ChunkMcHorkle
@ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
- Comment on How my morning is going... 7 months ago:
“No good deed goes unpunished” I guess. It’s a shame because you were doing that other guy a solid.
- Submitted 7 months ago to nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on What's inside the London Tower Bridge? 7 months ago:
Excellent response. You put it perfectly.
I like this sub exactly the way it is. If something isn’t for me, I move on. Not a big deal. And OP asked a great question. I never thought about it either, lol.
- Comment on If hot air rises, why is it colder at the top of a mountain? 7 months ago:
I never heard it explained that way. What an excellent comment. Thank you for taking the time.
- Comment on Waiting in a queue to see a Web site 7 months ago:
It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.
In the US, if you are an hourly non-exempt employee, that is overt wage theft in all 50 states. If a task is made mandatory by an employer, they must pay you for the time you spent on it.
I know this doesn’t help you now, of course, but it’s good to know in case you run into it again and feel like pushing back with a report to the Dept of Labor.
- Comment on What is a good, healthy, unhurtful, socially positive way to express anger? 9 months ago:
Get some time and space to yourself, 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the complexity of the situation. Think about exactly who/what you are angry with, and why (including yourself*). Don’t worry about solving it, just get it front and center in your mind. Pile up a huge number of couch cushions. Beat the ever livin’ fuck out of them with your fists and feet until you break down or wear yourself out. Repeat as necessary.
*Note: One of the reasons some emotional things never die is because we try to solve them without including ourselves from the equation: we see forgiveness is needed but we don’t include ourselves, for example, or guilt needs addressing but we don’t want to measure our own part in it because someone else’s betrayal was so overwhelming, thus it’s almost unbearable to think of the self as participatory in that destruction. Yet those are examples of exactly the kind of inner situation that keep us stuck in unhealthy emotional patterns. If you really want to get out of an emotional trap, including anger that doesn’t quit, and you think you’ve tried everything, try specifically looking for exactly what you don’t want to see about your own part in it.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 10 months ago:
Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.
No, it’s protecting the company from the consequences of breaking labor laws like the WARN Act, which may well apply in this employee’s case.
Companies love to break the law. Wage theft is bigger than any other form of theft in the US. What companies don’t like is to be exposed breaking labor laws, or suffer wage audits, or having to answer to pesky individual suits from disgruntled workers they assume couldn’t fight back but miraculously did.
Every single HR rep I have ever known – and that includes the ones I knew as friends outside work – made a knowing and openly acknowledged choice to check their conscience at the door to accept and keep those HR jobs.
You can justify it however you like, but it’s a choice, each and every time you lie, and it is for HR reps too. It’s just a more direct path to the paycheck and yearly bonuses for them: they literally get paid to lie, to hide, to fraudulently conceal illegal acts, and especially patterns of illegal acts, taking place within the company they represent, and to destroy and deny the existence of evidence whenever the rare employee who can fight back raises their head above the parapet.
And as a person who spent years in IT, I can’t even begin to tell you the actual illegal (and completely heartless and amoral) shit I have personally laid eyes on, like when I temporarily had to work at someone else’s desk on a network issue: a low-level but long-term housekeeping employee who was injured on the job had asked to return to light duty for a few weeks in a letter with medical documentation attached, and I had to sit there with it all spread out on the desk in front of me with a sticky note attached to it saying “Let’s draw a line under this, find a reason to fire her” staring me in the face.
If someone literally wants to lie for a living and be the dog that eats the other dog today, that’s on them. But stop trying to act like that’s NOT exactly how it is.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 10 months ago:
Somebody needs to tell Brittany Pietsch and her laid off coworkers about the WARN Act and its state counterparts:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini…
Just because Cloudflare really really needs for Brittany and her laid off coworkers to believe that it’s all individual firings based on performance and related measurements, in order to avoid the legally mandated costs of laying off a group of employees, that need does not make this anything less than a layoff.
While there are certainly exceptions to the WARN Act and similar laws, chances are excellent that if Ms. Pietsch and her coworkers take a look at it in light of their own specific experiences, they can come to a MUCH more equitable resolution than the shit on a plate with a side of material misrepresentation handed to them by the HR and legal reps at Cloudflare.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 10 months ago:
Yeah. When you already know there’s nothing better coming, no point in waiting.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 10 months ago:
Look at their post history, lol
- Comment on Chrome thinks Firefox is unsafe! 10 months ago:
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; out of curiosity I just now tried it on Windows myself (Google Chrome 120.0.6099.130 Official Build 64-bit) by typing mozilla.org, clicking “Firefox downloads” at the top, and selecting the one for Windows. It sailed through almost instantly.
BUT - just because it worked for me personally on a completely different machine, OS, and installer doesn’t mean OP is misrepresenting what happened to him; competitive app blocking has certainly happened with Edge. For all we know it’s some Google A/B trial bullshit, no telling at this point.
- Comment on KFC workers are caught licking chicken pieces 10 months ago:
I’m not homeless, I’m not hungry, but it enrages me on behalf of those who are.
It’s one thing to throw food away, especially multiple meals’ worth – which is kind of shitty in itself when you could give or donate it away, even fast food at the end of a night shift – but legally it’s just property. The owner can do what they want with it. No harm, no foul.
But it’s quite another to make a show of throwing food away AND going out of your way to be an asshole about it (licking it and making it uneatable, as a pointed message) in the declining world we live in right now.
These employees that are doing this clearly are not going without food today, but give it a few years. Even in the best of lives, shit happens.
- Comment on BREAKING NEWS: Amazon workers around the world on strike [2:45 | Nov 24 2023 | Progressive International] 11 months ago:
You should see the account history, lol - it’s pretty much ALL “trust me bro” and anyone who factually calls them out on their shit gets told they’re an idiot, a moron, a “dumb dumb,” etc.
Give it a minute, the “you’re an idiot” replies are incoming . . .
- Comment on How Long It Takes the Largest Companies in America to Make One Employee's Average Annual Salary 1 year ago:
The average pharmacy is not in any danger here at all, and unless a specific pharmacist is personally involved in illegal dispensing, they’re not in any danger here either, as far as I know. So if you know of specific pharmacists or non-franchise pharmacies caught up in this, you would have to look at the specifics of their individual infractions, or what the feds claim there is.
The problem is the huge chains, and to a much smaller extent their pharmacists. What the various DEA investigations found out is that in the states where the opioid crisis was/is the worst, the corruption went all the way up the supply chain. The actual prescription is just the first stop, but after that you have chains like CVS that were receiving literally truckloads of nothing but opioids at their regional supply houses, fully aware of their part in the whole thing but they were making MASSIVE coin, so why stop the gravy train? You’re right, individual pharmacists have to fill a script they are given unless they have cause to believe it’s fraudulent in some way, but again, the problem wasn’t truly at the pharmacist level, it was from the top down. So any pharmacist who recognized that 20 scripts a day from the same pain doc, day after day, was out of the norm and reported it to management was simply told to keep filling it regardless. And this went on regardless of how extreme the problem became, to the point that some individual pharmacies were distributing almost no prescriptions other than opioids.
Incidentally, this is how McKesson (a drug maker) ended up afoul of the feds: they knew exactly how much oxy and hydro they were shipping, to whom, and were all too well aware that the majority of that had to be to fill scripts that were less than legitimately gotten. By the time it got to state lawsuits the states had everything they needed to prove that it had been going on for years with McKesson’s full knowledge and blessing. Same for the other defendant who settled: they would have been gutted, and the proof by that point was legally indefensible.
WaPo did a huge series on this whole thing two or three years ago that is well worth the read, if you’re interested. Let me know and I’ll dig up the links (I have spare gift links, don’t worry about the paywall).
- Comment on How Long It Takes the Largest Companies in America to Make One Employee's Average Annual Salary 1 year ago:
Look at all those healthcare companies. Fifty years ago, such a list might have a Big Pharma company, but no patient care portals at all (hospitals, pharmacies, etc). Now they dominate the whole list.
- Comment on I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY? 1 year ago:
Sir, do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Linux?
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
While it is kind of sad you don’t know how to parse anecdotal evidence and it’s probably because you are completely unable to trust your own experiences and instinct to the point you require external validation for everything, I am enough of an asshole to admit that I have greatly enjoyed watching you stomp your feet and cry. And then wake up and stomp and cry some more the next day, lol. I love that we matter that much to you, and that we infuriate you so much you have to throw link after link at us and call us names, like anything you do matters at all.
But now I’m hanging up. I’ll leave it to you to find some links that tell you what that phrase means so that you can validate the experience externally before you accept it. Have a nice day.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
You will know if your house has knob and tube: go up to the attic or down into the basement, and look for exposed wiring. Chances are excellent you have a mix of older and newer wiring, if it was not upgraded after the mid-80s or so. I couldn’t tell you exactly when myself, but at some point municipalities started moving away from a “pull it onto the lot, plug it in” housing code toward actually requiring that ANY electrical work not be approved unless the entire house was brought up to code.
But save your heart attack for a good steak, because knob and tube is not inherently dangerous. It’s what people were doing with it that was winning Darwin Awards. (You could probably do a search for “plugging a fuse with a penny” and see what you get.) I was in a 1948 house in 2015 that still had it: the basic wiring was mostly knob and tube, but the breaker box was modern and it was actually up to code.
So really, no worries about sleeping outside tonight, you still have time to look over your house’s paperwork, seen when it was modified (and whether they pulled permits or did it the I-don’t-need-no-permits way) and then get a real electrician to look it over for you. Chances are good that you’re well within code if you’ve had any serious remodeling or repair work done within the last 30 years or so. When you find nothing objectively unsafe, try not to hate me for making you look. Just don’t stick any loose change into the fuse box, lol.
Apologies for the scare. Did not mean to do that.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
Wait, what? I completely missed that growing up.
Missing it might also be why you actually made it all the way to adulthood, lol. It’s dangerous as hell, but it’s something people used to do on knob and tube wiring in old houses. Codes changed after any number of fires, and they actually made a change to how circuit breakers were built so it wouldn’t work anymore, but essentially a fuse was a round thing that had two (I think?) wires crossing the center; if those overloaded they simply burnt out and that was the mechanism of circuit breaking. The hole in the center was exactly the size of a penny, and copper is an excellent conductor, and people put more and more appliances on house wiring that had not been upgraded since the dawn of electricity so they didn’t have available power, but they usually did have a penny.
If you lived in a new(er) house you probably never saw this, but for those of us in older neighborhoods and post WWII starter houses saw a lot of it. You were supposed to replace it as soon as you could (this was in the days of actually going to the hardware store and buying it in person during business hours) but shit happens, people forget, and houses go boom. So they stopped making it so that anyone could do that at all, which is probably a good thing.
God, yeah, that tv console, lol. That one is solid 70s, with the dark finish and heavy pseudo-Spanish turned posts; I think ours was a good eight or ten years older because it was more mid-century modern, blonde wood with sort of gold/beige fabric screen over the speakers, but yeah. That pic gave me a good chuckle, thanks.
And listening to good music with your head stuck between two physical speakers is almost mystical. They also produced it, specifically, for stereo as well as for listenability on little transistors, so there was a lot of thought given behind the scenes to those notes hopscotching across brain cells from left to right and back again. It’s meditative is what it is: thinking about nothing else, nowhere you had to be, maybe a little bored, and putting your head between the speakers. Pink Floyd was awesome that way, but so was a lot of music: everything from Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra to Kiss to Wild Cherry, whatever you got your groove on. It’s a holy thing.
BTW, I think your detractor is probably too scared to take me on lest they get hit with an avalanche of reminiscences and maybe a game of “what’s this?” with a pic or two of a 45 record adapter or something, lol. As well they should be. Thanks for making me think of these things. Those were good times.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
That is so cool. I learned those things, but only after I left. Started on TRS-80s (“trash 80s”) with the heavily armored clacky keyboard and then got into early PCs. I still remember Pong, lol.
Speaking of which, it was probably masonite or some kind of hard board on the back of the tv; it’s older than you think, and was on the back of a lot of those wonderful Art Deco radios of the 30s and 40s even before it was on the backs of televisions. The tv we had when I was a young kid was almost the size of a couch, so I have no idea what was on the back of it because I could never have moved it. But I remember the vacuum tubes, radios had those as well. And plugging a bad fuse with a penny, which probably wasn’t the best idea in the world but everybody did it.
(We had the faux-wood sided station wagon too, lol.)
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
Can confirm, lol. And for cable you had to have coax from the wall to the cable box, and again from the cable box to an adapter that went into one of the existing ports. Later, you plugged your cable box coax straight into the TV, but that was late 80s if I remember correctly. Waaaaay before “Skinemax”, lol.
And even then not everyone had cable. It was an added expense, and there was a LOT more going out for entertainment because it was cheap and affordable. I saw The Police in 1983 for $15 general seating. In the 70s dance was HUGE, as were bicycles and skateboards, and then later in the 80s you had malls and bowling and mini golf and whatever blew your skirt up. Pandemic aside, this thing where everyone stays inside and never goes out is the exact opposite of how it was then, so you saved your money for what YOU wanted to do, which was rarely sit home and watch TV. In my group of friends, among a dozen of us or so, maybe two had cable in the early 80s, but that grew, especially with MTV.
As an aside, I have to ask: Did you ever get sent up to the roof by your parents after a storm to reset the antenna? Or be the unpaid holder of the rabbit ears by the TV, moving this way and that so your old man could watch his game with the least amount of snow and rolling horizontal lines? I did.
- Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price. 1 year ago:
I mean, I’m not going off a belief, I actually lived this.
Yes, the clear reception vs bunny ears was awesome, but that was also limited on televisions like this, and I’m talking specifically about the content.
I’m talking about the late 70s and early 80s when they were commercially available to the masses and the cable wars began.
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.
This is my recollection as well; I was a young adult at the time.
Cable was ABSOLUTELY supposed to be ad-free. Ad-free, and local access so that anyone could have their own show. That was the tradeoff to get people away from the big three (ABC, CBS, NBC) at the time. There were literally no ads.
But it didn’t last long at all. Local stayed ad-free for much longer; anything national came with ads embedded. Even the very first day of MTV had ads.
And before anyone screeches at me about what link said what, forget it. I’m not interested in reading text about how the 60s and 70s were supposed to have taken place written by people don’t even know what it means to unplug or hang up a phone, or why anyone would even do that, or what green stamps were, or what happens when you lie on the floor with your head between two speakers listening to Pink Floyd, lol.
LillyPip is factually correct. You should be listening to them instead of trying to retcon history for them.
- Comment on How do poor people in the states give birth without money? 1 year ago:
- Comment on When the pizza party is too expensive, you go with the EncourageMint 1 year ago:
Thank you, yes, exactly. I don’t downvote low effort “but why” questions. but I also don’t answer them.
I am far more tired of putting effort into lengthy, carefully crafted, good-faith responses only to have gotten sucked in by some asshole looking for an argument than I am willing to accept further.
Speaking personally, from the earliest days of Reddit, I have taken unexpected downvotes for a genuine question as code for “keep lurking/look it up” and unless I am stuck on search words it has never failed me. I recommend this for others.
TL;DR: If you sincerely have a question, try putting as much effort into your question as you’d like to receive by way of a response. And if you’re just an argumentative troll (not you, CoggyMcFee, lol) then fuck you. Seriously. With a rusty, tetanus-bearing lawnmower blade. Sideways.
- Comment on Windows: we noticed that you kept the useless search bar disabled since 2015, so we sent an update that re-enabled it without your permission 1 year ago:
GPOs just edit the windows register so you could just apply all the changes using regedit instead of using a GPO.
No. Because GPO involves differing rights as well as registry hacks, and because GPO allows you to change certain settings that are not in the registry at all, there are some things you can literally ONLY do via GPO. It’s been a while, but I’ve spent multiple hours trying on a few occasions when the situation demanded it, and ended up either installing Pro with GPO or abandoning the effort altogether.
- Comment on Windows: we noticed that you kept the useless search bar disabled since 2015, so we sent an update that re-enabled it without your permission 1 year ago:
I know it has a shitty “95-ish” look to it, but distrowatch.com is quite possibly your best resource in finding out at a glance which of the distros you’re interested in are stable or rolling, and how popular they are. Go down the page hit ranking on the right, and start clicking: you will see the root build of every distro, whether it’s stable or rolling, the last release date, links to reviews, etc.
It won’t get you to your final decision, but it will get you to a shortlist. And then you can start making LiveUSB sticks to test drive your distros of choice in RAM without having to install anything. There are very few distros that require a full install to try out; if you run into one you can always use old hardware or a spare disk, etc. Mint has a LiveUSB of all its DE choices, Pop!OS has a LiveUSB, you just need the USB sticks and something like Rufus to make them with, and you’re ready to test drive.
Well worth the trouble, IMO. Good luck.
- Comment on Windows: we noticed that you kept the useless search bar disabled since 2015, so we sent an update that re-enabled it without your permission 1 year ago:
As someone who is currently in the process of moving everything to Linux, this is a genuinely helpful comment. I have it saved now, lol. Thank you for taking the time to write this out, much appreciated.
- Comment on Windows: we noticed that you kept the useless search bar disabled since 2015, so we sent an update that re-enabled it without your permission 1 year ago:
If OP uses a GPO as their personal config, that can’t be how they are supposed to be used.
“Supposed to” doesn’t matter at all in this context. The point and the utility of GPO on Windows Pro is that it allows admins much more granular control of a workstation, AND an admin can override rights limitations that are built into Windows Home simply because Microsoft doesn’t like home users tinkering with the OS, but accepts that business environments often require it for security or legacy software reasons.
Thus Microsoft has restricted GPO to Pro versions of the Windows OS, presuming that only business environments will elect to purchase it and GPO use will be restricted to experienced admins.
Because of this, there are things you can do with GPO on a Pro machine – combining elevated rights with granular settings – that you can’t even do with direct registry hacks on a Home machine. If OP fucks it up, they are the only ones who will suffer, but they also have the knowledge and ability to restore it to working condition (even if that means a reinstall). No harm, no foul.
And even if they don’t fuck it up, there is a non-zero chance that Microsoft will do it for them with one of their forced upgrades anyway.
This entire thread is about an unnecessary change Microsoft made to the LTSC (“long term servicing channel”) version of Windows: the whole point of LTSC is that it’s not supposed to change at all unless absolutely necessary, so that it remains stable for as many environments for as long as it can, reducing maintenance costs for businesses running it. Behold how easily and for what little payoff Microsoft shat on that too.
So if OP is running Windows Pro on a home machine and using GPO on a domain of one to override all the silly bullshit Microsoft has done to stop users from moving away from default home configs, more power to them I say.
No puppies are being harmed by O{ using GPO to hack his home machine, lol.
- Comment on why doesn't Egypt open its borders to Gaza? 1 year ago:
Just fyi, if you’re interested in anonymity always strip the ?=si parameter from any YouTube url you share. “si” stands for source identifier, it is there for invasive tracking purposes, and now your your YouTube ID is linked with your fluke@lemmy.world account.
It’s easy to strip, and you can strip it even when the rest of the url is shortened by simply removing everything before the question mark:
If there are other parameters like a time mark, just strip the part that involves the si=, leaving the t= info, and the remaining url will still work fine. Just so you know.
I did not click on it as you had it; I copied and stripped it before pasting because fuck Google, but go ahead and edit your post now if you care about not having your social media accounts linked to each other.
- Comment on Do you think VPN companies will start to feel pressure from legal/corporate powers to crackdown on pirating? 1 year ago:
This is an excellent answer, and the most realistic one I’ve seen so far.