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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • UN, which… failed to keep dictatorships out

    The UN while created with noble intentions certainly fell for the paradox of tolerance. They tolerate the dictatorships and human rights abusers because if they didn’t they’d be much less empowered to take action against them, or worse they’d form their own competing UN made up of nations motivated to join them and you’d just end up with another NATO and Warsaw Pact for example. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

    Ultimately the challenge comes down to how do you ultimately tame the leaders of the world who have absolute power. The founding fathers of the United States of America thought they had the solution with democracy and the many checks and balances they implemented into this new form of government they setup, but even that has its challenges and failures that they never could have forseen. The UN was the next experiment, trying to take the similar principles onto the world stage, and it’s been less successful (but at least has had some successes)




  • I feel that. I completed a degree that easily leads into being a sysadmin or network engineer, but my paid internship ended and I needed a job, so I snagged the best one I could get immediately, which happened to be as a cloud admin configuring a Salesforce-like SAAS product. The work doesn’t thrill me but the benefits are cushy enough and it seemed to be the best paying opportunity I had at the time (I could tell I was the top applicant for a couple of jobs I was applying to) I work close enough to IT to hear chatter about the things i actually care about and get roped into tasks that are more in line with what i want to do full time, but ultimately that’s not my job right now, so it’s just one offs that keep me thirsting for more.

    But now my needs are shifting and I’m struggling to land an interview for a hybrid role in a city an hour away that I intend to move to. Seems I’m getting the most traction with state jobs (I’m currently “eligible for further consideration” on 3 of them, but have yet to get a call to interview) but I think I can swing it if it just happens to be a tight labor market right now. I’m taking my time to focus on myself as well and try to improve myself outside of work and just enjoy what life has to offer






  • My experience when I worked in support for a device manufacturer is that if you get high enough in the support tree and can demonstrate that this effects you (and the support person will also have a matrix of affected devices) you’ll still get a repair/replacement outside of warranty for them bricking your computer with a bad update.

    We had a specific instance where a specific budget model of phone sold by Boost mobile would brick after a specific update for people who had subsidy unlocked it and taken it to a GSM carrier such as T-Mobile (this was shortly pre-merger) or AT&T. This update rolled out about 2.5 years after this devices release, so most customers were ~12 months outside of warranty. Since the scope of affected devices was so narrow our directions from the top was to replace affected devices regardless of warranty status, and the replacement would come with a standard 30 day replacement warranty

    So in short, I would expect HP to repair/replace affected devices that bricked after this BIOS update regardless of warranty status, but I would expect some amount of hassle in terms of reaching a specific support department before you get assistance and standard refusal of service for customer induced physical damage (smashed screen, smashed ports, mashed potatoes in the ports, badly bent, etc.)





    • Milk and potatoes can give a good base of vitamins and minerals.
    • Potatoes are pretty cheap and very easy to grow if you have the time and will to try it. Just toss a few potato halves into a bin of dirt, water periodically and you’ll have more potatoes than you know what to do with
    • Toast can be a fairly cheap breakfast, although not very filling. It’s easy to quickly eat as you run out the door too
    • I’ve found making sure your dinners have multiple dishes actually makes the food go further and helps in saving money on groceries overall compared to not
    • A bag of freezer veggies can keep in the fridge for almost a week pretty easily, and it’s very easy to pour a bit out, nuke it in the microwave for 30-60 seconds and help round out your meal.
    • Hotdogs cook very well with ramen noodles (you can also sprinkle in some frozen corn too!), and that can make 2-3 meals for a single person
    • if you’re in the states, Aldi is genuinely a really good option to save money on groceries, plus their store brand stuff usually has less sugar than name brand
    • white rice is usually dirt cheap and a good base source of nutrients




  • Its one of the challenges that seriously doesn’t seem to have an easy solution. Like the closest I can think of is a centralized authority that the service can send a identity verification request to that, then the user can sign into the centralized authority and confirm “yes I am the person you requested to verify”

    This would also help with annoying employment verification where I have to bring every document needed to steal my identity to my new employer for them to scan and digitally store indefinitely then return said documents to my safe


  • I keep bringing up how awesome the new SAVE federal student loan repayment program is. Income based repayments that go as low as $0 with the federal government covering any interest that you payment would have gone towards, plus after 10 years of payments balances of $12k and less are forgiven (11 years for $13k, 12 years for $14k, etc.)

    So if you got a low paying degree from a community college, like say an early childhood education degree, you get pretty close to free education since you can make your $0 payments every month and get your entire student debt forgiven after a decade. Or if you have a career that doesn’t pay much at first but ratchets up you only make payments when you have the income to make them, and still get forgiven after 10 years, and there’s no real penalty to paying the $0 payments earlier since the balance hasn’t grown and is still forgiven on the same date. Or like many people who attend community college, if you end up dropping out and getting no degree, you’re not penalized like earlier plans would have penalized you.