They understand all that. What they don’t understand is that the in-group will keep shrinking until they’re no longer in it.

Oh, you definitely wonder how long you can keep up with the corpo bullshit, but that wasn’t the vibe I was getting from the first panel. That was giving me more of a “junior engineer who can’t get something to work” vibe.

I’ve traded half my pay for more fulfilling work and less corpo bullshit before, but I didn’t quit engineering. I see some people dreaming about leaving it all behind and buying a farm, but what they all had in common was zero farming experience. The grass is always greener and all that.

I’ve never hired a software consultant, but most of the time when I hire a company or person to do contract work like roofing, gardening or similar they prefer to be paid by check. Sometimes they accept credit cards, but usually not when the bill is over a certain amount, due to the cut going to the card company.

Furthermore, “Direct Deposit” is basically a special term used for people getting their wages or salary paid to their bank account, as opposed to receiving it by check or cash. Other types of bank-to-bank transfers have different names, like “wire transfer” or “ACH transfer”.

Americans love overcomplicating things in general, and particularly love using overly specific and technical names for stuff. There’s acronyms everywhere, and things are named after weird technicalities. Like nobody says “retirement account”, they call it “401(k)”, named after the paragraph in the law which defines it.

You find stuff like that everywhere if you look. Some of their coins don’t even have a value printed on them, you just have to memorize how much they’re worth.

I know, and I mentioned that in another thread. The first panel in the comic was giving junior engineer vibes, though.

Contract work is rarely direct deposit, though?

That’s not that outrageous as a higher-level IC in a big tech company in a big city. But if you’re that senior you’re not questioning why you became an engineer.

It doesn’t say it’s salary. A lot of companies pay out bonuses right around now.

She’s on YouTube, too.

Charcoal, probably.

You still have the right to vote as a US citizen living abroad. The only taxation without representation is of people living in the US on a visa or green card.

I’ve never seen a single episode of Magnum PI, but I regularly listen to the theme song. I think you might like it if you liked Knight Rider.

Canadian dollar bills have the Norwegian maple on them. But Norwegian “watch out for moose crossing the road” signs have a drawing of a Canadian moose on them.

More like elephants stepped on my face, am I right?

Same reason it’s called “Blu-Ray” and not “Blue-Ray”. It’s much harder to trademark a normal word.

Anything which produces heat needs cooling to maintain an even temperature. What’s uncomfortable for you is when your temperature is higher than your natural temperature due to lack of cooling.

But you do, and the blankets retain it.

Sounds overkill. They were allegedly 00000000 from 1962 to 1977, and we turned out fine!

If you haven’t heard a spoken sound in your first few years of life (I’ve even seen people claim months), it’s very hard to learn to tell the difference well. You can learn to pronounce them perfectly at any age, but a lot of the time subtly different words will be hard to distinguish if you didn’t grow up with hearing them.

Argentinians (and possibly other Spanish speakers) struggle with e.g. “peach” vs “pitch”, and worry about mispronouncing “beach”.

Some Asians famously struggle with R vs L, which seems baffling to a speaker of western languages, but if you actually look at the frequencies, they’re nearly identical sounds. We’ve just been trained from infancy to hone in on the difference to the point that it’s hard to comprehend them sounding similar to other people.

I have some smart home stuff, but if it needs the Internet to function, it’s not going into my house. And if any of it fails, the house reverts to its old, dumb self.

In my experience, tech companies, especially b2b, just don’t innovate. They coast on existing products, and just sometimes reactively implement things enough customers are asking for explicitly.