networking skills are more valuable than service desk

Only true until you drop your laptop. Then the value of that service desk work skyrockets.

Would be very cool and good if IT folks weren’t constantly in a dick-measuring contest and could see the forest for the trees. Maybe we’re all getting underpaid, relative to the suits six floors up, and we’d do well to stand by each other instead of bickering over who works the hardest.

However, I do blame them for not using a password manager

Managing the passwords in your password manager becomes a job in and of itself when you’ve got enough of them floating around. My office is on year two of trying to do automatic password rotation for the myriad of service accounts in our systems. Anything that’s not Active Directory integrates is a headache. And even the ones that are have to constantly stay ahead of the Microsoft Updates curve or run into security problems of all sorts.

It would be cool if everything could be SSO, but you need to have a certain amount of faith in your OS to accomplish that.

Microsoft: “Here, have some shitty arcane dysfunctional software.”

Me: “Damn, this is hard to use.”

IT Guy: “Damn, I can’t believe you get paid to work here.”

Also IT Guy: low whisper “Fuck, they moved the button again. This is going to take me a minute.”

I’m not a fan of any appeals to gatekeep energy use to “just essentials” instead permitting growth

There’s a huge gulf between essential and wasteful.

hostility never changed anyone’s mind

Chronic abuse absolutely shapes human perception and behavior.

In this case, a lot of Lemmy has been so battered down by “China Bad” propaganda that they’ll straight up deny the threat of climate change to justify rejecting Chinese manufactured goods.

The argument is always “solar/wind still use chemicals” and never “this is the net reliance on extractive industry by energy source”.

That said, general energy conservation is still important. You can’t cut emissions if all your new power just gets funnelled into Grok style AI.

They were at the inflection point back in 2008. They’ve been full tilt towards the improvement side of the curve for nearly two decades.

Europeans demolished their manufacturing sector when they stripped all the wiring out of the walls during the austerity years.

You can’t blame people for buying foreign when you’ve been defunding domestic infrastructure for over a decade.

This is a very 2002 take.

Modern Conservatives just scream the N-word at the top of their lungs

If reading is the only driver to voting preference

Reading is a powerful tool because writing/publishing has a very low barrier to entry.

By contrast, audio and video tend to carry incrementally higher cost for production/distribution.

But you do still need peer groups with good politics to send you in the right direction. You can’t expect good politics to emerge ex nihilio across an entire population.

I mean, you think this is happening exclusively in red states?

DC is bright blue and they’ve got some of the worst schools in the country. And if you want to know why…

Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error

Privatization, downsizing, teaching to the test… Twenty years of NCLB has taken its toll.

Even then, there is something of a silver lining

Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes

The advent of modern text communications has created significant social incentives for improving literacy at younger ages.

But in business you’re supposed to read emails to know what you’re supposed to do.

So often I get a set of instructions that’s missing information, out of date, or deliberately misleading.

I’m often on the line with support walking through the steps and saying “How did you get from D to E?” and then finding out there’s a second secret set of instructions only tech support has - possibly even a different website or application - that they don’t want to tell you about unless you’re talking to an agent for some reason.

Menus have the descriptions of what you want to eat but no one reads them

Sometimes. Often they do not. They also regularly use shorthand or code.

My favorite is a series of red chili peppers next to a menu item. If I order the 1 pepper meal, am I going to be shitting blood for a weak? If I order the 5 pepper meal, are you going to White Guy Spicy it for the table because not everyone looks like they can handle it? It’s anyone’s guess. If I don’t explicitly see the words “peanut” or “shellfish”, am I confident it won’t have allergens?

Why even have a waiter if you’re not allowed to ask these questions, anyway? Just make everything a vending machine.

Also a big fan of

if you see a price list/menu/price tag or similar and you accidentally read it, better double check the price by asking “does this item cost what it says here”

Because it happens when management has three different prices and five confusing “discount” offers scattered in line of sight. Is this 50% off or does that happen at the register or does it no longer apply? And you’ve got the same thing on the menu as a side and a meal, which one am I ordering, again?

And

“employees only” actually means “for adventurous customers”

Oh, bathroom for employees only? At every location inside three city blocks? I guess I should just take a crap on the floor.

Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area.

Its a major base of operations for the Russian Pacific fleet.

Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions

Now, sure. And France has the technology and infrastructure to extract resources from the Mississippi delta region now. But the Alaska purchase was in 1867. Russians were still trying to secure territory on their own continent during this time. Repeated wars with Japan, the Ottomans, and with domestic insurgencies plagued the country through the 19th century.

And Alaska was already being filibustered by western colonialists as far back as the early 1800s, necessitating a Treaty (the Russo-American Treaty of 1824) to settle an ongoing dispute over territory (The Oregon Boundary Dispute) that Russians had little capacity or real interest in prosecuting. Much like with the Louisiana Purchase, this was a token transfer intended to get some kind of compensation to relinquish a claim the Russians were poised to lose one way or another.

Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.

BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you’re waiting for BlueSky to take off, you’re just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.

I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t think this is the future.

For the price of the bundle? Sure.

There’s about 60km between modern day Russia and Alaska

There’s over 5000km between Vladivostok and Anchorage. Virtually nobody lives in the interior.

Alaska was seen as nothing but barren piece of cold land

It still is. The mineral wealth is extremely difficult to access due to the weather.

But Russia also has enormous fossil fuel reserves. They just sold off a colony that was more expensive to guard than it was lucrative to exploit.

With the electoral college and FPTP, even opting in is of dubious benefit.

If Nato fails and Russia attacks

That already happened back in 2022 (arguably all the way back to '08). NATO didn’t do shit because it’s just the US military wearing a dozen different European baseball caps. And after the US finished scrubbing out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t have the logistics to launch another Asiatic land war (while keeping China at gunpoint in the Pacific and Iran in check in the Middle East).

American slippage is already apparent across Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Things are only going to get worse for DC going forward.

You would have to be suicidal to stick your neck into that mess, at this stage of the game.