throw_away2

“There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves.”

“The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up to management and it’s usually not long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. It is here that the structure is palpable — you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/deadening judgments speaking through them.”

So, one runway filled with dozens of airliners, the other one has someone doing three-mile wheelies in a Cessna :)

I had been at the company for over a decade, and had gotten quite lucky in the RSU lottery & thought, wait, I have enough money to last forever, so why do I do this to myself?

My health was bad, I was overweight, smoked, was depressed. I felt like it was going to kill me if I stayed another decade.

So I quit. In the years since, I stopped smoking, lost 1/3 my bodyweight & really got my shit together. I dink around on personal projects and learn new things. I follow HN because I'm genuinely interested in tech & now I can pursue what things I want, rather than those I need for $JOB or $NEXT_JOB.

I miss the good people I used to work with, but this is almost completely offset by how much I don't miss the assholes and the hassles (annual review, recruiting, meetings, explaining basic math to MBAs, etc).

That last one is huge for me because the local UPS store got wise to Amazon returns and now charges $1.50 for the first printout, but only if you email them, which neatly captures everyone who needs to print a return label, but doesn't have a printer of their own.

I recently lost a lot of weight and so I wasn't sure what size I was for a lot of items. So I just ordered a couple different sizes and sent back the ones that didn't fit. Such a better experience than trying to find multiple sizes of the same thing in a store, then going to the dressing room where everything is counted because I'm assumed to be a criminal.

Biggest down side is that they use their very lowest priority and slowest shipping for it. But for me, clothes are rarely urgent.

> This per-passenger profit is roughly double what airlines around the world make per passenger, according to the International Air Transport Association

This would be an upgrade as at least I would kinda trust that a file I found on my own system from the vendor can probably be trusted. I trust the options would be at least mostly self documenting (more self documenting than a random list of hex digits). And, if I'm going to use software written in the 90s, I'm going to go with good old vim.

I'm not surprised by Oracle's hypocrisy. I'm surprised anyone with a soul and functioning sense of right and wrong still works there.

You save money but what kind of life is that?

  it's a1so very different in monospaced fonts where these
  identifiers are 1ike1y to be read.  'l' 1ooks much more
  1ike '1' in these fonts.

My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism.

Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.

It's a discussion of descriptivist vs prescriptivist grammar and led me to A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which is a way more fascinating book than its title would imply.