What I see is an anecdote from a wildfire firefighter who conjured a narrative reflective of what we hope most firefighters’ jobs are — waiting for nothing.

Moreover, as others have mentioned, firefighting as a full time job is the same as military, search & rescue, etc.: training. Why? Because it’s super dangerous and people don’t want their children/spouses/parents to take a job that gets their loved one killed.

If we want to defund the fire department like others want to defund the police, we have to take the same approach as the ladder: a heavy investment and focus on prevention related to the systemic issues that cause fires. And much like the ladder “defund the police” thing, it would get super political and polarized faster than a spark burning down a warehouse full of fireworks, sawdust, and crisco lard.

I have family who did wildfire fighting in the private sector and yeah, a big part of the job is waiting. The other part is largely not being anywhere close to the fire. It is digging a fireline, getting the fuck outta there, and hoping to god the wind doesnt carry too many big cinders across it to negate that laborious effort.

If you are surrounded by flames immediately around you as a wildfire fighter, you are less likely to be “firefighting” and more likely to at the stage of your job where search and rescue is retrieving your cinders for your family to bury.

I think if you can confront the possibility that you are capable of reprehensible harm and fully game out how that would look, the far less likely you are to carry such things out. Confronting fear is difficult, particularly when it is yourself you are afraid of (and I think we are all afraid of ourselves in our own unique ways).

You hit the nail on the head, nowhere is safe and never was. Most things are illusory. So, then, why not construct an illusion that empowers you, those you care about, and your community?

It seems like that is your intention. Hope you the best whatever you end up doing

I think I get you now. I personally am way less measured. I just yolo in full steam without a second thought haha. My justification would be, “I’ll at least get one hell of a Himalayan mountain adventure out of it”

Well, as they say, “no time like the present.” If you are looking for permission from strangers on the internet, this is it. Git ‘er done

I hear you. My only question is, is your post a hypothetical?

I guess I am hung up on the mountains thing. What is currently your state of freedom that denies you from going?

I don’t think either of these things are related. Go to the mountains, nothing is stopping you. You will either love it and stay forever, or slowly miss all the comforts of civilized life.

Reality is the dream, Buddhism teaches you to wake up from it, so I am confused by the seemingly negative tone you have about this wakefulness given the parallel romanticism you seem to have to it?

In no particular order, this is my favs from 2010 - 2020.

Anthony Jeselnik - a master of not apologizing and leaning as hard as possible into the shock niche better than anyone else while not being a weeny about like most other “shock jocks”

Tig Notaro - particularly her album about her breast cancer, she masterfully guides your own empathy working against how utterly hilarious her jokes are about almost dying

Hannibal Burress - a completely different take on dry humor which is largely dominated by the Brits, he is monotone, seemingly sarcastic, and the wit is endless. I almost wonder if he is a pioneer in a new version of American dry humor that you can start to see popping up elsewhere like with Sam Morril

Thank you for sharing both links. Amazing extension!

This is what happens when you get extremists exerting control over any platform that requires institutional protection. Elon Musk has most certainly caused damage. Spin up a new Twitter account and within minutes you will have scrolled past multiple posts promoting or depicting violence against a wide range of groups. I literally saw the corpses of children hanging in a hut before I signed off forever.

I have this same beef with crackpot conspiracy theories. Promote enough lizards-in-whitehouse stories and all of a sudden someone telling us the literal, verifiable truth that Pfizer engineered untold chaos and misery to make a profit he gets dismissed as a crackpot before people in the general public will listen.

Likewise, when a billionaire crybaby invades an institutional free-speech platform as an undemocratically elected king crying wolf anytime he is rightfully reprimanded for not moderating incitement (which is unequivocally illegal, for good reason), the general public is further nudged toward assuming that all the platform is used for.

Thus, when events like this occur, the reasonable thinkers trying to voice reason are drowned out by the very people on these platforms — induced-ADHD who can't think for more than 10 seconds before chewing on another soundbite to repeat so they can get their likes and repeat.

Is free speech being suppressed via Twitter through the BR gov't? Yes. Did Elon Musk lift the guard rails for incitement? Yes. Both are true and both are an absolute disgrace to the society many of us were born into.

As Rear Admiral Grace Hopper always repeated, make sure to analyze the cost of doing something vs. not doing something at all and prioritize accordingly :)

I dilly-dally'd for way too long moving away from Adobe

For those who are not aware, Invidious is a free-and-open-source front-end application for YouTube that anyone can host. People use/host Invidious use it for watching YouTube without all the creepy trackers and stuff, or to customize their YT watching experience. The above is not necessarily a scam link like it appears (which is the first thought that comes to my paranoid brain).

Let us know how it goes!

Explaining Computers has been a huge boon to the continuation of my desire to support open software and hardware as the host is extremely knowledgeable and routinely does guides and showcases for these things. I cannot recommend his videos enough.

I have a non-techy friend already using Linux Mint competently, and I think this video is a great bridging of the gap if you've been desiring to make the switch.

We are outsiders, we have no concept of how much is too much.

This might seem unrelated, but I spend a lot of money eating out even though I would save a ton by eating at home. However, I don’t have the time or ability to communicate to anyone that may be critical of this choice why it is better for me. It would take hours to give all the reasons to explain my personal situation.

So when I see an article like, “millennials spend too much on coffee” it instantly reeks of a clickbait narrative that doesn’t contribute to any meaningful solutions around the actual problem of the economic decisions behind having coffee out and how prices are skyrocketing. It’s an ego trip to finger wag an arbitrary group of people.

Maybe there are legit reasons what millennials are dumdums, maybe there are legit reasons CPP is overspending. All I know is the article is primarily intending to aggravate, not inform, which causes my guards to go up immediately

Sorry, I edited adding a paragraph, you’ll want to double check the “all points” part haha

I just know the optics like this are not good despite potential logical reasons for doing so. On one side, the logical reason is that there is something wrong with the old office and they chose a dumb narrative, ignoring the potential greater cost of not moving offices. On the other end, maybe they are scheming with a local contractor to make an overly expensive office where certain items are marked up higher to land in the pockets of decision makers. Or it could just be that tax funded news corp is salty that tax funded CPP has a bigger office and they wanted a fancy office too

I had some roommates in Canadian government and they also had some office migration drama. The reality is there are a lot of full of themselves decision makers who have a ton of blinders on due to their own arrogance and make bad decisions. It seems to be the rule and not the exception. This is true for any large org, not just government. I guess i just dont like the comparison of paying for an office vs paying out organizational overhead. Its an apples to oranges comparison that knee-jerks me into, “well that’s obviously some kind of think tank propaganda that has their own agenda and using that talking point to distract us from the real reason they dont like that office”

As with any MSM article, my question is, why have they chosen this particular subject for me to defend/be outraged by? What is the conversation I am not allowed to have about Canada?

Making your software open source probably quite heavily depends on how much of an ideologue you are. That is, if you don’t have a solid business model behind doing so. Many big corpo projects like Facebook’s React are open source as a way to get free work from other developers, and developers are happy to do so because they like using React.

As others have said, offering your software in its entirety as self hosted if its a cloud option, and then just be the best and most authoritative source for hosting it if people don’t want to go through the self-hosted hassle.

Other reasons may include being a personal project that you want help with, similar to the previously mentioned React model.

Some may do so as a “giving back” model. Many coders know their success wouldnt have happened without open source. They enjoy coding, dont need the money and viola.

Another incentive is perhaps you have an employer or client who is paying you for work. If you have a strong negotiating position, you can make your contract stipulate that some or all code be made open source.

OnlyOffice has a great design and is quite performant as well. OnlyOffice, I believe, integrates well with NextCloud which is also awesome. I actually use it for a couple of my devices, but I wanted to keep the list simple and I indeed had a big debate on my head which office suite I put on it.

I think I ultimately chose OpenOffice because OnlyOffice's design seems like it could easily trick you into thinking you need to go into a paid version.