• 82 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2023

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  • I use the one that’s built in to the Fastmail service. I have a custom domain just for aliases. The Fastmail alias-creation API is integrated with the Bitwarden app (which I use) so that makes creating new accounts (that use email addresses as usernames) on websites really easy. I also use Spamgourmet which is free, convenient, and has been around a very long time. No custom domains there, but they let you use a variety of their domains and they have some short ones which is nice, but I do find that they’re blocked pretty often, mostly by major mailing list services.


  • Makes me think: this could be turned into a profitable new “sport”. I’m imaging something like a boxing ring, where a Boeing whistleblower and a Boeing MBA fight it out in public. Could be pitched as quasi-legit, like boxing, or maybe something along the lines of “professional” wrestling. Tag teams, outrageous costumes, stories of insult (“the MBA shot my teamie in his pickup truck!”, “this 'blower reduced dividends by $0.50/share!”) and revenge. I don’t follow fighting sports so maybe you guys could figure out something that would sell well in 2024+. You’d want betting of course, not sure if you could legally do that in IL or WA, might need to move Boeing HQ to Las Vegas. All profits would go to buying Boeing a new management and towards class-action lawsuit costs.















  • In my Connecticut hometown, the average winter temperature used to be slightly below freezing. Now, it’s slightly above. How many joyful days filled with snowball fights and sledding would I have instead spent suffering in a classroom, gazing out the window at the rain, imagining the world just a little colder?

    Ditto for my Vermont hometown. All winter = bitter cold and lots of snow - sometimes feet deep, but definitely enough for sledding and skiing most of the season. Dad was happy to have that snowblower and it got a lot of use. Now all I ever hear about from back east is all the flooding and resulting destruction. This article sheds some light on some of the reasons for all that. Rural VT and NH, easily reached from BOS/NY and southern New England, have economies that are heavily dependent on tourism, and especially winter tourism in the form of skiers. Less and/or crappier (wet) snow is really going to cause pain.

    The resort also sells as many preseason passes as it can, which can cushion the financial blow of a ski season without much snow.

    Sure you can fool the Flatlanders into taking such gambles, maybe for a season or two, but it won’t be long before they’re tired of taking the snow risk (quantity, quality) on themselves (rather than the resorts taking it) and choosing to stay entertained in some other way.




  • I’m pretty sure I read it back in the day but had forgotten all about it. I was at M$ around the time it came out and I vaguely recall employees talking about it in a dismissive but not exactly outraged sort of way. Kind of like you might expect if the author hit pretty close to home re: the culture but without it seeming (to the employees) like an attack piece.

    Thanks for mentioning the book, it’ll be fun to re-read it after all these years and see how it’s held up. Maybe my library can get an inter-library-loan of a special, limited-edition, BG-autographed version, embellished in gold leaf all over. <checks web> Hmm, Medina doesn’t appear to have a public library, how could that be?




  • M$ under Gates was also hugely about shafting many of the engineering staff working there. These were the Permatemps, people who worked on site alongside ordinary employees, doing the same work, working for the same managers on big products you’ve heard of. But the Permatemps, and I was one of them, didn’t work for M$, we worked for the most part as W2 employees of external staffing companies. OK salaries, basic benefits, but zero equity compensation or job security. Occasionally a permatemp would get hired as a M$ employee and that’s probably what a lot of them were hoping for. I got a small pay-out from the Permatemp lawsuit settlement (see link above) while some of the regular employees around me became M$ Millionaires in their 20s, including my tech lead at the time. But at least I was allowed to shop at the Company Store and got a discount on my copy of Vista! Meanwhile Gates conserved huge amounts of equity and had a big staff he could fire at the drop of a hat, because he didn’t technically employ us in the first place.




  • Huh, odd, I can see the entire content at the linked (substack) page w/o being logged in. The harpers.org version has an annoying pop-over but you can read it all there too for $0. I actually DO have a paid sub to the print+online mag so maybe they’ve set some magic cookie in my browser? BTW Harper’s Index != Harper’s Review & I think the former is paywalled from the unwashed masses but you might be able to read archived versions of it if you’re so inclined and suitably unwashed.