• 1 Post
  • 13 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • Rub it in why don’t you. :P

    I had sporadic health issues earlier this year that weren’t consistent enough for FMLA and I’m down to 4 hours PTO. If I’m a good boy, I’ll gain maybe an hour a month.

    Plus, the whole deal at my workplace was they acknowledged they paid under market rate in exchange for extra flexibility. Now we have new management who desperately doesn’t want to pay us for time on-call anymore, and doesn’t believe in time in-lieu (work after hours, get the equivalent off during business hours). I’m a full fledged systems engineer making under $90k. That’s a lot of money, but it sure as hell isn’t competitive for my skills, and more and more I’m wondering if it’s really worth what it’s costing me.


  • Imo, if your risk model has to account for nation state actors, you’re not the type of person who needs to ask about this stuff or you’re already screwed.

    There are plenty of different options for throwaway emails and defense in depth on that if you don’t want the link to be direct, but the idea is ultimately the same: make what you need to get by, insulate between your real and it to taste.


  • Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.

    What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.

    Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?

    Plus, there are benefits to blending in.







  • Mmmmm yes daddy billionaire business mogul, feed me more headlines, tell me what to think! Seed and manipulate my entire worldview harder! I love it when you twist my point of view! Twist it harder! Oh, you’ve brought vague state-sponsored talking points to double team me? Yes. Yes! Make me your sloppy anxiety ridden mess daddy! Let me slurp up your scum! Make me forget about how innacurate articles about my field of expertise are while I swallow every other article you give me! Fill me with your news daddy! ❤️


    Dropping the shitposting though? (Not that you really deserve it with the blatant patronizing)

    There are so many better targets for your effort than people choosing to not be led around by corporate interests through intentionally emotionally charged news.

    There are fucking 20 year old studies that show that over exposure to news media causes people to overestimate crime rates to a ridiculous degree, and even more so with violent crime rates. The news has only become significantly more polarizing and emotionally charged in the many years since.

    Save your efforts for careful organization and planning locally. Understand that 90% of the news will have no impact on you and those around you and is only meant for shifting public opinions. Not for actually informing. Shut the fuck up online and stop painting a target on your back. Practice fucking OPSEC if you have absolutely any seriousness about this, otherwise admit to yourself that you’re just larping or not going to take any action yourself.

    I sure as hell aren’t taking any action that could put the people I care about at risk before shtf. It’s not a judgement or impugnment of your character, it’s just that you should stop being so damn openly judgemental if that’s the case for you.


    Most importantly, as I called out in my first fucking sentence of my last comment responding to you, it’s a massive fucking false dichotomy. It is entirely possible to stay informed and up to date on events without fucking wallowing in the nonstop deluge of “sky is falling” headlines.

    And even if this black and white dichotomy was in any way valid, your insistence that only “duh libruls” do it is even more absurd. Get outside and meet people. I’m fairly introverted and I still regularly meet and see people from all across the political spectrum multidimensionalhypercompass showing the full variation of news awareness from “What do you mean ICE has built a Guantanamo on US soil for illegal immigrants?” to “I read every headline from 6 different news sources and cross reference each article”. Yes, that means I see fucking MAGATs that are absurdly tapped into the vein of fresh news but somehow still deluding themselves into MAGA. One is a relative of mine unfortunately.




  • Sure, the way I worded that is. Especially when divorced from the rest of that section.

    But I hope it is clear from the rest of that section that I’m drawing a line to separate the idea of CIS = majority default vs. the attitude that CIS is the only valid option.

    CIS being the majority default is just reality. Statistics.

    CIS being the only valid option is bullshit.


    When distilling concepts like that into the shorter statement “cisnormativity is a problem”, I feel that nuance is lost. The almost immediate follow up question is “Do you have a problem with CIS people being the norm/majority default, or do you have a problem with the fact that they are the norm/majority default is being used by some to suppress the validity of other options?”


  • The assumption that demonstrating traits not aligned with your gender must make you the other gender is silly, short sighted, needlessly restrictive of potential identities, and in and of itself dangerous. Full stop.

    That is the same logic used years back to argue that men who were not traditionally masculine had to be gay. That causes harm as well. Harm I’ve experienced through bullying, ostracization, etc. After hearing that assumption of my sexuality enough times, I suffered confusion about my identity as a teen. Now people are arguing that somehow using that same logic but now it means you’re trans?

    I cannot make this any clearer: Present people with their options and allow them to make their own damn choices.

    Over a decade later I’m still not particularly masculine, and I am happy in a cishet marriage with a child I am proud to be a father to. Yeah, I’m technically bisexual. I have a single digit number of men I’ve encountered in my 30+ years that I could go for, but I’m not gay which was the identity prescribed to me.


    When even the most generous studies show trans people as making up a single digit percentage of the population, it’s silly to argue that there is an intrinsic problem with CIS being the default.

    The problem is when people don’t understand that not being cis is an option. Or when they don’t leave options open. Don’t conflate that with the fact that good or bad, cis is factually overwhelmingly the default.

    If people are allowed to be whatever they wish (and they should be) then there is room for people who are cis but display traits not aligned with that.

    Tomboys exist. Women who demonstrate traditionally masculine traits but are still women. There are also trans men, who may have done the same pre-transistion but are men. There has to be room for both.

    Not entirely sure what the term would be, but feminine men exist who are still men and are not trans. There are also trans women.

    All of those identities ae valid. Assuming trans because non-conformity is just setting a new needlessly restrictive default.


    Lastly, once again I must emphasize that:

    your example of someone in a group of friends is NOT what the egg prime directive is about.

    Different fucking social situations call for different rules and approaches. For fucks sake.


  • Not to “true scotsman” this, but the egg prime directive isn’t saying you can’t have those conversations with people.

    This person notably didn’t say “my trans friends told me I was an egg, so I tried HRT just to shut them up.” It sounds like they were aware it was an option through conversations where it wasn’t pushed at them. This person made their own choice.

    The egg prime directive is saying that you don’t get to declare someone else’s identity for them. You don’t get to make that choice for them. It’s about consent.

    I think most of us would agree that it would be abhorrent to tell someone who is asexual that they just haven’t found the right partner yet and clearly they’re homosexual (or straight or bi) in denial. I see it as the same thing.

    And the online culture of labelling other people as eggs is so far removed from the concept of “trying to help someone figure out who they are” that I have a very hard time taking this in good faith. C’mon, of course there are different rules for socialization online vs in person vs with friends.