Punkie

One of my best friends lost her place of living when her boyfriend of 4 years said the relationship had actually ended in his head 2 years previously, but he needed the rent. But then he found a new girlfriend to grift from, “opened the relationship,” and they edged my friend out. I am still mad they did that to her; she was so heartbroken and damaged from that.

Okay, say this was true. I’m not saying it is, but let’s carry this argument to the next step.

IQ is a score that shows how well someone can solve problems and think compared to other people their age. It doesn’t measure how smart you are in every way, but it can help show how strong your brain is in certain kinds of thinking. So let’s say, okay, they aren’t born smart, but we’ll train them to BE smart, and this screening will make it easier because we won’t be working upstream against “the dumbness,” or whatever. Kid has the capacity to be smart, now all we have to do is train them, right?

Next, you have to assume that their parents and environment allows for this. These services will be available for rich parents only, which historically have been a better environment for teaching. But it also will give these “high IQ kids” access to parents of conservative, “Christian values” as well as liberal rich kids. So now we have a problem. What if having a high IQ also leads to insanity? We haven’t even defined what “smart” is, really, and so a lot of conservatives, “smart” means “stronger than your enemy.” Intelligence without compassion breeds psychosis, and leadership qualities that are sociopathic and ruthless. And that INCLUDES turning on their own kind. But that’s what they want, right? “Survival of the fittest,” a kind of social Darwinism.

“Sorry dad. I know you raised me to be the head of the company, but I gutted it instead, and will be funding my super-race and frankly…? You’re genetically inferior. Goodbye.”

I find them too windy and noisy half the time. They are also wet half the time, either from condensation or recent rain.

Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”

“Are these ‘weather weapons’ in the room with you right now?”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

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 weird thing is this is the exact argument many people give for socialized medicine: the wait times. “Imagine if the hospitals were run with the efficiency of the DMV. A,trak, or the Post Office,” meant as a negative slant. “Imagine if FedEx was the only game in town, and to mail letter was $10, and to receive mail and packages was a $25/mo service charge, plus fees for every item delivered.”

“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.