My company got purchased and then the purchasing company got purchased by a huge west coast tech giant. Everybody from the original company got reassigned to new teams and we all ended up with new bosses who had no idea who we were or why we were even there. I had a very enjoyable six months "working" from home doing absolutely nothing before I was laid off. I even got a severance package about equivalent to a year's salary for the first (and presumably last) time in my career.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 hours ago*

    I had a 25-year career as a programmer, ending up making nearly $200K a year. Now I'm a school bus driver making about $30K, although fortunately that also includes subsidized (and really good) health insurance. I'm also fortunate because I already own a small house outright and was able to save a good bit when I was making good money. I quit programming (read: was laid off) just before the AI "revolution" so I'm thankful that I've missed all that bullshit.

    Maybe I'll be able to get back into coding after all the AI slop fails catastrophically and there's nobody left in the industry who still knows how to actually code, but I don't have my hopes up for that. Corporate bullshit is simply too strong for catastrophic failure to be a real problem.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    I bought a house that had been occupied by smokers. One day I painted one of the bedrooms and everything seemed fine and I went home. When I came back the next morning, the top two feet of paint on the walls had flowed down off the walls and onto the floor. Not something I've ever seen happen before. Fortunately I was able to scrub the top with mineral spirits and get the next coat of paint to stick.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    I looked at one apartment years ago where a dog (hopefully it was a dog) had eaten a one-square-foot chunk out of the corner of the bedroom door. The previous tenants had repaired it by nailing a pizza box over the missing corner. The pizza box still had cheese on it. Somehow this seemed worse to me than the two big mounds of dog shit in the kitchen.

    The landlord was a wheelchair-bound woman who hadn't been upstairs to look at the apartment since the previous tenants had left. When I told her what was up there, she said if I took the place she would knock off $200 ... from the security deposit.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago* (1 child)

    I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it's in the neighborhood of a 6X increase (without factoring in inflation). Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of "financial aid" which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it's quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college's tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they're going to charge kids from better-off families.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 hours ago* (4 children)

    I grew up next to the Cuyahoga in the 1970s. It wasn't the part that caught fire (which was in Cleveland) but I have no idea why not. The river was chock full of old tires, rusting oil and chemical barrels, and there was a sheen of oil (or god knows what) over everything. All the industries in the town along the river (which included and still includes the factory that makes that green foam shit florists stick flowers in) had giant pipes that emptied all their shit right into the river. People still used to fish there, which is just mind-boggling.

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