#yet that’s the thing I keep getting jobs/money for

[hedgiwithapen]

Leverage timetravel, pre pilot/child ot3 meet their redemption era selves

(I took some liberties re: /meeting/) In hindsight, visiting the US Patent office was probably not their smartest move.  Never return to the scene of the crime, and all, at least not if the job was finished. 

But they'd put a pin in going back for the time machine, and not even a really bad idea could deter Hardison from an actual time machine. Well. Portal, like Eliot had said. 

It hadn't come with an instruction manual, but the three of them, Hardison, Parker, Eliot were professionals at figuring things out on the fly . Even lost in the past. Even scattered. 

Hardison knew he just had to wait, though. They'd find each other. They'd lived through the past once, they could deal with it again, especially knowing everything they did. And it wasn't like they had to live through the whole span of years, either. They just had to find each other, put the pieces back together, scattered with them, and go home. Easier said than done--he was starting to think they might have ended up in different times--but still, the Estimated range was fifteen to twenty years, so that was only five max before they met up, right?

Hardison had gotten right to work. Ads in every major newspaper in the heartland cost plenty, but he had years of criminal practice on top of knowing what tech to invest in, so he really wasn't that worried. He guessed Eliot would be betting on sports games, like in Back to the Future. Parker... well, it was hard to guess where she was. Once he and Eliot met up, they'd have to wait for her to get to them. He did have a few things to do, first.

He knocked on Nana's door, feeling like maybe he ought to be wearing a bow tie. 

"What is it? You from the county?" she asked, when she opened the door. He could see behind her a few curious faces, including his own. Damn, he'd been so tiny. 

"Yes, Ma'am," he said brightly. He could remember this day, vaguely. The box he held was more familiar than his adult face. "I'm here to install your new computer."

"I didn't order any computer," Nana said. "Run your scam someplace else."

"It's not a scam!" he heard his own voice say. "I entered a contest at school."

He had. And he'd lost. Stupid Jake Puckett had won, a kid who could have easily afforded a computer. Alec hadn't known that though, until Hardison'd checked idly. And he wasn't about to just let all of history change. Well, all his own history. 

"You got some proof of that?" Nana asked, and Alec went  scampering off to his room to find his copy of the essay.

Satisfied with the expertly forged documents (wow! it was much easier to forge past documents when you were in the time they were from!) Nana let him in and pointed to a corner desk near an outlet. 

"You ever use your own one of these?" Hardison asked Alec, who shook his head. " just the one at school. I really won?"

"Sure did. Now, let me show you what this thing can do."

~

Eliot stood at the edge of the field, a newspaper crumpled in his hand. Hardison was in Boston, if the ad was right, and of course the ad was. No one else put that much effort into a coded message. 

He watched the football fly. In two weeks, the kid throwing it would be on a bus to boot camp. He closed his eyes. There were options.  Kid wouldn't believe him, of course. There were no secrets yet, to spill as proof. And he was too stubborn to buy the warning.  A good solid tackle, though. Break his arm bad enough...

He'd thought about it. And then about the what ifs. The blood would still be spilled, he knew that. Someone else would end up on Moreau's chain. Someone else would end up with a half dug grave for Flores, and maybe keep digging it.  Everything he'd done for money, the money'd go to someone else. Job might not get done, or it might. 

He'd be there for his mother's funeral. He'd miss Katherine Clive's. Rebecca Ibanez.  the way the drinking might have gone... he'd miss Nate Ford's.  He'd go to school, like his dad wanted, never play college ball. Study something-- art history, maybe -- but no, that was him now. Not him then. Him then would be angry and broken. Him then wouldn't have... his people.

He crumped the paper further. "Dammit, Hardison," he said quietly, and walked away. 

~

Parker had a code. Some things, you just didn't do. Some were big and flashy and obvious. Some were smaller, quieter. 

Hardison would say she shouldn't do this, she knew, and she usually listened to Hardison. He knew what he was talking about, most of the time. You can't change the past. That'd been part of the lecture before they'd gone to steal the time machine.  You can do things, sure, but you always did them. 

Well, Parker hadn't done this. No one had, back the first time she'd lived through this day. But she was doing it anyways, breaking his rule and her own. You don't steal from kids who don't have anything. 

Carefully, she picked the lock on the child's bicycle chain. 

[octopustoaster]

Told my mom that I applied to a fellowship to study lesbian vampire representation in modern media and she sighed and went “are you trying to become the world’s leading expert in lesbian vampires? Your room is filled with books on it, you’ve written a dozen papers, you’ve taught a class, and now you’re applying to a fellowship. If people ask me what my son does for a living am I going to have to say he studies lesbian vampires?” Like yes sorry that is what the answer will be <3 Don’t worry mom when I finish my fellowship and publish my book on lesbian vampires that 3 academics will buy you’ll have something to show for raising me.

[sergle]

yall are about to piss me off by not having any PASSING basic knowledge of the way the u.s. military manipulates its recruits into joining by typing up one of your uninformed, unresearched, unempathetic, individualistic, unbelievably annoying posts about how 100% of the people in the military ended up there because they just Love America So Damn Much! they're extremely mature and informed at time of recruitment, they can totally leave anytime they want, they totally had tons of other avenues in life they could've taken, there was no rush at all to get income as fast as possible, and everyone in the military also totally is part of the combat divisions and personally enjoys being IN the military very much, big believers of violence. everyone in the military is shooting guns all day, that's how that works. they LOVE BLOODSHED. also I love the "amewicans haha" twang to this type of shit because you're actually TOTALLY stealing our Thing, which is turning systemic issues into Individual Issues. Instead of talking about the powers that be, it's so Personal Choice up in here. It's, "well you shouldn't have done it then. I totally wouldn't because I know better." you don't wanna talk about the military industrial complex as a whole, and you don't want to talk about recruiters, you just want to pin the blame on Specific Individual People one-by-one, as if they're responsible for the system that they're being ground up in. someone was in the military? bad person, no matter what. it's easier to believe that, I guess, than to acknowledge that Normal People (with high school educations) are manipulated and incentivized into joining a system that is Bad. at like age 18. but yeah no that 18 year old should have just been smarter lol haha anyway here are some screenshots for no particular reason

side note this reply of someone going "umm just get loans and go into a high paying field it's easy XD" as a direct response to someone trying to explain how most americans joining the military are being funneled in that direction out of a need for money.

and another person who Decided that americans join the military just CLENCHING their teeth thinking of other people, and not thinking completely selfishly about their own selves and their own income/housing/healthcare.

[envolvenuances]

and I think child modelling should be illegal I'm not even joking

[thekingdomofdong]

love that i applied for a job back in may, dont interview for it till july, i think it went p well, told i wont hear back till near the end of august just to be told i didnt get it im so sick of job hunting and just want to blow my brain out and be done with it

[autumnalhalcyon]

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[summerlycoris]

Guess whos potentially working a triple tomorrow?????????

Im going to transform into my final form if this shit keeps up i swear to god.

[direful]

i'm so fucking tired

[void-tiger]

What do I want? I want to be seen as a peer.

[dropthecop]

adult job i hate you

[yuukimiyas]

(*´ч ` *) happy tues to you all!! poppin by w some fresh coffee & a lil donut to kickstart your day!! i hope its as great as you!! <33

[binch-i-might-be]

not to sound like a broken record but I really do wish I had time to work on all my projects or just. write at all

[devils-little-sista]

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[vesselrae]

aaaaa my drs note got rat fucked for EI so im on No funds at all again

[tidepoolalgae]

soooo I thought maybe the ACA is helping me have health insurance but maybe even qualifying for medicaid removes you from the marketplace benefits pool. So I might have to pay like $3000 at the end of the year because my estimated tax credit won't go through but I guess we'll see! 😭👎

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.