• 0 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.

    Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.

    So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.







  • Long range attacks are about knocking out supplies, the ability to produce new supplies, and the ability to get supplies to the front line.

    Say Russia is getting more newly made artillery shells to the front line. The best way to fix this is to blow up the factories.

    If you can’t take out the factories directly, take out components that the factories need to operate: ore processing, fuel refineries, electricity grid, etc.

    The problem is all the critical targets are a long ways from the front line and Ukraine currently has limited capacity to hit them.

    Meanwhile Russia is targeting all of Ukraine’s internal infrastructure constantly.

    Long wars are won by the production capabilities of the groups involved as much as the front line troops.


  • First off, your rheumatologist is the most important doctor you will be dealing with. For some reason the field collects some odd ones with poor people skills. You may get lucky and find a good one right off the bat. However if the doctor seems to not be listening to you, understanding and explaining your symptoms, go for a second opinion or a third or a fourth opinion. It took my wife 5 different ones to finally find a good one. It’s a 3 hour one waytrip to see him but it’s worth it. We will likely be moving up closer to him in a few years.

    Second be patient with the meds. It will likely take several tries to find something that works. However not too patient, waiting too long can make the disease progress further. However once the right cocktail is found you’ll feel a bunch better, until you don’t. Changing meds is common and normal no matter how long you have it.

    Last, if your in the U.S. and have to deal with our shitty system, get ready to fight insurance. It will be a constant battle if you geton one of the criminally prices drugs. Just don’t give up and eventually you will win. One drug refill took my 2 months of twice weekly calls to push it through.




  • I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.

    Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.

    The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.


  • Terms and conditions are NOT copyright law. They are a separate agreement that is the companies “wishlist” of things they want the consumer to agree too. It’s common for them to spell out terms in direct conflict with copyright law.

    The reason that an iTunes video purchase is encrypted is because it is illegal to break the encryption in order to make a copy (DMCA). However capturing the playback and transforming it to another medium is for personal use is fair-use.

    There is also no time limit to how long a person can save the copy for. As long as they had legal access to the content at the time of making the copy. For example say I recorded a football game from a streaming service. I can save that copy for personal use for the rest of my life even though I purchased a one time only streaming.


  • Not an expert, but in the U.S. making a copy of a broadcast for personal use is legal under fair-use. Anything that loads up on your computer screen you can make a copy and save it for personal use. So screen captures are by definition legal.

    How exactly you copy the material on your screen gets tricky under the DMCA clusterfuck. Breaking encryption to copy the material is illegal unless there is an valid exception for fair-use. What exactly those valid exceptions are is above my paygrade.




  • The issue with wine is quality control is dependent many factors, weather, fertilizer management, water management, disease pressure, pest pressure, harvest conditions, unpredictable fermentations and the skill of the winemaker. The more variable the conditions the more unpredictable the finished wine product is.

    A good bottle is really tough to make. A mediocre bottle is difficult to make. A poor bottle is what is usually made. I’ve never had an excellent bottle of wine and I think it is a myth. Pricing is mostly unrelated to the quality of the product as well.

    When you usually put out a poor product people tend to avoid it unless there is a cultural expectation of low performance. What’s changing is the cultural acceptance of drinking horrible tasting stuff.

    The wine industry in needs to adapt and put out a better product or else they will go under.



  • Not really exeptional except it is commercial grade. It’s not the random stuff you get from the local brand. The local brand is whatever. Sometimes it’s really good, other times it’s pretty poor.

    The most common difference is in a test called “falling number”. Falling number is a fast easy way to figure out if an enzyme that degrades starch has been activated (alpha-amylase). Intact starch in flour creates a matrix in solution and thickens it. When alpha-amylase is activated it degrades the starch and makes it thinner.

    For baking you want a thicker dough that holds together. It’s how you get light and fluffy breads. The thicker dough traps CO2 produced by yeast or an acid/base reaction better.



  • Timeshares are written up as if they were property. Property that she shares with other people and is contractually required to pay for the upkeep. It’s basically a never ending money generator for the owners. Think of it a hotel where all the rooms are rented out to people who agreed to pay for them no matter if they use it or not.

    As the owner of “property” she has a few choices. First off read the contract.

    The management company sometimes reserves the right to buy the property back. Usually a good option - the “Owner” loses money but gets out of the never-ending bills.

    She can also sell/give the timeshare to somebody else on the timeshare selling site. This transfers the ownership to somebody else who might like it.

    If the property has degraded in value because of lack of maintenance from the management she might be able to get out by civil lawsuit. This is unlikely as most timeshare companies do exactly the bare minimum to meet their contractual obligations.