People who repost items to sell on Facebook month after month after month: Are you going to retire if it ever sells, or become a motivational speaker?
Samurai Sending a Fax to Abraham Lincoln
This actually explains a lot in Civilization V.
Twitter Reprieve; News Holiday
I deleted Twitter a couple weeks ago, and have been playing Fallout 76 in the mornings, when I often would have had the news on, while I caffeinate. I have no idea what’s going on in the world now. The only tidbits I get are through sites like 9gag, and most of that is about Ukraine, which I just skip over like it was religious nonsense. I just thought, wow, I’m so at peace! What’s differ… Oh yeah, right.
So I just checked Drudge and Fox News, and find I haven’t missed it at all. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care who any of those people on the front page are, and there’s no reason to figure it out, except to get back on social media, and scream into the void about it.
I keep thinking that I could use Twitter, but avoid everyone that talks about politics, and only follow, like, comedians and novelty accounts, but I use it to rant and rave at companies all the time, and that’s not changing anything, except making me feel terrible. I don’t know if I will cave and try this, but I think I have a couple more weeks to feel this out.
Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons” : Reddit/r/AskHR
And they let her! You mean, all this time, I could have requested Linux on my corporate laptop for religious reasons!? BRB. Going to HR to explain my actual, deeply-held beliefs on this…
Caring about Costs is Cool
But costs aren’t just about the bottomline, they’re also a measure of efficiency. I have a distinct distaste for waste. Money spent on the frivolous or the ill-considered is money that can’t be spent elsewhere. Like an engine drinking too much oil just to run. Tight tolerances (but not too tight!) are a joy in themselves.
Source: Caring about costs is cool
I’ve been a fanboy of DHH for many, many years. Yes, he created Ruby on Rails, which I’m still enamored with, 14 years later, so we have that in common, and as someone who’s made a living using it for the past 10 years, that’s a big deal. However, he’s one of only a couple of people “on the internet” with which I agree with on almost everything, and I’ve never really understood why until this post.
Of course I’ve known that he was an F1 driver, but you can probably drive those cars without understanding the engineering concept of correct tolerances in an engine. That he intuits this premise deeply enough to draw this analogy is the key I was missing to understand my fascination with him.
I may be a programmer (and system administrator, and network engineer, and database architect), but I’m a mechanical engineer at heart. It’s how my mind works. I see how things are related and interconnected. I tell everyone I work with the same thing: I’m awesome at seeing the trees, but pretty bad at seeing the forrest. I’ll give you options; you make the decisions.
Being a physical engineer, whether mechanical or civil or electrical or aeronautical or nuclear, isn’t just a vocation; it’s a way of thinking about the world and how it works. In this way, I think our thinking lines up really well, and I think that leads to thinking basically the same way about most everything else.
It’s a theory, anyway.
Tax Exemption for Churches (Is the Wrong Question)
For the many-th time, I see a repost from Twitter on some other social media site, complaining about the wealth of mega-church pastors, and trying to rile people up about how churches should NOT be tax exempt. And, sure, Joel Olsteen’s lifestyle is a mockery of Jesus’ life, but there are only a handful of “mega” churches and “mega church” pastors in this country. Meanwhile, many, many thousands of the so-called 1% in this country pay a lower tax rate (and sometimes, ACTUAL tax) than the average, blue- or white-collar person does.
As a country swimming in debt, we would get a lot more mileage out of calling for meaningful taxation of billionaires and multi-hundred-millionaires before we start worrying about removing tax exemptions for churches and pastors. I think those posts and reposts on Twitter are probably jointly paid for by The Koch Brothers and George Soros, for the class-warfare angle. And maybe Bill Gates, for the anti-religion angle.
Joel Osteen pays taxes on his income. How much of it he has managed to shelter from the IRS is a game played just like all the rest of the 1%. The church, as a non-profit, does not pay taxes, because the money being received in donations cannot be considered a profit to tax. That’s the definition of how non-profit organizations work.
Churches are supposed to be prevented from getting involved in politics. It’s part of the deal in being religiously tax-exempt. (How this works when Presidents and candidates go to churches and make speeches from the pulpit is quite beyond me, but I digress.) If you start taxing churches, then there’s no reason for them not to get heavily involved in promoting particular candidates, and forming political action committees, just like corporations, taking an active role in getting people elected, and lobbying government for favorable treatment.
You may retort that large, corporate churches like the Catholics or Mormons already exert a huge influence on government, and I’d say you’re right, but it’s still less than the average Fortune 100. If we open the floodgates here… With the “war chests” accumulated by both of those organizations? As they say: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Do the people calling for the removal of tax exemptions for churches really understand what they’re asking for? I don’t think they do.
Cummins, Brought to You by the Letters B and V
Cummins’ CEO just proudly spammed the whole company, announcing that she was “delighted” that the board has approved 3 more corporate officers for the company.
Goodie.
The only way this announcement affects me is to let me know that the company is now spending several more million dollars per year on executive pay packages. And this is happening as I am watching them like a hawk, and expecting them to announce a 3-5% headcount reduction later this year, to jump on the bandwagon that every other big company is riding.
That’s it. That’s the sum total of the impact of this interruption to my workflow. In fact, I have no idea who inside the company is supposed to benefit from this information, or in what way.
This can only be about juicing news for Wall Street, which has nothing to do with people, and everything to do with holding companies. Cummins is just another one of countless companies in the US which is being run by Blackrock and Vanguard, and various investment banks that you may (or may not) have seen printed on your 401K statements. According to Yahoo!, Cummins is 86% owned by “institutions.” Our country is being run by companies, and our companies are being run by Wall Street.
UPDATE 12/8/23: Many companies are announcing layoffs just before the holidays. (What an annoying time to do so!) Cummins offered early retirement buyouts. I’m hoping that this settles the balance sheet to their satisfaction.
UPDATE 1/4/24: Oops. CEO Jenn Rumsey says this settlement won’t affect stock price, business outlook, or even internal compensation. I hadn’t realized that Cummins made so much money year over year to be able to weather a settlement like this without even a flinch. I think this shows that the figure was reached based on Cummins’ ability to pay, rather than some quantifiable harm their actions supposedly incurred. This feels like a political shakedown, by a liberal administration, of a sympathetic Fortune 250, with deep pockets, which happens to make a product that’s politically unpopular with the party’s base.
Our Lives are Run by Bad Software: Verizon Edition
My son broke his phone, front and back. Instead of fixing it, I went to a local Digital Replay store, and bought a second hand phone. We logged into the phone with his Apple account, which wanted to send a text message to confirm the login. I swapped the SIM card, and it showed up on the new phone, and we were done.
Verizon correctly detected that I replaced his phone, and “helpfully” wanted me to “confirm” it on their service. I get a text on my phone. I log in. It wants to verify me, by sending me another text to the same number that they sent the first one to. If this was supposed to be some sort of security measure, they “dun goofed” already. But this is the experience of all of our lives, at this point, and I play along.
On the web site, I now try to confirm the swap, and it asks me to “confirm” my identity again, with another text message, not 10 seconds after the last time. This time, the web site prompt includes a second code. What’s this code, you ask? I have no freaking clue. I fumble around trying to give it PIN’s and codes that I think it might be looking for, and wind up here:
Remember, Verizon, you asked for this. My son’s phone was working just fine, yet you inserted yourself into my texts, and interrupted my work to hassle me to keep your database correct, and then the process was unnavigable, even for someone with 30 years experience as a “full stack” engineer. Well done. You have to work pretty hard to make this process this frustrating.
Corporate IT “Automated Systems”
Today, I was contacted by #CorporateIT as to whether I was still using <expensive software>. I said no, and that I had tried to uninstall it, but it didn’t work. And, by the way, I’ve tried to “surrender” several other applications, so that my department is no longer billed for them, and NONE of them have worked.
So #CorporateIT guy forwards my email to <IT Director>. I’ve worked at Cummins for 10 years, and still can’t figure out the organizational structure. Anyway, he explains that their systems are great, and process 12,000 requests per month without any problems. I thank him for the considerate response, but this doesn’t change the fact that this has never worked for me, not even once.
Then I get dressed, go into the office, and try to “surrender” one VERY expensive piece of software from a machine that needs to be retired, and I get this error message. Now, I understand that these are (probably) not the same systems under the skin, but it’s the same aggravation, and I just wish that the people running these systems lived in the same IT world that the rest of us do.
Corporate IT “Support”
Suppose you have a problem on your company laptop, for which you contact #CorporateIT, using Microsoft Teams. Now, you’re already logged in as yourself, in Teams, but the first thing they always ask is to confirm that it’s… you, who is contacting them. Then they always ask whether you’re at a company site or home, and what your phone number is. Now, about 90% of everyone is working from home, and with the VPN, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Also, they have no need to call you on the phone. In the rare event they want to use voice, they’ll just use Teams!
So, given the lag of getting a person from the queue, and the normal flow of question and response, you’re about 5-10-15 minutes into the process, and you have wasted the entire time by answering three stupid questions. But if you don’t respond in about 10 seconds, you’ll be badgered with, “Are we still connected?”
After your chat, you’ll get prompted to rate support’s “help” in Teams, and then you’ll get about a dozen emails — whether or not they helped you in any way — including ANOTHER prompt to rate their helpfulness. And they are judged on this. I once rated a support tech poorly, because he was completely unhelpful, and didn’t even try to escalate the problem. He contacted me back to argue about it, and couldn’t disagree with my rating, but pleaded with me to change it, because that’s how they stay employed. I did, but I just don’t bother with the ratings any more.