If the US was actually a meritocracy, I’d be rich. I built my career in comp sci and UXD from nothing. I left school in 9th grade, then taught myself programming in multiple languages – BASIC then Perl, Java, C, and on to C++, C#, ObjC, JavaScript, and markup languages, – and UXD including related important fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy), and worked my way from a delivery driver to cook, to assistant mgr in retail and restaurant to manager (to make ends meet whilst learning) to programmer, to assistant lead, to PM assistant, to project manager, to designer, to lead designer at a company where I had more than 10 million users and was submitted for an Apple design award for my design.

Then I got sick with a genetic disease for which there’s no treatment or cure. Now I can no longer work and as a result, I had to leave the career I loved and had worked so hard for – and lose the health insurance that came with that. Now I am destitute, my savings are gone, and I have nothing but social security and Medicare, and Medicare is horribly broken. I can’t afford housing, and have to choose between medicine and food.

This is in the US, obviously. I have plenty more to contribute – my mind still works fine – but I can’t contribute in this system because I can’t reliably work.

I am fucked. I can’t afford to live anymore and, regardless of what I could contribute in a system that might allow me to, I am stuck doing nothing and slowly dying because this system is designed to fuck me as hard as possible.

This is not a meritocracy. If it was, I would not be in the position of choosing whether to eat or buy medicine.

e2: and we wouldn’t have a complete moron making billions by stealing the work of others (people like me) then just casting them aside like they’re nothing. Yes, I mean that absolute shitbag poser, you all know his name.

Sorry for all the edits, this pisses me off.

late e3, because changes keep being tossed around lately with an apparent near-total lack of even the scope of a single project they’re heading and executing, and that’s quite alarming in this context:

Social security and Medicare both try hard to spend as little money as possible, often under pressure from congress, and Medicare is worse. Medicare is so much worse than people think it is, I cringed every time I’d hear someone shout ‘Medicare for all!’ – especially when they’d go on to prove their notions of Medicare were vague. Congress has been beating the shit out of it whilst big money pretends to tend to its wounds for a long time. It’s nearly functionally useless by comparison to what all but the worst insurance companies and scammers do. It’s so bad, in fact, it’s just generally known that you must buy what’s called ‘gap’ insurance so they can slather their slime into the chasms left in Medicare’s wake.

Gap insurance is private insurance. Poor people living on Social Security cannot afford gap insurance (please read my last 4 words as though spoken with the complete inability to keep the disbelief from my voice. I’ve no idea how to annotate that.)

Been on a tear lately because people are currently worshipping a moronic, childish, nepo-baby who didn’t work for what he has, didn’t invent anything, clearly didn’t learn anything except how to use other people most effectively, perhaps designed that laughable abomination of a truck… it really does boggle my mind.

e: I also wrote a scifi novel that I can’t market because I’ve been too sick. Because I’m so desperate, I’m going to mention it here – I could use a couple of reviews. Based on current reviews, it’s not bad: Blue Are the Hills by Lilly Piper on Amazon, if you’re into dystopian fiction. I’ve tried to market myself as much as I can, but it’s hard. That’s why my Lemmy icon is my face – not because I’m a boomer, but because it’s my branding.

She didn’t get her job by knowing how to spell or read

Also, looking past that spelling mistake, what the hell is a War Room White House? Is that meant to refer to the situation room? The briefing room? Is it that she’s in two places at once, the White House and a virtual War Room of whatever media organisation she represents?

Or is it, as I may be forced to suspect, a perpetual state of mind, a designation not in conflict of course with any of the above, but indicative of someone who not only cannot spell their job but is just there to, as the phrase goes, perpetually and obsequiously stir shit?

There are certain things which are required of those who wish to serve in the Trump Administration. None of those things happen to be intelligence.

Covfefe

We need to stop being in shock and awe at how stupid these people are and start understanding that they are our enemies. They work in direct opposition to the welfare of average Americans. They’re also stupid. But more importantly, they are our enemies, and we need to start framing it as such.