There's something to be said about leadership that sticks around even when things are tough.
What's important to remember is that those on the bottom of the org rarely have the same choice in walking away when things get tough.
Although I would like sudo that is formally verified, not simply memory safe. Maybe something worth doing in Ada/SPARK.
The heart warming tale of a Wal Mart CEO. Just work a summer job unloading trucks in high school, then go to college, get an MBA. Then with your MBA, make some calls and get a job of an assistant manager, and you just walk right up the corporate ladder from the bottom. Well from the middle.
I'd rather vote with my dollars.
Voting with your dollars is undemocratic. It creates a stratification of classes based on wealth, and the vast majority of citizens have little to no wealth. (income isn't wealth, a mortgage on your house isn't wealth). Realize that one person can afford $25 and another can afford $25 million. Should one person carry as much weight as a million others? That stinks of feudalism to me.
Your idea of using our buying power to decide things is an assumption that we all play by the same rules in the free market. When we clearly don't.
Remember, you own your own labor. You get to decide the best way to sell your labor. And I'm trying to tell you that the outcomes are significantly better for people who negotiate collectively than ones that come to their employer with hat in hand.
I might join one if I think the cost is reasonable
Teamers dues is two-and-a-half hours of base pay monthly. So if you made $50/hour, that's $125 a month in dues. There are cheaper unions than that.
Professional associations are relatively inexpensive. For example, ACM is $100 a year. But it doesn't provide really much more than the equivalent to a magazine subscription. American Bar Association (ABA) is around $200 a year for most attorneys, relatively cheap as well. But you also don't get much from it directly, but theoretically it works to improve the procession.
I would compare my ACM membership unfavorably to a hobby association like AMA. Where membership helps organize chapters, gets you a magazine subscription, some full-time lobbyists, and gets you liability insurance.
Bring back Clippy!
The top two undergraduate degrees are in Business and in Healthcare related fields, with Social sciences and Engineering a roughly tied in a distant third.
The trigger degrees for the Right, like woman's studies, gender studies, racial intersectionalism, etc. are not even 5% of the undergraduate degrees and obviously don't entirely account for the high unemployment.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to the poor job market is the economic uncertainty. It's difficult for a business to commit to hiring new staff and growing their business if they are worried about rising costs and a looming recession. Out of the popular degrees, I would say that Business majors are going to face the most difficult time in a down economy. And Healthcare related majors would be somewhat more recession-proof but for the near term the pay may be below what new college grads may have initially hoped for.
I'm generally against trying to centrally plan our higher education or our economy. Let individuals decide to go to school according to what they perceive is needed, since they'll be the one putting in the work to get that degree.
With changes to immigration and visa policy, I expect a lot of importing of brains to dry up. And for the US to compete, they will have to seriously consider cutting tuition and subsidizing universities. Even if those universities and students aren't likely to kiss the King's ring. Economics is more important than politics, even if the people ignorant of both don't realize it. Because if too many people don't have a home or food, they won't give a fuck about your politics.
If your politicians are costing you time and money with foolishness, then press for their removal. We ain't got time for reckless ideology, live and let live, and focus on your own accomplishments rather than judging others.
Are end-users really asking for some Big Brother bullshit to be inside their computer. That monitors all their activities and suggests things to them, and perhaps subtly offers advertisements. With some of these LLMs providing accurate information less than 50% of the time, is there an actual value to this? Obviously the market investors perceive a value, but that's not necessarily the same thing.
Treasure bonds are not included as revenue. I would argue it's "D.C. accounting" rather than "Hollywood Accounting". Fortunately the information is public and easy to access.
Tax hikes and GDP growth were the main contributors to the revenue, and the surplus occurred because of an earlier clamp down (1990) on increases in spending.
You get to vote for your union governance, and members can run for office positions in most unions. It's democratic, unlike a corporation.
People love the stories where the CEO started in the mail room 30 years earlier. It doesn't really happen but it makes a great story.
Killing yourself for your company makes no sense in an era where the company offers no loyalty to employees. At this stage of capitalism, I think every workers needs to organize and protect themselves through collective action. And I don't think my view is all that extreme, it's a compromise in my opinion. We'll still have capitalism, and people can still own things.
But why should we accept that a contract between an individual and a multinational corporation is fair? And that one between a union and a corporation is unfair? We've been completely backwards for far too long. Negotiate from a position of strength, even if you have to do it collectively. Agreements made between parties that are on even footing are mutually beneficial. (a corporation is a kind of collective)
Nov 2026 is what, 18 months away?
I think it's a mistake to wait for elections. I see this attitude from several key Democrats, and I don't think Congress will have any meaningful legislative power by 2026.
Attending protests, even relatively benign ones like Hands Off. Regular calls to your representatives. These can keep the pressure on people that can make a difference, and give them some level of confidence that if they take the difficult road of putting up an opposition that their constituency will support them.
Without popular support. There is really no reason for a career politicians to stick her neck out. Standing alone against the Trump Administration would be a career limiting move for most.
I still get RTF files from time to time. Most of them I get when I buy some indie tabletop roleplaying game that comes with a free (CC licensed) hackable version of the rules.
Even though Office 365 supports
Probably the biggest ODF based project I use is Basic Fantasy RPG. Which accepts contributions from the open source community, and maintains a large library of material based around their homebrew game system.
I'm going to use AI to attend any presentation that is AI generated, or have it read for me any paper that is AI generated.
Because if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
I worry that there's a good 30% of Americans that get their view on our budget straight from President Trump. With little to no curiosity as to what an independent audit might say.
We had a $73 billion deficit in 1980, equivalent to $285 B today.
For 2025, the deficit is projected to be around $900 billion.
We had surplus in 98, 99, and 2000. The first and last in a generation. Without major changes to our political system, such as legislating away the Citizens United ruling, we are unlikely to see a surplus ever again. And this nation will slide into deeper debt while deeply incompetent politicians damage our debt rating and currency throughout the world. Making it much more expensive for us to borrow.
I hope America is remembered fondly for our contributions to music, science, and space exploration. On our current path, we're not going to be leading the world in anything by the end of the 21st century.
The cuts to education in civics happened gradually, as the curriculum was slowly stripped away. I believe the removal of institutions that support a healthy democracy, such as public education, was an intentional move. US politics is a game of polls, and an uninformed public comes out every four years to vote in major elections. Often without any idea of the issues or who is running until they have a ballot in their hand. We're neglected our democracy and we will lose our republic.
We as a people don't realize that we did not come out ahead in the Cold War. Most of us assume that war is a zero sum game, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc are gone so the US must have won. Victory!
Because of the control industrialists have had over the US government for a century. And because of our deep cultural reaction to the Cold War. It became very easy to paint any labor movement as communist sympathizers, and unplug them politically.
Trap full -- please empty.
