The average utility bill for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers increased by about 67% over the last five years. (source)

I can vouch. My PG&E bills in 2020 averaged around $70 a month, now they’re regularly over $170. No change in my consumption habits. If I’m mathing correctly, that’s more than a 100% increase for me.

Not Safe For Work is a warning so if you’re browsing at work you know not to click on a link that might embarrass you if people are looking over your shoulder. It’s not about nakedness per se, but is more about what’s acceptable to look at in front of others in a professional setting.

I hope you wanted a serious answer…

I get what you’re saying, and I accept that reality for most of us here who already understand these things. But blaming consumers for corporate surveillance is not a good way to get corporations to stop surveilling consumers.

Heh logs.

You fixed my crappy morning, much appreciated.

I don’t know what to tell you. Your experiences are your own, and I’m glad your lab takes care of you.

Archaeology. But it was in the UK and I’m American so everything was a bit tougher than it should have been. My advisor for sure should have paid, and could have, but he was an asshole who didn’t bother to understand my situation.

It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.

In grad school I remember being encouraged to submit a paper to a journal that would have charged me a few hundred dollars to put it in for peer review, and I told my advisor no, I needed to buy groceries, I would not throw my money away for an extra line on my CV. He got all flustered and it was a great example of why higher education is so fucked. My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive. He was incapable of understanding that I was essentially unemployed while enrolled as his grad student, and every dollar of funding went to bare essentials so I could continue breathing. He had access to discretionary funds for this exact kind of issue (I found out later), and didn’t think to offer.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

That’s not how slurs work. That word is a slur, even if your intention isn’t explicitly bigoted. But in the content of your comment, you’re still using it exactly the way a bigot would use it as a slur.

That’s a wild take.

I think you have it the wrong way around: the movies are for everyone, the comics are for the super fans. Not much more to it than that, but getting this worked up about a fictional universe is not healthy.

Also, watch your slurs, most people don’t like ableism around these parts.

I really appreciate it when colleagues check in right before a meeting via chat just to make sure at least one person has something they actually need to talk about. If not, we skip it and go back to our work. Some teams do this as a habit, others meet anyway just to shoot the shit if there’s nothing work-related to discuss. My team is the former, thankfully.

I’m a Jew, and I’ve been speaking out against the occupation and genocide in Palestine since the beginning, and for decades before this current war.

Your bigoted generalizations only expose your insecurities. If you really believe this, then you haven’t met very many people who aren’t exactly like you. Or you’re simply incapable of empathy. Either way, this bullshit isn’t helpful.

Of course we need mass protest, it’s critical for building solidarity and sending messages to those in currently power, but by itself it doesn’t solve the problems. Sites like the one mentioned in the article are kind of a bandaid, sure, but when real peoples’ lives are on the line, and a bandaid donated by the community could save their life, why would you dismiss it out of hand like that? Seems pretty crass to me. Bigger systemic solutions are way better, obviously, but when the current power structure is incapable of providing those solutions, local communities need to come up with their own.

An effective political movement needs protest to expose the problems and bring people on board, and then the movement needs to be get involved in local and national politics by running for office or working to elect people who share the values of those protesting, to convert that solidarity into political power. More than 7 million people turned out to protest last time. What, specifically, would be different about your full massive protest? How would you organize it differently to be more effective than the no kings protests? And would your new mass protest solve the practical problems the orgs in the article are working to solve on the ground right now?

I completely agree. I revisit them every year or two to see if my tastes have changed, but I still gag when somebody peels a banana anywhere near me. It’s an automatic involuntary reaction. They are the only food I can think of that give me an immediate gag relfex.

For example, I can be sitting at one end of a train, and I can tell when someone on the opposite side of the train starts eating a banana. I have to put my face in my shirt to stop myself from puking. I wish I liked them, they’re so freaking healthy, but nope can’t do it.

Your ignorance is genuinely terrifying to me. I opened this post because your question is mostly legit. I have an undergrad and a masters degree, and while I don’t regret getting them, I will be in debt for the rest of my life. There are a lot of institutional and structural issues with higher education in the US, but most of them boil down to it being a profit business and not strictly a knowledge business. That fact has a lot of knock-on effects, many of which aren’t super obvious unless you’re entrenched in academia. But importantly, that doesn’t mean the knowledge isn’t still valuable or worthwhile.

Your comment might as well be an advertisement for why higher education (or really any education) is critically important for a functional society. You’re so fundamentally wrong about all of it, and it sure seems like you’re stubbornly unwilling to learn about the nature of reality, so I don’t think college would be a good fit for you.

This is a great question, I’ll be watching the replies. I had a similar thought this morning as I was checking how my very humble ETF investments were looking, and I remembered that NVIDIA is a chunk of one of them…

I don’t have much disposable income to invest, but I like to put a little bit in non-fossil fuel ETFs, and I feel like they’ll get super risky once the bubble pops (which I agree, it will).

I’m not a dev, but I work with a lot of them, and I do a fair amount of bug testing and reporting for them. Devs do so much: they usually deploy and maintain the infrastructure (servers, virtual machines, databases etc.) upon which they build stuff, they write code in a bunch of different languages, connect things up to external APIs to add more functionality, process and combine datasets to use in the things they build, and plan/track all of that wok as granularly as possible using a variety of project management tools like GitHub or Jira.

Actually writing code from scratch is probably only 15 or 20% of what they do, at least at my relatively small company. And that’s usually spread out among a few different devs who have their own specialities.

I feel this. A few weeks ago I was having problems with the headset I normally use for meetings, so I had to dial into the call on my phone while still watching the screenshare on my computer. When the meeting was over, I forgot I was still connected to the audio call on my phone, and I made a huge loud sigh followed by “ugggghhhh fuck this shit.” Everyone heard me and cracked up. I passed it off as me cursing out a different technical issue, but the people that knew, knew.

I’ve had a Brother HL-L2300D laser printer since 2021, and I haven’t even needed to replace the starter toner cartridge that came with it. I use it verrrrry lightly and infrequently, but it’s solid and reliable, plug and play. I’m pretty sure the starter toner doesn’t even have nearly the capacity as a new cartridge would, so for light use this thing will basically last forever.

Neighbors at my old apartment had KKK as their network name. They were huge pieces of shit who knew I could hear everything through the walls, so they would have entire conversations about me with slurs every other word. They were also armed, and talked about their guns constantly (again, knowing I could hear everything). Imagine laying in bed at 3am trying to get some sleep before a 7am meeting, and having to listen to two racist assholes literally yell through the walls just to harass me and make sure I couldn’t fall asleep.

Living there was so stressful.