Not meeee obviously!

Senescence maybe?

It’s bad that this scam is running of course but, I have to say this particular scam has almost a nostalgic quality to it. It reminds me of the type of trickery that old school malware back in the day used to rely on to get on to people’s computers. It’s kind of quaint how unsophisticated it is and how much active work it requires of the victim to successfully infect them.

woohoo no fascists then

Haha, did you ever try it out? Maybe it really was your life long calling.

There’s a podcast called hot money that goes in to this. Go check it out, I reckon you’ll like it

Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.

Maybe not entirely, governments probably aren’t thrilled that something that was once an obstacle to authorities when dealing with a small group of dedicated individuals now extends to huge portions of the population for any and every investigation where their communications might have helped authorities build their case so you can see why they might try and remove that obstacle for themselves.

Yeh it’s going to be every voter and non voter getting drafted so it’s really not a rational thing to wish for angry or otherwise.

ok, meet in the middle, shove a firecracker up his arse and attach some wings to him.

Can’t believe they couldn’t find a way to include one more t in that acronym, I mean come on, at this point you’re just obligated to.

This is the most obvious answer but given OP’s strong feelings on the matter, they presumably already thought this would be the best course of action and would already be doing it were it so easy. They didn’t say it directly but I think the problem they’re having is that their colleagues are not only themselves choosing to waste their time in this manner but because they are, they are expecting it of OP and it sounds like they’re having some kind of conflict about it that they’ve brought up with OP directly. I’m guessing some of them have complained to OP or indicated to them that they’re “supposed” to be ready by 12.30 even though they’re wrong.

This makes it difficult because in that scenario OP can’t simply plough on doing their job to the letter of the contract and just ignore the others, they have to choose to actively fight it out with them or just relent and start arriving early. It sounds like what they’re having the dilemma about is if it sounds reasonable to have that fight, given that although it feels important to OP, they recognise that it’s more about the principle of the matter than the objective scale of the problem. Seems like they recognise that 5 minutes of their time wouldn’t be that big a deal as their colleagues have concluded, making it seem petty or disruptive to have that fight and all the awkwardness that will ensue just for those 5 minutes, but the principle that they should have to give up any extra time at all, regardless how long, just because their workmates are doing it is troubling OP.

Depending on how whiny and motivated his colleagues are it might be advisable to pick their battles and let this go, but if they think they’re in a position to stand their ground and not have to suffer too many consequences and loss of standing with their workmates then of course they should, and even encourage others to do the same. I don’t think we have enough of an idea what their workplace is like to know which one of those situations they’re in.

I think this is a contender for the ugly stakes.

A throne that has seen so much shit, it’s become jaded.

Future topic of a chubby emu video in the making.

Isn’t jock kind of pejorative though? Athlete wouldn’t communicate the same disdain.

I was walking through one of the dodgier parts of my city fairly late at night with not too many people around. I could see these 2 drunk weirdo guys with a kind of homeless vibe. There was an older guy and a younger dude, sitting on a bench, I could hear the older guy. Imagine this with a thick crocodile Dundee Aussie accent.

“I don’t believe it, I CAN’T believe it, after all I’ve done for you. I was nice to you. I bought you cheese, I… … …”

An awkward 4 to 5 second silence followed as it slowly dawned on the older guy that his list of benevolent acts only had 1 item before he followed up with

“I bought you CHEESE mate!”

With that kind of hit rate and timescale did you ever think the apps were unnecessary vs just meeting people? Or were you not really in a position to meet people by other means anyway?

Here in Australia Trump puts us in an awkward position. For a long time we’ve meshed our interests with those of the US both necessarily and very much unnecessarily. Some say we’re the 51st state. This makes the increasing power of the US’ executive branch over the past 2-3 decades and the decision to put a joke candidate with the mind of a child in charge of that branch particularly worrying. Our politicians did what you’d expect and more or less refused to make much comment about this and publicly and emphasised the strength of our relationship with the US and how we’ll work with the incoming administration like any other. Unfortunately though we couldn’t really avoid being hit by some of the whirling shitstorm going on over there.

Last time he got his knickers in a knot about a refugee deal from the previous administration where we’d send refugees headed to Australia, to the US. I have to provide some context for that to make sense so I’ll be as brief as I can. I’ll just point out that this deal was the crowning capitulation on top of about 15 years or so of absolute bullshit xenophobia and cruelty on behalf of our successive governments who used refugees as political pawns and entered into a brinkmanship of which party could more cruel. For most of that time the public enthusiastically cheered them on but around the time of Trump’s presidency there’d finally been a seachange and the government of the day found themselves needing to avoid allowing refugees in to the country or be accused of no longer believing in cruelty to refugees as policy whilst also needing to seem maybe not quite so cruel anymore so they tried to make it the rest of the world’s problem instead by finding other countries to dump them in. This mostly involved Papua New Guinea who they paid to take them but who had little capacity to do so and also, but also a small handful of them to the US to try and take the sting out of some of the criticism about dumping them all in PNG where the locals were already threatening violence against them.

Obviously this deal would look bad for Trump given his politics. Known for his tendency to try to solve problems by personally throwing a tantrum at people, he did just that to our Prime Minister at the time in a phone call. That Prime Minister wasn’t, nor really is anyone else in our political system, known for his backbone or courage but nevertheless the leaked phone call seems to show that while he was mostly confused and bewildered by Trump’s directness and stupidity, to his credit he still didn’t give him what he wanted which was a demand to immediately cancel the deal. You could say he stood his ground, I personally think he was more just confused about what to do next probably because I assume politics doesn’t usually work that way and they’d normally operate through technocrats and underlings on anything of consequence rather than deranged phone calls but however you look at it he didn’t concede and the only consequence was that Trump had a big public sissy fit, that he somehow didn’t realise made him look even weaker, and then he just moved on to the next mess of his own making in the 20 minutes it likely took him to make it.

Basically, by that example I want to highlight that, though he is a threat, he does make things hard for us, and in general, long term, moves need to made to begin the long path of finding ways to live without such dependence upon the US, the good thing about Trump is also much of what makes him bad. He’s a baby, he’s got a very short attention span, and he doesn’t like it when he can’t win quickly by just throwing a tantrum and so it appears that when he indeed can’t, he has a little cry about it and then seems to just kind of move on and pretend he was never interested in the first place. This is a kind of silver lining because it seems like you can pretty much just ignore the dumbest of his statements and just try to put out smaller diplomatic and economic fires as he creates them. We’re still in a pretty shitty position here though because we’re so interwoven with the US culturally, economically and as far as defence is concerned entirely, that trying to untangle from that is going to be really complicated and long term and looks near impossible. Unfortunately the chickens are coming home to roost on some seriously dumb and unimaginative decisions for 30 plus years.

Been like 8 years I kind of thought it would be a little different but the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach has made a lot of money for people in the past I suppose.