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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Evita Duffy-Alfonso said on the social platform X that she nearly missed her flight after opting out of a body scan because she said she is pregnant and concerned about radiation exposure. She said she waited 15 minutes for a pat-down

    If taking an extra 15 minutes to go through security is causing you to almost miss your flight, then you’re already not arriving at the airport early enough. Shit happens. Gate changes occur. Overbooked flights are a thing. Long lines at bag check or security happen without any apparent notice or reason. Even something like unexpected traffic getting to the air port is common.

    and that TSA agents were “rude” and “tried to pressure” her into walking through the scanner.

    Welcome to the world the rest of us live in where the average citizen has to be the calm and collected one in the confrontation when dealing with law enforcement lest you earn their ire (or be shot because they’re nervous or angry).



  • Sure, it can happen. The anecdote sounds ludicrous to me: gatekeeping someone with that much experience over checking a box like that.

    This is surprisingly common in many industries. It was one of the reasons I went back and got a degree as a working adult. It worked and I was able to land jobs that had that requirement which was a springboard into higher earning work. It was so strange the first time it happened. I got a call from a old coworker I hadn’t seen or heard from in about 12 years. He was a boss then looking to hire for a lucrative position. We talked for a bit to catch up, he said I had the skills he wanted then almost as an afterthought he said “Oh, uh, do you have a Bachelors degree?” and I said, for the first time in an employment situation “yes”. His response was “okay, sounds good. Show up on Monday, you’ve got the job”. That was it. Without being able to say “yes” there I would not have gotten that job. In the years since, received that same question and gave the same answer in a number of jobs after than each with increasing salary and benefits.

    Also, no one asks when you got the degree. Everyone always assumes you got it after high school as is done traditionally.




  • Going back to school when you’re employed means debt, earning way less or nothing during your bachelor or master, stress, opportunities you’re not aware of because you’re simply not at your workplace anymore

    Don’t quit your day job. Do school in your non-work hours. This is how I did it. I stayed professionally employed and I went back at 30 years old. I did school for about 3 years part-time to get a 2-year Associates degree. Because I went with Community College and did only 1 or 2 classes per term, I never had to take on debt.

    I used that Associates degree and got a better paying job that also came with a tuition reimbursement program. It paid 75% of books and tuition up to a certain dollar figure per year (IRS limit). Again, because I was going to school part-time in my off-hours, I simply never exceeded that IRS limit to extra the maximum reimbursement. I finished by Bachelors degree before turning 40. Again, I graduated with zero debt because I kept my professional employment and used the tuition reimbursement benefit. With that Bachelors degree I was able to get an even better job which lead to significant pay raises in the years that passed.

    So, I disagree with your original premise that going back to school as a working adult has to means unemployment, debt, and loss of income. I’m not going to say what I did was easy, but what I did a little while ago is also still possible today. I have a close friend that is a year older than me that got his Associates around the same time I did using the same “keep your day job, do school partime” method, but he didn’t start his Bachelors when I did. However, he did so later. He graduates, getting his Bachelors, in two months from now!


  • As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don’t quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I’m certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I’ll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.

    Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.












  • so we can actually see what our friends do all day

    Friend: “So you get paid to spend the day periodically typing on your computers, surrounded by lots of large monitors, and several times a day you have video calls with people where you use so much jargon that the conversation is almost entirely divorced from the English language? You just finished an hour long meeting where I overheard every word from both sides of the conversation, and I have no idea what the hell either of you were talking about.”

    Me: “yes, that about sums it up”


  • 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.