I once worked with an SVP at a huge corporation that liked to engage in “bike shedding”. This guy is like seven rungs above me on the ladder and is trying to tell me what fields each SQL table should have.
Then we got a new department director who was very good at keeping upper management distracted and off our backs. Lots of people in middle management don’t justify their own salaries but I would argue that he sure did.
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Only if it can also be a microservice.
Just because someone collects data doesn’t mean that they’re using it for a particular purpose. I’ve worked at orgs that archived gobs of data - not necessarily user data - “in case we find a use for it.” Possession of data does not guarantee possession of a particular insight.
I’m not saying that no one at Google knew. Just that it’s far from impossible.
I’m still looking for a good solution that includes support for notes. I’m migrating off Exchange Online and using mailcow temporarily but the built in notes feature is sorely missed.
Years ago, I heard a lecture by the guy who investigated the case referred to in the article below. Thieves and con artists are a legitimate concern. Or at least they should be.
From the Batesville Daily Guard - Batesville, Arkansas
After fighting identity theft for seven years, country singer/songwriter David Lynn Jones is ready to take back his life.
During that time, Jones, on paper, was three people – and at times, four.
“Two guys were playing me,” Jones said. “It’s unimaginable, until you go through it . . . that someone who doesn’t even look like you can steal your identity. The damage,” he said, “is incalculable.”
Jones may be ready to sing “I Feel A Change Comin’ On” again. That’s the title of one of his singles from his heyday.
During better times, Jones released four acclaimed albums – “Hard Times on Easy Street” (1987), “Wood, Wind and Stone” (1990), “Mixed Emotions” (1992) and “Play by Ear” (1994).
His charting singles include “Bonnie Jean (Little Sister)” which was also a popular music video on television, “High Ridin’ Heroes” (with Waylon Jennings), “The Rogue” and “Tonight in America.”
He may be best-known for writing “Living in the Promiseland,” a No. 1 hit for Willie Nelson.
While Jones kept writing songs during the past seven years, he could not release them because the identity theft culprits were getting his royalty checks by having the checks sent to their address. Much of the time, that address was in Colorado.
Now, Jones and his wife, Illa, who live east of Cave City, are looking forward to teaming up to record and release a new album.
He also has unreleased albums from the past that can now be put before the public.
“There’s five (previously recorded David Lynn Jones) albums that never were released,” Jones said. He plans to make those available to buyers on the Internet within the next few months.
Fans should be patient, though, because it may take quite awhile, he said.
In February, Baxter County sheriff’s investigators arrested Danny James Sullivan, who was working at a McDonald’s in Mountain Home under the name David Lynn Jones.
Sullivan was also drawing disability checks from the government under his own name while working at the McDonald’s under Jones’ name. His aliases include Danny J. Bass and Danny J. Rader.
A day later, acting on a tip, the alleged mastermind of the plot, Janis Rae Wallace, was arrested at a home in Fayetteville. Wallace is also known as Janis French and Janis Rae Jones, the name she used while posing as the real Davis Lynn Jones’ “wife.”
She’s even booked into the jail as Janis Rae Jones.
Wallace and Sullivan, both 51, remain in jail – she, on a $500,000 bond and he, on a $200,000 bond.
They are each charged with nine counts of felony financial identity fraud, according to an affidavit filed with the charges and signed by sheriff’s Sgt. Bob Buschbacher.
The information filed with the charges and in arrest reports matches the story told by Jones – the real Jones.
“Those are all federal charges,” Jones said.
The theft started, Jones said, when Wallace stole his driver’s license while working for him.
“At the time, my Social Security number was the same as my driver’s license number, and with just that information, they infiltrated my life,” Jones said.
Soon, he was getting no mail. It was all going to the fake David Lynn Jones’ address via an address change. The mail included preapproved credit card applications that the thieves filled out; after they maxed out the cards, they reported them stolen.
“Among the stolen items via mail were personal checks and business checks from music royalties the victim had earned as a songwriter and musician,” Sgt. Buschbacher said.
“They had ‘me’ moved to Colorado; my phone was shut off,” Jones said. “This was back in 2002 . . . . By the time we realized what was going on, we couldn’t get it stopped. They wound up with my royalty checks from publishing music,” including royalties from “Living in the Promiseland.”
Buschbacher said that in the beginning, to further the identity theft scheme, Sullivan, posing as Jones, filled out an identity theft passport request victim information sheet and submitted it to the attorney general’s office. Then, he obtained an Arkansas driver’s license in the victim’s name.
Meanwhile, Jones’ elaborate and well-known recording studio at Bexar was stripped of all its expensive equipment.
“I still own the studio,” Jones said Saturday. “It’s for sale and has been for some time. These people had gone out there and took down the for sale sign and put up no trespassing signs. They were drawing money out of my checking account, which eventually caused me to be overdrafted,” he said. His interest rates were doubled because of a bad credit rating.
And to add insult to injury, Wallace convinced people who dealt with Jones financially that someone was trying to steal her identity (“She was speaking as my ‘wife,’” Jones said). So, those who could have helped would not even listen to the real Jones.
“When we started talking to credit card companies and banks, they didn’t believe it (was me),” Jones said.
The crowning portion of the identity theft scheme was yet to come.
“They started telling everybody I’d been in a horrible accident in Colorado and I was in a wheelchair and I couldn’t play and sing anymore,” Jones said. “She even wrote a letter and sent it to all of my family saying that.”
Since he had been busy with his work during the earlier part of the problems and hadn’t been in touch with family members regularly, several of them even believed the accident story, he said.
“My mother (Verna Jones) passed away during all of this and we were trying to make funeral arrangements,” and a check his brother mailed to help with those expenses went to Colorado into the thieves’ hands, Jones said. “Even my own brother didn’t understand what was going on. I told him I never got the check . . . . It’s so crazy when you’re actually experiencing it.”
The investigation revealed that Wallace and Sullivan obtained a Social Security card, a Colorado identification card and the Arkansas driver’s license, all in the name of David Lynn Jones. Wallace then obtained power of attorney over Jones, claiming he was mentally disabled due to the fake “accident.”
Wallace and Sullivan were even filing joint federal income tax returns as Mr. and Mrs. David Lynn Jones. Those returns were filed in 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Jones said as soon the investigation revealed the first name of the suspect, he knew who was behind the scheme even though she was giving her last name as Jones. Still, the identity thieves stayed one step ahead of authorities for a long time.
Before being arrested, Wallace and Sullivan were trying to get the title to some land Jones owns in Baxter County, authorities said.
A break in the case occurred 15 months ago when Wallace, as Mrs. Jones, and Sullivan, as Jones, applied in person for an identity theft passport at the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office.
As soon as Wallace and Sullivan were arrested, investigators obtained search warrants for their houses. Jones said several items found in their homes could only have been obtained by their breaking into his home east of Cave City, where he and his wife have lived for five years.
“We’ve known for years things were being pilfered, things moved around. They were hanging out in the woods, watching for us to leave (so they could get into the house).”
Investigators found pictures and other items taken from inside Jones’ house, as well as photos of the house taken from the driveway.
Jones said officers on the trail of the crooks had been advising Jones for months to be alert and stay well-armed, because one possible logical next step could be to eliminate Jones and his wife, so the identity thieves “could become us. That could have been the last (planned) step,” particularly with them applying for the identity passport, Jones said. “Who knows what would have happened next?”
He has high praise for the attorney general’s agent who felt something was wrong when Wallace and Sullivan approached him about getting that passport.
“That’s what got them caught,” Jones said.
The agent was suspicious enough to go into another room and look for pictures of Jones on the Internet. The pictures did not match the man claiming to be Jones.
“If it had not been for the attorney general’s office, it’d still be going on,” Jones said. “The attorney general’s officer said it was the worst case he’d ever seen in all his years of investigating identity theft.”
Baxter County Sheriff John Montgomery said the investigation involved personnel from the attorney general’s office, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General’s office and the sheriff’s office.
Jones said he expects he still has years to go to clear the damage to his name.
When asked what the identity theft has cost him, Jones did not give a dollar figure. Instead, he said quietly, “It’s cost me seven years of my life.”
I still write thank you cards. People really like getting them. In my mind, it’s worth the [small] investment of my time and effort to show my appreciation for something.
Fraternal orders. Elks, Moose, etc. The internal vibe is exactly like church but with beer instead of sermons. You do not have to be religious to join but some of them do require a belief in God.
I’m still a member of the Elks, although I haven’t been active in a number of years since I moved too far away from any local lodges. I made a lot of good friends when I was active. One thing that was always nice, back when I had to travel for work I could stop by a lodge, if there was one near by, and they would usually treat me like I belonged there. I always appreciated that.
Automotive cigarette lighters eventually developed a secondary use as an auxiliary power port. The modern ones don’t actually function as a cigarette lighter though. They don’t have the clips needed to hold the lighter coil in the socket.
What other things would be a big difference with the people today?
The lack of cigarette smoke everywhere, at least in the US and probably most other developed nations. In 1965, around 43% of American adults smoked. Today, just over 11% do. You no longer have to sit in the “non-smoking” section of a restaurant that still smells strongly of stale cigarettes. They no longer put ash trays or cigarette lighters in vehicles, which were a standard feature up to at least the late 90’s.
Dialing in a TV station, with the different bands and antenna tweaking.
That’s what younger siblings were for. Holding the rabbit ears or turning the antenna mast.
Eventually, we’re all the morning DJ at W.O.L.D.
Altman, a regular user of X since 2008, has been forthright about his frustration with the bots on it. In September, he posted to X that “somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.” A few days earlier, he made a similar point, citing dead internet theory, which posits that since 2016, the internet has been overrun with non-human activity. “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM [AI]-run twitter accounts now,” he wrote.
CEO of glorified bot farm complains about effects of bot farming.
Or the time Ulysses Grant ordered the Treasury to flood the gold market - temporarily tanking the US economy - in order to crush his own brother in laws market manipulation scheme.
That’s a tough call. I would say the hardest was when I was on the board of a regional charity organization and we caught the CEO embezzling. If you’ve never dealt with something like that before, it’s hard to imagine the river of shit that is coming your way.
This dude, who was paid a decent salary and benefits, very smugly told us that he felt he was more entitled to the money than the people who actually needed it. I’ve never wanted to punch anyone so badly. Firing him was the easy part. Dealing with the criminal investigation and the loss of community trust was the hard part. That was more of an emotionally exhausting year and a half rather than just a day though.
“Hmmmm. This codebase seems surprisingly lightweight.”
Opens random ‘Helper’ class.
“Oh… Oh boy.”
You would “clear it” by “opening” the action. A firearm cannot be fired with the action open. What that looks like depends on the type of action.
Edit: It’s a good firearm safety protocol to open the action before handing a weapon to someone. Always, always, always assume that it’s loaded.
I need Office/PowerBi/Teams to work without issue. The web versions do not cut it for my use cases.
Same problem. I actually use Mint on my laptop but the desktop still has Windows 10 because some apps are still just not useable or fully useable on Linux. As much as I wish Libre Office was a full replacement for MS Office, it’s not. At least not for power users.
The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.
Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.