Ok. Let's pretend this is what is done. Russia gets to keep all the land it took from Ukraine, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
Who's going to stop Russia from re-arming and building up its army only to launch another attack in 2-3 years? Who's going to prevent them from destabilizing Ukraine until it falls?
Russia won't stop until it has destroyed Ukraine, that much is certain. Russia only understands strength, and they won't stop until stopped by force.
But hey, peace is more important right? Maybe they should just take Ukraine, capture, torture, rape and murder all the people they deem as undesirables and convert it to another Russian oblast as it was once before. Then there will be peace.
I would imagine you would also lay down at your own home if someone breaks in and tries to rape and murder your family just for the sake of peace?
In my experience it doesn't do much. For example, I made the mistake of contributing to the campaign of a politician. Now I get texts from candidates all over the country. If I reply STOP to one, I just get sent more texts from another number, for another candidate in another state. I just got tired of replying with STOP after the 20th time. This just guarantees I'm never giving any money to any candidate ever again.
In a previous election cycle, I made the mistake of donating a few thousand dollars to several candidates. Since then, I get spammed through the year, and close to a major election, it's dozens of emails and phone calls and text messages every week.
Thankfully, Gmail catches 99% of the spam emails and my Pixel phone filters out spam texts and calls. It has a built-in Google Assistant mode that screens unknown callers with a robot voice picking up and asking them to describe what they're calling about. Most of the callers just hang up as soon as they hear that, and if they don't and actually say they're calling about so-and-so candidate, I just click the block button.
I tried to switch to iPhone for a few weeks (for iMessage), but the spam problem was SO bad (even with Robocaller and some SMS spam filtering app) that I switched back to Android. Google's spam blocking is phenomenal on the Pixel, but they barely even advertise it. It's an afterthought for them, but a lifesaver for me. My phone would be completely unusable without it.
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In the back of my mind, I keep thinking it'd be cool to have an app that automatically looks up whoever the candidate is running against and automatically donating 10 cents (or however much) to their opponent every time they spam you. "Hi, it sounds like you're running in District _____ against ______. Because of this spam, I've donated 10 cents to your opponent. So far, this app has donated $1,234 to your opponent because of your messages. Goodbye!"
Our government is so corrupt and broken they're never going to fix any of this, so it's up to the technologists and market incentives instead...
I thought about telling everyone to vote against whoever spams (phone/sms/email/mail/etc) the most. Chances are that whoever is funding the spam is expecting for a return on their investment to convince me to vote in a manner that is more beneficial to them than it is to me.
The problem is that once they identify you as voting against spammers it encourages them to false flag spam you from a PAC that looks like it supports their opposition.
The people who run campaigns are hired guns and they just collect lists.
A relative won an award from an organization a decade ago, the consultants just steal or otherwise retain the mailing lists and use them forever. I get pitches from many NYC council candidates from that one dinner
>Google's spam blocking is phenomenal on the Pixel, but they barely even advertise it.
It's a feature that's good enough to warrant me replacing the otherwise superior Xiaomi dialer/SMS apps on my phone with the Google ones. I don't get the screen calling, but all the other parts work 80% of the time.
I gave a few small donations and foolishly didn’t use a disposable email address. That was over four years ago and I’m still getting over a dozen spam emails a day from candidates I have never even heard of.
Maybe there is some central actblue list I can opt out of but I don’t even think I created an account with them
I'm fairly convinced that it's not a ton of different groups responsible for the bulk of messages I get, but one or two groups cycling through new names every few days
If I don't reply "stop" to anything, it seems like one day "Retired Democrats PAC" will suddenly stop sending me messages and "Save Democracy PAC" will suddenly begin, and that pattern is what makes me think a single group is behind a lot of it.
If I do reply "stop" to one, of course they will stop from that PAC, but a few days later another one will always pop up and pick right back up.
Every few days I send out a mass "stop" to all of the numbers I've gotten messaged by, and it usually gives me 3-4 days of peace.
Your campaign donations are a matter of public record and Actblue harvests them and repackages them to sell to political campaigns and operatives. It's a shitty business model that preys upon an unfortunate part of federal law that most donors don't know about.
Your donation records to the fec are explicitly not allowed to be used for donors mining like this. I'm sure it still happens, but it's not the majority.
What happens is that the campaign you donate to to puts you on their list (allowed) and then shares that list with others in the party (also allowed). They share back and forth so fast you can't get out of it.
This is why it's the email that's shared not the name. FEC records don't have your email attached to to them, but the spam still follows unique emails like "candidate@customdomain.com".
It's not just the re-use and sharing of lists, but also the incredible Facebook-style targeting available to anyone for spamming. Anyone can sign up for something like ActionNetwork.org or NationBuilder and send out an email blast to registered voters in a particular zip code. NGP VAN is even more powerful.
The whole industry is mature and super targeted like any other spammer, but mostly immune to spam regulations (because politics are specifically exempt from CAN-SPAM etc., and most voter registration and donation data is public record). The whole pipeline is thoroughly automated and you're marketed and remarketed to just like you are with Google or Amazon, but without any of the already-minimal consumer and privacy protections.
Their targetting is shit. The people selling the targetting capability are scamming everybody else. I get countless spam messages from both political parties, both seemingly certain that I support them. I never donated to any of them.
If the price of living in a democratic society with transparent voter/donor records is a few annoying emails, we should all be paying that price gladly.
I dunno if that's either necessary or sufficient... in a country with legalized bribery, billionaire presidents, SuperPACs and all sorts of dark money, I doubt that knowing Joe Citizen donated $27 is really going to save democracy.
I donated $20 in 2016 and have regretted it ever since.
In the 2020 election cycle it seemed some of the texts had people behind them, so I’d reply and told them if they kept texting me I’d vote for the opponent out of pure spite. That was actually quite effective, but did have to say it to a half dozen people.
This time around, I keep getting texts asking for $40. Most I report as spam, others I say stop. But it seems these lists are distributed out far and wide, so removing the name from one, or 10, doesn’t do much.
Like you, I will never again donate to a politician and will encourage everyone else to save their money. No one should pay money to be harassed. I’m not sure how they think this is a good idea or will win people over.
> In the 2020 election cycle it seemed some of the texts had people behind them, so I’d reply and told them if they kept texting me I’d vote for the opponent out of pure spite. That was actually quite effective, but did have to say it to a half dozen people.
I tried sending Goatse back to them, but whatever text spamming software they're instructed to use doesn't support receiving images, unfortunately :)
I've been interested in donating before, but this is actually the main thing holding me back. I get so little spam and unwanted messages (email and text), and I am trying extremely hard to keep it that way.
Use a email alias service like simple login, duck duck go’s private duck address etc
You can disable that email alias and never receive emails sent to that address again
It’s not worth it. Politicians have shown they can’t be trusted with our contact info. No one should be jumping through hoops to hide their identity to donate money.
Maybe if donations go to 0 they’ll finally get the message that citizens don’t want to be harassed for donations.
This is in no way enough to prevent election spam.
You have to give your name and address as a public record, and they will likely find your phone number and email and will call, text, and spam you from there.
One of the blessings of having a loved one in politics is that I know who is/isn't selling their lists. There's only a small handful of organizations who adhere to a firm "no list buying, no list selling" policy. Whoever you donated to apparently has dreadful data ethics. Once your number is in a major political/nonprofit consultancy's database, they'll happily hand it out to all of their other clients. You have to trust that the campaign you support isn't going to give them that data... which is, of course, impossible to know from the outside.
Since they use VoIP SMS and "first name" it's pretty hard to resort to the old fashioned doxxing despite living in the golden age of data leaks.
I would suggest simply wasting their time as much as possible (I've lead on such people pretending to be naive and caused great frustration). But ideally, not to waste your own time.
I think in the near future android-local chatbots will be further along, or iphone-local, and ideally one can run the chatbot. and you can just set the chatbot to "waste this person's time" as we will have chatbots for "flirt with this potential date and schedule drinks". Of course the endpoint of such a world is chatbots all around and no humans.
For email spam: you can use your email provider’s report spam feature so more of their emails end up in spam folders and their money is wasted. You can look at the email headers to figure out which platform sent the email (like Mailgun or Sendgrid or whatever) and report the email to them, which may cause their account to be shut down and then to be banned as a business from that platform. You can use the FTC and FCC reporting websites from my other comment. You could also report each incident to your state’s authorities like your attorney general’s office, by saying you suspect potential fraudulent practices or abusive practices or violation of privacy or whatever.
Actblue requires a phone number and email address.
As far as I know, physically mailing a check is the best way to avoid sharing information as you only need to provide your name, address, and employer. This information is the only federally required information.
I don’t know. What’s weird is that I think it is up to the campaign to make sure they have valid contact information. So I suppose there is a risk that the campaign might get dinged?
That's exactly my experience, except that I used my email instead of my phone number. That one little contribution (maybe $10) caused an endless stream of spam. And of course I forgot to give them a distinct To address after emotions are stirred up after their incendiary propaganda message on the donation page.
Ha! Worked for me, too. Heck it’s a minor request from a future president ready to run a country. Next week though “Hi I am Tim. I need that $40”. Well played, I only made the deal with Kamala, after all, ;-)
I had some woman use my email (I have an OG mac.com email), when donating to her local ASPCA.
They sold it to a liberal political group, who then sold it to an extreme liberal group.
I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of spam emails, every day, with the most batshit insane messages. It’s especially bad, now, with the US election coming up. The one saving grace, is that it wasn’t a right-wing group. They make the ultra-liberals look like a bunch of teetotalers.
Since she used the iCloud.com variant of the address, I simply nuke all emails that specify that, as a destination. Apple won’t let me block the domain, so I have to apply the rules, after they fill my inbox.
Sometime in there, one of the spammers figured out that icloud.com will also receive iMessage texts, so they have started coming to that, as well (so far, it is from legit political groups. I don’t expect that to last). I delete and report as junk. I very rarely respond with STOP.
If you actually read the article, what we send back is just IOUs or funny money. It's irrelevant what we send back actually, because the goal could be deindustrialization of other countries. The actual goods created are just the side effect of industrial production in order to keep their industries running until they need to swap them to military production.
Maybe we work in the same company. I'd like to add that usually the engineer responsible for the feature being bug-bashed is also responsible of refining the document where everyone writes the bugs they find since a lot are duplicates, existing bugs, or not bugs at all. The output is then translated into Jira to be tackled before (or after) a release, depending on the severity of the bugs found.
I'm surprised it took this long for LinkedIn to do layoffs. The amount of recruiters looking for candidates, tech companies hiring, etc. has gone down since the beginning of the year. As such, the income from LinkedIn that is tied to job postings has decreased. In order to continue looking good on paper they have decided then to layoff employees to cut costs.
The same thing has happened at other companies that make money from job postings.
God please no. I already have to yell talk to a human to get my problem solved with support phone calls. I really would rather not get spammed by AI bullshit. If you're trying recruit me, at least have the respect for my time to get a human to talk to me.
The main reason we all work for someone else is for money but there is something to be said about the things we build at work and not caring about them. This is something that took me a long time to realize but you need to stop thinking about software as a field and start thinking of it as a skill set. From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.
Working on something that doesn't interest you just for the sake of technology is not something that will ever make you happy. If you truly have no interest in anything then that's another problem on itself.
I think what you've laid out here is invaluable. My skill-set is mostly geared towards sysadmin work, and I loathed working for corporate places, being on-call, dealing with immediate emergencies (which were all superficial), stressed over attending bullshit meetings.
I saw my local library was looking for a sysadmin, it did come with a pay cut, but damn if it isn't a quarter of the responsibilities, fulfilling work, no direct manager, pension, decent healthcare, and I write my own schedule.
No one questions what I do and I have full freedom to come and go without needing to "check-in" with a c-suite.
Will I get rich working this gig, absolutely not but the sense of accomplishment knowing my skill-set is helping the community directly, and those less fortunate fills the pay gap I never thought it could.
It doesn't hurt that it shortened my commute and I do so by bicycle now.
I traded private for public service over a decade ago and I will never go back regardless of much more pay there is. My product is now the service to my community and pay is straight up compensation for my time and effort. No demands of loyalty, no dangling stock options, no C levels idiots with bright ideas ... just bureaucracy and a semi clear mandate. Its still work and id cut way back if I became wealthy but profits are the farthest thing from our organizations goals.
In the end, money is just a means of exchange by which we try to buy happiness. Well, food and shelter first, but once you've got those covered, it might be more efficient to work for happiness directly instead of trying to buy it with money made on a soul-sucking job.
> it might be more efficient to work for happiness directly instead of trying to buy it with money made on a soul-sucking job
I stuck with a stressful job I didn't enjoy because the pay was too good to ignore, with my sights set on achieving financial independence. After all was said and done, the money wasn't worth it; all I got was a bitter taste in my mouth from years of grinding myself down.
A better plan would have been to spend time figuring out what sorts of jobs would be better aligned with my life goals.
Very romantic, until you realize that nowadays working on what you like won't even pay your rent + utilities + food.
I am beginning to think we need HN for non-privileged people. A lot of "insights" on this forum come off as extremely deluded and living in a very positive bubble.
Now tell me, how do I get a huge break from programming while never losing a penny from my income? "Live within my means" would be your response perhaps? I still want to buy a house though.
Like come on. Sometimes I also wonder if people didn't start using ChatGPT for commenting on HN for clout.
Some people never watched Dirty Jobs and you can see it in posts like the grandparent.
Having a job you clock into, giving your best effort at that job, stopping work at 5 PM, and then going home and do the things you're passionate about that don't pay the bills is the way that the vast majority of people live. It's only the rich and deluded that think that this isn't the reality for most people, and that's because they're so disconnected from what it's like as an actual member of the working class.
Big petite bourgeoisie masquerading as a worker going on here.
Honestly this is something I find working as a software developer in offices... Many of my peers have never worked shitty jobs.
I've worked fast food, I've worked retail (during the launch of the Wii, even, which was an insane time), I've detailed cars, I've worked in a call center.
That's just what I had to do to avoid being buried under student debt.
I think a lot of people working in offices never had this experience. If they worked at all during high school or university it was cushy office jobs wherever their parents worked.
This doesn't generally apply to immigrants, though. That's a whole other thing.
I agree wholeheartedly, and maybe a bit to the extreme. Worked in pizza shops and factory jobs in and out of HS until I figured out I really didn't want to do that type of stuff the rest of my life. So I enlisted in the 2000s and carried a rifle for five years, one of those for a year in the ME. It was terrible, but it paid for a CS Bachelor/Masters and gave me a perspective on how shitty things really can be.
I am completely aware of my viewpoint being extreme and keep myself in check when someone presents something that I would consider a first world problem. But make no mistake, many people in the US and Western world should be counting their blessings much more often.
I think you are overlooking how in this modern economy many people do in fact go and work their next job at 17:30 rather than going home to relax.
Dirty Jobs may show some some clocking in and out of only one job and then going home to relax but as a television show that is highly selective of what it decides to show it is not a representative window into how the mass amount of people on this planet live (just like HN is not such a window either).
Simply reading the local news tells me more about the economic hardships of the common worker than a reality tv and internet forums ever could. And those hardships are harsh in many cases.
I agree. I find it highly pointless to spend one's leisure time learning new tech stacks, working on hobby projects just so that you can show them to an employer. Finding actual real-world problems that you care about to solve, that's way more satisfying. Intrinsic motivation beats extrinsic motivation.
I loathe the process of grinding some questions or stacks for interviewing. At some points in my life, I decided to learn what I love and pick a suitable company instead. Not every has the desire to work at a certain company for the quote status.
That's all fine and dandy, but more often than not you get into the field and you discover your whole interest that got you into the field isn't really how the field works in practice. There's an old saying about not making a job out of something you love, because having to do it for money versus out of your own interest will make you grow to hate it before long.
> There's an old saying about not making a job out of something you love, because having to do it for money versus out of your own interest will make you grow to hate it before long
I hadn't heard the saying you describe literally, though I've heard many variants of "find your passion" such as "find a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life." (Attributed to Mark Twain, Confucius, and others though the true origin seems to be obscure.) Which makes little sense to me since being paid to do something tends to destroy intrinsic motivation.
Perhaps there's a crystallized version of your saying such as "the fastest way to turn your passion into drudgery is to get paid for it."
Fortunately my passions are things I'm unlikely to get paid for - watching netflix, eating snacks, etc..
Big +1, work on something that bothers you in your personal life or something that interests you in your personal life. It will always undoubtedly be more fulfilling compared to simply "working for the man."
One risk I've heard of second hand. If you work on your personal-interests or hobbies ... then that might cease to be fun and just become "work." I've not had that experience (I've always found the projects in my career interesting even if they have non-fun overhead at times) but it is something my wife and others have reported.
Finding the perfect balance is the tricky part. I do I.T. consulting on the side, but I am not stringing myself out for a customer. Its one of the expectations when I offer my services.
No I will not be on call, no your computer turning on isn't a emergency and I will not drop everything to hit the power button.
If they don't like the terms, they're more than welcome to pay double my asking and pay a monthly retainer.
Surely it's a risk, I think with all things balance is critical. However, I've personally found the grind that can come and go with delivery dates and peculiar debugging are far more satisfying and easy to commit to when the medium is a personal passion/interest.
> From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.
Unfortunately the wildlife, economics and vehicle companies won’t hire
me because I’m not an established domain expert in wildlife, economics or vehicles.
To be a bit more concrete I’ve actually applied to jobs in some of the industries you’ve noted recently, particularly wildlife. I applied for a job that seemed pretty cut and dry: Doing mostly .NET CRUD work for an application supporting [wildlife domain]. It didn’t pay well but it genuinely seemed like a domain I would like and Delma technical view the job was a perfect match for my resume. The application had several binary yes/no questions I had to fill Out mostly along the lines of “Do you have experience in X”. For 90% of the questions my answer was yes. But there was one question basically asking “Do you have experience writing software for our hyper specific domain”. I suppose I could have lied and said yes, though that just meant I’d be rejected after wasting my time and the organization’s time, so I answered truthfully “no”. I was rejected not long later and while it’s impossible to know the exact reason I have my suspicions.
Not true for everyone, I’ve worked in fields that are very interesting to me and felt bored, then worked in fields that are not at all interesting to me and I really enjoyed it. I’ve found my day to day happiness has less to do with the actual thing I’m making with software and more to do with who I’m making it with and if I feel I’m growing somehow through it.
>>From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.
Nonsense. The lack of passion arises from resentment and by being treated unfairly. While things like communism where everyone is treated equally is demoralising to the key contributors, extreme inequality in compensation is equally demoralising. You need some middle ground.
Without stake(financially), no one is going to spend their whole lives to make other people rich. It doesn't even make logical sense if you think about it carefully.
This is an enlightening point, to distinguish between our skill set and field of work. And each field brings certain types of people, some of whom you'll find it better to work with.
Call it what you will, but what Russia is doing is trying to dissolve the Ukrainian identity through genocide and terrorism. I'm looking forward to the day when Ukraine gains back its stolen territories and pushes back Russia to their borders.
And who do you expect to foot the bill to recover your money? There are ways to mitigate this risk and it's not the taxpayers problem you mismanage your assets.
If he was an American citizen, and performed those crimes in the US, I wonder how it would go with him being extradited and tried for that in a different country? Earnest question, maybe there are examples of it
Who's going to stop Russia from re-arming and building up its army only to launch another attack in 2-3 years? Who's going to prevent them from destabilizing Ukraine until it falls?
Russia won't stop until it has destroyed Ukraine, that much is certain. Russia only understands strength, and they won't stop until stopped by force.
But hey, peace is more important right? Maybe they should just take Ukraine, capture, torture, rape and murder all the people they deem as undesirables and convert it to another Russian oblast as it was once before. Then there will be peace.
I would imagine you would also lay down at your own home if someone breaks in and tries to rape and murder your family just for the sake of peace?