The Washington Post got the What’s App transcripts and multiple participants confirming the content of the chat. They then asked the mayor’s office about it and the spokesperson said that the question was anti Semitic.

Correction, they asked about the Zoom meeting (which they had the transcript and on the record participants):

Asked about the Zoom meeting with chat group members, the mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that New York police entered Columbia’s campus twice in response to “specific written requests” from university leadership. “Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false,” Levy said. He added, “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”

He was a developer on whatever company he had that got folded into PayPal. It would be accurate to say that he never was a good developer.

follow one of the minor character paths

Cabbage seller spinoff!

In terms of net worth, sure. 10-20 million dollars is pretty much a billion dollars away from being a billion. But in terms of paying taxes? Unearned income pays the least in taxes. Psychology? It depends. If they have big mortgages and have to do a lot of the work themselves and be really careful with money? Then they might not feel rich (and may actually have a low net worth). If they own it all outright and have a employees take care of it all? That’s pretty different.

There’s quite a bit of difference between someone at the bottom of the working class and someone like a high earning professional that still needs to work, but has a much higher standard of living.

True. But they have much more in common with each other than they have with the owner class. We’re often fighting amongst ourselves while the billionaires are laughing all the way to the bank.

Same. And knowing that I have been an efficient cashier in the past makes the awkwardness of the self checkout super frustrating. If you have the items coming down the belt and are in a groove and so it regularly, you can get through a cart of items so fast. Between the poor UI and theft deterrence the self checkout is way slower.

Ans what happens to the people whose jobs are eliminated by the self checkout? Yeah, it’s a crap job, I know, I’ve done it. But if the only alternative in our current system is more homelessness and absolutely desperate poverty then I’ll skip the self checkout. I’d love to live in the glorious future where machines do all the grunt work and people are free to spend their time in better ways. But it seems humanity can’t have nice things.

Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.

Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.