I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.
Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.
That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).
The hard part of disconnecting as a manager is feeling like the team is blocked on you when you're not there. If you're a good manager then you enable the team to function without you. It's just tough to get that level of confidence in your management abilities.
I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.
My old company we had rotating on call shifts that was about one week a month. I got paged an average of 2 times a night because of some random thing breaking or some error. My current company, we get a week on call about every month and a half, either primary or secondary. But I have been paged I think 2 times in 3 years. Its a world of difference having a stable application and well done page rules.
Average of twice a night is freaking insane. I was burning out doing 1-week-in-3 with pages 3 nights out of 7. These were all actionable issues (DDoS, packet loss etc.) so I had to actually wake up and work.
I have a literal pager because my company wants to take over my phone with their software and have the ability to wipe it out any time they wish. No thanks, kiss my ass. They will not provide a work phone either. An actual pager was the only alternative.
While I agree with the gist of what I think you’re saying - that election fraud isn’t anywhere near a deciding factor, especially in Presidential elections - I don’t think it actually matters.
There is a large number of people in the US who believe that fraud is a big enough problem for it to change the outcome. That leads to loss of confidence in the election system, which in turn makes for a far more volatile political climate in the country.
That is in and of itself sufficient justification for us to take a very serious look at the system and consider implementing stricter practices. The actual goal here isn’t to prevent all fraud, it’s to ensure that the political process itself is trusted by the people.
Can you clarify the claim you're making? The 87 Chicago mayoral election is within living memory for over half of eligible voters in America. Do you think election procedure (which varies significantly as it is under the sole jurisdiction of the governments of states like Virginia) has uniformly improved to the extent that fraud like that, or even just a fraction of that scale, is completely impossible?
Can there actually be any evidence when the process is designed to not be very transparent or examinable from the outside? Election security and transparency should be a priority for all parties because of how foundational it is. The lack of evidence doesn’t mean much when it isn’t publicly auditable.
Walz, like you, deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom when called.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/swift-boat-walz/ says that he retired after 20 years of service with the Minnesota National Guard, re-upped after 9/11, then did "a year-long deployment as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Turkey and Europe."
If there is any interest in ground truth concerning the situation: "Many of you are asking how Tim Walz was able to get away with lying about his service record for so long."
I realize that the Narrative Alchemists think they can transform any lead into gold, but this is some tough material[1].
It's also a fair point that 20-year old news is less than fresh, but the Narrative Alchemists certainly don't want voters asking any hard questions about policy and direction.
So we get these lousy personality/biography reviews in lieu of serious discussion.
"Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) was the official name used by the U.S. government for both the first stage (2001–2014) of the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and the larger-scale Global War on Terrorism." [0]
"Walz deployed in August 2003 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. The Minnesota National Guard told CBS News the battalion supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey. Walz was stationed at Vicenza, Italy, at the time and returned to Minnesota in April 2004." [1]
So, as someone who actually deployed to Afghanistan with 270 days of boots on the ground from Dec2010-Sep2011, you and all of the other folks defending Walz can take a long walk off a short pier.
Walz is a classic case of stolen valor. His non-command of integrity is typical of his party.
The knobs bombing my karma on this thread can get stuffed.
I'm Australian and from a family with a loooong military association (going back at the very least to the Crimean War (1850s)).
With zero interests in the partisan political aspects of this, from a purely grunt on the ground, cog in the machine PoV, if it was true that he was "deployed in August 2003 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom" then he was part of that Operation even if that service was greasing wheels on vehicles in Italy.
These Operations sprawl larger than the pointy parts faced off across valleys, and those who serve generally STFU and do what they are told.
I get that he didn't have boots on the killing grounds, I have to assume that had he been deployed to a front line position then he would have gone as instructed.
Operation Enduring Freedom wasn't strictly limited to Afghanistan. I was there too, before you were, and for longer. Wasn't my first deployment, either. I don't know or care about anything Waltz or whatever his name is.
Walz has now been denounced by his replacement, his chaplain, and his Commanding Officer.
You are perfectly within your rights to continue defending this abject piece of work.
Understand that veterans do both understand that life is messy and junk happens...but also that, when it's obvious that the person in question is a total piece of work like Walz, the knives come out.
So you are telling me that my wife, in her two year-long non-combat deployments as part of the Reserve, did not actually serve as part of Operation Enduring Freedom?
Fuck off.
My grandpa got enough of that shit as a quartermaster in WWII Italy, when people considered him a lesser solider because he wasn't on the front lines.
because getting an ID costs money and time that most poor americans do not have. The poorest americans that work multiple jobs are simply not able to afford to take time off work to do this.
This is an absolutely nutso take. Nobody buys it, I don't know how it even continues to be repeated aloud anymore. You cannot function in the united States without a government ID. I have known (and been) the poorest of the poor in the US and have never, ever, met a person over the age of 18 without a government ID. Not a single one. You need one to drive, to buy beer, to get lottery tickets, to get government benefits, to get a job, you need an ID for everything.
Someone who can't take time off work to get an ID most certainly can't take time off to go vote.
Exactly. It's an oft-repeated talking point accepted as fact but with absolutely no facts to back it up. It identifies the speaker as being of a certain political persuasion and as a non-critical thinker.
Your ID may not have your correct address, because you recently moved. Heck, I know people who have moved across state borders and gone years without updating their ID.
In that case you can still use it to work, buy alcohol, drive, get government benefits, etc., but you still might need to spend four hours at the DMV in order to use it to vote, because your ballot is customized to your particular city/neighborhood.
So, it's still a tax/restriction which can prevent voter participation.
The rest of the world tends to have one national ID system per country, and they tend to be easy to obtain, and the government considers it to be important to try to make sure everyone who should have one does have one.
Having rented a dozen different cars with car play i can say some manufacturers make car play feel just as painful as their in house infotainment systems.
