Punkie

This is something that influences a lot of culture. Like most people when they think of style and decor in the 1980s, are thinking of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The rest of America was not always neon pumps, leg warmers, and thin piano ties.

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

Not currently, but I did a few sides jobs in the last ten years.

I am a Linux systems administrator. Before I did full contract work, I did part time contract work (alongside my full time salary job) for a general contractor as a piecemeal basis. A job here, 20 hour support there. Some jobs I made $300, some $3000. It was sporadic and came in waves. I got this from a former contract job who recommended me when they folded.

I also did writing gigs. I optioned a few scripts and sold a few short stories. That’s still ongoing, but I haven’t sold anything for a few years.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

MBAs who contract dev work out to India to make a quick buck without realizing how bad the code they’re going to get back usually is.

Ah, but some of them DO know what they are doing! In the IT world, I have seen where people say a job is about 2-3 years, show no loyalty to the company, and so on. But they don’t understand managers are doing this, too. Many KNOW these outsourcers are shitty (or don’t care because that’s not a metric they care about beyond selling points), but in a 2-3 year turnaround time, by the time it’s apparent they don’t work, the people who made those decisions are already gone. They ALSO thought ahead to the 2-3 year plan. Here’s how that goes:

Year 1: Make proposal based on costs. Find someone in Puna who will sell you some package with some bright, smiling, educated people who speak whatever language and accent that makes your pitch. Proposals are made, and attached to next year’s budget.

Year 2: Start the crossover. Puna Corp has swapped out the “demo people” for their core chum bucket. Sometimes, they don’t even change the names. How is an American gonna know that the Vivek Patel they saw in the demo is not the same guy named Vivek Patel who is working with your bitter employees who see the writing on the wall? Sadly to many who don’t care, “they all look/sound alike.” Puna is a product, their employees are a static pattern of commodity. Your people say they are shit, but, “oh, those grumbling employees. Your job is safe! We can’t fire you, you are too valuable!”

Year 3: The crossover has gone badly, but you are already looking for the next company to work for. The layoffs happen, and all the good folks are gone, and replaced by the Puna Corp folks. Things start to go badly, but you already got one foot out the door, charming your way into another company.

Year 4: You’re gone. Your legacy is that you saved a butt-ton of money. You are a success! The product is shit, but that’s not your problem. By the time the company realizes the tragedy, it’s middle manager versus middle manager, all backstabbing and jumping ship. Customers don’t matter, marketing covers up the satisfaction. “Wow,” you say. “Things sure when to shit THE MOMENT I LEFT.” You look fantastic! When you were there, you saved money! When you left, it all went downhill! You are a goddamn rockstar. Then repeat.

I have seen this happen since the 90s with a lot of tech folks. Everyone thinking short term for themselves. Only the customers get screwed via enshittification.

It would have been the 1990s by ADC, a street map company local to this area (and possibly other cities).

In the late 1980s, I had a roommate who graduated with a business degree and got recruited for a government contractor right out of college. She packed up her life and moved to the DC area. A month into her new job, the contract was pulled. But because she had a clause in the recruitment contract, they couldn’t fire her. But they had no work for her, either. So she had to come to work every weekday, 9-5. She’d sit at her desk with nothing to do. They didn’t ask her to look busy, just present.

She read about 3-5 novels a week. Over the next few months, we watched her get more and more depressed. She’d complain about her situation, but it fell on deaf ears. “Must be nice,” people said in jealousy. “Get paid to do nothing.” She became despondent in the lack of people’s sympathy. “Nobody understands how much this sucks!”

Eventually, she got a new job. Her mood vastly improved.

I’ll never forget that lesson. People need to feel useful, productive. Sitting at a desk with nothing to do, no purpose, no validation. It will destroy you.

That doesn’t even cover the issues of explaining how they figure out what DAY it is every year.

“Okay, so they start by figuring out when the Earth has the most direct sun on the the Tropic of Cancer… no, not the disease, a giant crab… it’s a line of latitude approximately 23°27′ north of Earth’s Equator, right? Yes, there’s math. Anyway, the take the day the sun is strongest and weakest, called the solstices, and … the solstices… It doesn’t matter, It mattered for agriculture back then, especially when spring and fall were, which are the calendar dates in between them, yeah? So the spring equinox ,., that’s what they call the ‘in between solstices,’ equinox… which is March 21st or 22nd or something. What? No no, I am explaining how they figure out when easter is. I haven’t forgotten. So now we know when the spring equinox is, so now we look at a chart of the moon, and figure out when it is full. Full. No, not ‘full of what?’ it’s full meaning that you can see all of in the sky. Well one half of it, actually. The sunlit half, but it’s FACING us, see… The sun lights up and it shows as a circle instead of a crescent or something. Moving on, they look at the FIRST Sunday AFTER the FIRST full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. Except if the full moon falls on a Sunday, then Easter is the next Sunday. Why? Well, St. Bede the Venerable, the 6th-century author of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), maintains that the English word ‘Easter’ comes from Eostre, or Eostrae, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. That’s where the Spring Equinox comes in. NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!”

1. Things like CNC machines and proprietary interfaces to TOL equipment, like bus fare systems, message boards, etc.
2. Don’t connect them to the Internet (most can’t, anyway, but some systems use a run-of-the-mill PC, so…)
3. Don’t install anything on them that wasn’t supposed to be installed, even wallpaper as this could fuck up the resolution of a small 240 x 180 screen

I have not done this for Youtube, but I have done it for tech reviews as a ghost writer. Basically, a lot of those tech reviews done under a pseudonym in magazines. No, I won’t tell you which ones, I like getting paid. Anyway, I’d say about 40% I had to send back in a set amount of time, about 50% I am told to destroy or keep, and 10% they don’t tell me and won’t answer my queries. Reselling is almost always a huge no-no, and that also applies to giving stuff away.

Sounds fun, but some of this stuff is utter, unworkable crap. So many SBCs that never see the light of day, or have the most impotent release announcements on the planet. Like, “this is set for release Jan 3rd, 2024.” Then it’s not ever mentioned on any main page on their website, is listed as a .gz image in their repo (which is on gdrive), but only one release candidate and it’s the same one you reviewed where the wireless chip just randomly stops responding until you reboot. Maybe has a byline on their products page under “this power adapter works with [list of models, including the one they don’t have for sale on the same site].”

I have two HUD displays I got in 2022, which look amazing, but the screen never powered on (which is why I have 2, they sent me a replacement, which was broken the same way), and I am considering at this point making them some cosplay item or taking it to a rave, because it glows super sexy. But with no working LED screen, kinda useless.

The Silver Spring Transit Center. https://ggwash.org/view/30613/silver-spring-transit-center-is-unsafe-everyones-to-blame

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

They had a multimillion dollar transit project near where I loved, like $112 million to replace a train station, a subway stop, and a major bus terminal to combine them into a single entity near Washington DC. They projected 3 years from start to finish, but it took almost 7. They had to reroute the entire bus terminal to surrounding streets and parking garages, which was a traffic nightmare. People using the train station or subway had to reroute their walk sometimes up to a mile off their present walk. While doing demolition, they found that the previous bus terminal was on the site of an old gas station which had been improperly sealed off: they just filled the tanks with concrete. Underneath that, they found tons of the the natural mineral serpentine, which naturally contains asbestos. So now they had a biological hazard which they had spent the last few months blowing up with dynamite into the surrounding city. After that was cleaned up and sealed, The got underway.

There were a ton of other mistakes, but when it was completed, they found defects. The superstructure is made of concrete and thus construction specifications were replete with engineering criteria for the composition of the concrete, and its pouring, curing and tensioning. The Inspector General systematically examined 22 project management and control points from the time concrete was mixed until the time it was ready for final inspection. 14 of 22 control points that should have minimized defects were weak or ineffective. Those defects may require recurring engineering inspections, higher maintenance costs, and they could shorten the planned 50-year useful life. In addition, the IG described the risk of concrete falling onto transit-center patrons.

The entire thing was a huge boondoggle costing the downtown untold millions into the future.

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”

About 20 years ago, I used to keep Lego Bionicles at my desk, but had to stop because pranksters would do this, and then HR would make negative comments.

I was for about 15 years post high school, but her life was rough and I was always the one initiating contact, so we drifted apart. I hope she okay. Smart woman, gifted arist, terrible parents.

When I was 19, I had friends from high school who were still younger, and one of them was my friend Julie who had helicopter parents (she would have been 17-18). I was doing security at an event where the radio headsets we had were super-shitty, and the guy running security was a dumpster fire on his own. Julie’s parents forbid her from going to the event, and grounded her to her room. Then her dad called the hotel where the event was being held, was told Julie had “run away” to this event, and that I was somehow responsible. Given she was a minor, the event runners were understandably concerned, although they were frustrated that Julie’s dad was unable to describe her in a way that was useful: “Asian, wearing black, or a tee-shirt, or something. Ask Punkie where she is.” So they contacted the head of security to find me on my rounds to see if I knew what this crazy man was talking about. The head of security said “okay” and did nothing.

At some point, the head of security was fired for a variety of reasons, and this increased the level of miscommunication. Meanwhile, Julie’s dad was calling every few hours, demanding to know where his daughter was. And soon there was a concerted effort to find me, which was complicated because of the communication issues. By the time someone found me and the connection was made, my response of, “I have no idea, Julie said her dad forbid her coming here,” was not what they wanted to hear, and met with skepticism “You’re not hiding her, are you? Like she ran away with you in some tryst? She’s 17 and you’re 19, that could have legal ramifications!” No. We’re platonic friends, I don’t know where she is. if I tried to bonk the poor woman, she’d clobber me.

Meanwhile, Julie’s dad finds Julie in her bedroom, right where he left her. Julie later told me that she was ignoring her dad calling for her, and didn’t “come downstairs” like he demanded because she assumed it was a trap to get her punished for leaving her bedroom while she was grounded. So naturally, her dad assumed she wasn’t in the house. Because he called for her and she didn’t answer.

Poor Julie. Her parents were crazy-nuts.

No mention of external dimensions, so I am going to assume that it exists in the abstract since you mention teleportation. Like you just think about it and teleport there, not carry it upon your person like a portable hole in D&D.

Like others mentioned, a living space of some kind. I’d worry at first where I teleport inside, like hopefully not inside my mattress. Also, when I teleport back out, where is that? Where I teleported in? What if that gets replaced, like say I popped out while in an empty parking garage, but popped back in and a car is now parked where I left off? Might be nice if I pop back out anywhere I choose. Pop in while in New York, pop out in London.

Man, I’d save so much on rent. Or at least storage.