Peter Jackson's abominations were utter shit. I walked out of "Fellowship" on opening day, which is the only time I've done that. The fact that the Hobbit movies were worse and Amazon's weird fanfic was yet worse again is no vote in favor of Jackson's earlier trash.

You either like the books, or at least respect the books' author, or you like the movies.

You can disagree, but you'll have to take it up with Christopher Tolkien (or his ghost).

All this time I was certain no one could be worse than Peter Jackson.

This summer marks 50 years since I first read Lord of the Rings. Maybe I should celebrate by unplugging from this retarded hellscape ... though today's preview of HBO's Harry Potter series does promise some redemption.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Lots of people have stenciled lots of things, but Banksy's consistently stand out.

I've seen some of the work in person, and it's not what you say it is.

Banksy's art is the point, not the person who makes it.

Mac OS is a real live Unix operating system, kid, not a game platform.

You're saying DEI isn't political?

HR? I haven't worked anywhere with a HR department since the early 2000s. I leave that kind of hell to drones like you.

Your reply says everything about your lack of character and slimy scheming mindset. If you were actually good at anything, you wouldn't sit around thinking of how you could get ahead by being a shitty person.

I see the PTSD and resulting drug addiction have taken their toll. Being too dumb to avoid being in a place like that for no good reason isn't really going to impress me.

"The Management" is a well-worn joke going back even before my time, kid. Get a grip.

a) You must have never managed humans.

b) Been here, with a break in the 2010s, since before moderation--1998 or so.

c) You're full of shit. Detroit's K-12 district starts at $55k with a bachelor's and $60k with a master's. The latter is common since it's easy to piggyback a master's onto a credential program. Source: my wife did it this way, and so have many of her colleagues. Michigan's median individual income is south of $50k and median household income is about $71k so that's a pretty good starting point--AND the benefits are gold-plated as usual.

Birmingham, Alabama School District is about $5k less but there are options to work up to a 12-month schedule for a starting rate of $62k-68k for non-math/science teachers; add $5k+ for math/science. Median income in Alabama tracks these reductions vs. Michigan pretty closely.

Same applies to humans.

Signed,
The Management

Another stupid fairytale.

My wife makes $120k + gold plated benefits and teaches 4th & 5th graders 180 days of the year plus half a dozen prep days. I've looked at teacher pay all over the country--it's public information--and I have yet to find this mythical place where teachers are underpaid. She'll retire at 62 with 80% of her peak pay.

The fucking kids read worse than they did 50 years ago when I was in grammar school and teachers' parking lots weren't full of BMWs and such. Money isn't the problem.

You're not wrong about the cops and such, I agree there.

As for balancing budgets, put the crack pipe down. Only Bubba claimed to do that within my lifetime (i.e. LBJ forward), but it was because he managed to get an accounting change that lumped Social Security receipts into general revenue. I didn't have to look that up since I was a concerned voter at the time.

Bob Metcalf and a bunch of other nobodies, I guess?

I've been here off and on since 1998, when I was 31 years old, and I remember the breathless cheerleading (and hot grits) quite well. Out in the real world there were a ton of naysayers.

pets.com didn't cause a multiyear jobs bloodbath in the tech industry. My son is 20 and technically inclined (math degree already, and he wrote a LLM inference engine from scratch in ANSI C including the matrix math libraries--I'm a proud papa), and he & his circle of friends (including current Stanford CS students) are staring a bleak future in the face firsthand. Five years ago they would have had companies fighting over them.

As the joke from the early 2010s put it: "Thanks for creating millions of jobs, Obama. I have three of them!"

There were some winners for sure. I am one of them. But the economic and demographic evidence overwhelmingly says that a large number of people were fucked who in other times could have worked at decent paying jobs & raised families.

My wife has been a public elementary & middle school teacher since the early 2000s and has seen this play out among her students and their families over the years. It's getting pretty bad. If you live in a bubble among others who have done well, good for you.

I've done this stuff for so long that coding speed is the least of my issues. Vibe coding isn't attractive to me at all after trying it a few times.

I don't let LLMs directly operate on my codebases, and I don't really generate that much code with them either. Where LLMs really save me time and effort is code reviews, debugging, dealing with obscure stuff outside my areas of expertise, spitballing various approaches, etc. I get better results in way less time.

I learn a hell of a lot, too, because I ask a lot of questions. It's like having a tireless, patient, and helpful colleague with godlike (but still fallible) knowledge available 24/7.