• 1 Post
  • 1.09K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

help-circle

  • I lost a lot of respect for a coworker over this.

    This was pre pandemic. They brought a nurse into the office to give everyone who wanted a flu vaccine. She wouldn’t do it.

    I said to her that if she got the flu, she’d probably live, but she’d also pass it on to other people. She’d be contagious before she knew she was sick, so she might be on the subway and infect a bunch of vulnerable people. Old ladies. Little babies. Anyone.

    She was like no that’s not how it works. That’s not going to happen.

    I was like, why not? In what way is that not how it works?

    “I’ll just stay home if I’m sick”

    “What about when you’re contagious and don’t realize? Or if it hits when you’re already at work?”

    “That won’t happen”

    Just denial.

    Can’t convince people with facts. You have to play on their emotions. Make them feel good about themselves, or reinforce something they believe in. I can’t always figure out how to do that




  • Things being illegal doesn’t mean they don’t happen. And, again, if people were redlined in 1960 and now a neighborhood is mostly black, that didn’t magically go away in 2026. The consequences are lasting.

    Furthermore, as an individual, fighting more powerful institutions (eg: banks, the government) is not trivial. Shrugging it off with “you should report is” is technically true, but not a complete solution nor especially practical.

    Breaking everything down to racism is naive

    Well that’s not what’s happening in this discussion, so okay

    focusing on what actually keeps people segregated, like socioeconomic status.

    Deeply tied into race, historically and presently.

    Regardless, the point stands that there’s few to no good reasons for an employer to know your address during the application process, and a lot of bad ones.


  • This isn’t the 1960’s. There’s no more segregation and people can live wherever they afford.

    Redlining is less of a thing, but there are still areas that are predominantly populated by different ethnic groups. Furthermore, the consequences of housing segregation are still felt today. It’s not like the people who were forced to live in “undesirable” neighborhoods in the 1960s got reshuffled around.

    To say “there’s no more segregation” is naive.

    And even furthermore, it opens the door for unfair judgements like “oh they live in a bad neighborhood”, which might not be first order racist, but are still undesirable. There’s no need for it. Only unfair things can come from the information.


  • If I was in charge, I’d make some changes to the job process

    • you must post the salary
    • if you post a job and it’s determined there was no intent to fill the role, you must pay every applicant a year’s salary. Whistleblowers also get a payout.
    • making the applicant fill out a form that duplicates information on the resume (eg: name, phone) is illegal.
    • asking for the applicant’s address is illegal. They were going to use this for racism. You can ask about time zone and willingness to commute to the office
    • employers must pay workers for their commute at their normal hourly rate.
    • Ghosting an applicant (no response without a rejection or hire for a month) results in a fine. Pay the applicant 3 months salary.

    All other fines now scale with wealth of the perpetrator













  • I work at a multinational mega Corp, but not one you’ve probably heard of. I am very disengaged.

    For one thing, I’m technically a “contractor”. I have to go to all the meetings, but I don’t technically work for them. They give me the legal minimum of paid time off, but only after I looked up what my rights are and fought them for it. They don’t pay for holidays. They say “have a nice Thanksgiving” and then dock me two days pay.

    The pay is insulting. I’m making less than I made ten years ago.

    There’s no technical leadership. These people are supposed to be doing python. They don’t know what unit tests are. They barely know how imports work. Trying to change everything is a months long battle and emotion massaging exercise. The people in charge don’t understand or care.

    They do love AI though. Lots of AI generated code. They don’t understand it but it looks so slick. Vomit.

    So fuck them. I used to go out of my way to fix problems and promote good practices. Not anymore. I hope the upper management and owners suffer.

    They’re probably not even renewing contractors past the end of the year anyway.