So much thinking to be done ugh

/ status report / , , , , , ,

So. The fucken orange idiot won the election:

  • Department of Education: To be closed, or as close to that as possible.
  • Abortion: Likely to be made illegal via FDA prohibition of abortion drugs and Comstock Act.
  • Kakistocrats taking over government functions. See who is getting picked to the orange idiot’s cabinet.
  • Immigration: Paths are going to get completely blocked off. And they’re talking about getting rid of Jus soli and switching to Jus sanguinis. Also, deporting millions of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re citizen, resident, or illegal. If you’re not white, you’re going.
  • Economy: Accelerationists are going to take over and they fully plan to crash the economy to achieve their societal aims.
  • Whatever it is they decide to fuck up next. Go read about Project 2025 to find out. You’re not going to like it.

For the past week we’ve been considering our options and we don’t have a lot of leeway— our savings were considerably sapped by large purchases for family and my own period of unemployment from August to October. We have just enough to get out with a large bag and that is dependent on us being able to afford to get out.

I don’t want to start over yet again, for the nth time in our lives. We have much to consider in the next month. Then comes the execution of whatever plans we come up with.

While we grapple with my personal facts, a whole lot of magaots are now realizing how badly they’re about to get fucked by the person they voted for. They’ll cry and they’ll moan and they’ll want for rescue but… what’s done is done. Fuck their feelings.

That was the big thing. Now for the usual things:

  • bartendJerb: Slowly picking up now that the weather has turned colder. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be. No idea how well the cocktails I came up with are selling, no one tells me numbers of any sort. I don’t think anyone knows numbers of any sort anyways.
  • mgbarJerb: It’s picking up steam and a lot of our staff still haven’t gotten it through their heads we are a high-volume craft cocktail and they need to fucken move. We don’t have the staffing levels they have at Bar La Grassa, much less that level of service.
  • Reading: Re-reading Meehan’s Bartender Manual to understand better what the fuck it is they want us to do at mgbarJerb.

I’ve mostly cut out twitter out of my social posting as most of those circles have moved over to bluesky, with twitter itself cratering even further down that it was before; still keep a browser window open to the site but it’s mostly for reading, not for posting. Been pruning a lot of my RSS feeds to cut out a lot of stuff we don’t follow anymore. Also! we rejiggered MariaDB on this server and hopefully OOM-killer will leave it alone from now on.

We also wanted to build a new server to replace our aging storage server hardware but… it depends on what we decide to do given the economy situation around this here parts.

The last bit we need to do is figure out a way to get us to sleep at a decent hour. We’ve been going to sleep with the first light of the sun and… we’ve missed out on overtime at work due to us not being awake to actually take the shifts. This post is one of those actions we’re taking since it’s keeping us awake past the usual sleep window.

We are fucked

/ from outside / , , , ,

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.

Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge

Years ago I remember reading a story about a technology that lets you remember everything as it truly happened, no as you remember it happening. The main character realized most of his adult life he had been the one to fuck up. Another one I remember is The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsys by Arthur C. Clarke.

Until we develop a technology like it, any visual media cannot be granted any authoritative display of fact. In a few months (hopefully years) the same will happen to video.

Computer illiteracy is just another symptom of mass disability

/ from outside / , , , , ,

The unhappy truth is the complexity of our technological environment has exceeded the cognitive grasp of most humans. We now have an unsustainable mismatch between “middle-class” work and the cognitive talents of a large percentage of Americans.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks

This is something we experienced at helpdeskJerb (a school). Most of the upper management had worked there for decades and had seen the technological environment go from zero tech to full-on academic infrastructure.

… And the vast majority of them could not handle it. About the most they can do is interact via email. Instant messaging? CRM? ERP? Completely out of their abilities. Which meant they need assistants to translate and handle things coming from the system/environment into something they could manage via email… bypassing the system entirely. It’s fine for them, but then someone has to enter the information into the system. During my time there we found this usually doesn’t happen, so there’s a lot of institutional memory that is lost when people leave the school.

That’s the management. Noticed the same thing happening with new students: A fair number of them were completely unable to navigate the school’s intranet and course management systems, requiring extra attention from counselors and assistants to get them signed up for what they wanted to study.

For all that modernity provides, it doesn’t help when you’re disabled. And now with the incoming US administration, they would rather you just die.

it’s okay to just be a manager. It’s fine and we mean it

/ from outside / , , ,

But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in.

Source: Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity

We’ve worked for chefs and GMs who will say they’re not leaders. They’re just making sure the things that need doing are done and that they’re done properly and in a timely manner. And we’ve worked for leaders who will abuse and belittle everyone in the payroll because they’re inferior and unfit to even be considered for full-time work anymore; then they’re surprised when people leave or ragequit.

Looking at you, bistroBoss, you sack of shite.

The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience

/ status report / , , , ,

It’s been a busy week over here:

  • bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
  • mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
  • bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.

All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.

Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.

Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.

Looking at you, KDE/Plasma

/ from outside / , , ,

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

Source: Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software

Joel’s post is almost 25 years old. Sonos learned this lesson this year cos their management was too stupid to realize what they were doing. Also, some people in the comments are wondering why CEO asked Lead Counsel to investigate the debacle.

That’s called fiduciary duty. CEO knows he fucked up hard enough by ignoring the growing issues that any number of shareholders could have sued the company and/or its officials (in a personal capacity), and those shareholders would have had a great shot at winning said suit.

Now if only FOSS developers would learn the lesson too.

Meses como esclavo para que ni las gracias te den

/ local / , ,

Con los años, los mejores restaurantes se adaptan más a las demandas de los jóvenes, pero advierten que la exigencia no puede bajar: “Quien quiere formarse en la excelencia lo hace libremente”.

Source: El infierno de los becarios de los estrella Michelin: 14 horas, sin cobrar y a vivir en pisos ‘patera’

La industria restaurantera en Europa esta cayendo en un precipicio de su propia creación. A donde va el dinero que cuestan menus de €400? Por mas caro que cueste la renta, los insumos, la labor, de ahi queda ganancia. Si Noma, en un pais nordico con una red social avanzada, no pudo con los gastos, que esperanza hay para los demas? Eso sin contar el incremento en costo de vida que mucha gente joven esta sufriendo.

De restaurantes en Estados Unidos ni se hable. Aqui la industria completa depende de labor migrante por lo regular indocumentada, cosa de la cual malos jefes se aprovechan. Yo he sido stagiaire pero por lo regular suele ser un dia, dos a lo mucho, con posible contratacion por parte del restaurante.

Scoffier invento un buen sistema para aquel entonces, pero ya es hora de cambiar.

No need for a wooden coffin even

/ from outside / , ,

If we all want to retire, how much do we need? How much does a person need? How much do they have, and how much money would government, or an employer or somebody else, need to fill the gap? Most people you know who are making minimum wages need about half a million dollars at age 62-63 to be able to retire. Say your annual salary is about $50,000. The rule of thumb is that you should have about eight to 10 times your annual salary at the time you want to retire in your mid-60s, in order to supplement Social Security, and you won’t see a big change in your living standard. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to travel around the world or walk the Great Wall with somebody carrying your suitcase, but you will be able to maintain your living standard.

Source: Why You Will Never Retire

We don’t know anyone that makes over 100K a year. Perhaps the owners of the businesses we’ve worked at, but that’s unlikely. Unless we migrate to some other country or become rich, we guess our retirement plan should be to go north as far as possible and then just walk until we can walk no more.

Ah shit here we go again

/ rucksack / , ,

That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I’ll be researching my micro blog options and I’ll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service

So much for the man gloating about buying out del.icio.us. He doesn’t even need to sell the service. He can be “the founder” with just one or two full-time people working under him to make the service viable for the next 10 years and beyond.

On the linked Hacker News thread there are some alternatives worth looking into, most of them self-hosted.

disease-danger-darkness-silence:defilerwyrm: cheeseanonioncrisps…

/ from outside, tumblr




disease-danger-darkness-silence:

defilerwyrm:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

mierac:

rowantheexplorer:

gorgonsach:

justgfy:

gorgonsach:

x

Unions are trash. Theyll Destroy a whole company for firing a shitty worker.

unions are the reason you aren’t paid 2.50 an hour with steel beams about to bust ya head open shut up lol

Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.

You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.

Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.

And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.

The erasure of labor history from US history curriculum has caused so much fucking damage to this country. 

Bosses: If you don’t like how we do things, don’t work here.

Workers: *Go on strike*

Bosses: Wait no not like that

A lot of union folk very literally fought and died for the workers’ rights we have today. Like no joke, bosses would hire goons to straight-up murder unionizing and striking workers.

All the most basic workers’ rights we have today were all paid for in blood. And conservatives have never stopped trying to take them all away again.

NEVER FORGET THAT LABOR DAY IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. I know people who legitimately think it’s like a secondary mothers day - you know, for going into labor.

But it’s about workers rights and the people who campaigned for it to be a holiday knew this fucking day would come.

If you are in the US and about to celebrate a 3-day weekend, thank a goddamn union worker.

original post

we will all lose something of ourselves

/ local / , , , ,

This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.

Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge

Considering the current state of reading comprehension and media literacy in the United States the situation is going to become horrible extremely quickly.

Take in point— conservative media blowing up over “Haitian immigrants eating pets“, which was from the get-go a fake issue, created by Springfield neo-nazis as blood libel. We were already familiar with this kind of racial perception from previous situations so I was already disbelieving of it. But other people on social media outside the US truly believed it. Ourselves we corrected a couple people. One of them blocked us for it 🤷‍♀️

But in both these cases there were no fake pictures to complicate the issue. At some point a fake picture is going to blow up and it’s going to be almost impossible to dispel the issue unless there’s video of the specific situation. But then genAI is going to then start faking video and we’ll be in the same situation.

Humanity will lose the ability to remember things as they truly were, choosing instead to remember things how they wished they were.

 

Scroll to Top