Punkie

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

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.

I remember hearing that some Hollywood contracts require that if you sign up for some studio, you must make X amount of films. Big stars get to chose those films to some degree, but once in a while, they have to do “a stinker” to end the contract as “X amount of films done, okay?” or something. Contractual Obligation and all. This film feels like a dumping ground of a lot of those contractual obligation hires from the trailer alone.

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

The weird thing is this is the exact argument many people give for socialized medicine: the wait times. “Imagine if the hospitals were run with the efficiency of the DMV. A,trak, or the Post Office,” meant as a negative slant. “Imagine if FedEx was the only game in town, and to mail letter was $10, and to receive mail and packages was a $25/mo service charge, plus fees for every item delivered.”

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.

Disclosure: I work from home and enjoy it immensely. I never want to work in an office again.

So sorry rich people are going to make less money off of their real estate investments, boo fucking hoo, how about adapting to technological and cultural changes better?

There is that, and some rich people need to be boiled in their own pudding. But this affects all downtown businesses, even mom and pop shops. People will just flee like urban flight did when people went to the suburbs. What’s left? I hear about “well, turn office buildings into residential space,” but the logistics of that with fire codes, building codes, and urban planning are not drop in replacements. They can be done, but at great cost.

We’re looking at an urban decay beyond what we’ve planned for. Minneapolis is terrified to become another Detroit or Gary Indiana.

While still a stupid thing to say, I am concerned that this quote was mildly taken out of context. It was made at a business luncheon, where he was addressing downtown business owners. I believe “you” in “you become a loser” meant “if people work from home, you downtown business owners become the losers here.” But yeah, “nasty cat blanket” is a classist and elitist statement from someone who has a stereotype image in their head.

Link to that part of the speech, sorry it’s from a FOX affiliate.

https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-mayor-says-remote-work-turns-you-into-a-loser.amp

When I was a kid, one of my friends got a stuffed puffer fish for his 10th (?) birthday from an uncle. We klater joked “he’s too old for stuffed animals,” but IIRC, he loved that thing.