Presidents Musk & Trump

This is really insulting to the real President: Musk.

should we be using APIs?

Nah, it’s a fad.

I’m a programmer. In 2010 I had a boss come up to me and tell me we should start using APIs. He had just read an article about how APIs were the next big thing. Fortunately he had a short attention span and soon wandered off and never mentioned APIs again, and I was able to get back to work on the awesome Blackberry app I was writing.

I used to work for a small software company in Louisiana. Part of our “business model” involved a $12 million per year bit of federal government pork that was granted to an organization that had a fancy-sounding name but was administered by one of our employees who operated out of a closet-sized office in a different building. For some reason our company was not able to just pocket this money (which I’m sure would have been our preference), so instead the money (which was ostensibly meant for improving industrial processes in the state) was given to a large defense industry corporation - not in Louisiana - and in return we were given lucrative consulting contracts by this corporation. Somewhat hilariously, my company was never on the list of this corporation’s approved contractors but we got the gigs anyway, which always prompted the people we worked with to question what the hell we were doing there in the first place.

Naturally enough, the owners of my company were conservatives (who prayed to Jesus to end company-wide meetings) who liked to rant about the “welfare queens” destroying this country.

The one thing keeping me going is that one day I’ll get to wake up to his obituary.

Sometimes I wonder if Trump actually died during his first term and was replaced by a (much younger) body double. I mean, is that something they wouldn’t be able to get away with?

Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor’s house it would be more than $3.

I had a boss years ago and I knew everything about his financial situation because he had hired me to trade S&P500 futures with/for him. He had about $20 million in stock, a beach house in South Carolina worth a couple million, and he owned a temp agency that paid him about $40,000 a month, so he was certainly rich by any normal human standards. But he had moved from San Francisco and was friends with a bunch of venture capital types who were all worth more than a couple of hundred million dollars, and it was obvious that his (relative) poverty absolutely burned him to his core. This was why he imagined that day-trading futures was going to be his key to the really big time - he could never see that the brokerages we dealt with were just scamming him.

My favorite thing about smartphones is that the “call” icon is an old-school telephone handset. I’ll bet younger people have never thought about what that thing is even supposed to be. My second-favorite is the gear icon for “settings” - like, what the fuck does a gear ring have to do with a list of options you can select? That isn’t even remotely close to what gears are used for in real-world mechanical devices.

I’m a school bus driver, and last year right before Christmas we had a notice put up banning Christmas decorations on the buses. We eventually learned that this was because a couple of parents had complained about the pro-Christianity bias of Christmas decorations, which was strange because nobody had put anything on their buses other than the standard secular red-and-green shit; like, nobody put up Jesus or manger scenes or anything like that. We then learned that the actual complaints had been about drivers encouraging the children to sing religious Christmas songs.

It turned out that the culprit was me, because I had asked the kids if they could sing “The Little Drummer Boy”. None of the (60+) kids on the bus had ever heard it so I guess some of them asked their parents about it. Ironically, I’m a fucking atheist - I just like the tune. Fortunately the ban caused a giant shit storm as all the other parents in the district complained about it and it was rescinded. For bonus points, it eventually led to the firing of the district superintendent (who was a shitbag for lots of other reasons).