Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think "oh, layoffs mean the company isn't doing so good," but shareholders see "they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold."

One revolution I have realized in baking is the recent trend to start talking about weight and not volume in recipes for certain dry ingredients like flour. Three cups of fluffy sifted flour is a lot less flour than three cups of densely packed flour. Same with brown sugar, or wondering if you need a "flat teaspoon" vs. a "heaping teaspoon" of something.

I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ''radio location'' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

"I was fired from my previous job due to acts of drunken sloth and a little theft. Then I spent time on my couch, doing nothing but watching Starsky and Hutch reruns in my underwear, eating cold spaghetti-os from the can and drinking warm beer. Then when the welfare checks ran dry, I blackmailed a manager at the next job. He hired me, I did nothing, but he was replaced by someone who didn't have anything I could dig up in his past quick enough. I can't work with Tom Swift Jr. there, so I am applying here. Here is a list of my demands upon hire, and some background checks I ran on you. When do I start?"

-- what these people think about a gap in your employment, possibly.

I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as "..." (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you'd never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of "[program] service is already running" errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little "helper" script for years.

Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.

So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.

Oof.

When I was 19, I had friends from high school who were still younger, and one of them was my friend Julie who had helicopter parents (she would have been 17-18). I was doing security at an event where the radio headsets we had were super-shitty, and the guy running security was a dumpster fire on his own. Julie's parents forbid her from going to the event, and grounded her to her room. Then her dad called the hotel where the event was being held, was told Julie had "run away" to this event, and that I was somehow responsible. Given she was a minor, the event runners were understandably concerned, although they were frustrated that Julie's dad was unable to describe her in a way that was useful: "Asian, wearing black, or a tee-shirt, or something. Ask Punkie where she is." So they contacted the head of security to find me on my rounds to see if I knew what this crazy man was talking about. The head of security said "okay" and did nothing.

At some point, the head of security was fired for a variety of reasons, and this increased the level of miscommunication. Meanwhile, Julie's dad was calling every few hours, demanding to know where his daughter was. And soon there was a concerted effort to find me, which was complicated because of the communication issues. By the time someone found me and the connection was made, my response of, "I have no idea, Julie said her dad forbid her coming here," was not what they wanted to hear, and met with skepticism "You're not hiding her, are you? Like she ran away with you in some tryst? She's 17 and you're 19, that could have legal ramifications!" No. We're platonic friends, I don't know where she is. if I tried to bonk the poor woman, she'd clobber me.

Meanwhile, Julie's dad finds Julie in her bedroom, right where he left her. Julie later told me that she was ignoring her dad calling for her, and didn't "come downstairs" like he demanded because she assumed it was a trap to get her punished for leaving her bedroom while she was grounded. So naturally, her dad assumed she wasn't in the house. Because he called for her and she didn't answer.

Poor Julie. Her parents were crazy-nuts.

I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another's presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother's suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, "I give it two years, tops." We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.

But we made it work for 25 years. We'd still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became "foxhole buddies," us against the world.

Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles

Well, they may like the attention and validation it brings. I knew someone who was asexual that had a lot of dotcom money. He loved to go to Vegas and gamble. He knew the house was stacked against him. He knew that the girls who sat on his lap only liked him for his money. He still loved the attention he got when he tipped big. I saw him tip a waiter $200 on a $150 meal. He LOVED it. And why?

"I used to be poor. I was a nobody. Now I make people happy with my money, and I feel good about myself."

Can't beat that.

I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don't do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life

I can answer this: my son was born in 1990. We were extremely poor.

We had midwives help us out as best they could, to the tune of about $3200 at the time. The birth got complicated due to a variety of health factors, and both my son and wife almost died (not because of the midwives). Luckily the midwives had a direct line to Georgetown Hospital, and the cesarean was done there. The total hospital bill was $58,000, or $138k in today's money, although hospital costs have rose much higher vs inflation, so maybe it would be in the $200k range now. She was in the ICU for a week, hospital for another week, our son for about 3 weeks.

My wife job didn't have health insurance, because it wasn't required back then. Because she was gone a week, her job fired her for an unexcused absence. Oddly enough, this made her unemployed and Washington DC had some law (or rule or something) that immediately dropped the hospital bills because of her unemployment. In the end, we had to pay $15k to about two dozen practices who individually sued us, which took 7 years to pay off and a lot of court visits and wage garnishments. It financially ruined us, pretty much. Both suffered a lot afterwards because we just couldn't afford minimal care. It was hellish. I can't imagine how much worse it would be today. We got evicted from our apartment, and lived in government housing for six years.

So, yeah. Don't have a baby in America unless you can guarantee it will be healthy and you have a lot of money. Most of my friends don't have kids, they simply can't afford it and look at it like the previous generation looked at concepts like summer homes and yachts. Nice luxuries, but way out of affordabilty.