Egregoros

@ThatCrazyDude No, we're in the same boat here. Trumps star is falling.

I guess there are two things at play here...

1. He's getting old, and it is starting to show. We must remember that the amount of stress he is experiencing on a daily basis is far, far above what we experience, and at that age. It takes its toll.

2. The upcoming election does not look good. He is therefore getting desprate. He gambled on a quick win in iran, based on erroneous information from israel, in order to go

@lebronjames75 Mastodon poetry at its best!

@toiletpaper Yes... I agree. One possible way is to hire a "manager" who is the customer facaing part, and he would also take care of payments, admin etc. You'll lose a percentage of your income, but you will be able to get a kind of privacy shield.

I've done that twice. One time I deeply regret, because the guy was completely crazy and borderline criminal. He came through a personal recommendation, and needless to say, that person I no longer have any relationship with.

@toiletpaper
The other time was an american guy who worked for the airforce and wanted to switch careers to programming. We discovered that it was very difficult to pay him through regular banks, so in the end I paid him with crypto. This would however, not be possible for me again, because I refuse to open an account with any of the major crypto exchanges since they are almost more privacy invasive than banks, and I also do not earn any crypto out of which I could pay. If I

@toiletpaper did, this would be an excellent way.

@toiletpaper This is the truth! Strangely enough, the only antidote I have discovered for these types of customers is to charge very high prices. The benefits, if you can pull it off, are two:

1. The cheap customers avoid you, which is great.

2. The customers that do pay for your services, never question you due to the high price. It sends the signal that you know what you are doing, and questioning you would be a waste of their own time and money.

@toiletpaper It is sad, because sometimes you do feel like helping a customer out by lowering your price, but it almost always leads to them complaining, so I stopped doing that.

If I want to be nice, I pay for lunch or beers, but I never lower my price.

@toiletpaper Yes... sadly this makes a lot of sense. I'll argue a bit, on the lighter side, and then we'll see. After all, the preson on the other side is a retarded, minor employee in the finance department, and hit has never been a problem before. But it is my biggest customer, so I do need to tread lightly.

@toiletpaper Makes perfect sense. I hope I can last for about 10 more years without too much selling out. Then I should be able to retire quite happily.

Speaking of balance of power, I had a funny experience today.

I have a big customer, who buys a lot from me. They got acquired, and I get a complaint from their finance department.

They say they won't pay my invoice, unless I create an account in their invoice system, and restructure my invoices to suit them.

@toiletpaper

Wtf? _You_ are buying from _me_, and refuse to pay me because you have stupid systems?

Will be a very interesting discussion.

Right now I'm thinking about just ignoring their email and to just keep sending them invoices.

@toiletpaper I've successfully used the plain Android dev environment in the past. Maybe it will be easier for you to get things to run on that one?

https://developer.android.com/studio

It is a huge java monster, but at least it installed painlessly on a modern linux distribution.

@toiletpaper Might work if the banks programmers are not very security conscious. I used the same method to print boardingcars at ryanair, when they stopped offering them to people without smartphones.

There are apps though, that detect that you do not run them on a phone, and then they refuse to cooperate.

I'll keep my fingers crossed!

@toiletpaper produced the odd, fake invoice in my own business. It is not a perfect solution, and it has severe limitations, but small stuff (depending on the size of the business and benevolence of the owner) should work.

@lain This is not strange. It is an established truth that the media, and people in general, can only keep on war in their heads at any one time. So if a new war starts, the old one has to go.

But now that there's a cease fire for 2 weeks in iran, we might get 2 weeks of ukraine war again.