what’s funniest about the pacific rim scientists is like. when newt geiszler says he’s a scientist he means an old-timey 1910s entomologist wearing khaki shorts and a comically oversized pair of binoculars traipsing through the jungle capturing endangered species of butterfly and murmuring “egads!! fascinating…..” and scribbling it in his journal. when hermann gottlieb is being a scientist it’s literally the fucking manhattan project. tortured chainsmoking physicist. pawn of a war. repressed homosexual all his life. gets executed for being a communist. And they have to do each other’s peer review

Steve: 1

Secret Service: 0

For those who don’t know, Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service in 1990, and all copies of the then-upcoming GURPS Cyberpunk were confiscated. Though this was bad for the company financially (they were set back months on a major project, and had to do layoffs), it did lend a certain air of pizazz to their product.

They ended up suing the government, and won. This was the first high-profile case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which successfully sued on behalf of the company, winning around $300,000 in the case.

The full story is here: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

ALT

we DO grow old and happy. btw.

And you find love and it stays with you.

Right now, my code work, so I'm the greatest man alive this earth has ever seen, but maybe I'll get a bug soon and I'll immediatly become the dumbest person to ever walk the planet.

Programming is exhausting.

I think the turbolift is stuck…

This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:

"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"

Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.

No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.

see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles

International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.

Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.

We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.

We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.

On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.

Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.

treat yourself like you would treat your favorite character

As a fanfiction author I think this is a bad idea.

Pensions sound so fake as a zillennial. You work for one place for decades (already sounds fake) and then afterwards you leave and they just. keep paying you. the same amount of money. to do nothing. for the rest of your life. if i wasn't already aware that this was something that readily and commonly existed during my grandparent's days then it would sound like some kind of socialist pipe dream

401(k)s became available in 1978, and that signaled the death of pensions pretty much everywhere that they weren’t part of a union contract. Workers who still have pension plans today are almost universally unionized and that benefit has been a holdover from contracts of the past.

The thing about pensions is that they are deferred compensation. You take a slightly smaller salary than your role should have, and the difference is being invested and paid out to you in retirement. But when 401(k)s became a thing and companies dropped pension plans, compensation never rose enough to offset the difference, and employer contributions to 401(k) plans is lower than what they had to invest in pensions. They got to have their cake and eat it too, and workers got screwed.

And now we’re into a third generation of workers who don’t foresee actually having enough money to ever fully retire.

(If somebody else already did it, I apologize)

legend 🙌