I’m just old enough to recall when being a cashier or a retail clerk, as this post mentions, was a respected career choice.

when i first got hired as a cashier, my manager who had been doing that since she was like 17 in 1975 told me that back in The Days, when you were hired as a cashier in a grocery store it was a) a well paid job & you could get full time work easily b) a respected career choice c) the store closed at 6pm and was closed on Sundays so the hours were a lot more pleasant d) they made you go to cashier school for 2 weeks, which was basically a fake grocery store and you just learned the trade completely before even meeting a customer.

As I said, I’m old enough to remember some of this. Now, when someone says “cashier,” that implies a person who has Failed in Life^TM, but when my hometown had a semi-functional downtown a cashier or a clerk was seen as a professional who could help you out in ways that sometimes you didn’t even know you needed.

This was all obliterated by the casualization, de-professionalization and corporatization of the profession.

One day I will tell you the unbelievable story of how custodians and janitors used to be held in much higher regard, too.

And I could watch Joanna Connor play blues guitar all day long. I nearly did.

If you're "but her emails"ing right now, you have brain worms pic.twitter.com/TCUzI6DzS0

— Gabriella Paiella (@GMPaiella) April 14, 2018

The fact is Trump and Clinton are both warmongering incompetents. It’s just that we had direct evidence of that in Clinton’s case before her attempted election/coronation, but highly suspected it of Trump. Now Trump has proved it fully while Clinton is merely confirming her tendencies and incompetence.

This is the most accurate general-interest article I’ve seen about the Southwest flight and Tammie Jo Shults.

Yep, a non-vet would’ve likely lost that plane. And the article is correct — the 737 is not a fly-by-wire plane. She landed that with no nanny. Amazing.

The story of the Southwest plane with the engine explosion has been widely misreported.

There was no uncontrolled descent from 35,000 to 10,000 feet. The plane was out of pilot control (and then, depends on how you define it) only for a few seconds even though the engine did in fact explode. It is standard operating procedure when there is a depressurization event at high altitude to descend as quickly as airframe and conditions allow to 10,000 feet or below.

Why? It’s because 35,0000 feet is in the death zone. At that altitude, most people die in minutes.

When the plane began to depressurize because of cabin breech, the pilot would’ve been aware of this and hauled ass to an altitude below the death zone. Again, not an uncontrolled descent.

The NYT gets it wrong.

Oxygen masks dropped down and the plane plunged thousands of feet in a minute.

Other than the initial steep bank (which would’ve been a few hundred feet of descent due to the physics of how that works), there was no “plunging.”

This CNN article gets it mostly right.

The plane was pitched at an angle of more than 40 degrees for a few unnerving seconds before it leveled out and began an emergency descent, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters Wednesday in Philadelphia.

I was not surprised to read that the pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, was a military veteran and a total badass. I’m betting that most non-vets would’ve lost that plane as you just don’t get the experience outside the military to handle things like this, in any context.

Shutting Down Doesn’t Fully Shut Down Windows 10 (But Restarting Does).

When I am forced to use Windows 10, I create custom shortcuts that actually shut that piece of shit down. Or just run command:

shutdown /s /t 0 /f

That does a real shutdown, and forces it with time 0. What a shitheap of an OS.

I do not accept the argument from enterprise IT orgs that a skill gap is keeping them from adopting cloud or platforms. Existing teams can develop the necessary skills faster than the organization can move to adopt new tech. There is no skill gap.

— Mark Imbriaco (@markimbriaco) April 13, 2018

I’ve worked in many IT departments and IT companies, and nearly always when this talk of a “skill gap” happens it is a management ploy to outsource or cut costs in some other way.

There has been more than one place I’ve worked where management claims that there is a “skill gap” and I say, “I know how to do all of that. I can do it right now. It’s not that hard.” A few times I’ve been certified (with industry-standard certs) in that very skill. And that is ignored, a “skill gap” is identified and outsourcing occurs.

It’s never successful, but it looks really good on paper at first. The spreadsheet jockeys love it, the execs get their “savings” and thus their bonuses, while remaining IT is scrambling to fix all the issues and problems that the outsourcing inevitably creates. It means double work. The outsourced company does it poorly, and then the skeleton crew of the remaining IT staff re-do it again correctly, while the outsourced company receives all the credit. Meanwhile, because IT has no time free any longer, product development essentially dies, R&D, maintenance and training is curtailed by the necessity of putting out fires, and in a few years the infrastructure becomes unsustainable.

I’ve seen this play out a half-dozen times and it always goes the same way.

When you hear “skill gap,” know that your job or your teammates’ jobs are about to be outsourced or offshored.