I just left cloud software development to be the jack-of-all-trades only computer person at a local shop. I love it. I spend all day helping people instead of fighting jira.
I have a related experience: a few years ago I built a website for a local music store, and I still do the occasional maintenance task for them. Their gratitude and happiness with the product has made it one of the most fulfilling technical projects I've ever done.
Advantages of being "the technical person" for a non-technical project/business/etc:
- You get out of the insular, one-upsmanship-steeped technical culture
- You can implement things exactly the way you want to
- You're probably much less abstracted away from the people you're actually helping
It's the third thing that I think is most important. In most tech jobs you're either gently swindling your customers through A/B tests and "conversion metrics", or you're doing "tech for tech's sake" which can be fun but ultimately feels empty. It feels really good to directly help real people.
Can't dismiss it now. Every major corporation and most congressional lawmakers are now pushing for reform.
Especially worth looking at Rep. Joyce Beatty who is a 70 year old black woman who got peppersprayed with the protesters. An elected lawmaker was attacked by the cops. Think about it.
i would say it is short term gain, but longer term police and businesses will just leave black neighborhoods leaving them even more broken and poverty stricken, meanwhile the politicians will keep them on welfare and drugs to bring in the vote
I’m not so sure you can pin causality here. Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates. A peaceful police usually means a peaceful protest in my experience. A violent police—on the other hand—can sometimes cause a violent protest, and even a riot.
Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the cause of the conflict.
> Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates.
Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't.
We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression from there to looting and burning down churches.
Like I said, crowd control is a science. Even if you have violent actors at the protest, it is still a failure of crowd control if the whole protest turns violent.
Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.
The premise "many assholes are cops" doesn't need a lot of new evidence. There is more than enough existing evidence.
But what do you honestly expect riots to lead to? Concessions? Or loss of the moral high ground and even more riot gear and tear gas and escalation?
It's just handing the cops a free pass to justify arresting you. And not just arresting you, but charging you with something that could actually stick. Its hard to advocate policy when you're serving a decade in prison for arson and conspiracy.
Yeah, really. If they can pull something amazing out of an old CPU again, that'd really be something. Perhaps a 128 penryn with modern accelerators bolted on? :p
