Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That’s a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.

I’m glad they’ve got themselves into a sticky situation.

Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):

One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

Oh there’s still far too much adulation. All those Tesla bros, for example. Given what an insufferable turd Musk is, and the crumby reputation Teslas have, I don’t understand it. And I don’t think I ever will.

Nope, he can’t manage that. Because he’s an attention-whoring malignant narcissist.

I can’t wait for the bubble of mystique to pop on this arsehole, if only so we don’t have to ever hear from or about him again. Sadly, there are still plenty of rubes in his cult of personality and greedy investors willing to ride his coattails. So I’m not holding my breath.

Good points.

Seems a little bit heavy on forwards and light on midfielders.

Or to paraphrase the man himself:

“Take the presidency by any means necessary, handle due process later.”

I only discovered Krita recently, but holy shit does it fill the Photoshop void very well. The UI isn’t the same as PS, obviously. But I find it much easier to navigate than Gimp’s UI. And Krita is surprisingly feature-rich.

I have no idea why anyone still goes to McDogsbreath (I’ll likely hear some reasons in responses to this comment, but I’ve heard them before and don’t buy them). Back in the day I rarely had positive experiences when I was dragged out there reluctantly. Plasticy food of subpar quality, and very uncomfortable, plastic furniture.

And in recent years, between the prices quadrupling, the limited menu for people who don’t like burgers, the shite Wi-Fi, and now them not even being willing to lose 10c on a relatively small % of customers who get a soda refill… Why go there at all! There are so many better fast food options than that disaster of a chain.

It’s pretty wild that their current manager and two of their very recent former managers have all criticized the club’s and the fans’ mindset. Not a good sign at all. There are some profound psychological problems at that club.

I have no basis for this theory, but I still believe that the FA and/or PGMOL deliberately fucked up the implementation and use of VAR as much as they could, so that after a few seasons it would be scrapped.

Eh, I’m okay with it if that happens. They aren’t really worthy rivals anyway, and haven’t been for most of the past 25-30 years.

But you’re right, as things stand I can see them struggling in general in the near future.

I feel bad for Postecoglu. I don’t think he fully realized what he was getting himself into.

I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s where they have malt shakes and ice cream socials, and dance the jitterbug to the Big Bopper.

The whole thing sounds like it’s just contrarian Russian axe-grinding against the West. It’s an interesting idea at a basic level, but very much lacking in subtlety in its execution, and it seems to distort a lot of Tolkien’s plot points and world building beyond the point of absurdity.

a prominent Fulani Muslim prince from West Africa who was kidnapped and trafficked to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade, having previously owned and sold slaves himself.

Well there’s some karmic justice right there.

However, once he gained his freedom and made it back to Wear Africa, it seems like he returned to selling slaves. So apparently the whole experience was lost in him from an empathetic perspective.

Overall, he sounds like he was an asshole.

Interesting article though.

There are multiple layers to this hornet’s nest of a topic. But from a personal perspective, I know I was (still am?) terrible at reading such interest from women. Luckily, I’m happily married, so I don’t need to worry about it now.

In the past I’ve literally had to have women launch themselves at me or graphically proposition me before I was aware that they were really into me. And even then it was often a surprise. And there were a few times I asked out girls who I knew and seemed to have done chemistry with, and they recoiled in alarm. And I’m a fairly average neuro-typical guy. So yeah, I think some of us definitely have trouble reading the interest of women in those one-on-one situations.

Quite a few of my make friends have run into similar experiences. While a few others assumed any woman who spoke to them must be into them. Which is, of course, the other side of the same ‘unable to read women’ coin.

But adding to all that, there are all the tricky social obstacles to navigate. Things like:

• a minority of women wanting to be chased off they said no to an approach (depending on who was approaching them, of course); or
• worries about making women feel threatened or distressed by offering an unwanted advance;
• or how it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate between a purely platonic friendship, or a pure romantic friendship, or one that the woman wants to transition from the former to the latter;
• or just realizing a woman is into you but feigning ignorance because you (the guy) isn’t into her and doesn’t want to exploit her for sex or ruin a social group dynamic.

So yeah, it’s a fucking (pun intended) mess.

In America, Falun Gong followers are often massive Q-anon conspiracy believers, overt racists, and Trump fanatics. Further proof that that group is filled with nutters.

Well, good quality chocolate tastes much better at room temperature. Shit quality ‘chocolate’ like some of the big brands here in America does taste better cold. But only because it dulls the horrible taste.

Which brings me to my own little life pro-tip: spend a bit more on decent quality chocolate. It’s worth the cost.

This sounds like my old place, but much worse.

We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that’s easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.

We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.

As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn’t a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn’t sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.

So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.

As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).

But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I’m sorry.

Good luck to you and your kid’s team!