Wastewater? Maybe get a job at your local plant or office? They need all sorts of people: customer service, maintenance, engineers, automotive, chemists, IT, etc. The alternative is dumping raw sewage in water ways. They sometimes have apprenticeship programs.

ETA: Best job security in the world. People aren’t going to stop shitting anytime soon. People don’t want rivers of shit. So…

ETA2: I know you said you are coming in unskilled, but a lot of better places to work will pay for education if you wanted to go from say customer service to engineering or something.

2024 resolution. Make 2023 peak oil

Maybe he is the 3 eyed raven? Brandon…

Maybe he is the 3 eyed raven? Brandon…

A number of measures to help students concentrate are taken during the annual event such as closing the country’s airspace and delaying the opening of the stock market.

That is what thinking of the children really looks like. Here in the US we just make stupid age verification laws for porn sites like it is going to make porn hard for teenagers to get.

Unless you REALLY need color, just buy a Brother BW laser printer. Toner doesn’t dry up. It is all but guaranteed to be the cheapest option. I bought the scanner BW laser printer combo like 8 years ago for $130.

So you want to advance to a higher level and have a broad interests?

You failed some MS cert exam?

You have a review coming up?

Broad interests. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. Learn core concepts and things that are useful in many contexts rather than specifics. This is where a lot of newbies go wrong. E.g. don’t learn about AD, learn LDAP and AD, OpenLDAP, DS389, will all come much easier. In most roles some basic programming with Python will come in handy. Once you learn to write code in one language, learning others comes a lot faster. Some worthwhile things to have a foundational grasp of: PKI and how it is used by SSH and TLS, a high level understanding of common network protocols. Peruse IETF RFCs for that. E.g. if you know how say DNS works, you can manage it using any DNS server software. Ditto http and web servers. You will need to learn configuration management SW and monitoring SW. I prefer salt stack and zabbix. There are many good choices.

Seriously learn PKI and TLS. I can recommend some good sources. TLS is used by pretty much everything to secure connections. Backup server to agent, browser to web server, AV to server, you name it.

Open Source is your friend, learn a bit about big projects. E.g. say you get good with backups and want to work for your favorite product vendor. That fancy backup appliance or cloud service is probably running Linux or FreeBSD on the metal and using something like Tomcat for the WebUI.

Learn a bit about licensing models. You will have to deal with it no matter what path you choose.

I wouldn’t try to impress your supervisor. Chances are, they’ll see through it. They may or may not care about their employees. Assume they don’t. Don’t assume the worst either. You can almost always trust interests. Their job in an MSP environment is to make sure contractual requirements are met and clients are happy. Focus on where your interests are aligned. Happy clients mean less headaches for you and your boss. I would let them lead the conversation, but focus on that aspect. If a lot of clients use X thing, mention that to your boss that you want to learn more about X thing as it will help you close tickets faster.

The US intelligence apparatus doesn’t do this. The OPM does.

As per your second paragraph and many other comments. I agree. It is hard to avoid it being politicized at any step of the process. Everything interview would have to be recorded. Copies of all reviewed records would need to be kept. Adjudicators would need heavily redacted transcripts of the records and interviews.

I was the same way. IMO, philosophy is WAY underrated. If the takeaway from intro to philosophy courses is ancient Greeks had some strange ideas about atoms and such, that is missing the point. Below is for anyone that has never touched philosophy at all.

Ethics is NOT what the corporate ethics things say about following the rules. Ethics in this context would raise the question of whether always following company rules is the right thing to do? Is right and wrong objective or subjective? Is something right in some contexts but wrong in others? Which system of thought should you be using (consequentialism, virtue, deontological)? I was just following orders when I murdered those people! By our laws it was legal, therefore right! It is a great way to persuade people and make decisions.

Epistemology is absolutely key to critical thinking. How do you determine what you know vs what you merely believe? Can you trust that error message is accurate? Can you trust your memory? Personal experience? It is a great way to build a world class bullshit detector.

Metaphysics gets you to think about things at a more foundational level. Think about a stop sign. Is it a red octogon with stop in white letters? Not everywhere. It could be a cop or crossing guard with their hand out. It could be a red light. It could be a red sign that isn’t an octogon at all. It is a great way to learn to challenge your assumptions about the nature of the world and things.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a take away by some people. The rebuttal:

It is a book about how to write unambiguously and clearly.

Clear writing isn’t useful? Think about arguments about phrases in the Constitution. Clarity would make those problems go away. I could name half a dozen STEM applications of quality writing off the top of my head:

• User Manuals
• Grant Proposals
• Research Results
• Emails to clients or coworkers
• Project plans
• Text books

20 year IT veteran here. What are your areas of interest?

Some potential areas:

• Networking
• AV
• End Points (PCs, phones, etc)
• Security
• Virtualization
• Programming
• Servers
• Applications
• Databases
• Storage
• Project Management
• Systems Analysis

Strunks Elements of Style should be mandatory reading every year of high school.

Match him right and maybe it could be like The Viper and the Mountain.

Rudy vs Alex

Dozens of other nations: “What they said!”

They get paid 274k…DC is expensive, but anyone that can’t live very comfortably on that is awful with money. Being awful with money will lose you a TS clearance because it makes you susceptible to bribery by spies. I would think it would also be a disqualifier for a SCOTUS judge for the same reason.

I think maintaining a TS clearance should be a requirement for all positions above a certain level in the federal government. Not because they need access to TS information, but to ensure they are at a lower risk of bribery, adversarial interests, and criminal activity. Getting a TS clearance isn’t terribly hard. Just generally have your act together. As long as you aren’t a train wreck, a drug addict, a criminal, an untrustworthy asshat, or have connections to adversaries, you will pass adjudication. TLDR: A TS clearance would ensure high level government employees are minimumly functional humans.

Another area where electric wins is smoking. My electric smoker is much easier to use and produces superior results to using charcoal. A really nice electric smoker can be purchased for a few hundred dollars. The electricity it uses is cheaper than charcoal too.

I know how a lot of people here feel about eating meat at all, but considering the current situation, anything that is better buys time to make even bigger cuts.

Beef is a big culprit with emissions, and I’ll tell you what, a well smoked humble and cheap chicken drumstick will taste amazing.

ETA: It isn’t just the emissions from burning the charcoal that are saved. It is also the emissions producing and transporting the charcoal to their usage point. High voltage AC is pretty hard to beat in efficient transport of energy.

Wow is that an old version of NGINX. Bad sys admin! If you are going to change your server string, have some fun. Set it to “server 1.0. Today’s special is caramel horse apple”

The poor thing is probably mining bit coins and deploying ransomware!

Government with cancellation of $6b of projects unless they got appropriate legislation.

I’m a yank, so I might be talking out of the wrong hole here. That sounds like an empty threat. If those projects are in their interest, they will do them. Assume corporations will act in their own interest, unless they are organized like Facebook and their management is immune. Otherwise, less principled institutional and large share holders will replace them.

Believe it or not, the woke backlash thing seems to be false:

https://www.truthorfiction.com/pink-floyds-woke-50th-anniversary-rainbow-controversy/

Anybody that is a fan or even old enough to know who Pink Floyd has seen that 50 year old album cover.

Anyone following them where they would see that post is going to be aware of this.

As much as I hate the anti-woke stuff from the right, it appears this is pure sensationalism.

This means two things. One, they (the right in the US) go on about it so much, people don’t bother fact checking. Two, the left isn’t immune to BS.

Coca-Cola did not invent Santa.