A lot of people never outgrew the schoolyard king-of-the-hill game, and still play it like they’re children.
A lot of people never outgrew the schoolyard king-of-the-hill game, and still play it like they’re children.
You’re right. I forgot about the lawsuit and settlement (for $65m). They’re both frauds.
Thanks, but I’m too disabled even for that now, because everyone requires some amount of office time – even if it’s absolutely unnecessary.
Even my doctors are now requiring yearly in-person visits, though they never did before, and even though I’m 100% medically homebound. I’m currently trying to square a circle to get my heart meds refilled. Back in 2021 it was no problem, but now they’re saying insurance post-Covid requires a yearly in-person visit regardless of circumstance, because people were abusing it, so no tolerance.
I don’t expect it to change. I’ve had a chronic pain condition for a long time but can’t get pain meds either (per insurance) because people have abused that. So I just take enough OTC Tylenol to ruin my liver and cry.
Insurance rules fuck people with chronic conditions, all the time.
I knew a Karla, but she was from Romania. Fantastic person. I miss her.
I taught myself programming in the 80s, then worked myself from waitress and line cook to programmer, UXD, and design lead to the point of being in the running for an Apple design award in the 2010s.
But I cared more than anything about making things FOR people. Making like easier. Making people happy. Making software that was a joy to use.
Then I got sick with something that’s neither curable nor easily manageable.
Now I’m destitute and have to choose between medicine and food, and I’m staring down homelessness. (eta I was homeless from age 16-18, and I won’t do that again now, with autoimmune dysautonomia and in my mid-50s, even if the alternative is final.)
Fuck these idiots who bought their way into nerd status (like Musk) or had one hot idea that took off and didn’t have to do anything after (this fucking guy). Hundreds or thousands of designers and programmers made these companies, and were tossed out like trash so a couple of people can be rock stars, making more per hour than most of us will see in a lifetime.
Slay the dragons.
If I’d had to bet whether this was The Onion before clicking this link, someone would be breaking my knees next week.
This timeline is absurd.
If the US was actually a meritocracy, I’d be rich. I built my career in comp sci and UXD from nothing. I left school in 9th grade, then taught myself programming in multiple languages – BASIC then Perl, Java, C, and on to C++, C#, ObjC, JavaScript, and markup languages, – and UXD including related important fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy), and worked my way from a delivery driver to cook, to assistant mgr in retail and restaurant to manager (to make ends meet whilst learning) to programmer, to assistant lead, to PM assistant, to project manager, to designer, to lead designer at a company where I had more than 10 million users and was submitted for an Apple design award for my design.
Then I got sick with a genetic disease for which there’s no treatment or cure. Now I can no longer work and as a result, I had to leave the career I loved and had worked so hard for – and lose the health insurance that came with that. Now I am destitute, my savings are gone, and I have nothing but social security and Medicare, and Medicare is horribly broken. I can’t afford housing, and have to choose between medicine and food.
This is in the US, obviously. I have plenty more to contribute – my mind still works fine – but I can’t contribute in this system because I can’t reliably work.
I am fucked. I can’t afford to live anymore and, regardless of what I could contribute in a system that might allow me to, I am stuck doing nothing and slowly dying because this system is designed to fuck me as hard as possible.
This is not a meritocracy. If it was, I would not be in the position of choosing whether to eat or buy medicine.
e2: and we wouldn’t have a complete moron making billions by stealing the work of others (people like me) then just casting them aside like they’re nothing. Yes, I mean that absolute shitbag poser, you all know his name.
Sorry for all the edits, this pisses me off.
late e3, because changes keep being tossed around lately with an apparent near-total lack of even the scope of a single project they’re heading and executing, and that’s quite alarming in this context:
Social security and Medicare both try hard to spend as little money as possible, often under pressure from congress, and Medicare is worse. Medicare is so much worse than people think it is, I cringed every time I’d hear someone shout ‘Medicare for all!’ – especially when they’d go on to prove their notions of Medicare were vague. Congress has been beating the shit out of it whilst big money pretends to tend to its wounds for a long time. It’s nearly functionally useless by comparison to what all but the worst insurance companies and scammers do. It’s so bad, in fact, it’s just generally known that you must buy what’s called ‘gap’ insurance so they can slather their slime into the chasms left in Medicare’s wake.
Gap insurance is private insurance. Poor people living on Social Security cannot afford gap insurance (please read my last 4 words as though spoken with the complete inability to keep the disbelief from my voice. I’ve no idea how to annotate that.)
Been on a tear lately because people are currently worshipping a moronic, childish, nepo-baby who didn’t work for what he has, didn’t invent anything, clearly didn’t learn anything except how to use other people most effectively, perhaps designed that laughable abomination of a truck… it really does boggle my mind.
e: I also wrote a scifi novel that I can’t market because I’ve been too sick. Because I’m so desperate, I’m going to mention it here – I could use a couple of reviews. Based on current reviews, it’s not bad: Blue Are the Hills by Lilly Piper on Amazon, if you’re into dystopian fiction. I’ve tried to market myself as much as I can, but it’s hard. That’s why my Lemmy icon is my face – not because I’m a boomer, but because it’s my branding.
Of everything I said, that’s the part you decided to focus on?
e: not that trump had said he’d glass the region to build hotels?
You’re kidding, right? You think that aid is because of trump, when you’re responding in an article that says his stated motives are the opposite of that?
Much of that aid was already secured before he took office. Shit takes time – especially in a war zone. Wait a month or so and get back to me on whether aid from the US continues. The US has been giving aid to many places that will continue for a short while until the new policies filter through.
Listen to what the new moron-in-chief says, and notice that some policies take a bit of time to take effect. Like the US economy, for instance. Large systems don’t turn on a dime.
Check out !voyagerapp@lemmy.world.
It’s a fantastic Lemmy client for mobile, and the devs are quite active and responsive.
e: link format
Great fucking job, bothsiders. Now you get Genocide++.
I really hope you’re happy that your conscience is clean now the guy who’s main spokesman said Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’ and who himself declared it ‘could be better than Monaco’, clearly with an eye towards beachfront real estate, has the power to make that happen for his own gain.
This was entirely predictable, and we told you this would happen. Trump told you so himself. The dems weren’t perfect by any stretch, but Kamala absolutely wasn’t looking at the situation as to how she could personally profit through real estate development if the Palestinians were just wiped off the map as quickly as possible. Trump likely had the choicest property mapped out, with property developers already submitting proposals.
If you abstained because of both-sides re Israel, fuck you. You at best were played and at worst helped to play others, and now we ALL get to suffer.
And they recently added user tagging like on RES for Reddit. It’s so useful. Been using it like mad lately to identify trolls and sealions.
Oddly, no.
Joke’s on them. Project 2025 plans to dismantle NOAA and gut/privatise the National Weather Service.
Who will pay for their weather forecasting once nobody will give them that data for free (under zero government funding)? They could just stop doing weather entirely, I guess, but millions of people rely on local weather reports to know whether to go to school or work. How do they plan to pay for that data?
I can’t believe how short-sighted some CEOs and mgmt types insist on being.
e: phrasing
The culmination of the Paradox of Tolerance.
Send those same words here. You put that quite well, and they need to hear it from as many of us as possible.
I’m sure your message was just as good; we each have our own voice. Thanks for sending one. We all need to do everything we can. Sometimes that’s protesting, sometimes that’s sending letters. Every action matters.
Same. Here’s what I wrote in case it helps anyone:
I’d like to express my deep disappointment regarding your firing of Sam Kuffel for posting on social media to call out Elon Musk’s egregious display during the presidential inauguration.
There was zero ambiguity about what Musk did – so little ambiguity, in fact, that media in Germany cannot show images or videos of the moment because his gesture is illegal there.
Your willingness to bow to this appalling display of hate is contemptible and, though I no longer visit Milwaukee regularly, when I do, I will be avoiding your programming. I will also tell my friends and relatives who still live there.
This is also a stain on CBS as a whole, and I will be avoiding all CBS programming in future.
Please consider how bad this makes you and your parent company look. It’s despicable for a media company to hold such little regard for free speech.
Only about a third of the Gulf of Mexico is US territory, so how can the US president unilaterally rename it? Seems Mexico has the larger claim to naming rights.
He’s been gradually ramping up the severity of his crimes for decades. He’s still doing it, and won’t stop until we stop him. I don’t know if there’s a ceiling, but I’m certain his gang doesn’t think there is.