4grams

First, I love you for this joke. Second, I don’t want to risk pissing off Ron Swanson.

I know right. And the motherfucking cultists in my own family are telling me it’s my fault for trusting the stock market. But these same fucks have told me that’s my only option for retirement because Soc. Sec. Is a “Ponzi scheme”.

We’re setup to fail, we’re only here to produce value that can be stolen.

Feel like these days it’s “do unto others what you imagine others would to do unto you.”

America, by far, and that’s from someone living here. I’ve been to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Iceland, Mexico, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Canada, and probably a couple others I can’t remember. I’ve been treated nothing but friendly, with genuine curiosity, even when I shouldn’t have been.

Every day in the US, someone swears at me.

ha, of course my t-deck plus just arrived today…

Yeah, I’m a fancy bricklayer these days…

My most recent job hunt has me thinking the same. I used to be a dime a dozen, and young folks were real and serious competition in the job market, but I’ve been in IT since before the .com crash and now my skills are once again becoming unique.

I’ve been raising my kids, warning them about the shit state of IT. Maybe I should have been nerding them harder.

Champagne prices would skyrocket.

Don’t forget, his own wife is a dei import, dude can’t find himself a good American woman so he’s got to outsource. Irony is dead.

I just got a job with an EU company, doing business through acquisition in the US. I don’t report to anyone in my office, or even this country. I’m building the US infrastructure based on the designs coming from the EU and integrating with their cloud.

Was an intentional move to get employed by a non-us based employer, but so far I think I really lucked out.

Ok, this is what social media is for. Thanks everyone, so much good stuff in here. Glad I have similarly esoteric tastes…

Very limited so far. I don’t have much near me but there has been enough sproradic connectivity that I pick up the occasional chatter in the default channel and have about 145 nodes it’s aware of.

Mostly been my son and I playing around. He wants to get his neighborhood friends involved :).

I’m building services out for my family as things enshittify. Moved the family over to an immich instance, run a family blog on Wordpress (working on rolling my own since it’s over complicated and with all the Wordpress shenanigans…), plex (lifetime account, works for now). I have a number of self-built projects as well, a “momboard” like system that is integrated with my Wordpress blog for access and control, a pi based backup server that lives at my friends house and nails a VPN connection to my router and I’m playing with Meshtastic as an offline communication system for my kids scout troop when we’re camping without cell signal. Lots of home automation with home assistant as well.

I host it all on Debian servers, raspberry pi’s and esp32 devices (Meshtastic and home automation). I used to run kubernoodles but it was more complicated than needed and for my use case, docker, ansible and bash scripts manage it all just fine.

For plain text, either nano on CLI or whatever built in basic text editor comes with LMDE.

Windows I used notepad, from now on I’ll add ++ :)

vscodium fixes the privacy anyway. It’s always open so startup times are no issue for me.

I still prefer to keep a stripped down, basic text editor though. Ah well, I’m not on windows so no big deal.

K, sorry, felt like you were defending the greens and wasn’t sure where you were going…

I agree completely. But there was one before the election, and one before that, and one before that. Nothing good ever happens at once, it takes long and gradual change. I’m with you on the no real choice this time around but despite that, we got it objectively wrong. Point is a vote ain’t enough, and I blame stupid, lazy, simple minded people for that.

Kamala wasn’t a savior, but if people understood that progress is incremental and hard, they wouldn’t have voted for turnip. I blame the system yes, but we should be smart enough to play the game. We’re about to get what we asked for.

Anyway. Again sorry for being a shithead, I’m most certainly blowing off steam. Again, a little triggered by what I felt was the thinking that got us here. But again, my words are directed at the words, not the people. I’m usually a lot nicer when I’m not facing looming fascism.

this is very much the democrats and republicans (the greens really did nothing) show.

I disagree, dems, republicans, greens, etc., they do what they always do, try to amass as much power as they can. It’s up to us to look at those choices that we have and make a good one. Usually it’s fairly inconsequential, often time it’s not though, and so it’s ultimately up to us to be informed and make the best choice. Saying things like you will never vote for a party again, when they are just another side of the same dice, is the sort of thinking that we actively MUST avoid.

We have a broken system, but at least up until now, we had the ultimate power to change it. We sure did this time, I sincerely hope we can do it again. If so, I pray we ALL take it seriously.

No, I do not want anyone to swallow pride for a particular party you dense moron. I have said repeatedly that you should vote for issues, and the greater good regardless of party. What I am arguing against is an asshole who said that because he wasn’t thanked enough that they can burn next time because he won’t vote for their team anymore.

Yeah, I’ve been an asshole myself here, I’m a random angry internet jerk who’s pissed off about the election, but to be frank more pissed off at the selfish sort of behavior that got us here. It’s not the democrats, it’s not the republicans, it’s not the Green Party, it’s the people who voted for them (and the specific people they voted for).

I am hot, I am upset, but again, it’s pretty obvious what my target is here. It’s not just the folks who did this it’s the ones who are refusing to learn from it and in fact give in to the exact same problem that got us here.

“I won’t ever vote for a democrat again” is the same team bullshit that to us here. And bolstered by the revenge bullshit for not being grateful. That is TOXIC, and that is the sort of thinking that got us here.

This is the internet, we swear here.

Ok, so we’re at an impasse here. I do not find this line of thinking defensible and I do think this is the words of an asshole:

“Saving the nation from fascism and preserving their own rights, freedoms and lives in the process wasn’t a good enough reason to speak to people like me with respect. And now they can burn for it. And they’re going to blame me for it, just like they’ve blamed me for everything their entire lives.”

I’m in that exact same boat but I don’t give one single shit about not being thanked, nor for being blamed. Maybe it’s because I am a father and I don’t really live for myself but doesn’t matter because it’s not something that makes me feel bad. Men are a problem, men should do better, and they should do it because they are good, not because they deserve it, or they want thanks. Doing the good is the reward. My life’s guiding principal is the old Paul Wellstone canard: “we all do better when we all do better”. In the end, I’m just as selfish as everyone else because ultimately I’m after my own happiness and fascism, suffering, exploitation, cheating, etc. is antithetical to it.

I can already hear responses, yes both sides are terrible but one was UNDENIABLY far, far worse and we will face the same decision in the future so this ain’t a fucking team sport to me. I’ll pull the fucking trigger for satan himself if he’s going to maximize the good.