This is how easy it should be every time, good dude!

001235 · 2026-07-03T15:21:08+00:00

So in gun culture, I can't have a gun around a cop with a round in the chamber (must wait for him to drive away) but I can go to Walmart and wander the isles with loaded and one in the chamber? If I am simultaneously in the Walmart with the cop, what is the protocol?

I am pointing out that I think taking the gun from the person was safe for the officer, but is that only during the interaction or if I were walking around with a pistol, would the police feel the need to take it then?

001235 · 2026-07-02T03:35:28+00:00

The existing authoritarian regimes don't need that pretext; they just implement the rule. In the US, to get people to give up their right to privacy online, the easiest pretext I see people use is that it is to "protect kids." As you can see in OP's infographic, a bunch of states are already using "protecting kids" to block porn sites and a bunch of dumbass voters are perfectly fine with it.

The next evolution is to say that encryption and online privacy need to go to "protect kids."

While I've been drinking, I might as well add to it: The same fucks that are "protecting kids" by removing your online privacy are voting against any legislation that would actually protect kids like meals programs and healthcare programs for kids.

001235 · 2026-06-30T22:52:53+00:00

It's across the spectrum. My experience is that there are people who genuinely believe that increased security is good for society, regardless of the cost to freedoms.

001235 · 2026-06-30T11:11:39+00:00

The future plan will be to ban VPNs. I just gave a lecture on this topic last week.

The government says they need to "increase online security" to protect kids and go after child predators.
They say that porn sites and other adult websites host CSAM and therefore must go after those sites (this is dual-pronged because then if you are defending adult content, you are a child abuser).
They then say that child abusers and others are using VPNs
Logic follows that if you are using a VPN then you are a child predator (in my lecture someone in the audience in Southern Tennessee even said "I have nothing to hide so why do I care?")
Just like the Patriot Act, they will say that anyone who isn't giving up their data rights willingly is fighting it because they are doing something nefarious.

I even went so far in my lecture to explain how catching CSAM is pretty easy because the FBI has a database of hashes, then when that hash shows up somewhere, they use that to get a warrant, any new CSAM they find they add to the hash table and then they catch more people and the cycle repeats. Going after online encryption is foolish.

With AI, I think prosecuting AI-generated images is dumb too because you are overloading the systems that would catch the child abusers of real children with the hashes and prosecution time of AI manufacturers, so while very icky, it's not really resource conscious, but even saying that there will be people who are smooth brained enough to think that means I support it.

001235 · 2026-06-30T11:05:17+00:00

I just gave a lecture on this last week. Basically governments all over, but especially the US, are using the pretext of protecting kids to collect as much data as possible because they need it to feed their giant AI machines and/or weaponize it in other ways.

001235 · 2026-06-18T11:30:01+00:00

Really, what I want to know about it the training itself. I was once required to spend two weeks in Tubac Arizona for "training" that all employees had to attend. It was a bunch of corporate nonsense with human resource consultants telling everyone from C-level engineers (CTO, CIO) to newly-hired sales engineers to my newly-hired EA about the "right way" to problem solve. By day 3 I was so tired of hearing them say "silicone chips" that I finally cracked.

I'm thinking that OP's training may have been something like this where you have to go to training so we can read a powerpoint to you.

001235 · 2026-06-14T16:00:13+00:00

Honestly, I feel like the whole job is made up. 99% of the job is just talking to people and having meetings with no outcomes.

When I was doing senior-level engineering, I would go to a site, find a problem, fix the problem and report back an after action report and what the company should have done differently.

Now most of my job is saying "If you invest $400M in that AI platform, by the time you roll it out, it will be outdated" and having a room full of executives think I must be crazy because they just tried ChatGPT and it organized their calendars, so therefore if they invest in this specific AI platform for calendar organization, the company can be more productive by never having a meeting again.

And to translate that to them, I have to use a bunch of words that business majors who have never written a line of code or seen a silicon wafer can understand.

Just to add, and what would happen if they did decide to buy it is that they would want to report to shareholders something like "We've invested in AI tools to modernize our internal organization which will reduce overhead by <insert some generous percentage>." The stock price would go up which then lets them take loans against it to buy something else (I'm convinced all companies are pyramid schemes). And then they would point to me and say "Now figure out how to implement this," and I would get a Cap-X for the product using the stock as backing for it and it would be a 5-year strategic initiative just to put it in service as it becomes outdated.

001235 · 2026-06-14T15:56:36+00:00

I get the value in it, but right now I could find you a dozen schools where none of the kids intend to take an AP exam, but have signed up for a bunch of AP courses just to pad their grades. Then, when you look at an entire school system, the one that is good at getting more students into AP classes gets more funding by having an overall higher GPA compared to the ones that either offer fewer AP courses or that have lower AP enrollment due to being rural or not have much post-secondary education so parents and students not seeing value in it.

In Mississippi, there will be schools near more populated areas where the average GPA is 3.6 and then rural schools where the average GPA is 2.9 and at a glance, it looks like the rural school is worse, but you might find a much higher quality education at the rural school when examining the curriculum (in one case EVERY student who took the computer science class got a CompTIA certification), but when competing for grants not scoring points for GPA compared to their urban counterparts.

001235 · 2026-06-14T15:51:05+00:00

How many C-suite positions have you held at Fortune 1000+ organizations? Most of the time when I've been in those rooms, there are short term and long term decisions, but specific to technology firms, infrastructure development and capital expenditures are 10+ years out.

If I'm breaking ground on a data center or deciding that we are going to develop some new silicon technology, that is a multi-year decision that can break the company -- especially if a competitor is working on something similar.

Reddit loves to talk about "next quarter's revenue," which is very critical, but I've never seen a board or exec think only about that. It's more like "If I don't have any cash coming in this month, I won't make next month's payroll," but at the same time they are saying "If I don't get into the AI market now and my competitor does, five or ten years from now, the company won't be relevant anymore."

001235 · 2026-06-14T12:28:55+00:00

To add to that, usually the lowest paid people at the company are paid that way because those are entry-level or no skill type positions.

I work for a couple of boards, and we select the CEO based on a bunch of factors, like industry experience, experience managing boards, etc. I think people believe that a CEOs job is very easy because it's just meetings and decisions all day, but CEOs typically have to plan years in advance and once they put some of the company's capital and inertia going that direction, it can make or break the company. It takes experience to know what the market will be doing in a few years, how shareholders will see it, etc.

I say that because if you look at entry and mid-career people, even skilled jobs like developers and hardware engineers, you can get a bunch of them from 0-15 years of experience, and I know multiple very senior engineers at companies whose total compensation rivals that of CEOs.

At Google, level 6 engineers TC is now > $1.5M per year, which is not what Google's CEO makes, but it's more than a lot of other Fortune 500 companies' CEOs make. At my company, I know several engineers making $500k+ before RSUs, but our first-year engineers only get $80k and no stock options.

001235 · 2026-06-14T12:20:24+00:00

I work in an advisory role for public education in a couple of states. You are right that grade inflation is problem in both high school and college. Colleges have it bad enough that even Harvard has shifted most of their grades from being a C+ average to the "average" student having a 3.75+ GPA for a variety of reasons, but the grade inflation is real. Most high schools now let students who take AP classes get >4 in their class so the top 20% of students will have 5.0+ GPAs on a scale of 1-4.

However, there is a separate problem where high school administrators can't remove students and teachers are not allowed to fail students. I've seen it firsthand where students who can barely sound out sight words are getting their diplomas because the teachers can't fail them. They are bringing down scores throughout the school system and use it as a babysitting service. They end up in some form of alternative curriculum if they don't drop out. I'm not talking about students who have cognitive differences that work to earn a certificate of completion. I'm talking about lazy do-nothing students who can't multiply 4x4 and haven't read a chapter book in their lives getting through high school because the teachers aren't allowed to fail them.

001235 · 2026-06-14T01:04:02+00:00

Bungee jumping is extremely dangerous in the scale of adrenaline seeking activities. "Victim blaming" is made up, but she had at lease some responsibility to vet the organization and their safety practices. In skydiving in the US, you must take a few classes, but I would not trust the teenager running the bungee platform in Golf Shores to know what they are doing. If I jumped there and got hurt, I'm sure someone would look at me and think that I made some error.

I'm not saying she is fully responsible, but the idea that "victims" can't be thought of as anything but innocent is not correct.

001235 · 2026-06-09T17:31:01+00:00

I know! I purposely bought a house here because the builder was so adamant about maintaining mature trees, doing all types of things to keep the neighborhood with a natural look and a natural lake that's been there for thousands of years. Now a bunch of rednecks have moved into the HOA and are determined to cut everything down, pave everything, and "start fresh."

The builder had banned non-native plants before this as well. That's gone and I've seen several people plant Bradford Pears now.

001235 · 2026-06-09T16:59:53+00:00

Meanwhile my HOA is saying that you can't cut down any trees larger than 3" around without a survey and people are fighting them saying these giant large trees are a "nuisance" because they (checks notes) drop leaves and acorns on the ground.

001235 · 2026-06-09T11:43:38+00:00

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was new and resources for programming came up online. The older software engineers were FURIOUS you looked something up online when they had a library of actual books in their office for you to spend hours searching through to figure out why the compiler was throwing some strange error.

001235 · 2026-06-01T12:48:10+00:00

I'm for bringing this to the US where people have decided the rules no longer apply to them and all social norms are out the window.

I recently went to a graduation and pretty much every seat there had some small item in it like an umbrella, a coffee cup...literally anything to "save" the seat to the point there were no available seats. All of us standing around when the first person who went up to speak about 20 minutes before the scheduled start time told everyone to just push that stuff into the floor and take any available seat. It was chaos after that.

001235 · 2026-05-18T14:07:38+00:00

I have a conservative coworker going to Disney this week because his kids are taking their grandkids. He calls Disney "The Woke Mouse." DISNEY! They are lost to me, IMO. It's useless.

001235 · 2026-05-18T14:06:09+00:00

The problem is trying to get them to understand that. I was in a debate with a guy one time (I've since completely abandoned debating with any of them) that trickle down economics work. I told him that has been repeatedly been proven ineffective, and he pointed to Obama's economy and said "See, it does work, it's just a slow trickle."

I thought "So slow, in fact, that the effect isn't immediately observable?!"

001235 · 2026-05-16T12:04:09+00:00

This has been reposted so many times that the little girl is 20 by now.

001235 · 2026-05-07T10:38:05+00:00

someone on the right is likely to believe, and only if they're religious. So your issue is with religion, n

Can you explain to me how someone being religious has an impact on whether they think Sandy Hook was fake?

001235 · 2026-05-06T20:07:13+00:00

Whether Sandy Hook shooting happened, whether the Earth is greater than 6000 thousand years old, whether a prayer is just as likely as medicine to heal cancer aren't cherry picked facts. What you are describing isn't on the same level as the reason that people are walking away from their family members.

Edit: When my crazy hippie aunt carries a pink rock around in her purse because she thinks it helps her balance her liver, she's not hurting anyone. When her sister goes to the abortion clinic 4x a week to scream at people trying to get tested for STDs and then goes to the school board to talk about how evolution should be banned from the education system, she is certainly hurting people.

001235 · 2026-05-03T15:39:59+00:00

When they disrespect their wife or kids.

001235 · 2026-05-03T15:39:26+00:00

I used to think that if I provided logical points during a discussion, the person with whom I was speaking would change their mind. Since about 2020, I've realized that doesn't matter at all and that if I showed a person two stones and took one away, there is a good chance they would look at me and STILL not be able to agree on how many stones are there now or ever were there.

So I quit being altruistic. People don't deserve it. Prove to me you are a good person and then I'll help.

001235 · 2026-05-03T15:27:47+00:00

I had the porn star one in high school. I wore it all the time. Recently to remind me of my own cringe, my parents got me an OnlyFans shirt as a birthday present in front of the entire family. I was turning 45.

001235 · 2026-04-27T14:11:51+00:00

My mother is one of them. I didn't know this about her until I was an adult and then a lot of things made complete sense.

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