I think it’s more trying to win political favor by spending big with the company owned by a member of the incoming presidential administration.

Or it’s just wanting to market their ads on that platform and as you said, not having the balls to stick to their boycott

A friend showed me their workflow for piracy and it’s really incredible just how easy it all is. Literally just download an OVPN config from whatever VPN provider you subscribe to, connect to the VPN and search in qbittorrent (and use the link in qbittorrent to download the necessary search plugins)

Like obviously this is a few decades of software refinement, legal battles plus a fair amount of large companies turning a blind eye to the obvious. So it’s shoulders of giants and all but it’s still kinda jarring

You know what’s better than the bare minimum? Give your work more than they expect, but keep some of your potential to yourself. Only give work 70% and keep that other 30% of yourself for yourself. You get all of the benefits of being an overachiever with none of the drawbacks.

You know your job is as safe as it can be because you’re exceeding expectations, and you can reap the bonuses and pride that brings but you still have remaining capacity to do more in your personal time. Plus if you’re not completely applying yourself every day you can hit the grindstone on a really bad day when SHTF and really come out looking like a hero

I have personal goals in life I want to reach and I’m going to do whatever it takes to do so. Try laying out your life goals… What do I want to do 5, 10, 20 years in the future?

As a relatively young person but older than OP myself, this is exactly what I did to get out of the slump of knowing how the system is stacked against us all. I set myself goals, and kept updating my goals. I had a 6 month, 1 year and 3 year plan at any point. Longer than 3 years it’s hard to set specific goals because too much can change in that time frame. I always had goals to work towards and make myself a better version of me. If you can continually be a better version of yourself than you were before then you’ve won the game of life

Good question! I can’t remember.

I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

I think for some people it’s more about killing multiple birds with one stone. One guy I know went to see a Dolphins game, bought a car and got some warmer weather during the coldest part of the year. Another bought a car while visiting family (and learned the hard way that radiators are sometimes refilled with water and therefore will freeze in the winter if brought north) and another had their 20 year old truck die while hauling their RV and bought a new truck from the nearest dealership. So maybe it’s not widespread, but every one has talked about the benefits of a car that’s never seen salted roads

You say that but there’s basically 0 chance I’ll buy it anytime soon because I wait for games to be down to about $20. If I really really want it I’ll snag it at $30-40 but I don’t think I’ve ever bought a title at $60

In the north there’s even people who will specifically head south to buy a car that’s never spent a winter driving on salted roads. Road salt corrodes so badly it’s nasty

I feel similarly. I work in an office that’s heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine

I started playing that one a couple of years ago but found myself horribly lost on one of the introductory quests (I think the first lockpicking was what did me on?) and kinda lost interest from there. I can see the appeal though and at some point I’ll certainly circle back to it

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

On the subject of Matrix parodies, I just want to throw this classic out there

Thunderbird still supports RSS, however I’ve found many news sources don’t provide proper RSS feeds anymore

If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

Manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well. Like I said, it’s hard to beat the pay and benefits of working in manufacturing if you don’t have a degree.

The reason they struggle to fill these roles is because most people don’t want to work in industrial facilities working physically taxing jobs, often at odd hours filling second or third shifts and risking that the facility doesn’t sufficiently value safety leading to a serious injury or death

A large percentage of US manufacturing is food processing. Manufacturing has been struggling to fill open roles for years,¹ and as a low-skilled job with tons of openings lots of migrants, both citizens and not work in manufacturing since the pay & benefits are hard to beat for not requiring any degrees. Its a similar situation with farm work. If the Trump administration actually performs significant deportations and cancellations of visas like he promised, food availability will be affected as farms and food producers struggle to keep up with demand

¹ Here’s the JOLTS data showing as much as 200k unfilled manufacturing jobs. I can’t easily directly link my query, but here’s a screenshot of the data with enough info to replicate my query

Makes me wonder what would happen if a government funded and operated pension fund were setup. Basically like social security but ramped up to fully cover the cost of retirement for all Americans.

I also wonder how that would realistically impact macroeconomics if the money were simply printed instead of budgeted to avoid the problems of expecting infinite growth and a growing retirement population as people live longer and populations shrink. There seems to be some growing economic questions as to if measured money printing can be beneficial to an economy, and doing so for social good, even social security if you will, might theoretically stave off deflation. It would probably become a useful dial for the Federal Reserve to adjust in persuit of its dual mandate as well, increasing or decreasing how much of the fund is printed vs budgeted as needed. Maybe that could even become a third mandate of managing the social pension fund to ensure comfortable retirements

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.