kevin_standlee | Darn Computers

Despite someone online who seemed to think that unless you were making multiple millions of dollars per year, you can't possibly be "well off," and that anyone else was obviously a pauper, I think I'm pretty well off. I have a good job with excellent health insurance, own my home, could pay off the mortgage if I had to do so and still have more than $1 million in my 401(k) account, and am technically considered economically "upper class" where I live, because my income puts me in the bottom of the upper quartile. No, I'm not a multi-millionaire, but I sometime wonder if those people are leveraged to the hilt and are teetering on bankruptcy. I live a pretty comfortable upper-middle-class existence.

The Day Jobbe is important, of course, so I try not to get too grumpy when work gets intense, as it has been of late. It does mean that we have work to do and we're not under threat of job reductions.

Meanwhile, my new computer keeps throwing more updates at me. You'd think it would have had enough by now, but no, every day there seems to be something else. I also still have to keep telling it variations of "No, I don't want you to install lots of marketing software so you can try and extract more money from me."

I hope eventually I will have enough time and energy to figure out why the computer seems to know that the 15 TB network hard drive is out there, but won't let me map it to the new machine.

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From:

a_cubed

It used to be that a GNU/Linux box would get updates for software every couple of days but the core system would only get updated every few weeks or longer. Now, it seems like there's lots of updates every day and system stuff at least once a week, often more frequently. I still tend to only actually re-boot once every couple of weeks because the current system I use (KDE/Wayland) doesn't save my session properly and I have to spent 5-10 mins resetting all the windows properly for my multi-flow workspace (main, teaching, research, personal).

But, I'm on Fedora which is a quick updating GNU/Linux. Perhaps others are less aggressive at rolling out minor updates.

cmcmck

Truoble in the UK is that being 'comfortably off' as we are makes people assume that that equals rich.

kevin_standlee

Yep. And there appear to be people who think that the natural order of things is for a tiny number of people to have all wealth and power, and for every other person (at least 99.9% of all people) to be a slave. And those super-wealthy people don't think that this will eventually get them killed when the rest of the population gets tired of it.

belak

I'm glad you're not under threat of reductions at Day Jobbe, but am surprised, as the ports are shutting down and shipping/trucking traffic is reduced significantly.

Amazing what "wealthy" is compared to when I was a child. Millionaires were rare, or at least, that I knew of. Now, just owning land in California will often put you in that class in most urban/suburban areas!

Yeah, but not where I owned (and still own) land. I was lucky to get $10K (and out from under paying property taxes) to sell my grandparents home in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I still own a one-third interest in property I inherited from my mother, and I'd be happy to unload it, again, so I could stop paying property taxes. I keep paying the taxes in memory of my mother, essentially.

There may be other parts of the company that will face trouble, but I'm on a specific account whose prospects are pretty good at the moment, and they are moving plenty of material. I can't say more, of course.

I TOTALLY understand you can't be more specific, I used to work on backends of some important machines/businesses and I was warned never to mention specifics. Likely there is code I wrote or implemented still lingering around, but don't ask me to remember it or how it works anymore from decades ago when I was working on it!

I'm glad you're safe, considering that in many fields, Rome is falling around everyone, possibly.

I get it on the property issues. I own a piece in the mountains that cannot be sold except in specific conditions. I keep it for similar reasons and pay similar taxes, as memories are golden for me. More than worth it in my opinion.

Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

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June 2025

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