partial_accumen

And nothing of value was lost. I’ve never liked Matisse’s works. Especially considering others that produced works before and after his time. His look like the epitome of laziness, but without any artistic commentary or meaning to justify it. I don’t begrudge works that can look simple to produce. I appreciate Rothko and Pollock for example If someone can point out something redeeming about Matisse’s work, I’m open to hearing it.

So its USAID purchases with extra steps?

This one seems very equal to me. Its a usually a tragedy to lose someone of either gender. I’m not upset if a rapist or murderer commits suicide, however, irrespective of their gender.

I don’t really get your point here, but there is something like 3x more men suicide than women suicide, and this is pretty much true everywhere in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates

My point is that neither men’s nor women’s suicide are dismissed. A woman committing suicde is an equal tradegy to a man committing suicide. I’m not aware of any social convention which dismisses men’s suicide. This is what I meant when I said they are equal. Society treats men’s and women’s suicide the same.

I’m not following where this is a detriment to men. Statistically and my own anecdotal observation, women are much more negatively affected by job inequality.

It really depends on the fields, you’re right in most, pretty much all, cases it is a detriment for women, but for example when it is about working with children men get less hired, and even when they get hired they have to be really careful about what they do, they quickly get called pedophiles.

First, you’re right on your very specific example, but that is a very very very small representation of job inequality. However, even in the case of male and female elementary school teachers where you’re calling out discrimnation, it is men that are out earning women in the same jobs as elementary school teachers.

Further, the scare around male teachers being around young children is a construct mostly from the last 20 to 25 years. Trying to use that as a statement to suggest that there is equal job (and pay!!) discrimination against both men and women would be disingenuous.

I can’t say I see that reflected in society. What I do see are some calling out specific issues (at least one you’ve raised above) as recently negatively affecting men, while the same issue has been negatively affecting women far worse and for far longer and that it had been ignored. It comes off as lack of self reflection and disingenuous where men have allowed women to suffer for years (decades? centuries?), but as soon as men are experiencing it too, its a crisis now!

When you complain about something happening to you as a men pretty much all the time either people tell you to “just man up” and/or they even just laugh at your face.

What you’re describing is an example of “toxic masculinity”. I see a lot of irony in you citing it here as supportive of a position that would negate the argument of discrimnation against women vs men.

In short, we both agree that “just man up” is a problem and that philosophy should be discarded, but it isn’t on women to fix that when its largely perpetuated by men.

Certainly not all, but certainly lots and lots of bad things. Only 13 of the 193 UN member nations have ever had a woman leader of the nation. source I don’t see how anyone can say women are to blame for that, nor the policies those world leaders put into place.

People in power are responsible for most of the bad things in the world, the fact that they are mostly men doesn’t mean all men are responsible for this,

Strawman. I didn’t say because men are in charge that all men are responsible. Thats a common strawman on this topic. Please don’t introduce it here.

women in power do lot of bad things too(Indira Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Park Geun-hye, Elizabeth Holmes to name a few), but it’s because of the power and individuals values they have not because of their gender.

You’re straying pretty far from the topic here. This isn’t “women leaders good, men leaders bad”. The point you’re replying to is specifically in the context of defining public policy in which discrimination occurs. There have been so few women leaders, and their tenue in modern politics so short that I’m not sure if we can really measure very much impact (positive or negative) on discrimination yet.

Ruby was the most approachable language I found and sheparded me from my limits of bash scripting and Windows batch file scripting into the next level.

The author derides Ruby’s easy readability and syntax because it has issues scaling to large enterprise applications. I don’t disagree there is a performance ceiling, but how many hundreds of thousands of Ruby projects never rose to that level of need? The author is also forgetting that Ruby had Rubygems for easy modular functional additions years before Python eventually got pip.

I don’t write in Ruby anymore, and Python has evolved to be much more approachable than it was when Ruby was in its prime, however if someone came to me today saying they wanted the easier programming language to learn that could build full applications on Linux, OSX, Windows, and the web, I’d still point them to Ruby with the caveat that it would have limits and they would be better served by Python in the long run.

Sorbitol

Alternate headline: trump accidentally establishes list of plausibly trustworthy journalists

but I think the realistic reading is it was simply a kickback to fortune 500 companies that got these politicians elected.

If there were no legitimate geopolitical reasons, then the “simply a kickback” would be much more plausible. Also, if it was a single source company, then “simply a kickback” would look true. Additionally, if was perhaps just domestic companies “simply a kickback” would certainly be even more likely. Lastly, the Chips act wasn’t just about production domestically. It also blocked sales/exports of completed high end chips and chip making equipment to China. If the Chips act was “simple a kickback” you wouldn’t do all that other stuff, and you certainly wouldn’t allow foreign winners (like Taiwan’s TSMC).

Was their rewards because of industry lobbying? Certainly. However, unless you’re in a purely communist system of government where all the companies are owned by the state, you’re always going to have private companies benefiting from government spending, tax breaks, and subsidies. As to this just applying to fortune 500 companies, there isn’t really a “mom and pop” semiconductor industry making handfuls of chips at a time except outside of engineering sample that are used in R&D for fortune 500 companies.

The worst of it hasn’t happened yet. The point where consumers can no longer afford to consume is coming.

Its mostly already arrived.

“As of June 30, the top 20% of earners accounted for more than 63% of all spending”

source

This means that the other 80% of Americans represent only 37% of the spending done today. If a company is looking to maximize profits the typical path is to do so by marketing to the group where they could earn the most money. That is less and less the bottom 80% of Americans.

The creator in that video seems to think the Chips Act subsidies were to benefit consumers by having affordable memory produced domestically. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to derive drive GDP by having another source of domestic production, and drive job growth/tax revenue from workers working at the domestic facility. Lastly, it was to have strategic domestic production decoupled from other nations so we, as a nation, could not be held hostage by another nation (like we do to so many other nations) for crucial (pun very much intended) resources we need.

Nothing about that is about making RAM cheaper for retail consumers.

The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.

Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.

To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.

I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that

I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.

You got me curious. I also have a Frigidaire, but its circa 2012 I think. I took my largest cast iron skillet (12" Brizoll) and put it on the range dry with nothing in it. I turned on the range and here’s what it looks like under a thermal camera after 50 seconds:

I see crescent you’re talking about, but the thermal difference between the hottest and coldest part of the pan is less than 1.2 degrees C. This was only on for less than a minute. The next time I’m cooking something I’ll perform this test again. Additionally, my range has 2 induction elements to cook on on the right hand side, and the left hand elements are electric thermal, so I can perform a non-inductive test too.

At one time, it was a government promise to exchange for a certain amount of gold. After that became a limit on growth of a nation it becomes “fiat currency” which is simply a conceptual agreement of value to make the exchange of goods and services easier. This is your AMEX money.

The induction makes hot spots which are inconsistent across my larger cast iron pan, requiring me to rotate the pan or move food in the pan around to get everything evenly.

I can’t say I’ve experienced this with my cast iron pan and induction range. Can I ask how big of a pan you’re using?

It would be interesting to see the Canadian traffic by provincial origin. I’m guessing the difference between, say, Newfies and Albertans is pretty different.

So he’s going to deport Elon, right?

My intention is to complete the IT Management degree and then evaluate whether I want to go on to an MBA or pursue more education in a different direction.

I thought about a graduate degree too, however my career really took off (partially because of jobs I was able to get that had a Bachelors requirement). A graduate degree at this point in my life would not advance my career further and actually probably reduce my success because of the time commitment and what it would mean I couldn’t do with that same time and energy. Maybe I’ll chase one after I retire just for fun!

My biggest worry with jumping into something entirely new is burnout.

I had this same worry for myself, and it is certainly a balancing act. Too much course load, and you won’t succeed on learning/passing then get burned out even if you do. Too little, and you might get “comfortable” again getting your time and schedule back to what you had before you started.

For me I found success by starting with one course per term for the first term, then two courses per term for two more terms, then three per term (finding out that was too much), then dropping back down to two per term. Additionally, I never took a term off. I was worried I wouldn’t go back, so I did the low-and-slow path or the entirety of my Associates degree to completion. Then when I got the new job (with tuition reimbursement), I did the same, low-and-slow until completing the Bachelors degree.

So, a plan is coming together. Thanks again for all your advice, this is good stuff and will absolutely help me on my path.

Right now you might be thinking “how am I going to find the time to do this along with everything else?!” After the 2nd week of this new responsibility you will have it worked into your schedule. You will then ask yourself “What was I doing before with all this time I found for school commitments?!”, and finally after you graduate a month or two later you’ll loop back and say “Where the heck did I find all that time for the school commitments!?”

You’ve got this! The hardest part is just starting. You are so close. Just. Start.

This is the first time I’d heard about the “trump accounts”. This looks like just another trump tantrum copying something Obama did. Obama created the “myRA” program in his last term in office which served the same purpose as these “trump accounts”, except myRA could be used by low income adults too which received government subsidies to encourage personal contributions. Also the investments were in government bonds, not stocks.

trump took office in 2016 and canceled myRA 6 months after.

source

The lemmy instance you choose (for example, you chose .ml) to join will have its own tone, flavor, rules, politics. You will find instances that are left, right, and center. Additionally you will find some that are VERY far-left or VERY far-right. If you are finding the tone for the lemmy community (equivalent of reddit subreddit) different that your position, it may be because its hosted and moderated on an instance with that particular bend.

You may also experience some judgment from others because of the instance you are coming from as it can communicate some of your positional bias. Some users have chosen to relocate to other lemmy instances once they get an understanding of what ideas live where.

All of that said, while lemmy and the fediverse has a much smaller userbase than Reddit, it is so much nicer here. My last post to reddit was over 2 years ago, and every post I hear about how bad it is getting over there confirms this is the better place here.

Warning incoming wall of text!!!

There are two things I’d recommend you give some consideration to altering from what you described as your current path so far:

#1 Don’t go for an IT degree

You have decades of experience in IT. You are going to learn very little from trying to get a degree for an area of expertise you already know. Yes, you’d be able to test out of a bunch of stuff, but in the end you’re still going to have to take lots of classes that will be boring for you or worse, you’ll have to “learn it wrong” because of the gap between academic answers and what we both know from experience is how it works in the real working world. From my previously aborted attempt at college after high school I knew “getting bored with classwork” was one of my weaknesses. Pushing myself to do work I knew was useless or wrong is a large part of why I think I failed to complete the first time. You may or may not have the same issue as I did. At best, if you are successful getting an IT degree, you’ll likely have learned little to nothing more than you know now.

Consider instead getting a degree in an area you don’t know backwards and forwards already. I chose the business/marketing path. There are a number of reasons I liked this path:

• The coursework is not generally difficult compared to technical IT material you and I have to consume on a regular basis for work. As I was doing full time IT at the same time, it was a really nice change of topic to be able to do coursework without getting more IT to deal with. It made it something to look forward to instead of dreading.

• Having the business education gave me fantastic view of what the organizations I was working for were trying to achieve with IT, where the challenges existed we have almost no visibility to in IT, and the ability to speak the language of business to C suite executives while fully retaining all of my IT knowledge I already knew. This business communication ability alone I can point to for several specific instances where I was later successful in an IT objective because I was speaking their language.

• As for the worry about having a degree not in IT, nobody cares what you get your Bachelors degree in. Employers always assume you did it after high school anyway, instead of as a mature adult. They just want the “degree” box checked for the hiring requirement. If you truly want a degree in the field you work in, do that as a graduate degree. There, it matters.

• Its cheaper to get the degree! Business and marketing classes are available from far more schools on far more frequent schedules. This means you can shop on price for your school with far more schools to choose from and things like lab fees and textbooks were generally cheaper too.

   

#2 Don’t go to WGU as your school of choice

WGUs business model, as I’m sure you’re aware, is different than most schools. Instead of a “per credit hour” fee, you pay a flat fee “per term” that allows you to take all the classes you can handle. However, that flat fee requires nearly a full-time student course load to break even compared to other “per credit hour” schools. One the surface its a good deal. If you were quitting your full time job, I might recommend it. Instead, if you’re keeping your full time job that means you’re going to be paying FULL PRICE per term, but only able to take advantage of a small fraction of that high cost.

#3 Costs (bonus unsolicited advice!)

Avoid taking on debt for school! I’m hopeful that your employer has some sort of tuition reimbursement. Many do! Check into that and find out what the terms and conditions are. Though many have a golden handcuff clawback provision, they are usually limited to 1 year. So if your degree takes you 3 or 4 years to complete part-time, you quit your job immediately upon graduation, at worst you only pay back 1 year’s costs. Further, if you’re laid off you don’t even have to pay back that 1 year! For whatever isn’t covered, pay out of pocket if you can. This is also why choosing a cheaper school is important. You’re at an age you should be contributing heavier to retirement, not taking on student loan debt (again if you have the luxury to avoid it).

I’m not sure if you have done much if any college before, but if you have, its entirely possible that any courses you passed can still be applied to your new degree attempt. I had credits that were over 17 years old (English, History, Math) that fully applied to my new degree saving me time, money and effort. You’ll find out all of this when you pick a school and have your first talk with your assigned advisor.

As for picking a school, this part of the advice may be out-of-date so take it with a grain of salt. Avoid “online only” schools. These target people just like you that are working adults, but they charge a high premium because they know you have money. There is also a bit of a stigma with employers for some of these schools. Most state support schools which are bricks and mortar offer many online-only degrees. This means you can get a mostly or entirely online degree, from an actual accredited (seek regional accreditation only! “national” accreditation is a scam!), while getting low cost schooling from a school that is established and recognizable to employers as legitimate.

Select your 4 year school, and see which Community College credits they accept. Community college be the least expensive courses you can find, and have your advisor at the 4 year school confirm these CC classes transfer 100% into the 4 year school. Your Bachelors degree will say the 4 year school name. Nobody asks or cares where you completed your pre-req courses. Don’t pay high 4 year school prices when you can pay cheap 2 year school class prices! Also, frequently there is an Associates degree with 100% overlap with your Bachelors school. This means you can achieve a 2 year degree without having to spend all the time for bachelors before you have something to show for your work. I got a 20% pay raise with a better job just from my prior IT experience and my new Associates degree in business/marketing.

If I may be so bold, here’s your homework for next week:

1. Find out what tuition reimbursement options your employer has. Its also possible they have preferred rates for specific schools so you need to find this out first.
2. Select your degree.
3. Select your 4 years school, and search their website for what 2 year/community college they partner with for full credit transfer.
4. Contact your school of choice through their admissions process, and get assigned an advisor (all this is free). They will be able to set up a meeting with you and walk you through the next steps after you communicate your goals with the school. You will come out of that meeting with a Plan of Study which is a document that tells you what classes you’ll need to take, the info required to calculate the approximate total cost of your degree, and give you a good idea of the time to complete it.

100% of the above homework steps have ZERO COST and ZERO COMMITMENT! There is no reason for you to NOT do these things as these are the critical answers of evaluation info I was missing when I was taking too long to get going. The very first time you have cost or commitment is when you enroll in your first class. Start with just one. Use that to get in the grove with what school will demand of you. After than you can ramp up the number of courses at once. Again, I did a regular load of 2 courses at once as I found 3 to be too many.

I hope this is helpful info. If this was too much info, my apologies. If you have other questions, feel free to ask. I want you to be successful in this!