I have an aunt slowly dying of kidney disease, living on just Social Security. She got hit hard by the Medicare cuts and it hasn’t affected her love for Trump in the slightest. My mom just got a text from her where she says she’s looking forward to meeting “Jesus and Charlie Kirk” lol.

Rich people don’t pay SS taxes, essentially. There’s a cap on wages that are subject to FICA, and the truly rich don’t live off of wages anyway.

Bombast retired this app three years ago, so they at least realized they weren’t making any money off of it. It was always understood to be a loss leader of sorts, but I don’t think they were ever really fully aware that even its utility as a loss leader was being greatly exaggerated.

Bombast is strangely competent in a weird way. During my time there, I frequently worked under vice presidents (they have hundreds of these in their corporate structure) who ranged from grossly incompetent to clinically insane, but they were always disappeared within weeks of my being assigned to them. I assume they were fired and escorted out of the building immediately, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out murder.

Also strangely incompetent in weird ways. The founding Roberts died in 2015 and many people wore his signature bowtie to the corporate memorial service to honor him. The scuttlebutt was that everybody who wore a bowtie was fired shortly afterwards. I know for sure that this was the case with my own boss. I could never hope to explain why this was done.

I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.

I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.

That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?

I always liked “my body is a machine that turns childhood trauma into profits for the pharmaceutical industry.”

My body is a machine that transforms absurd requests from technically illiterate managers into overpriced bloatware.

like making it black and white except one of the strips is blue

My favorite sticker is that “thin blue balls” flag but the blue stripe is peeling off to reveal the Nazi flag underneath. I wish I had the balls to put it on my car but I absolutely do not.

Burning the flag should be allowed as long as wiping your ass with the Constitution is allowed.

Spy magazine ran a great cartoon back in the early '90s which I can’t find anywhere online. It was captioned “Clarence Thomas greets the day” and it showed him bending down on his front porch to pick up the newspaper with a negro stable boy lawn statue next to him.

In my first professional programming job writing custom software for clients in 1995, one of our standard sales pitches to clients was the idea that a GUI-based application would do away with the need for command prompts. This was always met with applause and great rejoicing. It’s kind of remarkable that command prompts are still going strong thirty years later. I’m sure nobody would appreciate having this phenomenon compared to the Amish so I won’t do it. But I think it’s pretty cool that the Amish are still around doing their thing.

the only person who helped the injured man

They took er jobs!

I enjoy asking people to name all ten commandments whenever they bring that shit up - they can never do it. “Uhhhhhh … do not cover thy ass?”

do a proofread before adding the D

Always think twice before bringing the D.

Lol “credentials”. This was done directly on the server, which was kept always logged in with the admin account so anybody in the server room could access it. It was OK though, this was just a small company … just Reliance Electric, now part of Rockwell Automation.

And you thought “security through obscurity” was bad - this was “security through apathy”.

I remember my first day of my first professional programming job back in 1996. I had just learned SQL that morning (which I’d never even heard of before) and that afternoon I forgot to add a WHERE clause to a DELETE command. Good times …

Fortunately this was in production and not in any important environment like development or test.

Where is Visual Basic in this diagram? Does nobody enhance blurry license plate pics any more?

Elephants are an endangered species!

I wrote a web app for a client back in the late '90s that is still in (heavy) use at the company. It was actually a “Classic ASP” app and they kept one old PC around to act as the server for it for a couple of decades (they eventually replaced that with a virtual machine and the app is still going). The output is straight HTML + CSS so they’ve never had any problems using it with progressively more modern browsers. Ironically, this app is a front end sitting atop an unbelievably clunky mainframe application that dates to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe application is still running as well.