proof? Some YouTube video linked to from a Facebook post where a white guy wearing sunglasses in his truck says he saw the real list with Biden’s name on it!

    2. Trump was undercover. They’ll claim that Trump was actually working undercover to expose these people. Being on the flight logs “proves” that he was only there to spy on these people. Why? Non-specific Excuse! Therefore, Trump’s name on Epstein’s list is actually a good thing and they support him more!

    Meanwhile, the rest of us will scream in frustration.










  • I frequent Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads. I feel like this is true in any of the three. Occasionally, I’ll wade in, but more often than not I regret it.

    This is especially true on Threads where the algorithm sees you arguing with someone saying X and then says “hey, you must want to see more posts that say X.” I finally realized that all I was doing was feeding the algorithm and stopped replying.



  • If all you consume is news and social media – which have incentives to show the most extreme views, events, and content – you’re going to have a distorted picture of the world as a 100% awful, dangerous place.

    Especially with social media sites that have algorithms. Did you view a thread slightly longer because it was on a scary subject and people were arguing about it? You’ll see more of that. Did you get angry at another post and decide to reply to correct them (possibly using ALL CAPS)? You’ll get more of those.

    Repeat again and again until the only posts in your feed are the ones that raise your blood pressure and make you want to scream.


  • GenX-er here. I grew up thinking that any day nuclear weapons would fly and obliterate us all. Coping with “one political party wants to turn the country into a Christian Fascist state” is easy by comparison.

    With the nukes, I had no say in the matter. The USSR could have lobbed nukes at us at any moment and the best I would have been able to hope for would have been a quick death. (Dying slowly from radiation poisoning and starvation would be much worse.)

    With the Republicans, I can vote and encourage others to vote. I can work against it. Yes, I’m only one person. I’m not going to topple their efforts myself, but thanks to the Internet, I have plenty of people helping me to thwart their plans.



  • ZScaler. It’s supposedly a security tool meant to keep me from going to bad websites. The problem is that I’m a developer and the “bad website” definition is overly broad.

    For example, they’ve been threatening to block PHP.Net for being malicious in some way. (They refuse to say how.) Now, I know a lot of people like to joke about PHP, but if you need to develop with it, PHP.Net is a great resource to see what function does what. They’re planning on blocking the reference part as well as the software downloads.

    I’ve also been learning Spring Boot for development as it’s our standard tool. Except, I can’t build a new application. Why not? Doing so requires VSCode downloading some resources and - you guessed it - ZScaler blocks this!

    They’ve “increased security” so much that I can’t do my job unless ZScaler is temporarily disabled.