ZDL
@ZDL@ttrpg.network
- Comment on IDEA to make this site standout why don't you make a live chatbox for people who have logged in? 1 day ago:
The fact that you don’t know the answer to that question yourself is pretty much clinching evidence that it’s AI code.
- Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women 1 day ago:
The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.
A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?
Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.
Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:
- Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
- The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
- As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.
None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.
But that final job interview… Yeah.
I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.
“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”
And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.
And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.
In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.
That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.
¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.
- Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women 1 day ago:
What stood out for me was this line:
— so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.
Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?
Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).
- Comment on A new Europe community for discussing current events, news, and just content relating to Europe 1 week ago:
Because the “global” news/politics communities are filled to the brim with Americans mouthing off American talking points?
- Comment on Welcome to the BRICS community 4 weeks ago:
Not even slightly surprising to me. Mention China, directly or indirectly, and the fee fees of American neocon thugs get hurt and the downvote brigade comes out to fight as only they know best to fight.
- Comment on Welcome to the BRICS community 4 weeks ago:
snort
The downvoting brigade is out in force I see.
Terrified, are we, about an alternative to the current broken system?
- Comment on People's Republic of Britain - A community dedicated to documenting and critiquing government overreach in the UK in terms of freedom of speech 1 month ago:
Oh, God. Freeze Peach has reached the UK.
- Comment on !unlockthread@lemm.ee For those frustrated by locked threads 3 months ago:
Maybe you want to edit this so there’s a direct link? Like putting in !unlockthread@lemm.ee in the text somewhere (or whatever the link format is)?
- Comment on Trump picks vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy as health secretary 6 months ago:
Worse.
They’re going to have to go to China to get the seals for those.
I mean it took a Chinese maker to get seals for one of the few remaining living people who needs an iron lung: www.wired.com/story/iron-lung-maker-community/
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
Also, whether something is “extreme” or not depends on someone’s background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America.
Weirdly, I find a lot of the content on America-centric sources (not just in Lemmy) to be pretty damned extreme myself. Like the casual assumption that guns are the right way to deal with all problems. (Slightly exaggerated, yes, but sadly only slightly.)
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
My point is that there’s nothing specifically objectionable about .ml. There’s many instances out there, after all, and all of them are at some risk or another form over- (or under-)zealous moderation. If a community is on .ml and seems to be valuable I’ll go to it, unlike, say, a community on a hypothetical instance called youngnazisforfreedom.sieg.heil or whatever. If the moderation causes issues, I’ll switch to a community (or make another community) on another instance.
THAT is to me the principle of the Fediverse: the ability to choose and to move on at need or will.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
In the case of the “tech”-oriented instances it’s actually the user base I find distasteful.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
You know, before lecturing me you might want to check out which instance I’m coming in from.
I said “I don’t have issues with .ml” … but I’m not coming in from a .ml account. So when I say “I have no issues with .ml” it’s in the context of the original question: do I refrain participating if the community is hosted on .ml.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
What a surprise. A japanimation fan from a japanimation instance cheering on genocide.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
But there’s no such thing as “politically neutral”.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
Most political slurs (“tankie”, “Nazi”, “fascist”, “communist”, “leftist”, “liberal”, “centrist”, etc.), if they ever even start from a position of actually knowing what the words mean, rapidly transform into a general slur that means “someone that I disagree with who’s in a different political tribe from me”.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
I’m not going to name them. The point of this isn’t to expose which instances I dislike, but rather to show that every instance has its fans and its antifans.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 7 months ago:
Whichever instance you choose, someone will have complaints about it. Personally I don’t have issues with .ml, but there are quite a few “tech”-oriented instances over which my trigger finger is itching on the site ban trigger.
It’s all a question of which subset of human stupidity you’re willing to deal with. Because all humans are stupid, we’re just different in how and where we express it.