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Leave. Seriously. If you're contemplating it, and it's something you can do fairly easily, a lateral move, do it.

Restructurings always suck, especially those resulting from sales. They have every incentive to keep you on the line like a trout hooked, "a potential resource". Nothing they say will be binding. If they need you, they might keep you. If they don't, you went through all that trouble for a big fat goodbye.

There's nothing saying you can't come back. If you're a good employee and you leave respectfully, you can always come back. They might even need you to, and if they do, you'll get a significant salary bump.

Yeah, man, restructurings suck. You're the total fuckbag all the way through and nobody tells you anything that's true. You know this is true because HR is always a central cog to the clown show. Bleh. Shiver. Makes me itch. Went through a Koch Brothers "restructuring" once and boy was that aplenty fun to never want do that again.

Everyone whose data was leaked will have had their data absorbed into public and private databases now being used against them in algorithmic ways that even the people using those algorithms don't understand.

Such is the nature of data persistent today. It persists f.o.r.e.v.e.r. That means there is no forgiveness for the mistakes that even we don't make for ourselves, as well as those we do, but are made for us by others, like Equifax.

You can tell people that a data breach like this will have certain ramifications, and they just don't understand. They don't understand that algorithms run their lives, making decisions about them every single day. Worse is that they don't realize that these algorithms run on risk modeling. These algorithms eat actuarial data for breakfast. They suck data and chop it apart and put it back together to make you into whatever risk model they want. Data is used to quantitize you as a risk model. You're a risk score, be it a credit score or whatever, is affects your life at every possible level, and it's all connected to our fundamental economic systems. I don't mean to sound like the guy from Fight Club, and certainly not half as clever, but these are truths.

We exist in the real world as real living entities, and we exist as multitudes of fake representations, all algorithmically-determined risk models based on data you have neither control of or even understand how it's being applied to you. Your life is owned by the heuristics written by some PhD candidate.

I do sound like that guy from Fight Club.

Vasectomy worked great long-term as a not-to-do. No magical children have magically become manifest.

Marriage is on that list too. Also working swimmingly and comes highly recommended.

Your mileage may vary.

It's just something I noticed. Marriage and children did something to people. Especially to men. Whatever it was, it wasn't good. They all seemed to prematurely age and become miserable. I tell myself the good is private, you can't see the good of family life because you are not privy to it. I don't know if I'm wrong. I also tell myself that this is a construct of our society, not of man. That we should want to have children, that this shouldn't be a fundamental part of our lives. Yeah it isn't it, it's a misery. That a child can so completely trap us financially and otherwise is a great sadness. Money being more valuable than life. The high priests of finance determining how much life there can be.

Of all the places I've hung out online, IRC is still, by far, the very best. It had something to do with the simplicity of it. It had something to do with the organic policing, how channels and voices don't get overrun because it's impossible to understand a conversation after X number of participants (i.e. if too many people chatting, then people leave or silence themselves, like an auto-organic throttle). Of how unique voices and interesting people seemed to bubble to the top simply by the nature of the anonymity and the force of their personalities, of how punishment for bad behavior was carrot or stick and judgement rendered instantly /kick. There was something about the meritocracy of it all. And your name was only so good as your lastest contribution, because you knew that people would remember what you said. You had the power of anonymity, but it regulated itself because you cared about the people you were talking to, because you would develop relationships with them through that anonymity. Those who contributed the most were respected. You weren't competing with NeverEndingWaterfall™ of blah from Facebook, Insta, etc. Yeah, I miss IRC a lot. I know, it's still there, but the privacy and anonymity are all gone, so too the personalities.

First you go everywhere local that does not sell new furniture. Does not. New furniture is the pits. It's like a new car. You spend years worrying about the damage you're doing to it, the money you've lost, the depreciation, the interest you're paying on that depreciation, etc. New furniture tortures you like anything that's new. Then you set a budget and start selectively buying used furniture. I give you a 100% guarantee that you will love this process. You get to see your furniture in real life, you get sit in it and see how comfortable it is, you get to know that it's had real life behind it. Once you find that one unique sofa, that one table, that one thing that really speaks to your heart, build your furniture stable around that one piece at a time and it will be uniquely you, composed entirely of previously owned stuff, will have cost you anywhere from nothing to far, far less than Pottery Barn, and you'll get some fun out of it too.

This living room is uniquely me. This is the furniture I chose for myself because I liked it when I saw it, I liked it when I sat in it, because it speaks to me. I bought this sofa from this chick who got it from this dude over here, and you wouldn't believe what you told me about how she got it into her 10th floor apt.

This is not $5,000 of furniture that I have to “get used to sitting in” because it makes a statement about who I think I'm supposed to be, because Pottery Barn told me style looks like $5,000 of furniture I don't need.

F** that. Hit the garage sales, hit the thrift stores, hit the estate sales, especially in wealthy areas, have some fun.

If you make something that's you, you can keep the picture of the Pottery Barn setup and paste it on your refrigerator with a magnet. Each time you pass by it you can snicker at it, how you almost made the worst possible choice: new furniture.

If you can afford Pottery Barn, you can afford someone to pick it up and bring it to your place. Don't worry about shipping/moving yourself. Just pay for it.

Just be aware of that what you pay for shipping now, you will pay again when you move and again and again and again as many times as you move.