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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Wearing a suit isn’t the only way to show power.

    Tech used to dress up to the same standards as other professions in the 60’s, with their rules for conformity. Some engineers realized that they were too good to need to conform, so they dressed down, daring their bosses to fire them. Given how valuable the good engineers were, they got to keep their jobs even though they didn’t fully conform to the dress code.

    It became a statement of power. Meetings would often be decided on the person worst dressed because they were the valuable tech decision maker.

    Fast forward to when Facebook is trying to get its IPO and Mark Zuckerberg is going into meetings with financiers dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The financiers were all wearing suits, but Zuckerberg didn’t need to because they needed him more than he needed them. Zuckerberg didn’t need to dress up for bankers, bankers needed to dress up for him.

    The only time Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit as part of his work was when he was testifying in front of Congress. Why? Because Congress had power over him and that power made Mark dress up.





  • The issue with Linux is going to be if there will be a single distro that dominates or if it will be more distributed. Right now, it looks like Google and Valve are the closest to making dominant distros, but I can see at least one EU government one being created as well. If there are few distros, then I can see development getting locked to those distros rather than across all Linux.

    The same thing happened with Android, Google ended up controlling Android so the open source side got hollowed out and the closed source side controlled by Google became necessary to running Android.


  • It is important to understand the context of who defined it.

    It was mainly defined by queer people in various Latin communities as a self descriptor. LGBT acceptance within the various Spanish speaking communities in general is nowhere near universal, which explains why adoption of Latinx isn’t a thing.

    I’d only use the descriptor if I knew that a lot of people there within earshot wanted to use that description.








  • The only “influencer” that I can think of who has done anything involved in Hollywood was John Green, and he isn’t the typical influencer. Even then, his path there was to use his fame to sell his product, books, and then that product became something that Hollywood could turn into a movie.

    Outside of that, I think the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies had influencers in the cast, but I don’t see them using this to build an acting career yet.

    Usually, it isn’t that an influencer becomes a movie star, but a movie star becomes an influencer since the star can use their same to build a following online. That’s likely why studios use the follower count as a metric in getting actors for certain roles; it is a way to determine fame and the ability of the actor to pull in crowds to see a movie.


  • The American rail network was built mainly as private enterprise regulated by public agencies. This worked when rail had an effective monopoly on long distance travel, but fell apart when other modes could compete. When a major railroad (Penn Central) went bankrupt, the federal government relieved all private companies from having to maintain passenger service and the long distance trips went into Amtrak in the 1970’s.

    Until Biden, there was little public demand for building out rail transit. The Interstate system built out a decent highway network and air deregulation meant that flights got very cheap.




  • For Tony Stark, being poor makes him more of a Peter Parker equivalent. Also, having a suit of high tech armor likely means he’s sourcing his components from some very wealthy companies anyway. I feel like owning the companies feels a lot more moral than stealing from them.

    For Bruce Wayne, being poor makes him more equivalent to the Punisher. By himself, Batman has to be at odds in hiding his secret identity and, to some extent, getting lost in his alter ego. In the Justice League, Batman ends up being de facto leader a lot of times because that is because he is funding the organization and his leadership skills in Wayne Enterprises and up matching well for the Justice League.