When I was in college I learned I liked the idea of coding a lot more than I liked coding. Now I know just enough C++ to be able to translate dev speak into corporates speak and back, can claim to be an engineer, and get to talk to stupid people, who think they are smart, who think that I’m really smart, and I spend more of my day on social media. I had one job that in the six months I was there I think I actually did MAYBE 40 hours of work. If it wasn’t for “business conditions related to COVID-19” I’d probably still work there, though I’m making more, and working somewhat more, now.

developers SHOULD make more, but in my experience they don’t. I suspect part of this is because the people that make the salary decisions frequently talk to the PM so they know he’s valuable, but the devs even if he has talked to them he likley doesn’t have a relationship with them, and sees them primarily as a number of spreadsheet that can be replaced with less expensive developing nation devlopers anytime the stock price goes down (or in my case went up but they thought it was going to go down, so they went ahead and laid off 1,000 devs in the States anyway, promising to hire 3,000 Indian devs in their place, and then not actually doing that even, which made the stock price go up again)

Yeah, that’s a crock. My first corporates job did that to us, and then never approved the paid vacation requests, let-a-lone the banked time-off we were promised for being such good cubicle slaves working above and beyond, and it is all legal because “exempt salary employee”

that’s capitalist bullshit

I have two degrees in music theory and a masters in English

Oh you poor baby. You remind me of my college roommate junior year, everyone knew he was gay except him.

My parents used to winter in Arizona. They told me many of their neighbors used to go to Mexico for dental care, but allegedly Mexico (I would think America but my dad said Mexico) is trying to put a stop to folks crossing the border for this kind of care.

insurance isn’t SUPPOSED to cover regular expenses. YOur car insurance doesn’t pay when you take your car to the shop for maintenance. If you want that you’ll need to find someone willing to sell you a dental warranty. Reach out to carshield, they aren’t doing great at getting me to buy an extended warranty on my car, maybe you’ll convience them to expand their business model. ;-)

my parents didn’t have teeth by the time they were in their 30s either. Americans have a rather out-of-proportion concern about their teeth. I know its a trope that Englishman have bad teeth, but look, dental isn’t covered by British universal health care because most times its primarily cosmetic , even things American dentists say are essential, and not a true health concern.

I may have a user bias, but I think KBin is already started down that path, of actually making a usuable platform for both communities and users. Unlike say Lemmy that doesn’t even really let you follow individual users, and Mastodon, which lets you follow Lemmy Communities, but its hard to follow threads because every post just looks like a Re-Toot by the community “user”

Then again Friendica is pretty nice too, it treats Lemmy communities just as if they are Friendica Forums, and it supports other platforms in addition to ActivityPub, including Diaspora*, and allows for integration with Email, Calendar, etc. with several very different “themes” to choose from, with the default, Firo(?), being a UI ver similar to the world’s most popular social media platform, Facebook.

The good thing about Free Software is you are never at the mercy of a single provider. If you and your friends like Lemmy, you can always use lemmy. The amount of content might not be what it once was, but you are welcome to use and change, or pay someone else to let you use/change, the service forever. (Like pump.io used to be the whole #Fediverse and now identi.ca is little more than a internet graveyard save me 4 bots, and six people that cross post to Mastodon, but even it may come back now that /u/@evan indicated he’s adding ActivityPub to it now that its all the rage.