Rugby players.

I don’t care for sports so much, but a ton of my friends play rugby. Several of my exes play rugby. I’ve got cousins who play rugby. I live in the States and, while rugby is popular, it’s no where near the levels of enthusiasm where like 90% of the people a person hangs out with plays it (and you not also play or have any real interest in it). Mostly to support people I was dating, I’ve been to like ten games in my life and, while I understand how the game is played, I’m just completely uninterested in sports and following sports as a hobby or interest. I don’t know why, but rugby people love me and I love them.

Season 1 was basically Seth MacFarlane’s TNG fan scripts… it’s a Star Trek series through and through.

They’re kinda like the S-Pen… is it cool? Sure! Do I find myself using it? No, not really.

Don’t forget: dollars are votes.

I mean, like the OP said, unless it’s a worker owned co-op or, at the very least, a small mom-n-pop that treats their workers fairly.

One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y’all, as the words “wait let me help you reset it” were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face “I said I fucking got it!” So… I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer’s office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer’s office saying “hey [chief engineer], we’re having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?”

My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said “I don’t think I’ve got this.” An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically “union shop rules” for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment… essentially: if you’re not trained on them, don’t touch and we weren’t training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.

Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of “I said I’ve fucking got it” and stop what I’m doing. I’ll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers’ jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It’s just not worth it.

Haven’t seen it here yet, but it’s one of the greatest and most prolific YouTube channels about science fiction and the future… Science Fiction and Futurism With Isaac Arthur

• How to Colonize Mars
• How to Colonize Venus
• Building Orbital Rings Around Earth
• How to Get to Alpha Centauri
• How and Why to Industrialize the Moon
• Settling the Atmosphere of Jupiter
• Godlike Aliens
• Alien Invasions
• How to Escape the Galaxy

WTYP Pod, the podcast that hates you back!

WTYP Pod, the podcast that hates you back!

Behind the Bastards is fucking great! If you like their stuff, you might also enjoy “Respect The Dead (A Podcast Where We Don’t).” It’s a kind of queer younger sibling to BTB and a whole lot of fun, but they only cover people who are for sure dead.

All your need to do is drop in one card randomly with all the holes punched out to screw up those things… there was a name for doing that to be a dick but I forgot and am drunk right now so I don’t feel like looking it up.

Democracy©®™

*Not available in all areas, rates subject to change, data and messaging fees may apply.

From what I’m given to understand of my state’s laws, this would be covered under the same kind of thing as the surveillance cameras at a convenience store or shopping center parking lot and the expectations a person would have for their privacy… it just sucks.

Some are like six feet away and others are set farther back. It’s not all of the ring came 5 that go off. I know there’s a setting where the user can create a like a bounding box so that they don’t go off unless someone is actually at the door… these folks simply haven’t done that, don’t know to do that, or are watching the sidewalk intentionally. At any rate, my street doesn’t have much traffic so I usually just walk in the road.

Some of my neighbors have them and I hate walking down the street. I know it’s a public sidewalk, but hearing all the little pings and “some one is at the front door” it creeps me out. I live in a single party consent state so there’s not like anything I can do but now there’s a database with a record of when I go to/come back from work. I don’t like that. Thankfully, when signing the lease, my landlord forbid in the contact the installation on those. He also owns the houses on either side of mine… a little strip of privacy in a sea of surveillance.

I was 21 years old.

It’s on the list… got some homework to do, but this project is shaping up be an afternoon instead of the months long thing I thought it would be.

Thanks! Will definitely be asking more questions as I get started in all this… but step one has been identified: beg the IT lady at work for a used laptop or buying a used/refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad.

Ubuntu and Mint are on the list and I’m now leaning towards buying a used Thinkpad.

Thanks for the info! Not knowing where to start gets… not overwhelming… I guess moderately-whelming. I am moderately whelmed.

Someone pointed out work laptops and made me realize my company is about to do a whole laptop replacement cycle (kind of embarrassed I didn’t think of that, but that’s why we ask questions). Gonna check with the IT manager if I can have one or if they’re already spoken for (donated to a school, etc). If I can’t do that, looks like a cheap eBay Thinkpad with Mint or Ubuntu is where I’m going to end up.