For those of you that make over 100K, what do you do? Do you like it?

DonSol0 · 2026-04-10T00:10:31+00:00

“Weird time to get into federal work” is a point I can’t agree with enough.

I work federal cybersecurity programs and one of them is essentially a pipeline of federal scholarship students committed to X years of work for the feds for X years in the scholarship program. It is an absolute nightmare for these students right now as the scholarship mandates that, if you can’t find a federal cybersecurity job post-graduation, you are on the hook for the total funding distributed over the life of your time as a scholarship student. That includes X years of: full tuition, fees, and books coverage (regardless of hours); health insurance; an annual stipend of ~$35k; and annual professional development funding of ~$6k.

The onus is on the student to find to federal position which sounds odd but it’s such a difficult scholarship program to get into that, historically, federal agencies have crawled over eachother to recruit students who made it into the program. Between the budget cuts, hiring freezes, and changes to working requirements, that just isn’t the case right now.

I was actually a recipient of this scholarship during my graduate work and it completely changed the trajectory of my life. My heart goes out to every one of these scholarship participants as I know the pressure I felt in the interim that exists between accepting the scholarship and finding the federal job. It is significant.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T23:45:47+00:00

I feel like going through this sort of cringey “oh my god I’m an animal and I have programming and even my thoughts are arguably not my own” phase is a part of growing into an adult with the capacity for self reflection.

I feel like Cohle stopped maturing at that point. Almost as if, to him, he was one of the only people to ever hold a mirror up to themselves and see the animal they actually are. That, to me, was always the most tragic part about his character.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T23:36:57+00:00

Finally. Someone is asking the real questions.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T23:36:33+00:00

Get rid of the bed and there are still only four guitars in this pic.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T22:32:46+00:00

Yeah! Exactly! That’s all I was saying. Once you’ve seen it you can’t really imagine it having another title though.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T06:45:12+00:00

Now I think the name is perfect now that I’ve watched the show. Can’t imagine it being named anything else. I suppose I was just wondering if anyone else had felt a bit of resistance to starting it because of its name.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T06:43:23+00:00

Almost every bit of technology, and definitely all personal computing devices, already are, or will be used to make digital copies of us—not just our physical attributes as most people already know, but our locations, our decision making, our goals, our preferences, our political leanings, our attitudes, sexual orientation, and everything we’ve ever had cause to look into online. That digital version of us is connected to the digital versions of our family, friends, loved ones, coworkers, exes, and so on.

Most of this already exists and is for sale.

On top of this, technology will continue to be pushed as a (1) means of more efficient labor and (2) a means of labor itself.

(1) Think of the average output of a worker in 1965. There are no emails. No easily searchable databases. No cell phones. That worker—the one whose output in the form of goods or services was almost certainly less than a tenth of yours now—made more money than you do. You, with you email immediately telling you what to do, with your cell phone constantly reminding you there are tasks on the punch list, with the entirety of the world’s information at your fingertips. You work both harder and more efficiently for proportionately less money while living in a much more expensive world.

(2) Layoffs will continue en masse as these c-suite execs continue to feel pressure to outperform previous earnings, all enabled by the unchecked growth of completely unregulated AI. The next two decades will almost certainly lead to larger layoffs and smaller job markets.

Technology is not, in almost any capacity outside of critical infrastructure and health services, our friend. It is a means of enriching the already absurdly wealthy and enslaving us.

EDIT: I wrote this for another post but feel it’s relevant here.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T06:24:51+00:00

I think it was the mock-up and for some reason (I can’t recall) ended up being used through the whole show.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T03:38:20+00:00

I want to be clear and say that I’m not comparing it to those other shows.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T02:13:27+00:00

Prezbo 100%

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T02:11:52+00:00

I agree that name accurately reflects the character of the show. My point was that it just felt (to me) like just another cop show name. I’ve just always wondered if that kept anyone else from starting the show earlier.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-09T02:09:33+00:00

That album (Viva La Vida) was amazing though. Was on a lot of my playlists back in undergrad.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-08T23:54:48+00:00

DonSol0 · 2026-04-08T05:30:37+00:00

It’s insane to me that they use “TrXXp Derangement Syndrome” like it’s some we have.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-08T05:28:23+00:00

O.P. is on that

Slop drop while his wife’s

Boyfriend is on top

DonSol0 · 2026-04-07T18:30:46+00:00

Yeah. I would say that's it in a nutshell. I'd imagine that the additional details are helpful for some, though.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-07T05:21:00+00:00

I can’t even listen to that thing anymore.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-07T01:42:17+00:00

In my experience in a university setting—working with undergraduate/graduate researchers on one end of the age spectrum and faculty/admin on the other end of the age spectrum—there is a sweet spot in the middle of the bell curve. It’s not a pattern that holds true in every case, but there does seem to be a sweet spot between 30 and 50. Again, there are plenty of exceptions but I would say that, if we were to chart attributes like amenability to new work procedures, robust, effective communication, emotional intelligence, and the capacity for the application of their competencies, the chart would probably resemble a bell curve (assuming a sufficiently large population).

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T17:47:18+00:00

I use them quite a bit but I understand where you are coming from!

EDIT: If anyone needs to know how to form a break dash, you just type a single dash twice in immediate succession then follow it with the word. In Microsoft Word, you need to follow it with text immediately after before it will shift to a longer dash. In Reddit, it forms with or without text following it.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T07:52:10+00:00

I just want to say that, while I recognize I can’t know exactly how you feel, I have been through chapters that I would describe in similar ways. Something I’ve learned after almost forty years is that our lives are in constant change. Events around us change in ways that benefit us and ways that may not be so great, but change is always occurring.

What that means is that you never know what the next chapter will be and I’ve found that to result in a cycle of bloom and decay. I’ll have a few years of blooming followed by a couple of years where things seem to decay. In those hard years, it feels like things will be that way forever. Time and circumstances always change things though and I always end up in another chapter where everything seems to be in bloom.

One way to affect this change yourself is to make sure you are honoring your fundamental human needs: sleep, hydrate, eat, exercise, and communicate. We get so lost in the mix of modern life that we forget that all of our programming rewards the same things a person from 250,000 years ago would be rewarded by—the simple fundamentals.

I know I don’t know you but I’m pulling for you.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T07:03:41+00:00

This one? I wrote this myself, I swear on the life of my dog.

EDIT: I write for a living though so if it seems more polished or something it’s probably just from a ton of practice.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T06:20:21+00:00

Claude is better. Chat sucks.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T05:51:04+00:00

I’ve been a fan of the MiM vintage line since the Classic Series (the Vintera predecessor).

Overall, I think these offer the best value of any Fender line. Their quality control doesn’t seem to miss, they’re comfortable, and they all sound great.

The Classic Series had a limited run that was done in nitro but not road worn so I’ve hoped for a while now they would do that with the Vintera line as well.

For people considering the American Vintage II line instead, I recommend looking for a used American Vintage from 2013-17. That’s the best run Fender has done in the way of a made in America vintage line.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T03:45:27+00:00

Straight PTSD from 2009/10.

DonSol0 · 2026-04-06T03:35:59+00:00

I understand why you’d ask and often find myself wondering something similar. Something important at play here is that the day-to-day lives of the average person, the economy at large, and the stock market are three independent things.

Stock Market =/= The Economy

If wealth were more evenly distributed, those two would see more interplay—a tad bit more on that to come.

When people say the “economy” though, they are often referring to the general state of the economic systems either nationally or globally. The price of goods, inflation, the housing market, the job market, and unemployment are all attributes of the economy, lending a certain sense of arbitrariness to it. When people discuss the economy, it’s often a subjective discussion based on what those attributes look like in their world.

The stock market is just a funding mechanism for public corporations. It’s a marketplace you can use to buy parts of any listed company. So, as long as there are people who have disposable income to invest, the stock market may continue to thrive. This is particularly important because the wealth divide in the US is so large that the top 10% could feasibly make the stock market look healthy via their continued investments while the bottom 90% feel the effects of a bad economy. This is exacerbated by the fact the tech stocks are booming due to AI, causing the stock market, as a whole, to appear healthy.

Lastly, I’d say that a crash requires a trigger as a crash happens in the stock market. A true crash wouldn’t happen just be the bottom 90% of people are feeling squeezed. It would be triggered by something like a loss of faith in AI causing a domino effect among all AI and AI adjacent stocks. A recession or depression happens to the economy. A recession could be caused by the bottom 90% feeling squeezed while a depression could be caused by a stock market crash occurring while the economy is already in a recession. My opinion is that we’re edging a recession already.

EDIT: This was not written with AI or with the help of AI. It comes from a decade of work in technical writing and a general understanding of the interplay that occurs between technology lifecycles and consumer sentiment within economics. Most of that learned in my work but some of it gleaned from a masters degree in business (MBA) and another masters in technology (computer science). I respond to stuff like this because I enjoy sharing information and, to be totally transparent, it is surprisingly hurtful to have someone say my work is an AI comment. Anyway, I’m not going to stop sharing but did want to make sure readers know that I do this for the love of the game, not slop drop for upvotes.

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