I get around $400/mo from the VA for being exposed to toxic chemicals that will lead to me having cancer in the next ten years.

Pretty good trade off, let me tell ya!

I mean if you’re wealthy enough you can just make money on interest and dividends. You can get a 5% interest rate on $2m right now and that’s insured, no real risk. That’s like 75k/yr without doing any work.

But that’s probably not what most people mean when they say passive income. And basic income for the wealthy is kind of backwards.

It’s real in the same sense that income from illegal activities is real. You have to report it to the IRS and it requires harming others in order to acquire.

It’s real when you own property.

You got a 401k? Boom, passive income.

It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.

But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.

I make about $7k a year from some books and T-shirt designs I did a few years ago. I literally do nothing to maintain them (I put in the hard work making them originally) and the money just goes in my bank each month. It’s certainly not enough to live on, I have a full time job, but it pays for our groceries.

Not with that attitude!

What about royalty income? Like, residuals, or…?

A few years ago I designed a bunch of clever tee shirts…and they keep selling. Not a ton, but enough for me to call it “passive income” at this point.

I know. I’m right there too.

Don’t worry, the oligarchy commends your lifelong efforts with a pizza party … :/

Yep. I’m in the midst of that. We’re in a “busy” season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I’ve reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it’s more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don’t want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.

So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I’m idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.

I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there’s nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn’t here to justify their existence by staying busy. We’re here so that when you need help, we can help. If there’s nothing to do, then we’re standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn’t impact our ability to respond when needed, then that’s fine. That’s what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you’re constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.

I’ll also mention that there’s a paradox in IT: we’re expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you’ll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don’t have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you’re doing everything by hand, you don’t have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.

I’ll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don’t recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.

I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn’t load properly. The program service just wouldn’t start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.

I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I’m done I’m working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don’t have to be involved.

No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you’ll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn’t be broken.

Yeah, firefighter mentalities are terrible.

That said, as someone in software development, wouldn’t there be some optimization work you could do? Keeping up with the technology? Preparing training material? Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system? Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?

I find it hard to believe that things are so static.

Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I’m too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn’t happen. I’m moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.

Compounding this, when it’s that busy, I’m often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I’m off trying to chip away at something else. When it’s slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it’s easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it’s busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05… Yeah, I’m not entering all that time… At best I’m going to guess, at worst I’m just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: “fixed problem” done.

The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I’m too busy trying to put out fires, I don’t care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.

This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn’t just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I’m not putting out a fire instead I’m taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.

I dunno Sally, why don’t you fucking Google it? I’m not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that’s not broken. I’m currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I’ll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my “attitude” towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp’s file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally’s feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn’t meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I’m lead technician on that account.

Fuck.

The IT cycle of violence.

I write software for car dealerships so have been aware of all of what you said by proxy for some time simply by virtue of having to write time tracking code which handles all that.

It’s insane.

I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you can’t really get ahead.

This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, I’ll do it myself. I’ve become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap I’ve learned but you get the picture.

I did a brake job on my SIL’s car and discovered that the last person in there didn’t lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.

I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didn’t bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.

The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, it’ll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.

grumbles

Yeah, they say that.

When you’re too busy to actually get your time in and you look like a damn slacker, they’ll use it as evidence to say that you don’t need any additional help. I’ve been through this song and dance several times.

Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then don’t worry about it when things eventually break.

You’re not wrong, but the problem with this is that the worker will be blamed for the bad quality, not the manager.

In fact, it’ll be the manager rating the worker poorly because of the quality at review time, and they just won’t care or won’t connect the fact that the worker is not being given enough time to have a level of quality that would be acceptable to the manager.

Literally every boss I’ve had has been like this. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of IT jobs that aren’t at this point. I’ve worked several and if they’re not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.

i’m often sorry i had kids - not for myself, because i love them, but for them.

i’m glad they’re not interested in having their own kids, and i hope they are able to stick with it. and hopefully none of them/their partners ever needs an abortion.

This is exactly why I’m opposed to bringing kids into the world… I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom I’m sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?

I didn’t have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.

The only thing I’m thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. I’m not thankful that I’m alive and I’m not thankful for being born. That said, I’m also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. I’m not making a significant impact, because I’m just one guy working a menial job, but I’m going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.

My advice: fib.

Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Don’t exaggerate, don’t over bill, just adjust for what fits.

For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333… of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, I’m getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666… of an hour).

I’ll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, that’s 15m. If it took 20, that’s 30m on the record. If I’m looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. I’m not exactly taking a break from working the issue, I’m just trying to brain storm while I’m away from my keyboard.

Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time I’ve closed it, should be on the books. I didn’t work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldn’t do it. You’ll lose more time from what I call “grey time” (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues… All of that is grey time.

I’ve put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even “reading email”. None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Don’t hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they don’t want you to do that, it “artificially inflates” your worked time, but bluntly, if they’re going to require that you account for so much of your day that you can’t have grey time anywhere in there, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.

The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. That’s not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But I’m going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, I’ll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but it’s an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.

Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, you’ll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and you’re missing an hour of your day at most.

Grey time. Log it.

You say this as corporations are making record profits.

The US recovered just fine, the elites just didn’t think it necessary to include us in that recovery.

So am I. My rent however is three times as much (for a worse apartment), food is 2-6x as expensive, gas is… shockingly about the same but it was killer in 2012 too. Utilities are up, insurance is at 250%, medical aid remains unaffordable even with insurance, and I’m older will more medical problems, less energy, and it’s harder to learn new things. Oh and I’m in much more debt due to all the previously mentioned things, so I don’t even have space on credit cards for emergency purchases.

And 9/10 people I talk to are in the same situation.

Millennial and I’m making over twice at much as I was in 2012. 🤷‍♀️

And able to afford a third as much…

Even adjusted for inflation?

Keeping up with the cost of living would be nice.

Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn’t bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.

This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. “If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can’t be happy so you can’t either blah blah”

I don’t think WFH is completely to blame for that. A significant contributor to the explosion in housing prices was historically low mortgage rates (<2%) as part of the covid era stimulus plans. This triggered a wave of home buying, which in turn led to a lot of panic from people that were afraid they would be priced out of the market and fueled further home buying.

😮‍💨 I understand too well. “Average” single family homes in my area were like $400,000, now it’s $820,000. Rents for single bedroom apartments went from about $800-900 month to $1,600+ per month. I live in a town of about 65,000 in the Rockies, middle of nowhere, like minimum 5 hour drive to a city with more than a million people, yet somehow, people are still flocking here from all across the country.

Shift your blame to the housing market for jacking prices up for well over 40 years. Yes they used wfh as another excuse but seriously housing market has been fucked looooong before wfh

I hate the housing market too but it’s been going bonkers way before covid and WFH.

Sure WFH added fuel to the fire, but that fire has been growing and would have grown without WFH.

Productivity has gone up, pay has remained flat or declined when adjusting for price increases. How is that not “working more for less?”

And your read on the average lemmy user is inane. Most of the people I’ve interacted with want to do meaningful work and be able to live without the constant threat of homelessness, starvation, or death from easily preventable causes.

If you do “enjoyable work” and get paid enough to have a personal life that is also fulfilling, bully for you, but the vast majority of people are fucking struggling.

the average American today works “harder” and more strenuously to the average American in like 1920 is off their gourd.

The point is that the average person’s work produces more value, but that increase in value is all going to corporations. The value of wealth went up, the value of labour stagnated. That means the rich have more of the pie, and since money begets money, the poor get less and less.

Most of the news subs on Lemmy are just cynical pity parties for first world problems. Idk what to make of people here. Wealthy educated countries with historically low unemployment and yet no one can seem to find a decent job.

Oh my god do you think nobody’s Fucking tried this? It doesn’t work. The elections are fake, my dude. Remember 2000? Remember 2016 dem primary? Remember 194…4(?)? 2020 dem primary?

And I live in California. My vote literally does not count.

Fuck your bullshit elections, I can’t respect that shit

Gotta respect your choice of home Lemmy tho. I feel ashamed for not thinking to do the same.

Suddenly I’m reminded of the mayor in The Wire.

That’s one tac. More in line with the Great Man theory of history. If I had to guess I’d say we have hundreds of people in politics who are exactly like this. And it’s maybe a part of making things better.

But those people will be powerless to do anything until collective and direct action gives them the political capital to point out in a room full of chuds, “look we’ve got to give them something.”

This is just to say, don’t wait for your heroes to save the day for you. Even if they’re there, dormant, they need your action to do anything.

Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but that’s all shit everyone thinks they can’t do.

Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind you’re being gouged on materials (because you’re being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.

Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.

But whatever you do, if its not just useless theatrical bullshit (which isn’t to say all theatrical bullshit is useless; just the useless kinds) its going to be illegal, and will face state retribution, even if its explicitly legal and protected in your local constitution.

Further, this is one case where decidedly not voting (to borrow the analogy) would have an impact.

Reminds me of the short story Enough, by William Ledbetter that I just read.

See also https://bdsmovement.net/ for a practical, targeted example.

My point is it fucking should be, with modern tech and skilled specialists and economies of scale, but rarely actually is.

That all that shit isn’t for us, we do not see the benefit of it.

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Copy pasting:

So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:

It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.

So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.

So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.

Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.

Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.

You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?

Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?

When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?

Yes, don’t try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The ‘good’ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are ‘taxes’ and (ratcheted)‘cops’? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know it’s been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.

Direct action doesn’t mean ‘go it alone’. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.

I don’t want to criticize that, it soubds pretty nice, but that’s nowhere near as radical as I was thinking.

Plus, remember; there is no outside, walled gardens do not endure, thermodynamics apply, and you cannot lifeboat the coming catastrophes.

Gotta make an impression somehow

Every system is going down faster than expected. Food sources are already taking hits.

This will accelerate exponentially.

Unless we get unlikely, easily sacked, breakthrough energy source quickly or fucking aliens come down and save us, we are doomed.

Climate change was stoppable around 1980, the worst of it was preventable around 2000, now? We may survive if we put our resources toward adaption. Which we don’t, and cannot unless some magic happens.

So unless you believe in fairies, don’t bring children cus they won’t grow old. If you do believe in fairies, you are too delusional to raise children.