My son’s group in middle school hosted their own proxy overseas. They then pirated a whole bunch of educational videos that the teachers liked to use and made nice clean interface. The games pages had no direct links on the educational videos screens. They had to type in the the page directly in the URL.

So the teachers all loved the site and gave the official “approved for all students” bypass on the districts Chromebooks. The kids had uninterrupted access to all their games.

The kids were smart enough to keep the location of the games to students with a B or higher GPA. Most of the teachers turned a blind eye to them playing games when they did get caught. The games pages also had a home button that sent the students screens to a random educational video. I was truly impressed with their clever approach.

The IT department either never caught on or enjoyed the games themselves because its still up and they are all in highschool now.

Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20’s at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It’s not a generational thing, it’s an aptitude and interest thing.

Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.

The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.

The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.

She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.

There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.

Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.

She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.

Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.

The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.

I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.

Factor label conversions. They get really complicated in chemistry as well.

Sigh… 196 was the reason I figured out how to block communities.

What’s the new ones so I can block them as well?

Hmmmm… I wonder what would cause pharmaceutical prices mysteriously drop?

Steel wool and elbow grease is what it looks like to me.

In my state they ended up passing a distracted driving law that includes eating while driving. It’s a secondary enforcement law (they can’t pull you over for it).

If you run a red light while eating a hamburger, you’ll get the primary fine (running the red light) plus another $100 fine for distracted driving.

Why? because for some people taking a drink or a bite of a burger will make them crash. This is especially true in urban areas with a ton of things a driver needs to be aware of and react to.

They are doing a major release every year. . Then they do 2-5 feature releases every year. The they do constant bug fix releases/and security updates.

Often they change shit just for the sake of changing shit with no apparent rhyme or reason. I tried to figure out how to multi-task on my work iPad. Every release they change it and it’s all hidden commands. I finally just disabled multi-tasking and use my phone as an extra screen.

It’s seriously much worse than my android phones. On my pixel I install a launcher, set it up how I like it and never see most of the changes between versions.

Large corporations rarely innovate and try new things. Most innovation comes from smaller players with limited market share taking risks.

Large companies buy out smaller ones who create cash cows from taking large risks. The large company then milks the cash cows until they are completely dead.

The consolidation of studios to a few megacorporations has led to this inevitable end. The solution is simple: break them up. If we have 30 or so similar sized studios competing, we will get better movies/TV again.

Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90’s.

Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90’s. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.

Microsoft’s business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don’t need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.

The smaller restaurants kept their prices tracking actual inflation to maintain their customer base. Lately they have been enjoying increased business because of the nationals screwups.

The local Greek place $65.

The best taco truck in town is $55.

For $75 I can get my local family owned Thai place with leftovers for the next day.

DQ, McD, Subway, KFC, all run between $60-75.

For $70 I can even get my family chipotle and enjoy the guaranteed food poisoning a few hours later.

That’s an ad for Mormons. The Mormons are a corporation disguised as a church that has gained extreme wealth. They own a huge real estate empire, universities, and farms plus over a hundred billion in one investment fund.

Thy have been caught numerous times breaking all sorts of financial laws but because of their status as a church it’s hidden.

For the Mormons it’s all about profit and hoarding wealth.

I have a strict, “do I give a fuck” policy when it comes to security.

I keep the harder to crack passwords for critical things like banking, etc… since there’s only a few I can remember them. I also always use MFA.

For all the other shit that I don’t give a fuck if it’s hacked it’s the good old *Banana$1234" type password that I reuse for decades and save to firefox’s password manager.

Most people never use all the specs. If all you are doing is browsing the Internet, watching videos, or playing some simple games, you don’t need much.

I have purchased unlocked mid-range phones for for a while now. Expensive enough to have decent specs but not so cheap that the build quality suffers. When the teenager is dropping the phone 3-4 times per day, a good case and a good build quality is required. 3 years with that type of abuse is about all you’ll get out of it.

I run two phones. For work I get one of the flagship phones. I only pull out my laptop in my office. Most of the time I am using the phone in all weather conditions. I use those specs for thousands of hi-res pictures, data entry etc… all day long. At the end of 3 years it’s toast.

Why 5-6 years, that’s about when I start seeing the cascade of little things. Weird transitory bugs when rebooting. Speed issues and compatibility issues with bloated new software etc. After that amount of time, I start to spend way too much time maintaining them.

I could tinker with them and keep them going. Its what I used to do when my kids were small. Install a Linux distro on an old computer, load a bunch of educational games and set the browser homepage to PBSkids.

However I have 5 computers to maintain now and my teenagers need compatible fast systems for college and school. My wife works from home at times and needs something that reliably works.

I have everything on a upgrade list depending on how much we use it and how fast the technology is changing.

Phones: 3 years. Thinking of moving this to 4 or 5 years with the industry’s stagnation. Starting to see some companies offering updates for longer times.

Laptops/desktops: 5-6 years.

Wifi/modem/router: 10 years.

Palatability is not related to the GMO. It’s genetics type that are used in the production.

Organically produced seed historically has been straight dent corn (older genetics in the public domain). These are softer kernals that are easier for he animals to chew. The don’t need to be ground as fine.

GMO hybrids are mostly dent x flint crosses. These have a harder shell around the outside of the kernals. It needs to be ground up finer for the animals to digest it.

This is changing recently as Bayer and Corteva are licensing out their dent x flint varieties to the organic companies.

Before you can use land to raise organic products, you must stop applying inputs like fertilizers and pesticides that are prohibited in organic production and handling.

To complete your transition to organic, your farm or ranch cannot have used any of these substances in the last three years.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/transitioning-to-organic

Doesn’t matter what crop it is. Organic certification is 3 years.

Monsanto doesn’t exist anymore. It was purchased by Bayer in an all cash deal

Bayer of course is worse