I don’t see any of the other “soldiers” moving in to help here

It’s crazy how hard people miss the memo on this.

You are in parade formation. One of your coworkers collapses from strain. You do not help because your boss hazed you into subservience. This is fine because idk maybe someone else will be by to handle things eventually.

Fucking corporatist mindset on steroids. People are denuded of their empathy in their quest to perfectly follow orders.

I wonder how any one of these freaks behave in a torture blacksite when their bosses line up another round of “enemy combatants” for waterboarding…

If you know a big chunk of your city’s skilled developers and you collectively agree all the firms suck… might not be a bad idea to start organizing and withholding your labor as a unit.

It’s a modest bedroom, small living room, and a kitchen.

You can fit in a smaller space. I wouldn’t say you can live in it. 300ft is barely a hotel room.

The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices

Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you’ve got your fingers in the dam.

There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry

Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.

The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with “10 years experience” on their resume for twice what they’re paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.

Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you’re unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.

That’s when you can really squeeze’m

There’s an old story about the lead developer at Texas Instruments saying “I want a computer that fits in my pocket”. And then his staff dutifully measured the pocket to spec before proceeding to perform a feat of miniaturization that would revolutionize the modern world.

I’m trying to imagine one of the techies, from way out in the back, saying “Does it have to get the right answer?” Then getting fired, walking off the job, and walking into Microsoft with 10x the salary the next day.

I’ve seen a few in shades of matte gray and camel tan that work great. Very boring and gender neutral. No need to proclaim your sexuality when you’re using them.

Plenty of diaper bags with sportsball branding and Comic Books for Adults aesthetics.

Of course, there’s a lot of military advertising in both of these media circuits, so… shrug Any time you need to make your diaper bag look like something other than a diaper bag in order to feel secure, you’ve been cowed by The Patriarchy.

This person just needs better parents

That’s what we’re saying, yes.

designed aesthetically

“Military” as an aesthetic is very 90s-minded. Like, 30 years ago, when I was a dumb teenager who was excited to see the live-action GI Joe movie, cosplaying as an Elite Operator Guy felt no different than playing around as a cowboy or a knight or a jedi.

Now? Idk. I can only expose myself to so many “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” gore videos, with guys dressed like that opening fire on a crowd of starving Arab children, before I’ve lost my taste for this kind of aesthetic choice. Its beginning to feel like I’m seeing a guy who wraps his kid in a swastika themed blanky.

no different

• Being insecure when you see a guy in tight pants and feeling things your pastor told you that you shouldn’t

• Noticing insecurity in others, as they scramble to camouflage something they’ve internalized as an “other gender” coded activity.

Turning your diaper bag into a tacti-cool military gear is more akin to the sorority sports team that needs to color everything pink and add a tutu as an accessory, so nobody will mistake them as being too butch. It’s the fashion equivalent of shouting “No Homo!”

Yo, guys. Is it gay to take care of your kids?

Better butch this up.

SET UP A TRAP FIRST!

The mentality that separates an “Oops, we screwed up” PC group versus an “Oops, I screwed up” DM.

The goofy party will stumble around slapping every button in the fun-house, just to see what happens.

The pro-gamer move party will key in on “Unlimited Resource” and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.

The only thing I love more than Vibes Coding is Vibes Management.

You get a meeting! You get a meeting! Everyone! Gets! A! Meeting!!!

I mean, its hardly unique to SV or to the Tech Sector broadly speaking. One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen down in Texas is teachers earning enough money to live in their (comparatively much cheaper than California) school districts.

But I gotta say, I was earning $48k back in 2006 way out in the Houston 'burbs and it was a tight squeeze. Nothing has improved. “Just earn less” doesn’t work when you’re bumping up against a bunch of landlords and lenders saying “Fuck you, pay me more”.

Try a $48-64k job and get some experience.

Try renting an apartment in Silicon Valley with a $48k/year paycheck in your pocket.

The starting salaries justified the crazy cost-of-living in a city that wanted $5000/mo for 800 sqft. Now the question becomes how you afford to get the experience in a job that pays below the regional pricetag.

Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.

… There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.

One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.

Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.

That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.

The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.

Obviously, the problem is that you’re asking the wrong questions. The AI is infallible. We just need to get the end user to accept that sometimes 2+2 = 5. Just depends on what Big Brother tells you.

Um, Aktuky…

President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations.

In approving a recommendation Thursday by the Administration’s top economic officials, the White House decided to put the tariffs into effect about April 17, less than two weeks before Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is scheduled to begin a visit to the United States aimed at easing trade frictions.

The tariffs will be targeted to bring in as much as $300 million and designed to punish such firms as NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Oki Corp. by either pricing some of their goods out of the American market or by forcing them to accept substantial losses on U.S. sales.