You also bring up an interesting time in ham radio history that a lot of newer hams are largely unaware of; WWII. Amateur radio thrives on communication globally, so anyone from the US could talk to anyone from any other country. The need for restrictions of the bands became obvious in the years leading up to the US entering the war, with various countries that were once accessible by radio going dark. The US logically followed suit, but operators were still monitoring.

There's a great article on this time in amateur radio history here; https://bw.billl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Radio-Histor...

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.

It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.

I likely need to reread it, though, as some of its ideas are a bit above my weight class when it comes to understanding physics. But, you may enjoy it!

Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.

It's pretty entertaining!

And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404

As a controls tech, I provide a lot of documentation and teach to our customers about how to deploy, operate and maintain a machine for best possible results with lowest risk to production or human safety. Some clients follow my instruction, some do not. Guess which ones end up getting billed most for my time after they've implemented a product we make.

Too often, we want to just do without thinking. This often causes us to overlook critical points of failure.

I did not mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize.

But of course, apologizing when you have definitely wronged a person is important, too. I didn't mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize, just think before you act. But you get the idea.

Right! But, wouldn't a more appropriate approach be to mitigate the damage from being hacked as much as possible in the first place? Perhaps this starts by simplifying bloated systems, reducing data collection to data that which is only absolutely legally necessary for KYC and financial transactions in whatever respective country(ies) the service operates in, hammer-testing databases for old tricks that seem to have been forgotten about in a landscape of hacks with ever-increasingly complexity, etc.

Maybe it's the dad in me, years of telling me son to not apologize, but to avoid the behavior that causes the problem in the first place. Bad things happen, and we all screw up from time to time, that is a fact of life, but a little forethought and consideration about the best or safest way to do a thing is a great way to shrink the blast area of any surprise bombs that go off.

For me, it's not about the pennies I'm losing. You're right, I don't care about them and the end of their minting doesn't mean much to me at all. No, it's about who is getting the pennies I'm losing. Let's say Nestle, a company I loath, has a box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD. Our hypothetical noodles are very popular, so everyone in the US tends to buy them.

Suddenly, pennies go away. Nestle thinks "hmm, so our customers were already paying $0.99, might as well just bump the price up to $1.00, nobody will care." And they'd be correct. As a typical consumer, I'd pay $1.00 for something that I was just paying $0.99 for because the difference is negligible to me.

But if everyone in the US buys them for lunch, that's not a negligible difference to Nestle. That's nearly $3,500,000 USD in extra revenue that week. If the consumer behavior remains consistent, that's an extra $182,000,000 USD per year. Maybe that seems like small potatoes compared to what Nestle grosses annually on a global scale, but even the richest of companies can do A LOT with that much extra cash.

But of course, that is an extreme and overly simplified example. However, it illustrates the idea that while the individual will not really feel the change, the collectives or corporations will.

I'm not an economics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing I'm fairly sure about is when something like this type of change happens, the corporations are unchallenged at finding ways to exploit it, which usually translates to more money going up to them and less coming back down to the individual.

As an example, I consider myself a pretty successful controls technician because I have a good reputation in the circles I run in, generally get the job done quickly so my customer can get back to work and stop losing money and my work hasn't resulted in anyone getting hurt (a very real possibility in my industry). I have almost no social media presence.

My friend is in real estate, and he has spent years building a client base that feeds itself on referrals by making himself very open, accessible and interactive on nearly every social media platform that most people use daily. He is also quite successful and has cultivated a reputation for trust and honesty because of his social media presence.

To define success, it's important to understand what it is you want to accomplish.

I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.

I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.

7. It's also okay to not have or want any tattoos

Self-expression can take many forms :)