Mine is gone.

Our library is awesome, and I go there more than I went to Ernst & Son, but so many people use it that you're pretty anonymous. They only people I recognize at the library are either staff or people who I know from another context and are at the library to use their meeting rooms. I've never said to myself "Ah, that's _____ from that one time at the library!"

Nature, Addresses and Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Enjoyed reading it. Feel like I recall almost none of it.

From the perspective of someone doing a similar job as the ones we are talking about here( that got the wage increase):

We've got attendance bonuses at my gig. We've* got them because the wages were so low, nobody was showing up to staff the building. I'd be thrilled if they went away in favor of higher wages. Warehousing is dangerous. With attendance bonuses, if you get hurt on the job, and have to miss a day then you're not simply out that day's wages. You're out a day's wages plus $125 for the week. The end effect is as if your pay rate for the days already worked were retroactively reduced. That's quite the incentive not to report injuries or to work through an illness.

We don't have production bonuses at my shop, and I'm not sorry about it. "Productivity bonuses" sound nice, until you realize that we're talking manual labor with little chances for optimization through creativity. It is effectively paying piece work. If you're the sort of person dependent on maximizing their pay this way, I wouldn't look to favorably on your odds to hack it long enough to qualify for that restricted stock unit program. Joints break down. Injuries add up.

_____________________________

* When I say "we", I mean newer employees. Turns out selectively offering attendance bonuses is easier to slip in to a workforce than selectively offering higher base pay. It is also turning out to be harder to get paychecks corrected if the bonus is missing on it that week.

I just told the local DSA folks I'd help them canvas next Saturday. They asked if I could do it today, but I've been day drinking.

Honestly? This kinda scares the willies out of me. One of the reasons I'm so militant at work is I've figured how to override my social anxiety through combativeness.

My anxiety isn't anywhere near as bad as it used to be, and I can recognize that this will be good for me to do, but I haven't felt an abstract twinge of fear like this for quite a while.

BeOS / Haiku.

Haiku's window tiling is simplistic but feels good.

I'm late to the party, and I think I've said this before, but if you need disposable work boots, you could do a lot worse than Thorogoods.

I've had mine for two and a half years. The soles are shot. I could resole them, but I've worn the leather through on the toes from kicking boxes. They look like hell, but I can still probably get another year out of them. They are comfy. Union made. And way cheaper than buying $60 shoes every five months.

If you're poor, watch the spring/fall Amazon fashion sales. For whatever reason, they tend to get included in those.

t h i c c

My daily routine for the past few months has included checking my notifications hubweel and blocking any new comment spammers.

See also

____

edit: mk I just noticed that when an account is deactivated that I've blocked, sometimes the user name still leaks through.

you picked a bad time

you picked a bad time to listen to me

and the kids gather round and they listen to me

they don't think im all used up

As a lay person / arrogant pedestrian, may I just say:

what a shitty infrastructure layout.

- When I backed out of street view and looked at sat. images, I 100% thought the paving stone X in the divider was a crossing point. Had to look around in street view to find the 'no crossing' sign. Why the fuck is it even there? Is it a decorative reminder of bygone times when pedestrians were a design constraint?

- The necessity of a 'no crossing' sign would seem to indicate that they know people are going to want to cross there. Please don't walk on our affectation of a sidewalk.

- In fact, you can clearly see a desire path at the X in Strava heatmap .

- While you're there, notice that there seems to be a goodly amount of foot/bicycle traffic in the area.

- They very cleverly neglected to put the no crossing signage by the sidewalks, i.e. the point of origin for anyone crossing. Instead, they're only placed on the median. Not exactly a high visibility choice. Especially at night. Fuck it, I'm already in the street. Might as well finish.

- It's not like there's a constant in the universe saying that crosswalks can only fall in street intersections. But hey, I guess a poorly deployed no crossing sign is cheaper if not actually safer.

RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

I don't think the two are exclusive options.

Wanting to believe that someone cares about you and is it taking care of everything in a way that maintains your sense of pride and self worth absolutely is a survival mechanism.

Being a drug dealer who believes that Trump cares about you is pretty stupid by this point, though.

I don't know. On the one hand, I absolutely see this a class issue at root. On the other hand is salt from daily interactions with vocal Trump supporters. That's where I'm at right now.

I should probably nix facebook again.

Brought up the fact that the memo said there were Three FISA court renewals with my Trump supporting facebook friend.

I asked what the evidence uncovered by the FISA warrant must have been for a judge to renew the warrant three times.

He said: none, it's politically motivated.

I asked if he had that little confidence in Chief Justice John Roberts, the Republican who appointed the FISA judges.

And then the conversation stopped. Weird.

edit: Ok, he apparently he doesn't trust politicians, but he never said Roberts was one. Won't comment on Roberts, but the FISA court has people who hate Trump, and there are activist judges that need to be removed from duty. Brought up the travel ban. Won't comment if this means that the judiciary as laid out in the constitution is fundamentally flawed.

There's more, other people are interjecting now, but I'm done. I don't want to piss him off: he's really an ok guy and also our good sniper in Halo.

I was pretty despondent after I bricked my camera, but kleinbl00 pointed me towards sending it into the manufacturer for repairs.

It worked out to be significantly cheaper than replacing, even though the damage I'd caused necessitated replacing the main board and thus tearing apart the entire thing.

to machine repair

You know what department is gonna be hecking hard to automate away?

Plant Engineering.

I'm not too optimistic about anybody's job being "safe" from automation. But those guys? They'll be fine for quite a while I reckon.

I hate the union, they've done nothing for me. It's stupid!

-- The lady at work in a cushy seniority bid position after having life saving surgery for free on the union health plan.

And can someone explain to me why many Americans think that unions is a bad thing? (Or why unions are a bad thing in the US)

I feel like this is another thing that millennials might kill, but the "git 'er done" work ethic in the US is real and deeply ingrained.

The NLRB is also structured in a way that weakens unions. We've have a few cases in my local in the past year where the company was clearly violating the contract, but the cases still managed to got sent off to Arbitration. Never heard about them again, so I assume they decided against the union. One of these cases was black and white where the company was selectively handing out extra-contract bonuses to employees. If we'd won that, it would have easily put thousands of dollars in lots and lots and lots of pockets.

We've also inflicted a lot of wounds against ourselves. See Hoffa, Hoffa Jr, Ron Carey, etc, ect.

Not too sure how long it will stay like this. I picked these handlebars out eight years ago when I was much more interested/able to ride in a lower posture. Nowadays I only touch the drops if there is a severe headwind (or, since they are flared outwards for leverage, if I find myself in deep gravel).

I'm looking at replacing them with these, which would put me much more upright. If I do that, I'll probably also throw this stem on there, which would shove the bars up above saddle height.

Ergonomically, it'd be a great change. Not as pretty of a setup though. That would have really bothered me a few years ago. Now, not so much.

Thanks! The blue was my first choice, when I had to go back and get more tape I discovered that I'd gotten the only blue set they had the last time I came in. I almost went with pink, but the orange was slightly brighter.

I've never ridden with squishy tape before. Always used cotton. The difference is amazing! I wrapped right over the old cotton layer, and added some gel inserts. The result is comically fat and squishy.

Bet Trump will drop his talk about a manned mission to Mars now that he doesn't need to give Gorka a lift back to his home planet.

http://i.imgur.com/9AsqsFj.gifv

Beer is a product that benefits greatly from industrial scale.

The guys who give the tours at Boulevard like to talk about this a lot.

Someone invariably asks them on the tour if the recipe for, say, the KC Pils has changed. And then they have to respond no, you've just noticed the variance between different batches.

Then they bring the conversation around to Budweiser, and how it all tastes exactly the same. How you can take two cans that were made in different plants on different months, and not taste the slightest bit of difference.

Valuing hard work means having the rigid self-discipline to do a menial job you hate for 40 years, and reining yourself in so you don’t “have an attitude” (i.e., so that you can submit to authority). Hard work for elites is associated with self-actualization; “disruption” means founding a successful start-up. Disruption, in working class jobs, just gets you fired.

This is cultural, not a mechanical product of at will work.

We're a union shop with a labor shortage. Getting fired is at the bottom of our list of concerns. And yet, the number of people who don't report injuries, or who choose to work in unsafe conditions is mind boggling.

You can straight up go into an area, tell someone that $BLANK is an OSHA violation and that management can't do shit if they stop production to fix it, and what do you get?

A blank look and then they keep on keeping on.

I'd say just jump right in. The quickest way to get people to care about what you're doing is to start talking about it.

I'm not reliable enough to do this on the dot, it would seem. Isherwood had to pick up the ball entirely last week.

I'm thinking I'm doing Focaccia for dinner.

I've forever been a little confused as to what you do. The Amazon thing makes me thing "warehousing" but the metal trailers thing makes me think "not warehousing".

Logistics! I help move other people's stuff around the world.

"Warehousing" isn't too far off the mark for my job. Since we don't hold onto anything, though, life revolves around taking stuff out of trailers and then putting said stuff back into trailers for the next leg of the journey.

This is becoming a thing, isn't it? ref's gonna skin you alive.

I'll be honest, I had no clue that GROK was a scifi reference.

It entered my lexicon thanks to P.J. and SCO.

c. chip cookies, based off of The Joy of Cooking.

My first time trying browned butter in cookies

JOY wanted nut meat, and 50/50 mix of white/brown sugar. I put in no nuts, and all brown sugar.

Turned out good. Kinda chewy edit: at first, 9 hours later and they crunch.