Punkie

I was out of sugar, so I tried to sweeten Kool-Aid with honey. Nope. Just god-awful.

I had an assistant who didn’t really need the job, but her parents forced her to have one. She was the youngest, and only girl, of a family of 5 siblings. All her older brothers worked at the race track that their family owned, and she was dating someone they didn’t approve of. I liked her boyfriend, he seemed friendly and soft-spoken, but her folks were like “if you’re going to date whom you want, you better have a job and live on your own.” Well, one day, she got mad because I asked her to work a shift she didn’t want to. So she simply didn’t show up, which really fucked me over. So I called her up, pretty pissed. No answer.

She didn’t show up for 3 days. So I fired her for job abandonment. She didn’t really need the job, right? Her parents owned a racetrack.

A week later, her folks called me, and asked if I’d seen her. No, she didn’t show up for work ever again. They panicked. “OMFG WE DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE IS!” They immediately assumed her BF kidnapped and/or murdered her. The police were called, an investigation was opened up. Her BF’s address showed he’d moved away. I had to sit with the police and go through an interrogation about her last whereabouts. She became a missing person, and once a week for two months, her parents called and asked if I had heard anything. The detective called with more questions. Then her car was found in an impound lot: it had been abandoned and looted in a New Jersey parking garage. Then the calls petered off and stopped.

A year went by, and I assumed the worst.

One day, one of the employees in another store in the mall told me he saw her with her BF. I didn’t believe them, but then other people said that they’d seen her, and corroborated some stories she told them. Apparently, she had been planning to run away for some time, and just ran away with her BF and went NC with her family. That didn’t work out so well, because both had trouble finding jobs and then their car got carjacked. Both of them were forced to return home, and her parents were forced to reconcile that she was never going to leave her BF.

I was pretty pissed, though, that I thought she was dead.

Cats can pant, I have seen it happen in times of extreme stress, and is often a bad sign. Like dogs, cats may pant if they are anxious or overheated. Strenuous exercise may be another reason, especially after a huge fight. Once your cat has had a chance to rest, calm down and cool down, this sort of painting should subside. However, even this type of panting is much more rarely seen in cats than in dogs. So, if you’re not 100% positive about why your cat is panting, it’s best to bring her to the vet.

A side note, however, I misread this as “since cat’s don’t like pants like dogs,” and wanted to point out that dogs also do not like to wear pants, before my anti-dyslexia medicine kicked in.

One revolution I have realized in baking is the recent trend to start talking about weight and not volume in recipes for certain dry ingredients like flour. Three cups of fluffy sifted flour is a lot less flour than three cups of densely packed flour. Same with brown sugar, or wondering if you need a “flat teaspoon” vs. a “heaping teaspoon” of something.

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

Trying getting out of that in your 50s with arthritis setting in. Oof.

I think this is one of the extreme examples of revenge instead of rehabilitation. It’s a prime breeding ground for control freaks who want to punish those that break the rules, and will stop at nothing to try to accomplish this by dealing out damage via a morality defense. And I think a lot of parents know this, at some level, as revenge for not conforming to their definition of normalcy. “Retribution for being bad.” Like mob mentality.

In the bible you get permission to declare your teenager wayward, take them outside the city gates and stone them to death.

I was like, “Really…?” But sure enough:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them. Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

… k.

I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.

We had a case not too long ago where someone “recruiting” for one of the GAFAM who was stealing PII by “accepting” applicants, getting their IDs and personal info for supposed employment, and when these people showed up for work, the real company had never heard of them. I think they got 30 people last time.

Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Probably HR (or the NCS equivalent) never told the right people. I am not saying this is actually what happened, but a lot of IT bemoan the fact they are never told some rando employee was fired because HR neglects to inform them. Sometimes it takes months to discover, and even with a 90 day password/login lockout, some halfway decent admin could get around this by secretly building a back door, and using the messed up communication and politics between departments to hide this. Even in the 1990s, I saw people put in “time bombs” in their code that “if such and such is not updated in 6 months, run destructo-script A.”

But imagine someone like Kandula Nagaraju here. Worked in QA, probably did a great jobs with some skills, but had the personality of swallowing broken glass. He was terminated in October 2022 due to “poor work performance,” which could mean anything. “Not a team player.” Or maybe he really was an idiot: I mean, a smart person would have a conniption, but get employed elsewhere and then slam his former company at parties. “Those NCS folks didn’t know what they had with me!” But this guy was probably someone with some anger management issues, probably a jerk, and possibly stupid. He might have had revenge fantasies, and set up a small virtual server posing as a backup code mirror. But outside the audits, it allowed ssh from the outside, and hid it through a knockd daemon. Or maybe only launched ssh at certain hours before shutting it down again. Silently working away in a sea of virtual servers with little to no updated documentation. He gets in, has internal access, and runs a script with admin credentials because they don’t rotate their AWS keys/secrets quickly enough. Or didn’t even know he was let go.

After Kandula’s contract was terminated and he arrived back in India, he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials. He did so on six occasions between Jan 6 and Jan 17, 2023.

That’s embarrassing to the company. Not only did he get in, but SIX TIMES after he was let go. he probably knew what order to run the delete commands (like, say, an aws “terminate-instances” cli command from a primary node), and did so one by one, probably during hours with the least amount of supervision, where the first few alerts would take hours to get someone in the monitoring chain to wake an admin. Given his last day was in November, and he got back in January, the admins probably thought their 90 access credential rotation was “good enough,” but he got in on his 80th day or whatever.

I know this because I have had to do triage when a former contractor did this to a company I worked for. But instead of wiping out instances, he opened a new set of cloud accounts from the master account, put them in an unmonitored region (in this case, Asia), and spun up thousands of instances to run bitcoin mining. Only because AWS notified us of “unusual traffic” were we made aware at all, and this guy knew his shit and covered his tracks very well. He did it at a speed that could have only been automated. Thankfully, AWS did not charge us the seven figure amount that this activity amassed in just three days.

I remember hearing that some Hollywood contracts require that if you sign up for some studio, you must make X amount of films. Big stars get to chose those films to some degree, but once in a while, they have to do “a stinker” to end the contract as “X amount of films done, okay?” or something. Contractual Obligation and all. This film feels like a dumping ground of a lot of those contractual obligation hires from the trailer alone.

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

Man, so many of my friends, who were high-functioning illectuals nerds like me, ended up is really terrible situations: bad marriages, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and they never grew out of the ideation of a teenage mindset OR they became really bitter victims of their own prison. Now they are in their 50s, and nothing’s changed. For the few friends I managed to keep all this time they ended up “doing okay” or better, I am grateful. Hell, a lot of my punk and goth friends did better on average than my science fiction nerd friends.

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”