I imagine you’d either have no phone, or one of those prepaid with cash ones. You could also probably turn off the cell parts and only use wifi

The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like “{Coworker} says this test case is important”. Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could’ve gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.

I would have questions about how they work with a team and structure.

Are they going to be okay with planning work out two weeks ahead? Sometimes hobbyists do like 80% of a task and then wander off (it’s me with some of my hobbies).

Are they going to be okay following existing code standards? I don’t want to deal with someone coming in and trying to relitigate line lengths or other formatting stuff, or someone who’s going to reject the idea of standards altogether.

Are they going to be okay giving and getting feedback from peers? Sometimes code review can be hard for people. I recently had a whole snafu at work where someone was trying to extend some existing code into something it wasn’t meant to do*, and he got really upset when the PR was rejected.

Do they write tests? Good ones? I feel like a lot of self taught hobbyists don’t. A lot of professionals don’t. I don’t want to deal with someone’s 4000 line endpoint that has no tests but “just works see I manually tested it”

I’ve definitely had some coworkers that in retrospect we should not have hired. But I’ve also had people I was iffy on that turned out great. Hiring is hard.

I don’t grade papers, but I imagine a bit of flavor stands out favorably from all the other very generic writings.

I guess what I took away from my upbringing is the rewards are intrinsic. You don’t get a cookie for cleaning your room, but now your room is clean. You don’t get $20 for passing your math test, but now you (hopefully) learned some math and don’t have to worry about it anymore.

The owner in your example is the same. His rewards are inherent to the action.

Covering someone with praise and rewards when they do stuff they’re supposed to do anyway I guess works, but seems unsustainable. If they’re only doing it for external validation, how are they going to feel when that’s absent?

Saying “thank you” for doing chores isn’t what I had in mind. It was an overly effusive “omg you did so good I’m so happy here’s a pony you didn’t throw your cigarettes on the ground! You’re such a good boy and very handsome!”

I know intellectually that’s true but in my cursed heart I really don’t want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.

It’s just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I’m sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you’re not nice to them, they might shoot you.

edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like “You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you”, so that’s probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.

I’m not going to try to change your mind here. Changing someone’s mind means taking care to massage their emotions, make them feel good about themselves and you, and get them to make the decisions on their own for their own reasons. It’s a lot of work. I’m going to skip it.

Have you considered that you might be stupid? I’m not joking. Seriously. Because “I haven’t personally seen it, so I don’t think it’s real” in this kind of context, maybe most contexts, is weapons grade stupid. What else don’t you believe in? Bacteria? France? Submarines?

When you’re done being mad about being insulted, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_transgender_people might be a good entry point.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Gibson, Count Zero

That would certainly help with a lot of problems, but won’t fix the underlying problem that hinders all of us. That is, that humans often weigh emotions more than they probably should.

It’s like…the solution is right in front of their noses. Just treat people better/not like robots

I’ve been saying this in response to a lot of things lately, but… people are emotional. It’s an emotional problem. Management feels a way, mostly contempt, and any studies about how treating people better would be cost-effective don’t matter. Studies show that a 4-day workweek is good for productivity and profits? Nope, feels wrong, can’t be true.

Essentially, people are stupid and I don’t know how to fix it. Can’t just bop a CEO on the nose with a newspaper when he’s being bad, unfortunately.

I bring my own reusable bag nearly every time I do grocery shopping. But I also live in NYC, which might as well be a different planet compared to most of the US. It’s a five minute walk (on sidewalks! Big ones!) to the grocery store.

I think about this sometimes. Also sometimes I like to just give my fingers a wiggle to cherish that I can just, like, do that. I was in a bad bike accident a couple years ago (no serious lasting harm) and when I was on the ground right after I was like “oh no oh no ok ok extremity check can I still move everything?”

Kid is lucky the racists didn’t murder him and say that he did something to deserve it.

I hope those racist almost-murderers are ruined.

A lot of places ask if you have a criminal record, often so they can not hire you for totally unrelated reasons wink wink.

There’s something of a campaign to get applications to not ask: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box

Eggs are also used in other ways than just scrambling and eating them directly, like baking.

I’m not vegan but I don’t love animal products so much I’d oppose it. When people are like “I need my lunch to be tasty I don’t care about suffering, the environment, or disease” they sound really simple minded and selfish.

I would eat nothing but rice and beans every day if it made a difference for climate change. I’m not emotionally invested in food and it’s not part of my identity.

A lot of conservatives are authoritarians that value group cohesion above most everything else. Going against the group feels bad in a deep way, I think, so all sorts of justifications will be made to stay with the group.

Honestly, as far as I’m concerned that’s a form of stupid. Kind of funny given the boomer cliche of “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?”. It turns out yes, a lot of people would.

Something like half of US adults cannot read at a 6th grade level. That’s like reading for plot. That’s reading a couple paragraphs about like “Sally moved to New Jersey from Maine when she was 17. She went to college at NYU, where she met her future husband Jake. They got married and now have two children.” -> “Where did Sally meet her husband?”. A lot of people struggle with that. And we kind of expect them to keep up with politics.

Some of that is their fault. They don’t try. They don’t want to be literate. But a lot of it is a failure of our public education system. But that is largely the fault of conservatives who don’t want to fund it.

You’re also not going to find a lot of those people on a platform like this that’s mostly written, and where the norms generally a somewhat high level of diction that adheres to standard english.

There isn’t really agreement on who is too shitty to “participate in society”, whatever that means. And if you build a mechanism to exclude people, assholes will use it for evil.

But like if I had a magic wand I would remove all republicans from power. They make it easy by self identifying as shitheads.

No one made the “pee v pee” joke yet?