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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The automotive manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler were partially nationalized in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis as were several banks… these were less a full government takeover and more of a government guided restructuring, but the government owned large stakes in these companies. Before that, the only full nationalization of anything substantial was the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad and subsequent establishment of Consolidated Rail (branded as ConRail) the US’s only national freight rail company.

    Conrail was later privatized into what is now the private companies CSX and Norfolk Southern. The collapse of Penn Central was the largest bankruptcy in history until Enron in the 1990’s. Amtrak, our national passenger rail corporation, is also a nationalized entity created around the same time as ConRail, for similar reasons, and is still nationalized (although the Trump admin wants to privatize it).








  • One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

    Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y’all, as the words “wait let me help you reset it” were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face “I said I fucking got it!” So… I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer’s office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer’s office saying “hey [chief engineer], we’re having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?”

    My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said “I don’t think I’ve got this.” An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically “union shop rules” for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment… essentially: if you’re not trained on them, don’t touch and we weren’t training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.

    Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of “I said I’ve fucking got it” and stop what I’m doing. I’ll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers’ jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It’s just not worth it.








  • Some are like six feet away and others are set farther back. It’s not all of the ring came 5 that go off. I know there’s a setting where the user can create a like a bounding box so that they don’t go off unless someone is actually at the door… these folks simply haven’t done that, don’t know to do that, or are watching the sidewalk intentionally. At any rate, my street doesn’t have much traffic so I usually just walk in the road.


  • Some of my neighbors have them and I hate walking down the street. I know it’s a public sidewalk, but hearing all the little pings and “some one is at the front door” it creeps me out. I live in a single party consent state so there’s not like anything I can do but now there’s a database with a record of when I go to/come back from work. I don’t like that. Thankfully, when signing the lease, my landlord forbid in the contact the installation on those. He also owns the houses on either side of mine… a little strip of privacy in a sea of surveillance.