This can’t get said enough. HR is not there to help you. HR is there to keep you from being able to sue the company if something happens.

If you have, or someone gives you a cause to sue the company, before hiring a lawyer and possibly (likely) losing your job because you’re suing your employer, you can instead take the complaint up with HR. They should recognize the liability for the company in your situation and take steps to minimize or eliminate any possibly perception of blame that could be cast upon the company.

Here, I’ll give you an example of something that actually happened to me. I used to work at a grocery store and to say the “left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing” … Would be an understatement. It was a fairly large place in a national chain of stores. I was working in the produce department at the time… So, the supplier for grapes informed us that the location where the grapes are grown has black widow spiders in the habitat. Though every effort is made to prevent it, there is still the possibility that the grapes may contain traces of venomous spiders.

Corporate HR appeared, like a fart you didn’t hear, but you can definitely smell. They tasked my manager to get everyone in the department to sign a paper that said, and I shit you not: we’ve been made aware of the possibility of black widow spiders in the grapes, and that we understand that we should use specialty gloves that are bite resistant/bite proof when handling the grapes… As soon as I read that I turned to my manager and said what fucking gloves? Where are these gloves?

We, of course, didn’t have any such thing. I asked the manager if they could get some for us and they didn’t even know how to do that.

Simply: after everyone has signed the statement, and if anyone is bitten by a black widow, the HR dickwads that work at the company can hold up the form you signed saying “we tooky them to use the gloves for safety, and they were not using those gloves at the time of the incident” … Because nobody ever got the gloves. Regardless, it lets the company throw you under the bus for getting injured, while management won’t help you in staying safe on the job, often encouraging the behaviour that HR says you should not be doing.

HR is not your friend, they’re actively protecting the enemy (the business owners) from you, the worker.

Herd immunity is pretty important.

The first of the crazy parents who went anti-vax benefitted greatly from Herd immunity. Now enough of them are not vaccinating that the herd immunity is basically non-existent. So we get things like measles outbreaks.

There are people who are medically incapable of getting vaccinated, like those with compromised immune systems (some might be in treatment for cancer)… And their best defense is if all of us, who can be immunized, are immunized.

Cancer treatments are not the only immunocompromising thing that can happen and not all immunocompromised people have cancer specifically… For the record.

Anyone who is anti-vax should be aware that they are actively and intentionally putting other people at risk and that should be strongly and thoroughly documented; so when they bring in a cold/flu/COVID/measles/whatever preventable disease to the school and someone else’s kid dies as a result the grieving family has the ability to sue them into poverty.

They deserve worse, but legally, I can’t condone that… But if someone wanted to take a page from a particular person named Luigi, I would be hard pressed to find a good reason to pursue any charges against them.

Interestingly, I have some nurses in the family and the rate at which people who are educated in healthcare, are anti-vax, is too damned high.

Which isn’t to imply its a lot of people, but any nonzero amount of people, working in healthcare, who buy into anti-vax propaganda, is too many. You’ve been formally taught about this stuff. Yet, you’re anti-vax because some person on Facebook/Twitter/whatever, fed you some bullshit about the “dangers”?? Wow. What the actual fuck.

Yeah, I kinda went off on a tangent there…

My brain is weird

This is actually rather poignant.

By this standard, “successful” companies simply haven’t failed yet.

It’s standard that in human experience, we will fail at things. It happens, it happens often, and it will continue to happen. Failing at something is the first step. Without failure, how would we ever know how to “succeed”?

This doesn’t, and shouldn’t, imply that we are bad at a thing, or that we can’t become good at it, or that we should give up and stop trying. It also doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that we should continue to try. “Failure” is just an outcome, whether that is good or bad is entirely up to the viewer to decide.

I would argue that failure is simply a mental/social concept. Things simply happen. “Success” or “failure” is entirely dependent on those who had some interest in what specifically happened. Even if you’re trying to achieve a specific outcome, whether you do or not is entirely inconsequential. You tried to achieve an outcome by doing x, y, or z, and then a, b, and c occurred. Whether a, b, and c are the outcome that was desired or not is not a consequence that the universe cares about.

So much of this is simply social constructs.

Fun. I didn’t grow up issuing a Mac, not did I grow up using Windows… Nor Linux.

When I started on computers, we used DOS.

I’m old.

I’m not old enough to remember punch cards, I was solidly in the x86 generation, but still.

For the record, I do IT support now. I’m the one that helps you with your printer.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

You wasted a lot of words here.

You acknowledge that at the beginning of COVID, contact tracing and sterilization of contact surfaces was paramount before we knew better, going to the length of generating, or otherwise obtaining “tubs” of cleaning products for the purpose.

My entire point is that “contact tracing” is not just who you make contact with but what you make contact with. My point is not and was never that it was relevant for protection against COVID. My point was that it was a part of contact tracing. I only mention COVID at all because that is what was taught in the early days of the lockdown. A point to which you have all but plainly said, that you have also been educated on.

The miscommunication here is that you are only looking at contact tracing as person to person contact because it was relevant during the pandemic, while I’m focused on the umbrella concept of contact tracing not just for COVID specifically and that as a medical term, which it is and always has been, “contact tracing” is not just person to person contact, but also contact with surfaces. The context of the word contact, is the difference. In your view, you are seeing contact as in someone on your contact list, a person you connect with, or communicate with. In my context, contact is the act of touching or making physical contact with peoples and things, including nonphysical contact, like what happens when you share a small space with someone, you are in contact with all of the surfaces they are, inhaling the air they’re exhaling.

For COVID, contact tracing and education thereof started with the full medical definition of contact tracing, including, but not limited to, physical contact to both people and objects, and sharing a space with others. Later the former part of that was dropped for COVID specifically as it was established that it did not yield any significant prevention from infection.

None of the above paragraph is in question.

My friend who sanitized their groceries on the advice of medical professionals during the early days of the pandemic did, indeed, as you say, waste cleaning products with no real gain to show for it. In their defense, at the time nobody knew that.

My point is. Contact tracing is more than who you make contact with. That was it. You’re arguing something totally off topic about COVID that doesn’t refute anything I’m trying to prove.

In the context of COVID, again, no it does not prevent the spread in any meaningful way, as medical science has since proven. You were, like everyone else, taught the full meaning of contact tracing during the early days of the pandemic, yet here we are. You’re up on a soap box, shouting from the rooftops that it doesn’t prevent the spread of COVID. A point that was never in contention. Good job. You played yourself.

That seems like the same thing as soda stream, which is far more popular where I am.

I don’t want soda stream, I also don’t want this drink mate thing. Far too manual to make soda when I want it.

With an actual soda fountain: I set it up, and beyond refilling the supplies every few months or so, I wouldn’t need to think about it or do anything… Just fill up my cup and go.

I disagree. I specifically cited in the context of the apps made. The contact tracing that was in effect for COVID was far more comprehensive.

If you didn’t get that message, you likely were not paying attention. I knew people that were using disinfecting wipes on their groceries because of contact tracing. Eg, they couldn’t know what or who made contact with their products prior to having them, so they did the right thing in the context of contact tracing and sanitized the items to the best of their ability.

This wasn’t uncommon among those that actually wanted to avoid the virus.

If you’re only referring to contact tracing in the context of the apps that were made, sure. Then it’s about who you were in contact with.

Contact tracing in medical contexts is entirely not that (or at least, not just that).

Therein lies the issue I have with modern streaming. When Netflix was the only game in town, things were mostly fine. Then I saw content I was actively watching disappear from the service, and research showed that this was due to licensing issues.

I saw the writing on the wall. Copyright holders were gearing up to make their own Netflix competitor streaming service. Which is exactly what they did.

When it all started, I dusted off my tri-point hat and got to work building “my own Netflix” and honestly, it’s been amazing. A royal pain in my arse sometimes, but mostly amazing.

I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with some of the more recent streaming services, shortly before everyone started cracking down on “asking sharing” bullshit. I live in the same house as one subscriber, but I run my own network, and have my own Internet IP address, so I’m not in their “home” and can no longer use the service because of account sharing restrictions and related bullshit. Anyways…

One thing that always grabbed me is that my own service puts all my recently watched shows that have new episodes front and center as soon as I open it up… New streaming services either have that info halfway down the page, with the top of the page dominated by ads for new shows to watch, or whatever popular… Meanwhile, I mainly just care about the show I’ve been watching and I want to watch what’s new… What a pain in the ass.

On top of that, I would have to memorize what service has what shows/movies, and if it’s anything pre-streaming that’s not part of a large franchise, like Star wars or Star Trek, or whatever, I usually have to look it up, or bounce between different services frantically searching for what I want.

No thanks.

The MPAA needs to take notes from the RIAA… I subscribe to one music service and I never have any trouble finding what I want to listen to. … Key takeaway: I subscribe to a music service.

I do not subscribe to any video streaming services.

In medical environments being aware of what you make contact with, aka, contact tracing, is absolutely about tracking what the hell you touched.

You leaned on that wall over there for 2.6 seconds after touching this thing contaminated with x, y, and z? Great, now we have to sanitize that, and everything that made contact with it.

Sit down.

We wanted to do it this year on our anniversary, which was about a month ago now, but there was too much going on financially that even throwing a modest party with the budget constraints was going to create problems. We both had job disruptions in the last months of 2024, and things have just been a bit to hard financially to really bother.

We’re starting to save for next year already. Planning shall begin soon.

I love it. I think it would be pretty awesome to have a drink fountain for home.

Not sure I could get the wife approval on that…

My partner and I are similar to you. We couldn’t care less. I proposed to her, she said yes, we’re happy with the way things are, nothing needed to change.

However. Legally speaking, when you get married, you are considered as a single legal entity in many things including court/law enforcement/taxes.

A person cannot be compelled to bear witness to their partners actions in court, in the USA, that’s the fifth amendment, in Canada, it’s section 11© of the charter of rights and freedoms. The basic concept being that you have the right to remain silent (and not incriminate yourself).

While I don’t plan on doing any crime or anything… That’s a nice perk.

Also, she hates doing her taxes, so when we’re married, I can do taxes for both of us.

There’s very few perks here and bluntly, it’s not worth the cost…

We’re going to elope and just throw a “reception” (party) afterwards.

Confirm this for me. It’s not one hole per drink on the first, isn’t it? It’s two per, since one is for the creamy thick syrup, the other is for fizzy water.

That’s why you basically end up with soda water if the syrup is out.

That’s correct, no?