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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Here’s a nice quote from The Communist Manifesto:

    What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

    It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen…

    We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate… Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people…

    A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

    Ah shit, never mind. This was from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations




  • It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.

    Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.

    90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.


  • I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.

    I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.

    My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on Scripting.Dictionary which is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.

    Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.




  • I’m all for American versions of things, but please get these staples of British cuisine right.

    Kind of ironic this is where you’re making a stand.

    The first known use of the recipe for pig in a blanket, the American cuisine, was in 1940 by the US military.

    The first known use of the recipe for pigs in blankets, the British cuisine, was in 1957 and was inspired by British soldiers who tried the American version during WWII.


  • droans@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldReal
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    8 months ago

    My TV came with a five year warranty - two year manufacturer, two years Costco, and one year from my Costco credit card.

    My washer and dryer got seven. Same deal, but Costco was offering an extra extended warranty plan for free.

    The best part is that they design their warranties to run consecutively instead of concurrently. Unfortunately, Citi got rid of the extended warranty with the Costco credit cards about a year and a half ago.






  • If the slide has all the information, then it’s a poor slide deck.

    The slides are supposed to be an outline. The rule of thumb is max seven lines and max seven words per line.

    Here’s a couple examples.

    Good slide:

    • Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
    • Industry trends
    • Low demand for new products
    • Strong demand for XYZ

    Also good slide, depending on who you’re presenting to:

    • Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
    • Industry: -3%
    • New products: -30%
    • XYZ: +4%

    Bad slide:

    • Revenue is 10% below estimate
    • Industry has seen a 3% drop in sales
    • New products ABC and MNO have had a 30% lower demand than we expected
    • Product XYZ has higher demand than anticipated with sales 4% higher than estimate

    All the extra information on the bad slide can be delivered by the presenter. It’s not necessary on the slide. The slide is for people to glance at to assist them during and after the presentation and to help them anchor themselves in the discussion.





  • OpnSense would be the easiest way if you wanted to go. It’s still not easy, but the articles online should help you out.

    First you’d need a machine. I’ve got an m920q I bought off eBay for $135 after shipping.

    The computer will likely only have one Ethernet port. And it’s likely the port is Realtek which isn’t supported well.

    So, you’ll need to get yourself a NIC (a fancy term for a network card). There are good forum posts and articles online about the best NICs to buy for your needs. Intel is a must. However, you can find many of their NICs online labeled as another brand - usually HP, Lenovo, or Dell. Again, the forum posts will tell you what to look for.

    If you bought the same computer I mentioned above, you’ll also need a riser and a bezel. Amazon and eBay will have a good selection.

    Now assemble it. Flash the computer with OpnSense. Don’t plug it in as your router yet. Follow along with some basic setup guides online to figure out how you want it configured.

    Once you’re happy, plug it in as your router and test that it works. If not, you’ll need to put your old router back in place until you can figure out what you need to change.



  • droans@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlMust win
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    1 year ago

    They haven’t had an expansion franchise since 2002 and it’s unlikely it’ll happen any time in the near future. 32 teams is perfectly balanced - each conference has 16 teams and four divisions. Each division has four teams.

    It would also be very expensive.

    You’d need a stadium that met the NFL standards. The average stadium costs about $2B. Fortunately for her (and unfortunately for the rest of us), taxpayers on average pay about $1.2B of that. We’ll be very generous and assume they paid even more or she received a substantial loan that will be paid off otherwise, leaving her with about $250M out of pocket.

    It should be noted that the opposite is more often true for expansion teams, though. Cities don’t want to pay for the stadium because there’s more risk with new teams. They could decide to leave very quickly, the owners might not have the capital to keep the team afloat, etc. The Texans were the last expansion team and nearly all of the cost for their stadium was privately funded.

    Now, the NFL also charges a fee for expansion teams. This mostly has to be a guesstimate because we haven’t seen one in two decades. The Texans paid $700M at the time so we can assume it would be closer to $1.5B now.

    After that, you have the practice facilities and offices. Cities don’t usually cover that. You might be able to get away with using local facilities for a couple of years, but that won’t be enough to actually create a competitive team. A safe low-end estimate for this would be $150M. The Cowboys paid $1.5B for their facilities, but other teams have paid as low as $125M.

    Finally, the last big cost is payroll. This by itself would sink any chance she has.

    The NFL requires all guaranteed contracted salaries to be placed in escrow. I’m not sure where that rule came from, but I can probably guess Al Davis is to blame. A single year’s salary would be $225M for 2023 and around $240M for next season.

    However, most of the big name players have guarantees that would destroy that. The most common is a signing bonus. Teams love them because the salary cap rules would allow them to amortize it over the length of the contract, including “void years”. Your QB would receive about $200M immediately upon signing. The expansion draft picks and early draft picks would be another $300-500M likely. In the end, the salary escrow plus bonuses would be about $500M-1B.

    So assuming everything goes her way, she’d be on the hook for close to $2.5B immediately plus the reoccurring costs.

    It should also be noted that the NFL isn’t really a great way to make money as an owner. It’s really just a long term retirement hobby for billionaires. They could just go invest in companies or whatever, but they buy NFL teams because they like football and it occupies their time. Yeah, they’ll make money, but not as much as they otherwise could. There’s a reason most owners hate the idea of a super-billionaire like Bezos owning a team.