Should have took a lot more.

Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.

The shit is already running pretty deep.

Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.

Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.

I mean, it really it is you reach out and take initiative. It’s never like this if you sit around waiting for this kind of thing to happen, you will be perpetually disappointed in others.

But like our fictional hero, I can at least attest from my own long life, that if you seek out the kind of experiences and people you wish you had in your life, you will find them. But if you roll your eyes at the notion, if you are apathetic and are discouraged because you had one or several bad experiences, or if you’re discouraged because you read about someone else’s bad experience, or if some youtuber told you how bad things are, you will live in that world and that world only as long as you live.

I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we’re getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people’s own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.

This comment alone makes me understand why my 12-year-old reddit account was banned, it was so I could come here and find this comment with this instruction that will massively impact my life.

Alternatively, and more realistically: drugs.

Traveling across Southeast Asia I stayed in a hotel that had a beautiful bathroom with a glass wall, a private garden view, big open floorplan, comfortable toilet with a bidet and several settings with warm water.

I thought “Hmn a bidet? I’ve heard of them, but are they really useful?”

That day I contracted something, being nearly impossible to avoid all local water sources and contamination when going out to eat, etc. My white ass was like, tender, delectable vittles for the Asian jungle digestive diseases. I spent the rest of my stay there running to the toilet every 10 minutes and that bidet was the giant, silver lining on all of it, if I had to use cheap-ass paper (or cheap ass-paper) I would have sanded my ass clear off after the first day.

I’m working towards just this, not a tent necessarily but a very small house/shack, gonna get some dogs and chickens and probably work at a local grocery or do art until I die.

I am not making much progress. I wonder who tf is buying houses.

This is no way to live.

I wonder what would happen if everyone who felt this way all at once just decided to stop. All at once, everyone turns around and goes home. How many people would it be? Half? 3/4? Most of them?

We almost got to experience a change when Covid hit, the only bright spot, but it was soon eclipsed by corporate buzzwords and inspirational music montages on powerpoint telling us how happy we are to return to offices and ten hours of driving and 1/8 of our paycheck on gas every goddamn week so we can sit in a visible place while we waste time reading emails that don’t pertain to us and attending meetings about initiatives that are meant only to make the shareholders think we’re doing something.

Shareholders who attend the meetings via Zoom at that.

The things you think that people care about are most often the things people care least about.

How about a young guy with truly progressive ideas?

What are you, insane???

deleted by creator

I’m expecting a response in relation as to why i chose a cult.

This reminds me of one of those furries who always has to interject in any role playing situation that they’re furries and their character is a furry despite nobody in the gaming session actually asking or encouraging that person.

Drats, we were so close.