Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…

Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is at about it being a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.

Well, sorta.

Plenty (maybe even most) of 1st level manages will see and understand, but are still unable or unwilling to push back on unrealistic expectations coming from outside (sometimes not even from above, just from customer) so from the point of view of those working under them the result is the same if they’re not doing their own internal time reporting averaging and and are honest towards them.

Further, they often fuck-up things, from planning to analysis and taking in account the dependencies on external providers and it’s the team that has to make up for it. Absolutelly, the managers will notice people going the extra mile … and do the same thing again next time around and it will be just as “unexpected” and “we have not other option” as all the previous times.

I would even go as far as saying that the “understanding” manager that fucks you up anyway (sometimes because they’ll always put themselves above those working for them and might even be fake, others because they’re not very good at playing the game that needs to be played to other stakeholders) is the most common of all.

Looking back (to almost 30 years of experience in several countries), some of my worst managers were “really nice” people but the team still suffered massivelly because they were not in fact good managers (they suffered alongside the team, for all the good that did to the rest) - essentially the team was holding the career of somebody who should probably be doing something else and at the end of the day, the managers rather than the rest were the ones getting more pay and bigger bonuses.

It’s a pretty damn sad thing having to do it if you’re a fair and honest person, but that’s just how the world works.

(There are a few managers out there whom you can be honest towards without them taking away your reward for being efficient of going the extra mile, but in my personal experience those are pretty rare).

Yeah, I’ve been there - it’s how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn’t just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).

I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.

Anyways, I still keep the “no waste” habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn’t want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).

Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is “lower TDP”) and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.

Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).

Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it’s normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don’t really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It’s worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).

The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like “least maintenance time required” or “maximum computing power lowest energy consumption” (or it’s companion “silent yet powerful”).

Maybe “I’m fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side” is the real mid-life crisis of techies.

That’s not mid-life, that’s entire-life.

They’re running around looking for the thiefs.

Same moneys, fancier tools.

Well, Money de facto ruling over massive domains in a country, including access to life essentials, is the very opposite of Democracy.

Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.

Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.

I think the problem is because CRT displays didn’t have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had “dots” of all sizes.

Also another possible thing that’s off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?

The noise is basically the product of radio waves at all frequencies with various intensities (though all low) with only the ones that could pass the bandpass filter of the TV tuner coming through (and being boosted up in intensitity by automatic gain control) and being painted along a phosphorous screen (hence no pixels) as the beam draw line by line the screen 25 times per second so to get that effect right you probably have to simulate it mathematically from a starting point of random radio noise and it can’t be going through things with pixels (such as 3D textures) to be shown and probably requires some kind of procedural shader.

If government is actually the top power on the land with oversight over and the power to rule over everything, then the power of voters which choses the people who lead said government controls the top power on the land, which is what’s known as Democracy (even when imperfect).

However if government ties its own hands so that it doesn’t really oversee or rule over the domains were Money has the most power, then it’s not the top power on the land anymore - Money is - and the votes of people do not control the highest power on the land anymore, they only control a secondary power, so what you have in not Democracy anymore, it’s Oligarchy - Money is not democratic since doesn’t have any “one person one vote” rule and instead some have billions of times more power than others.

“Small government” is really just a slogan for a government which has had its hands tied by reducing its funding so that it’s unable to oversee, much less rule over, the areas where Money dominates, especially when it comes to facing the wealthiest people and companies. Mind you this only works if the other elements of Democracy are kept, so Money still wants a Judiciary and Law Enforcement independent of Government to uphold their ownership of things and stop the plebes from taking their shit, just a government weakenned in all other areas and unable to fight Money in the Courts.

Why waste time and fuel going all the way to the location of a black hole (not to mention that all the radiation near it isn’t going to be good for the ship) plust the delta-V to reduce their speed until they actually are not in orbit anymore and fall down into it?

Best just jettison them out of the airlock without a suit in the middle of nowhere.

By the way, the picture illustrating the post isn’t actually displaying the real thing - the noise in it is too squarish and has no grey tones.

It’s definitelly an analog over the air TV thing.

The way digital works you would either get a “No signal” indicator (because the circuitry detects the signal to noise ratio is too low) or squarish artifacts (because of the way the compression algorithms for digital video are designed).

Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.

Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggests whilst agreeing with the objectives.

It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.

There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it, in disagreement with it or to put down that other person, but to try and help improve that idea even further - in other words, genuine constructive criticism. A downvote isn’t constructive, and sometimes people deserve an upvote for trying or for how far they got, even if the end result could be better.

I think their double standard on media manipulation is derived from them being absolutelly fine with some people mass-manipulating others but not with other people doing it, which if you think about it is another aspect of the same kind of take that Trumpist muppets have: such an such should be done to “them”, but when it’s being done to “us” it shouldn’t happen.

People whose thinking is based on Principles and who at least try to not be tribalist, tend conclude that it’s the act itself - the manipulation - that is the morally and ethically wrong thing quite independently of who are the perpetrators or the victims.

The funny thing specifically with US libs is that it’s exactly the turning of their media into Propaganda Outlets, which they themselves supported and used, that sewed the fields for the harvest that Trump is harvesting: it destroyed people’s confidence in the traditional media opening the path for manipulation via social media and for the kind of populism that Trump uses - “strong man” saying whatever he thinks people want to hear quite independently of it being true or not, in a very assured way and using everyday language (even rufian language) which massivelly contrasts with the style of deceit prefered by liberals.