partial_accumen

I know for me, I’m having more difficulty because of failing eyesight. If you can’t see the word you can’t perceive you’ve spelled it incorrectly.

In email, I always make my questions the last thing right before my signature as a call to action. I think many people skip reading the entire email, but may read the line above the signature if they see a question mark. You always want the last thing they read to be the idea they have to act on THIS part.

• Phrase your questions unambiguously
• Bonus points for phrasing them with a binary response: “Do you want A or B?” or “Do you approve that we can move forward with the plan as stated here?”
• Only ask the questions you REALLY need an answer to. Every next question risks losing a answer you really need.
• Make self liquidating statements instead of questions “If you want a different path let me know. Unless I from you by the next Tuesday, I’m moving forward with what I described in this email”

If you write open ended or ambiguous questions you risk your audience having to take time to think about a response and they get distracted. Risky questions in this area are: “So what do you want to do here?” or “What do you think?”

Are you having trouble with reading comprehension? Look what you posted to. I had stopped that conversation.

You had to throw your little dig in here though. I was initially concerned, then I saw your post history and see this is just your regular habit. I hope your got your desperately needed dopamine hit.

I don’t think we’re communicating with each other. I’m reading your posts and it looks like you’re responding things I never said, some even contradicting things I did say.

My advice applies to some, and it doesn’t sound like it applies to you. I hope you have a great RV trip. Drive safe!

Yes this is realistic advice. Two scenarios you may not have considered:

1. Vacation - you can still take this advice when you make occasional vacations which frequently required air travel except choose an international destination instead of a domestic one.

2. Home geography - A whole bunch of people live right on the boarder with another country and can drive or walk across without needing a plane ticket. Just because this may not apply to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to anyone.

As an individual, you take your purchasing power and can go to that other country and spend your money on services and consumables there, and not bring any goods back. That would be tariff free.

Identify all of the candles that burn twice as bright, but only half as long.

Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics

“Wise” is subjective here. Using a cloud vendor’s implementation can yield many times more efficiency, simplicity, stability, scalability, and agility vs rolling you own. Does it come with the cost of vendor lock-in? It absolutely can. Will that make migration to another vendor difficult? It will.

So for organizations that never embraced the cloud alternatives have had to maintain their own infrastructure or use commodity solutions, as you mentioned, to deliver their IT needs. How much more was spent using a general purpose approach with higher portability to deliver the same result vs a cloud providers proprietary version? Then include the time component.

Only time will tell.

For a CEO these days that’s an accomplishment to earn just a shrug.

One that’s happy with a refilled toner.

Here’s the challenge. Is it possible to create a refilled/remanufactured toner cartridge as good as an original? Absolutely! Is the one you’re buying meet that standard? There’s no way to tell.

You could have bought a garbage refilled toner where the company did less than the minimum needed for it to function. There’s no standards body for these. The best you can do is buy from a company known to do good reman work. If you work at a company that still has a fleet of printers, and your IT team still maintains them, ask what brand they use.

How close are you to high voltage transmission lines? This might be good for an commercial sized solar farm.

Dogfighting of sentient beings. Some of which have the capacity for human speech. All of which show clear signs of experiencing pain. Some of which can have full conversation with you and speak intelligently. Yeah, that’s who you’re sending in for your personal blood sports. Pocket Monsters indeed. Not the creatures. You, the “trainer”.

My head canon is that its actually a viola and the kitten is actually “illegally smol”.

Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.

Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.

I had already downloaded and installed Ironfox (FF Android fork) on my phone and have been using it for a week or so. It works identically to FF for android. Ublock Origin is working in Ironfox too.

A 55-year-old software developer

… and…

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate “realignment” in 2018 that “reduced his responsibilities,” the DOJ said.

So he was 48 at the time he started this. Was he planning on retiring from all work at 48? I can’t imagine any other employer would want to touch him with a 10ft (3.048 meters) pole after he actively sabotaged his prior employer’s codebase causing global outages.

I appreciate alternate methods of business, but some of your statements here are worrying.

there is the temporary furlough route,

but you also said earlier…

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire at “the top” needing a second yacht.

Furlough sounds like another name for layoff here.

but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.

Ideally sounds like wishful thinking. They’re already limiting their work because they only work with NGOs or non-profits, which are usually cash strapped. Further, the lower pay to tech workers mean that the workers have less of a financial cushion should the work dry up for a time. This goes back to my first post that tech workers that don’t live a country with strong social safety nets may find tech co-ops a risky employer.

more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims

Yeah yeah fuck the rich, but billionaires are a small fraction of the owners of IT consulting companies. The majority of them are small boutique firms rather than giant fortune 500 companies.

One answer could be that the organization maintains a large fund to act as a buffer to maintain salaries between contracts instead of operating “paycheck-to-paycheck.”

Thats great in concept, but keep in mind they’re already taking customers that likely have small or limited budgets. Where does this extra buffer come from? The only income stream is delivering on limited contracts to cash strapped NGOs and non-profits. Remember, they took corporate work at one point, but hated it. Corporate work is where the bigger bill rates for delivery of contract service come from.

An even simpler answer could be that the co-op chooses to take on a large number of small contracts instead of a small number of large ones, such that the revenue is relatively consistent to begin with.

Its amazing if your org can get so much contract work that there’s jobs available to turn down. This usually requires a dedicated sales and marketing staff, which don’t generate any revenue for the co-op, only delivery of services to. So the sales and marketing arm are yet another drain on the already meager amounts earned from contract awards.

If there was surplus money to be made large for-profit contracting companies would be in here already doing some or all of this work.

the difference in salary they’re talking about is more along the lines of small business vs venture capital-backed startup or established huge corporation.

That would make sense if the organization is revenue generating with its own business efforts instead of enabling other organizations, which is what it sounds like is the case for this tech co-op. The co-op doesn’t seem to generate anything of their own. It sounds like they get contract work from NGOs and non-profits. If there is no work, or not enough, what happens to the co-op workers?

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire

So when the NGO and non-profit contract work declines or dries up entirely for a time and there is less or no money coming in, how do salaries get paid at 100%? Does each tech co-op worker simply get a small percentage of the remaining income? How long do workers actively working contracts for NGOs/non-profits in the co-op continue to subsidize those that don’t/can’t get placed on work?

Certainly, but this is a different animal. What you’re describing is non-profit organization that retains employees doing IT. Like a for-profit, the employee has the expectation of a job irrespective of the level of project work the organization has. The non-profit will have a similar reporting structure and expectations on the IT worker, with the upside that the IT worker is deriving not only benefit from their salary, but from the good the non-profit is doing.

Contrast that with the IT contracting world were rates for IT work are much higher than a standard retained IT worker. The reason the pay is higher is because of the risk to the worker they may be unemployed with the work dries up. So from what I gather from the article this tech co-op is the worst of both worlds: low pay, low job security.

I’d love to be corrected if anyone has IT co-op knowledge/experience.