You’re absolutely right on all counts. And that’s why I quit (without waiting around to be laid off which frankly the severance package would’ve been nice). I got hired into the first (private) company I applied to, I’m thriving, and I don’t miss that stink of wall street/silicon valley money at all.

Ghostrunner 2 is 80% off for $17CAD and runs great on the deck. It looks like some of the best speed swordplay vibes from Cyberpunk and I’m stoked to play it.

Also picked up Rage for 5 bucks.

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

I don’t have any personal experiences with any of these crew finder sites but I know lots of people who’ve used them. The catamaran designer I *apprenticed under met his wife through one. She had no prior sailing experience but was willing to learn, and he needed crew to do a Caribbean crossing, and that’s how the story began for them like 25+ years ago. They still sail together all over the world.

The other advice is good too. Just walk the docks and ask around. People love talking about their boats.

Who’s even still on Twitter at this point besides racists and transphobes and companies who have no tech department to help them divest to a better platform?

Shopify laid off a couple thousand people, then “chaos monkey’d” the entire company just over a year ago, and forced everyone to open an FB Workplace acct as though it was going to boost productivity somehow having us split our comms between slack (which already sucks) that we’ve been using for years and some half assed afterthought Zuck’s team came up with (at least the public facing piece) leading into their own layoff waves.

I left Shopify happily and voluntarily and I’m not gonna pour one out for FB Workplace, at all. Good riddance to bad garbage.

He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.

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Amazing book. Haven’t thought of it in ages!

4. If every psycho and their dog knew there was a parachute onboard for them it would happen often that some drunk asshole decided today was they day they’re gonna jump from a commercial flight

The other comments almost got it right. If you had your torrent client bound to Mullvad and then opened your Tor Browser… your torrent client would be running over the VPN tunnel (Mullvad) while your Tor Browser would be sending all its traffic over your vanilla ISP and through… the Tor network (unless you also bind it to Mullvad). You’d effectively be “split tunnelling” your traffic, which is actually a good use-case for Tor anyhow.

There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s fine to run a VPN tunnel (OS-wide) before you fire up your Tor Browser… effectively you’d be pushing your Tor traffic through the tunnel to the VPN’s entry/exit nodes before it got to/left the Tor network. Some say it’s a security risk (if you don’t trust the VPN provider, for instance. Which is valid if you’re using some of the scummier providers). You need to do some research and understand the implications of doing that, before just mashing buttons.

You can also fire up the Tor network system-wide if you’re crafty and then create an encrypted VPN tunnel to go over that, so all of your VPN traffic would be travelling over and through Tor nodes before it reached the entry/exit nodes of your VPN. It can work both ways. There are cases for both options, if you know what you’re doing… which is a huge caveat.

Overall though, no. Please don’t torrent over Tor. As you say, it’s not necessary and eats bandwidth from an already slow network protocol. A VPN is more than sufficient for that purpose. If you wanna get more secure than that, make sure you’re running an encrypted DNS solution (or resolve your DNS locally if you know how to do that) and profit. Then your ISP can’t see shit. They’ll still probably traffic-shape and throttle you, simply because they can tell it’s going out over an encrypted tunnel of some kind… but they’ll never be able to see what specifically you’re up to.

Is there a Canadian (or ideally an international) org similar to this? Remote work is global. I’ve worked with two fully remote companies in the past three years and my colleages are literally everywhere. I’ve seen mass layoffs personally, followed by onboarding thousands of contractors in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. We all know remote workers in less developed regions are training the AI being deployed. and moderating our content. Etc etc.

Would love to see this labor movement go global. Remote work is connected and networked, inherently. I don’t know if I’ll see a global workers movement in my lifetime but I fucking hope I do (I’m pretty old).

I quit a well known ecomm tech company a few months ago ahead of (another) one of their layoff rounds because upper mgmt was turning into ultra-wall street corpo bullshit. With 30% of staff gone, and yet our userbase almost doubling over the same period, they wanted everyone to continue increasing output and quality. We were barely keeping up with our existing workload at that point, burnout was (and still is) rampant.

Over the two weeks after I gave my notice I discovered that in the third-party app ecosystem many thousands of apps that had (approved) access to the Billing API weren’t even operating anymore. Some had quit operating years ago, but they were still billing end-users on a monthly basis. Many end-users install dozens of apps (just like people do with mobile phones) and then forget they ever did so. The monthly rates for these apps are anywhere from 3 to 20 dollars per month, many people never checked their bank statements or invoices (when they eventually did, they’d contact support to complain about paying for an app that doesn’t even load and may not have for months or years at this point).

I gathered evidence on at least three dozen of these zombie apps. Many of them had hundreds of active installs, and were billing users for in some cases the past three years. I extrapolated that there were probably in the high-hundreds or low-thousands of these zombie apps billing users on the platform, amounting to high-thousands to low-tens-of thousands of installs… amounting to likely millions per year in faulty and sketchy invoicing happening over our Billing API.

Mgmt actually did put together a triage team to address my findings, but I can absolutely assure you the only reason they acted so quickly is because I was on the way out of the company. I’d spotted things like this in the wild previously and nothing had ever been done about it. The pat answer has always been well people are responsible for their own accounts and invoicing. I believe they acted on this one because I was being very vocal about how it would be ‘a shame’ if this situation ever became public, and all those end-users came after the company for those false invoices at one time. It would be a PR and Support nightmare.

You have definitely interacted with this ecommerce platform if you shop online.