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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • I love India and the people from India. I worked in IT for Ford for over 30 years and had a lot of Indian coworkers and traveled to India a few times for work. Like others have said, all of them came over through technology jobs. Unfortunately many companies in the US play the green card game to keep your wages low. Finding a company that will help get your card is very tough. If you can handle the learning for controls engineering, a 2 year degree will get you a good paying job in a lot of the western world helping companies with their automation of production lines. One of my friends who had all the needed skills wanted to come to the US so much but his pronunciation of words was really bad and it was very hard to understand him so he could never get past an initial interview.
    But I agree about the current state of India but nationalist leaders are gaining more power and Modi is an example of that. His playing the Hindu and nationalist card over and over again is an example of that. When I’d walk around it was always amazing to see stone and bronze workers doing work that’s been done for hundreds of years along side shops with ISO certification making advanced tooling and micro parts. India is where the Bronze age meets the digital age. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. China is probably the closest but I didn’t see as much technical incongruity on one street like I would in India.
    As a worker and many agreed with this view, Indians and many Asians are great at following orders which is what they grew up with, but thinking out of the box was usually a challenge. I believe the freedoms of the west allow people more ability to see things differently and we feel like our view/idea/opinion has value and should be heard because of the differences in the individual. Because of that we’re more willing to contemplate other methods in our own heads about possibilities instead of just doing what rote learning taught and not go against the grain with teachers, bosses, etc. Like you’re finding, seeing what others choose not to see is a challenge. The young are the future and need to stand up for the view of the world they want. It has to start at the local level with enough force to be a regional power. Unfortunately the nationalist have a lot of thugs to do their work and wrack havoc on people trying to bring about change that would challenge those in power and bring more power to the individuals.



  • I had a triple major of Psych/Soc/Phil with the intent of teaching. My focus in Philosophy was mostly logic and analytical reasoning. I ended up marrying my GF and had to quit college in my junior year and go to work where I ended up doing a lot of computer work on the IBM XT. One late night working on electronic bids for parts we sold I realized computers are not going anywhere and focusing on that would get me out of this sales job. I went to Control Data for a year which got me in the door of a company. Programming was nothing but logic which was my focus in college so it came pretty easy to me. That was 1989. I contracted to Ford for the next 30+ years doing everything from data analysis at the start to SQL and DB’s for a while, and then I ended up on teams delivering software to the plants. I always wanted a job that would allow me to see the world and for over 20 years I traveled on the corporate dime, including an around the world trip for work in Asia and Europe on the same trip. I traveled almost 300k miles on planes during that time and had a chance to see how people live and work all over the world.


  • IMO no comparison to a nice pair of sandals. My grandkids got me some with pins? or whatever they’re called in them. They’re like slippers around the house and about as comfie but walking they’re not as nice as good sandals and driving in them is not great. However it is nice having an enclosed toe. If I had been wearing my sandals on a walk the other night when I caught a stick with the tip of the shoe it would have torn up my toe so they do offer more protection than an open toe sandal


  • The spell options and classes in Palladium, Rolemaster and Swords and Sorcery had a lot more flexibility. For the most part any class can learn some magic. For fighters it’s more observation or stealth type stuff unless it’s barbarian type classes that may get more bard type skills and there are like 5 different types of thieves/rogues/burglars, etc. like most other classes. When I ran a group we used a lot of different rule books. Some offered better detail for hit location and armor by location, some had better control of weapon type and how it’s used like bash, pierce, slash, and as noted above, the magic in other rules had so much flexibility. I gave my players a lot of options as to how they built their character and having 4 or 5 rules books of different skills, classes, races, etc really opened up variety. An accountant may be a really good burglar with attention to detail and noticing patterns



  • I’m an old fart but we learned a lot of languages in school from simple Basic to Cobol, to RPG for corporate reporting, then Pascal and Fortran for engineering, and finally C for the future. And then of course I ended up hired and placed on a DB team to write SQL for years after being hired as a C programmer. But I do feel my years in Liberal Arts majors helped me in many ways through my career and gave me a lot of flexibility to keep finding a niche as the corporate entity changed goals and methods. I trained engineering sw for about half my career and couldn’t have done that without my non computer education