We’re willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh chest of gold.

All we ask in return is your còóperation in bringing a known evil to Mordor.

No the worst meeting is when the entire team — CEO, CTO, sales, engineering — spend all of Friday (every Friday) divvying up the tabs in a big excel spreadsheet, going and re-going through workflow checklists.

I knew they had no automated tests when I joined. I was promised, when I joined, that I’d be allowed to spend at least 25% of my time building an automated test suite for our app.

But we never had time to allow me to do that. So instead of spending 25% of my time developing an automated suite, which would steadily reduce the following until it was zero, we spent 20% of the entire company’s time doing human rspec tests.

One time the CTO asked me “Why wasn’t this caught in testing?” and I said “Because we don’t do any testing”

Here comes the juice!

This is why you make your own work better, improve the team’s work, and position yourself as a candidate for team lead by insisting that meeting timeboxes are enforced.

Even if it breaks productivity by cutting things off the first few times, it will train everyone to get to the point, which will make everything better after the first few breakages.

Right, that’s what I thought you were referring to, and responded to. Ruining stonehenge versus the climate. Or vandalism generally versus the climate.

We’re not picking between these things. They’re independent variables.

In the other, you’re a ring bearer and are guilty of virtually every smuggling crime that we have a nose for.

One of these lives has a future. The other one does not.

I’m going to be as forthcoming as I can he, Me Baggins. You’re here because we need your help.

My colleagues believe that I’m wasting my time with you Mr Baggins, but I believe you wish to do the right thing.

Bonko me $20 and I’ll send you some

They named it after gazelle, which is a herd prey animal. That causes it to slip away from attention when it’s mentioned.

If they’d called in Bonko or something it would stand out in people’s memories more. Bonko, bright orange icon, it would spread by wildfire. Nobody would forget that name.

There are no hard consonants in the word. Synaesthetically, it’s a blue-purple word. Cool, muted. It’s a word that, even before the “gazelle” reference, is hiding there. Your mind slips over it without friction. It enters and leaves your mouth and your mind like a fish passing under the sparkling water, nearly unnoticed.

Terrible brand name. I mean, it does convey a little more safety than “Bonko” but the whole point with the unsafe sounding name is it causes the person to consciously ask “How safe is it?” and if you can answer that immediately with “Safer than Ft Knox” then it becomes part of the brand consciously.

Zelle is non-threatening, but that’s not the same thing as safe when it comes to business or finances.

What’s a good safe, energetic, competent, orange word for this service? Hmm. Bonus points if it’s intuitively self-descriptive.

How about “Paytag”. It’s yellow but whatever. Still might not be better than Bonko.

I got locked out of paypal for no reason I could discern from like 2007 to 2015. Can’t remember the exact dates but for years it was “I can’t use paypal any more because my account broke” and then finally after years if that one day it was “oh shit it work look at that”.

Then what are the two evils you’re referring to, and which action are you referring to with picking the lesser evil?

90 time

“Picking” the lesser of two evils implies there is some kind of exclusive relationship between climate change and vandalism. As if this action had some kind of effect that counters climate change.

But it doesn’t.

Why? Have you been bad?

My life is not so great, financially or socially.

Sometimes things go wrong and I get very close to being homeless. I get scared, and suddenly it’s easy to know how to spend my days.

The crisis creates a clarity of path. And when I experience myself fighting against that impending catastrophe, I find parts of myself that are strong and noble and relatively free of mental health problems.

I’m actually really functional in a crisis.

I think this is a major problem we face as a civilization: the lure of life-altering disaster as a way to give ourselves direction.

I think for me the path out of this cycle of failure is, for me, to find something to work on passionately when I’m okay. But I really struggle with this. I over-intellectualize, and I look at like twenty different options for how I can help and they all seem good and they all seem scary and I end up choosing nothing, other than survival, and then because I didn’t find that mission to set myself on, my subconscious manifests another disaster so that I can feel myself come awake.

As individuals and as a group, I believe we either find a mission worth growing and striving for, or via self-sabotage, we downgrade our lives to a survival struggle because at least it’s a mission.

A bit of rust

That’s a decent strategy but really you want as much water as possible.

I’ve spoken with many, many people about their jobs and McDonalds is not that bad

By the way guys in this country it’s immoral to drive

Mars is nicely weathered since it hasn’t seen volcanic activity in an extremely long time.

Like the ice oceans in the Mars trilogy