• 2 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Basically because every time this happens the burden of debt is passed towards the tax payers. They just built a long toll lane in my city in what was a 2 lane highway. Adding another lane or two would have alleviated traffic immensely. The company that built it owns all profits for approx 50 years. What could have been a 5 lane highway is still two except now you have the option of paying a ridiculous amount of money to not have to deal with the traffic. This is money that could have been spent on improving the city’s other methods of transportation, trains, bicycles, etc.

    It doesn’t affect me personally. I ride a motorcycle every day. It’s just painful to see how private interests are almost never in line with what’s best for constituents



  • +1 on the book idea. Sounds like a delightful read. I have a similar philosophy as well that’s worked for me. I’ve never once cared about getting credit or props, I make my boss/team look like geniuses. That naturally tends to reward you as well. Great individual contributors are actually pretty rare. Out of hundreds of engineers I’ve worked with closely, only a few were brilliant in the way you described.

    If you’re looking for related reading, perhaps for inspiration, there’s a great book called

    Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.

    I highly recommend it.


  • I work as an engineer for a huge financial company, so I relate. I was a scrappy upstart who worked himself through the lowest tiers of my industry towards the top. I’m also neurodivergent.

    I can speak on for days about how bosses don’t care who’s doing the work as long as it gets done.

    As a top performer, you’re likely to feel that people should perform at the standards you set, and your natural first instinct is probably to try to train and educate your coworkers. You soon realize that they either don’t give a shit or they’re offended that you’re giving them advice. No problem, we live in a hierarchical society, so you tell your boss about the problems you face, they’ll have your back, right? Wrong. You’re rocking the boat, and the boss’ job is to keep the boat afloat.

    Now, instead of rocking the boat, you start to wonder if you there’s a way you can change the current of the water so the boat goes in the proper direction. That’s where wisdom and skill meet. There’s an incredible amount of depth involved in influencing people and change. I wish it wasn’t the way of the world, but it is. Being brilliant is only half the battle.




  • You know there’s elections before the primaries right? The Democratic party has shown that it will resort to all means of corruption to give you the “establishment” candidate. And people like you keep voting for the lesser of two evils. Let the Democrats lose more elections they shouldn’t lose, eventually they learn they need to uphold the values of democracy to win an election.

    If the Democratic party wasn’t corrupt to the core, it would have been Bernie. After that it would have been Andrew Yang. You keep voting these Republicans in Democrat clothing, nothing ever gets solved. Every democrat in history since I was born has promised to do something about immigration, nothing ever gets done. Why? Because it serves their interests to have a variable workforce that they can underpay and demean.



  • There’s a documentary on YouTube called “The internet’s own boy”, if you want to learn more. Basically, he was offered a 6 month plea, but he would be a convicted felon, and basic logic/morality tells you that you shouldn’t plead guilty to a crime that you didn’t commit. However, the justice system is very imperfect, and often people plead guilty for reduced sentencing even if they’re not guilty. He stood on principle until his legs gave out. they were already in millions spent in attorney fees. Not a shred of justice can be found in how Aaron’s story ended.


  • I came across this early in my career in networking. I ended up having to support another technicians customer(we primarily managed our own workloads) and he did not use the tools(vault) we had to manage the network equipment credentials, so I always had to call him and ask him what the password is and why he doesn’t update it in the vault(it frequently changed) … After bothering him enough about it he said it was job security.

    This was a 45k entry level job that he was years into. Why someone would want job security at the bottom part of the totem pole is beyond me, but that is where I mostly came across tribalistic tendencies(I worked in a lot of small/medium sized companies before getting a big break)

    If I look up those people on LinkedIn, they’re exactly where they were or in another lateral position. They don’t tend to make it very far.