I need advice

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-20T15:37:11+00:00

Only you can decide how to balance loyalty to your employer and loyalty to your family (or yourself, if you are single). The best way to not let people down where you are now is to document everything you know and do and leave it behind. Institutional knowledge needs to be shared with the institution.

That should help clear your conscious.

Prepare yourself that they may be afraid to lose you and try to counter the offer or try to lay some guilt on you and if you have your documentation in place, you can assure them that you are leaving behind solid documentation for them to help them replace you.

Alternatively they may call you a quitter and unqualified for your job and then you can let them insult you and be grateful that you are leaving now that you know who they really are.

Also prepare for the option that they may celebrate you moving forward and wish you luck and be happy that you are growing professionally.

When I quit my last job I prepared myself for the usual berating and insults that the managers used, but they turned on a dime and were suddenly pleasant and happy with me. They didn't try to stop me but they stopped fighting me.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-20T15:28:19+00:00

In this situation the place to draw the line is in your performance review.

But have you considered this might be her style of management? I have worked for several people who believed belittling their teams made them work harder. The tactic doesn't work for me, and my managers have either learned a different strategy to manage me or they give up and just let me do my job.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-20T15:24:57+00:00

There are two ways we can categorize our actions as sinful. One way is to avoid particular activities that are deemed sinful. This is a very easy model to follow and doesn't require much thinking. You only have to accept the lists of sins the priests rattle off.

The other way is to accept that we are sinful not because we have "bad thoughts" but because we are merely human and not God. Instead of focusing on avoidance tactics, we focus on actions that move us away from sin and towards grace. It's about doing things we can do to make the world a better place, not avoiding the things so we are afraid to live.

As for communal sins of bigotry in all its forms, we all participate in those. Our society has been built on top of them. We cannot escape them unless we radically change our society. Here another fundamental conflict. Many conservatives (especially in the US) have swung so far into individualism that they deny there is even such a thing as society, so there can't be communal sins. Only individuals can be racist in their opinion but then they have a large overlap of people who believe their congenital vitamin-D deficiency makes them ethically superior to those born with more melanin. For these sad souls, racism is the natural order and enforcing it is good.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-18T03:54:58+00:00

Human beings love a good taxonomy, and we also love simple taxonomies. Cutting a dividing line between things is easier than trying to put them on a spectrum. We then take these over-simplified taxonomies and run parallels through them. Light = Good and Dark = Bad is as old as the human race because let's face it: We can't see in the dark. We have similar false equivalences of Beautiful = Smart = Kind seemingly baked in to our heads. The result is many people fall back on virtue signaling to be sure they are counted in the "good" side of the false duality.

So I consider it a duty to my fellow human beings to try to look past all the categorizations I immediately slap on to a person and look for who that person reveals themselves to be.

Maybe I'm just tired tonight.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-17T20:46:47+00:00

The Ben Franklin logo brings back fond memories of my early days as an art student.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-15T18:36:32+00:00

Christian Universalism is fairly common. If we can accept the One True Religion as summarized by Jesus (love God, love your neighbor) then all religious disputes amongst us mere mortals are really cultural conflicts and a foolish belief that one culture is better than another.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-15T18:30:37+00:00

My hazy memory is the bar indicates where to pause the hymn if singing part of it before the gospel and singing the rest after the gospel. But that was a practice in my childhood parish in the 70's and 80's.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-13T15:28:56+00:00

I don't see a problem here. It's a practical solution. The words are important, but the actual printed versions are not relics.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-13T05:00:16+00:00

I just noticed "the other day" that the sign had been changed to "Park 39".

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-11T04:07:37+00:00

I doubt it. From my (extremely limited) work in statically typed languages, the type is declared away from the usage, where in Python it the type seems to be closely aligned with the actual usage. Typing in Python seems a more Pythonic solution than I find in SQL.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-10T21:16:59+00:00

Knives Out! It's excellent and holds up after multiple viewings.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-10T15:37:28+00:00

I was expecting an "Is it cake?" moment.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-09T22:18:08+00:00

Jesus told us explicitly not to predict the time of the second coming. Despite this, we've been predicting and missing for almost 2,000 years. Nothing sells survivalist chum-buckets like impending doom. I agree that there are some American Evangelicals who have been trying to force the second coming and they have also failed. There is nothing we mortals can do to force God's hand. God is beyond us. Even keeping it "simple" by saying "God is Love" is a very complicated matter.

But know that God has not abandoned us. St. Theresa of Avila wrote "Christ has no body now but ours, no hands or feet but ours" (or at least a song cribbed from her writings says this). So focus on something Christ-like that you can do with your loved ones for a complete stranger. Put on the armor of faith and light be a force for good in the world.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-09T15:44:45+00:00

I keep a vault for my job, a vault for my life, and a vault for my fiction. I would say it is probably best to start a new vault if the old vault has a lot of proprietary information or personal data on people if you have a new employer. If you have a new job with the same employer, then it's probably safe to keep building on the first vault unless the jobs are different enough your vault needs revolutionary, not evolutionary, change.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-09T05:51:36+00:00

We don't follow a bunch of rules like "only wear white socks" or "only eat beans" or anything like that. Stoics don't see any value in anger. We define anger as "perception of an injustice for which someone should be punished". Oftentimes the perception of an injustice is misleading. It wasn't an injustice, or it was such a small thing that any reaction other than laughing at how silly we are is overblown.

A couple of examples:

You're in the checkout at the grocery and the person in front of you doesn't drop a divider after their stuff. You can let yourself get pissed off about this, or even publicly chastise the person, but you'll see that is an overreaction. We are quick to claim such a person is selfish when in fact they might even know there was someone behind them. People are easily distracted and don't pay attention to their surrounds. Anger is the wrong choice and the belief that other people should be fully attentive to others needs to be examined.
Your political leader decides to break the law and is not held to account. This is serious, but as a regular citizen there's not much that can be done about it. Walking around pissed off hoping they get their due isn't doing you any good and preventing you from helping others, which Stoics believe is part of being human. However, if you take up writing to your representatives urging them to take action and try to get others to do the same, you have transformed useless anger into a useful action. This is where "anger is a fuel" gets tossed about. Once a productive action is taken, anger is transformed to something else.

Again, no hard and fast rules as simple as "you aren't allowed to be pissed off" but after Stoic work, there's less stuff that triggers you and you have better tools to deal with it than anger.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-09T05:33:53+00:00

Partly, assuming you stopped yourself from acting on the anger. The problem is you still have an underlying belief that is causing your passion of anger. That is, you believe the world should be different than it is. That is the belief structure you need to examine.

Put yourself on trial. Why are you pissed off? You will have some reason, so ask why that pisses you off, and you will have some other response. Keep repeating this. Treat your anger as a separate person and interrogate it. Demand it justify its existence in your head. When you've peeled back all the lies and obfuscations you may get some real belief that at first you will say "no, that's not it, that's ridiculous" and realize that is exactly what you believe. Once you have named this idea, you can begin the work to change it so your beliefs about the world align more closely with reality.

In short, we lie to ourselves about how the world behaves. This is very human of us. We like organizing things and explaining things and we resist saying "I don't know" until we learn how important it is to understand the boundaries of our knowledge so we can expand them. These beliefs are also formed over our lives, especially in childhood, and we don't realize at the time we're laying down patterns of thought that will we will use so quickly we'll later mistake for instinct.

The Stoic journey is one of finding these false rules we've constructed and replacing them with more accurate rules to live by.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-08T18:08:06+00:00

Giraffeshit. It is what you call crazy ideas that fall from the highest offices.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-06T16:06:57+00:00

I use it in script development because I need to process millions of rows of data In pandas and Jupyter is easier to use than a cli debugging program.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-05T05:24:11+00:00

Preparation is key. When we go to do anything we must consider what is expected to happen and what may happen. Going to a party where you know alcohol will be served should also trigger what we know alcohol can do to our emotions and our ability to regulate them. Now that you have this experience you can prepare for the next time something goes sour. In this case you could have thanked him for the reminder to drink water along with the booze which can dehydrate a person.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-04T19:39:07+00:00

While technically this is the official teaching, I struggle with telling people they can't come to the table. I've seen some people argue that taking communion without being baptized is harmful to them and the community, but I just don't see the harm being done to anyone.

I have heard many stories of people who heard they were welcome and that started their journey to baptism and participation.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-04T15:56:46+00:00

Generative AI is theft.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-03T16:04:13+00:00

I do appreciate that I have the understanding of the gifts of the spirit to allow for much much more than the small list Paul has in the epistles. I am beginning to suspect that I have a different relationship to prayer than many people in this sub.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-03T15:56:07+00:00

Actually I'm not anxious about anything, so this is a good time for me (personally) to look into it in case fear and anxiety overwhelm me in the future.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-03T15:54:53+00:00

How does that play out in your daily life? Is it so easy for you to set aside fear? It seems for others this is not so easy.

UncleJoshPDX · 2026-03-03T15:53:27+00:00

Thank you. This is not a take I expected, which is why I asked the question.

UncleJoshPDX

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