The Network

Preach it, brother! Seriously, a lot of my IT knowledge does come from spending vast, vast amounts of time proving it’s not the network causing issues, but rather someone’s poorly-written code, poorly-designed application, or other completely non-network issue.

I’d estimate I’ve spent a solid six months of my entire life doing just that alone.

Ella Ay

One of the things I deeply like and appreciate about Aella is that she firmly and fully believes that women are not in fact children and acts that way in her own life, no matter what she does.

This makes me like her as a person even if I feel like I probably would not actually get along all that well with her in real life (I think we’d annoy the fuck out of one another).

Source

Why are so many roles paying so little?

IT is a worse field now than when I went into it, by far. The roles are vastly more complex and the pay has mostly stagnated or declined at all but the very top end. Help desk and sys admin jobs that paid 50K-80K back in 2005 still pay that now — and that is in nominal dollars, so that is an enormous pay cut in real dollars.

If I were to do it all again and having to start fresh, I would not go into this field. There is very little chance of advancement now, the pay is low, and the chance of your job being offshored or outsourced is high.

Everybody Knows

How NAFTA Broke American Politics. Since its passage in 1993, the trade agreement has played an outsize role in presidential elections โ€” which now often hinge on the three Rust Belt states it helped to hollow out.

“Hollow out” is a good way to put it. Economists tell us that NAFTA was a net benefit to everyone. They have pretty little charts and graphs to “prove” it. However, those do not take into account much of the actual economic effects, the political follow-on impacts, the foreign policy implications, international competitiveness effects, or the necessity of domestic production and supply chains in the case of war.

Economics, therefore, captures maybe 10-20% of what’s important about trade agreements like NAFTA while lying about it in the name of the plutocrats the entire time. Good work.

Current

My assessment is that Harris will be slightly better than Biden for Ukraine, while Trump will be substantially worse. And one big reason is that the Trump campaign is being indirectly bankrolled and assisted by Russian money and propaganda, and to a lesser extent by the Chinese as well.

Trump is loyal to one thing, and that is cold hard currency. He’ll never quite be Putin’s lapdog, but he’ll be tame enough as long as the money spigot keeps flowing. And that’ll mean bad things for Ukraine.

Once

Yeah, seeing that lately has made me laugh. But I think a lot of FA types do believe you diet for a few months and then are done. Not the way it actually works, though. Which is of course why they fail at it. I’ve been working out for six years straight now. If I stopped, I’d lose 80% of my strength gains within six months.

Such is life.

Checking

People on r/scams crack me up sometimes.

At least they’re checking I guess, but they can get an email from “russianscam@scammy.net” that links to a website called iwillstealyourmoney.com and then post, “I got this email. Is it a scam? I can’t tell for sure.”

Hmm, I wonder.

Obsess

I just saw it on Reddit today, so don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. That said, it’s strange when women are like, “All you care about is SEX!!!!!!!1111” when you’ve mentioned like a dozen other dealbreakers.

And then you say, “Wanting kids is also a dealbeaker. We have no future and should not have a relationship if you do want that. If we have nothing we enjoy doing for fun in common, also a dealbreaker. If you are super clingy, also a dealbreaker. But yes, not wanting a sexual relationship is in fact also a dealbreaker.”

Then it’s the “All you want is SEX!” again. It makes no damn sense.

So my question is, why are so many women so oddly sex-obsessed? ๐Ÿ˜‰

Claimed

To clarify something, it’s completely wrong for incels and others weirdos to attack and harass any specific woman, no matter what she’s done. It’s pointless and counterproductive in addition to being morally misguided. It just doesn’t help.

But it’s a fine and even a good thing to do to observe that women’s mental health is in decline, that social media is causing grievous harm especially to women, that feminism has gone off the rails completely by its demand for power with no responsibility or accountability, and that a lot of things that women demand and do harm men. And that no one really seems to care one way or the other what men say or feel about anything, while believing that they are ravening sex beasts with no emotions at all.

Those things all should be discussed out in the open, and even more so the more people declaim so vociferously that they are not real problems.

Europeโ€™s Populist Surge Isnโ€™t Only About Immigration, It Is About Fading Trust.

Massive data breach that includes Social Security numbers may be even worse than suspected.

FinCEN Issues Final Rules to Safeguard Residential Real Estate, Investment Adviser Sectors from Illicit Finance.

Most American workers want a unionโ€”and it may be the only way to save the middle class.

America isnโ€™t ready for another war โ€” because it doesnโ€™t have the troops.

AI Layoffs have begun….

The AfD has stunned Germany โ€“ but this was no surprise victory.

Beloved Russian celebrity โ€˜spyโ€™ whale is found dead off Norway.