I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

I hear this argument against unionization all the time:

During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

Ditto. I started my linux journey with Slackware 1.0 that I got in a book. I quickly got tired of dual booting so I picked up a used 486dx66 on Craigslist. It even came with a green on black 12" CRT! I took a class and started hacking on the kernel to learn the innards. I fixed a semaphore issue, improved the task scheduler for performance and constantly rebuilt the kernel for performance (before modularized drivers were a thing). I learned not to panic from a kernel panic.

Slackware’s “package manager” was a notepad next to the computer. I switched to debian later and loved the whole idea of a package manager. Mostly because it was a trove of free software, but also because it would handle all the dependencies for me and cleanly uninstall (at a time when disk space was valuable).

Those were the days! Long live apt & apt-get!

For those too lazy to click through to the article and don’t know what an Ai Pin is;

The Humane Ai Pin is a wearable, internet-connected AI device designed to offer a phone-free way to interact with an AI assistant from anywhere.

I’ve installed much tile and tend to notice these things. Uneven grout lines, one tile set higher than its neighbours, uncaulked gaps visible between the tile and wall or tub. I also notice, bad kerning (SFW).

I have the same policy with public toilets. If you flush at the start to verify that it’s working and flush at the end then it’s double the flushes. That’s why I only flush at the start. All my coworkers complain, but they’re not concerned with the environment like me! So wasteful!