Hey, could you kindly shut the hell up?

I already feel old. You don’t have to rub salt in the wound.

Can we talk about the willenium now?

Hey now, there’s nothing wrong with star trek.

Niche communities… Sure.

Funny enough, from some of the replies I get to my posts, some of them relating to us politics, I can only assume that people either don’t notice or don’t care about what instance I’m connected to.

It’s a fun game… At least, I’m entertained by it.

I think it was a bug or some kind of resource saving technique. The original did all online servers, AFAIK they were hosted by Rockstar. So I would be in a new game I started as “friends only” and after a while (I imagine, alternatively, if their servers got busy, IDK), it would just transparently merge your current session into another session. Suddenly I would live join a populated public server.

IMO, it was an effort to limit their resource use. When someone was solo in a game, it would just merge your online session into another one that’s populated to consolidate resources. Ignoring any game settings for friends/invite only or whatever.

I gave up on it quickly afterwards, because people insisted on being trolls and griefing anyone they could. Not everyone, I’m sure, but they’re was plenty of it going around.

They may have changed away from a server/client model, to a more peer-to-peer model, I don’t know. I lost interest in everything GTA after I finished the GTA5 campaign and tried to play online.

I don’t know if I’ll return to GTA when 6 comes out. At this point, I’m leaning towards not doing that. I might just wait for a sale and pick it up to play the campaign, but I’m done with their online gameplay.

I get a stipend every month for home office costs, it’s a modest amount, IMO, but it’s to partially cover everything I need to pay for to work from home, electricity, internet, even my cellphone, since I occasionally will need to use my personal phone while working (no company issued phones at this place). So if I need to tether to my cell to work because my ISP is down, the stipend covers any costs associated with doing so.

The expectations are significant because of that stipend, but not unreasonable IMO.

The amount is separate from my pay, and untaxed. It’s basically a reimbursement for expenses.

Vehicle costs are separate, if I need to drive anywhere for my job, I can submit the distance driven and I’m reimbursed separately, a set amount per unit of distance.

It hasn’t happened for me yet but there’s a nontrivial chance I may get deployed to another area of the country, in that case, I get airfare, hotel and a meal allotment daily, as well as a rental car to travel to customers sites for the duration I’m there, all at the company’s cost. I’m reimbursed 100% for travel in those cases. Anything local is just by distance travelled.

About 80% of our client base is local enough that I can drive myself to their location when needed. It’s rare that it is needed. I have not needed to go to a customer’s location in the 6-7 months I’ve been at the job. Others have, and for the most part, they’re closer to the customers that they traveled to, compared to me, but I should be ready in case I’m ever needed to travel, whether local or nationally.

Due to the work we do, and our relative size, we’re only (currently) servicing clients in our country, nothing international right now, as far as I know. Our business model allows for it, but our specialty, which is our main marketing point, is pretty specialized to our country, so I don’t think that will change anytime soon.

The last couple of jobs I held, had similar, but not as generous rules. Talking to the management, they’re primarily interested in ensuring that we, the workers, are happy and healthy so we can work efficiently. IMO, it’s the best management team that I’ve worked under so far. If things continue the way they have been so far, I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon.

From what I know of my management (it’s a fairly small company), unless I quit fairly soon after I claim the credit, maybe within a year, I don’t think they’ll bother making an issue of it.

There’s an economic argument to be made, since most people would challenge such a demand, and the time and effort of the managerial team to pursue it, and the cost of hiring a lawyer to issue the correspondence to say that I should comply, among other associated costs would start to eat away at any benefit from getting the $1000 repaid they would end up spending more money chasing it down.

I think my employer is financially intelligent enough to know that. I also didn’t see any such provisions or clauses in my employment contract. So it’s borderline impossible to enforce to begin with, you can’t really argue that it’s breach of contract since it’s not in a contract that I signed. So it needs to (legally) be pursued as damages, which is a bit harder to prove without a drawn out legal battle. The cost of the lawyers alone to get to that point makes it a triviality in terms of cost.

If they can threaten you with minimal cost to them, and you willingly pay it out of fear, that’s on you.

Only people who penny pinch on principle would even bother doing anything more than issue a threatening letter demanding repayment.

I’ve known business owners that have that kind of mentality, and they are honestly some of the worst people to work for.

Honestly, I’m still a bit surprised that anyone still plays it.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s really never been good.

My favorite feature of the game was when you went into a friend’s only game, just so that you can get a handle on mp before subjecting yourself to actual mp, and halfway through driving through the city, you would merge into a public game and get shot to hell with no warning, and when you let out an exasperated “awww come on” the game triggers voice chat, which you never set up and didn’t know the game had it, and only realized when the 10 year old kid that just fragged you comes on the mic with a “cry more noob” or some similar retort.

Oh yeah, super fun game.

Well, if they want to come and unbolt an 80lb battery from my rack and take it away after I’ve gotten a few good years out of it, I’m okay with that. By that time I’ll already be saving up for a replacement.

Oh, I’m just curious about alternatives. There’s a lot of ways to measure this, but only a few that are mostly unbiased.

The results will likely always be skewed one way or another, since this is about punishment, not the number of people committing the crime. It’s impossible to know how many people drive while intoxicated, we only know how many get caught doing it. The data is flawed from the start.

My work gave me $1000 for office stuff to work from home. They also provided a KB/mouse, three 1080p 24" monitors, a UPS, brand new laptop, a dock for the laptop, cables, a headset, etc.

I already had my system set up for work from home including two 1080p displays, a 1440p display, mechanical keyboard, wireless mouse with charging mouse pad… Even a headset and KVM.

I spent the money on an additional battery for my homelab rack (which will extend the uptime of my firewall during a power outage.

I’m pretty happy with my setup, I combined everything, and decommissioned my oldest display, and bought myself a laptop stand, so when I’m on my PC (selected from the KVM), I have five displays, three wide, and two above. When I select my work laptop, the laptop screen becomes a sixth monitor, and the stand props it up to be one of the top displays, so I have a 3x2 grid of displays.

I’m usually fine with three for my personal use, but more are not unwelcome, at work I was pushing from three to four pretty consistently in the past few years.

Though, I find that having a 1920x1200 or 1440p display set up in portrait is usually pretty helpful for work. So I can see more of a page. I wouldn’t recommend doing that with a 1080 display, since most sites that have a static width are optimized for screens that are at least 1280x768 (around 720p) and going down from 1280 px wide to 1080px wide, results in some horizontal scrolling… Which is never fun.

This is the way.

I find this does the opposite of helping.

One of two things happen: more commonly, I break it down too far. Now, the task isn’t “clean”, it’s about 28 steps of get x cleaner and y supplies and scrub this clean and wash that and do the thing over there to tidy up, etc. Then, once I’m done making a task list for this one very simple thing I need to do, and micromanaging every aspect of it via a list of things to do, I’m now overwhelmed by the massive list of things I need to do in order to accomplish this one very simple task.

On the flip side, if I don’t micro manage myself into task paralysis, I end up breaking it into smaller sections, like “clean living room” and “clean bedroom” etc… And make an agreement with myself to do one today, one tomorrow, etc, until everything is cleaned. So today I only need to clean room x, and I’ll do room y tomorrow. So I clean room x, but I don’t want to put away all the cleaning stuff, I’ll just need it tomorrow, so I put it in the corner ready to go for tomorrow. I accomplished something, I cleaned a room. I’ll do the rest later. About three months later, I’ll wonder why the cleaning supplies are sitting out, and remember I was supposed to clean room y. Feeling like a failure, I’ll be unhappy with myself and instead of getting back to that task I’ll just put the cleaning stuff away, because if I’m going to start over, I’ll need to clean room x again. You see, the dopamine from getting room x cleaned that one time basically made my brain say “yep, task is done, we cleaned” then file it away in the completed file, never to be thought of again.

For me, I have to go all or nothing and just fight my task paralysis head on. I don’t often win, but if I don’t, things never get finished.

I’d like to see this data against ownership numbers. Like, what percentage of Dodge Ram owners have a DUI.

I don’t think that’s what this data is showing us. From what I see, it looks like, from a random set of 1000 DUI’s, these were the most common vehicles, and/or, from 1000 vehicle drivers, those that got DUIs were driving these cars most often… Sort of thing.

I want to know, how many were purchased, and how many individual drivers were cited for DUI while driving that vehicle.

I’m betting that all the very rare and expensive vehicles would have a huge percentage of DUI drivers. Someone driving around in a hurrican, probably has enough money to afford whatever ticket the law can throw at them, and there’s probably so few of them that actually obey the laws that a large portion have been caught DUI.

Drinking.

Just, not at a bar.

Oh no, anyway.

Sorry no. I was not a part of the workforce when working remotely involved dial up connections.

I was in highschool when DSL and cable internet became the norm. From then on out, it was all VPN.

Not in the USA, I’m not sure that we have a similar law. Any agreement that may or may not have resulted from the above story, which I cannot confirm nor deny, would have been examined by a legal professional whom is familiar with local laws and if such an error were to have been included in such a document, they would have surely pointed it out.

I’m not saying that’s what happened, but if it did, I certainly would have had any such agreement looked at by a professional who is familiar with the laws to the point of knowing if such a thing were not enforceable.

I wish I could say more specifically what happened, including my opinions, or name and shame the company involved but I am compelled to not disclose any such information. I also cannot elaborate on why or how I am limited on what I can disclose.

I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. The chances that someone is going to even care enough to trace my username to my identity, then do something about it, is pretty slim, even if I were to disclose everything, and name and shame as I would love to do… But I’m more honorable than most I suppose.