Mandatory minimums for those who break the public trust. Harsh ones.

I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.

Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.

On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’

Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.

Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).

I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.

Can part of it be skatepark laser tag?

Can confirm! I still have my 2$ bill from Woz.

Woz may be the nicest person I’ve ever met. I hope he’s ok.

I was actually trying to express the same sentiment to my wife about her grandfather just this morning. Less crudely but also less eloquently.

That was my first real experience with Linux!

My little brother bought one open box from Best Buy. Somehow it didn’t have keyboard or trackpad drivers? Not even external usb would work.

Ended up putting Ubuntu on it for him I believe. Fun learning experience.

Man, Cheryl Gallant sends me enough crazy flyers already.

Yes and no.

Tl:dr I should be dead but I’m not.

My health has become a monkeys paw. False anaphylaxis and seizures I can work around but the medication has made me healthy enough to gain weight and muscle. Then my boss gave me a very physical job. While I put on 35 pounds of muscle the doctors added osteoporosis to the symptoms list of my disease.

So now I’m strong enough to break my own bones if I’m not careful. And have dealt with chronic pain for long enough that twice now I’ve been to the hospital and discovered months old fractures because ‘it doesn’t hurt that much’. Soooo fuck me I guess?

Layer on top of that a bunch of gender identity issues and delayed puberty(second? I dunno I’m 36 with a proceeding hairline and my pecks are visibly bigger than last week) and I feel like im turning into a monster. My wife says a sexy monster which does help a bit. Pro-tip: don’t complain to your overweight wife about your anxiety around becoming physically attractive.

But I have a meeting in January to start a research project and pivot a bunch of my time at work to research and software development. I work at a lumber mill? My boss may be a complete fuckshow when it comes to safety but he’s a pretty nice guy and lets me work how I work. I do make him a buttload of money. I’ve learned to run a planer, filing cnc, front loaders and their kilns. One of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten was this year when after 18 months working the kilns they told me ‘there’s things you can do better but they are matters of diminishing returns for us so we’d like you to focus on something new’. They expected that timeline to be 5 years. I’ve developed spreadsheets and algorithms to track and extrapolate moisture data for my lumber. I led a skunkworks dev team in Turkey to make an OCR app and deployed it at work for the basis of an inventory system. One of my projects this summer is to expand that system to their entire yard from my purview at the kilns. I’ve made and iterated processes for their saw filing and tracking and eliminated about 30k/week of downtime. I’m fucking killing it honestly but still feel like shit about myself. I struggle a lot with whether I’m actually smart or just good at reading. There may not be a practical difference. I would like to be paid more. Im considering the startup route and founding my own company but having access and resources of the mill would be a huge help for development so subsidiary company? I don’t know. My boss is the kind of stupid where he gives a former apple employee a computer but no IPA so I’ve got some cards to play.

My wifes grandfather passed away last week. We moved in with him and gramma 7 years ago when I went on disability and they needed home care. Gramma is in a long term care facility with PSP(super-Parkinson’s) now. My wife is an absolute saint. He gave us a place to live when I was sick and I owe him a lot of who I am. I also knew him longer than any but 1 of my own grandparents. It’s really hard. Also the 6th person to die around Christmas since 2016 so we are pretty well done with the whole month. We don’t even know if her dad committed suicide on the 26th or 27th. Fuck Christmas.

But our time spent caring for the grandparents and various other circumstances means that we might be able to buy/inherit the house! We might own a house! Ahhh the millennial dream! Start work at 11 years old, work in 9 different industries, have 6 years of disability off work and save up just enough of a down payment to inherit a house! It’s pretty fraught. Just the whole melancholy and juxtaposition of moving upstairs and having windows again because an amazing person died is a bit too much.

And like…my dad tried to start a cult so I’m glad they’re getting divorced but having been the person to ‘not cause it, but you did open my eyes a bit’ is all sorts of fun to process. Sorry/Thanks mom. She is doing a lot better now so that’s nice. My dad not so much. Not sure if I have it in me to see him at Christmas. But as mentioned previously and statistics I worry about suicide at this time of year.

But hey! I’m autistic, high school diploma, post-traumatic and non-specific traumatic stress disorders, cycle food and environmental allergies on a weekly basis, 25+ fractures through my body, had fucking scurvy twice, 6 years off work in total and I make my national median wage, I’ve got a job that I can keep for as long as I want it, a boss who actually accommodates my disabilities and weirdness, an amazing wife, two dogs and too many cats, I look better than I ever have and my doctor told me to write my will at 21. I’m 36 now so fuck all y’all.

If anyone read all that thank you! If not it still feels good to just put it down in words.

I posted this in another comment in this thread. This poem always comes back to me when I hit these moments or these threads. Any suggestions on how to get ‘thissus offeroede thissus swae maeg’ as a tattoo without looking like a Viking fascist nutjob?

http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Deor

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant

Who was very rarely stable

🎶🎵

If you listen on Amazon’s ad free feed only 1/3rd is plugs and ads rather than half!

Great content but I can’t take the amount of plugging and begging he does. I get it. Journalism is genuinely in trouble but he’s got to find a better balance or pitch.

Lmao exactly.

I work at a lumber mill and made the GM cry in the break room one day. All I said was ‘I see you man’ after talking about the stress he takes on.

He’s a very different person with me now.

‘Compassionate Masculinity’ is how I described one of my managers at the Apple Store. He taught me a lot through his example.

That’s amazing. What’s cool design and it actually looks playable if difficult.

Maybe tws earbuds with transparency mode? I’ve found it helps me hear voices more clearly and it allows for adjustable volume.

Best: I’m good at it and I self taught in 18 months what was supposed to take 5 years. Having something(s) to take pride in is strange and nice.

Worst: I’m bored now but very busy.

This was a very hard question to answer in a short format. Well done.

This is one of the key deficits in modern liberal politics that will cause democracy to fall. I can totally understand the arguments for why political assassinations are regarded as more or less ‘not worth it’ but there reaches a point where a nation-state as pseudo-person in and of itself must practice self-defense up to and including arguable murder.

Napoleon being the classic example. Hitler after the Putsch another. Letters from a Birmingham Jail in a more positive light. There are figures in politics from whom flows such charisma and control that a polity, a democracy, a nation-state must choose to integrate or extirpate the figurehead of a threat.

What happens with Trump in jail? Civil war. What happens with trump as President? Civil war. What happens with trump assassinated? Still civil war but against disparate movements with no leading figure.

Fuck all you Americans for letting it get this far. Someone should’ve stomped on New Gingrich’s face back in 94. Y’all let Mitch McConnell Weimar your republic. Your liberals and neutered leftists have failed the world. Fuck you all.

Fight.

I have an underwood typewriter that I fixed and used for the guest book at my wedding. It sits as a decoration now as there’s not much use to it.

I do love that font though.

A templatable OCR app that maps areas or shapes to excel fields.

If you have a product tag with different serial numbers or product details and a standard layout it would be really useful to be able to scan for a tag shape, apply an overlay with each block of relevant data and then map that block to a cell address.

Take photo of product tag x100 OCR and edge find on product tag Select/draw areas Assign areas to spreadsheet cell or column. Apply and check with second photo. Confirm function and process next 97 images automatically.

Thought of it for work but would be great for food labels and nutrition information collation as well. All sorts of paper->digital stuff.

Typically yes and again I understand the argument but what else?

Should Napoleon been given the opportunity to return from Elba? Should Hitler have had the chance to assume the Chancellorship after the Reichstag fire?

There’s a risk and balance to all action especially in geopolitics. I doubt someone like Kissinger would give a different assessment if our morals aligned.

Gaining weight can be HARD.

One of the things I’ve personally struggled with is how much these conversations and resources are focused on how to lose weight or not gain weight. But there are some of us who have various disabilities and conditions that make getting up to a healthy weight incredibly difficult. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to increase my calorie intake without resorting to simple sugars and carbs as my job has gotten somewhat out of hand. I may go to 4 meals a day? I kind of hate eating so it probably won’t work.

I have MCAS and wasn’t diagnosed until my mid thirties. Lowest I weighed myself at was 138lbs at 6’4” tall. You could see when I needed to pee I was so skinny. Mosquitoes stopped biting me. I hit 170lbs at 12 years old, got sick and then hit it again at 32. I weighed myself at 213 last week so I’m officially more than half again what I used to weigh. I look and feel so much better it’s kind of crazy.

I’d be happy to answer any questions people in similar situations may have. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve tried ask people about this topic and have been simply laughed at. Or put down by comments belittling it as a problem and expressing jealousy. That said, my advice may not be useful to a plurality of people.

Learn about food on a biochemical level to some degree. Find out what makes a complete protein. Figure out your circadian rhythm and good times of day for you to eat. Pay attention to the amounts of what you’re putting in your body and adjust accordingly.

Pay attention to your cravings. If you’re craving potato chips try to think about what it is in them that you are actually looking for(salt) and address that specific craving with a healthier option if required. It takes some trial and error but one can train themselves to crave components over foods. Do you want cake or do you want that mouthfeel? Or the fat? Or the sweetness?(a big revelation for me is that I rarely crave sugar, I actually want the comfort food aspect of sweetness which is much easier to address is a healthy way) Also learn when to ignore your body and when it is lying to you. A good place to start on this front is that you are thirsty for water(specifically water) right now. There’s a sort of evolutionary drive to restrict our water intake to the bare minimum because clean water is expensive typically and prepared beverages were often safer. Where one has potable water flowing from taps this efficiency bias becomes a lie and you should really just drink more water.

Cook from scratch if you have the space. It’s a lot to learn and I was very lucky to grow up in a household that provided this focus. Don’t learn to cook unhealthy things. It’s much easier to not buy a deep frier and never learn to deep fry foods than it is to avoid the temptation of delicious fried goods every day. The crucible for me on this is that I’m terrible at making eggs but amazing at pancakes and I found a lesson in my breakfast. If you learn to make tea biscuits or scones vs cookies then you’ve limited what level of trash you can feed yourself.

If you can’t cook at home or don’t have the time find good restaurants or how to shop differently. Pad Thai from a takeaway is just as fast and cheap but can be significantly better than a Big Mac or pizza. Bag of greens or head of lettuce, Fresh bread, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cheese and a rotisserie chicken or chunk of salami(pate or Creton is great too) makes a delicious meal that will keep for a day or two without refrigeration and is reasonably healthy. Makes a 5$/meal if you’re careful with the meat and cheese. This is one of my preferred road trip foods because you get to try different bakeries and cheeses and meats along your route.

People talk a lot of about rice and beans being a healthy cheap staple and I always like to point out peanut butter and jam sandwich’s fall into a similar category. It makes a complete protein, if you’re able to add cows milk it’s a good boost of vitamin d, complex and simple sugars in the jam satisfy cravings and give longer term energy, fat in the peanut oil, etc etc. It’s also very cheap and low entry investment. Under 10$ for starting with big jars of peanut butter and a loaf of bread that gives you 2-3 days of food and another 2$ or so every 2-3 days until the jam runs out. No learning or equipment required. Houseless friendly. Wide cultural acceptance. Good for hanger.

Listen to this guy. I’ve lived the shift he’s prompting you take.

It’s incredibly hard to describe. People start to see it on you I think.

From my experience it seems to be in the way I look at people differently and how my body language has shifted. I’m face-blind so it’s hard for me to say for sure but I think people can see that I’m looking for positivity and a way to compliment them or brighten their day.

And if you’re trying to get laid… Holy shit. Give a genuine thank you and compliment someone of the same sex on your dates. Show your romance for the world and not just the person across the table. It really really works.