Personally, I'm a Mozilla Firebird fanboy. Small, fast, slick, everything I need. Well, almost.
Sure, me too. I'll even use Lynx in the console with my headless machines and be happy with that.
But quite frankly, we're talking about people here who don't know the difference between a browser, a webpage, the internet itself, or a webserver. I advocate Firebird and Thunderbird to everyone i know, regardless of their platform, because i truly feel it is the greatest thing since sliced disks, but to walk someone like this through a browser installation over the phone because they're too afraid to read and click "next"? Naw, no thanks.
...is the public's misconception about pop-up ads. Due to the slick marketing of AOL and Earthlink et al, when their screen becomes full of ads, they call up their internet service provider and give them tons of grief. I see my (less than savvy) friends pay fees to companies like AdsGone (i think it's $50/year to use the software) to get rid of "popups" by automatically closing them when they open.
But the other issue, is that 99% of the time when someone is getting the shit hammered out of them by popup ads it is because they've got about 15 parasites embedded into IE that sits and serves them all day.
True "pop up ads" only occur when you enter a site, or leave a site, and shouldn't just pop up spontaneously whenever the computer is on, regardless of whether or not you are on the inet. I've seen computers so laden with these that they are completely useless- you start the machine up, and it serves so many ads in the first minute that it crashes. But once again, the customers do not understand this, they simply blame their ISP.
Finally, the latest thing that i'm seeing (i work in tech support if you haven't figured this out yet).... people will call up yelling and screaming and bitching and moaning about all these pop up ads they're getting. So i look at their computer and i start pointing to such things as Precision Time, or WeatherBug, or all these other "adware" programs they've installed as the culprit. They understand it when i tell them, but then i get things like "but i LIKE my Desktop Calender, i don't want you to remove it." or "but i LIKE my Huntbar." or "but i LIKE the MYWAY software, i want to keep it." and stuff. They will bitch about the ads, i tell them why they are getting them, but they don't want to fix it. However, this still doesn't stop them from calling up and bitching about the ads every other week.
It's a no-win situation for all concerned. I hate blanket statements, but the fact is, most of the people on the internet don't deserve to be there and will always be miserable, no matter how much you try to help them.
"From Takara, the folks who brought you Bow-Lingual the dog translator
This isn't that email i get 15 times a week proclaiming "Amazing Breakthrough In Software Technology! Turn Woofs into Words! Free Download!" is it?
stare at a photograph of what you want to dream of (Natalie Portman maybe) and record the dream plot. When you fall asleep, this gadget waits for REM and then uses your voice recording, lights, music and aroma to help direct your dream."
It's probably not recommended to have a device cooking up some grits when there's no one there to keep an eye on it. But in other news, i did hear that they are selling perfume that smells just like natalie portman!
...and call this flamebait, though i don't mean it as such.
What i think is a *real* issue for the BSD folks to consider if they are being misunderstood..
(and i mean this as informative, not scathing)....are the new hordes of OSX users that go around trumpeting "I AM A BSD POWERUSER" or "I HAVE A HIGH-END UNIX SERVER" "MY APPLE HAS PROTECTED MEMORY, PREEMPTIVE MULTITASKING AND UNIX, WHICH IS SOMETHING YOUR STUPID WINTEL PEECEE WILL NEVER HAVE" that have never seen the inside of a terminal window, init script or log file. Essentially lifelong Mac nuts.
In other words, the BSD community just inherited a whole new legion of zealots, who will have the side effect of causing people (who probably also aren't very knowledgeable) to associate "BSD" with bad flamewars, etc. The difference is that some of these folks don't have a clue, and they spout a lot of dumb rhetoric.
Sure, there are zealots in *any* camp, and there are kind, knowledgeable, helpful folks in every camp too. I'm not saying that all OSX users are zealots, or clueless, or that all BSD users are assholes, or anything. Good and bad in all.
I see a lot of folks in both camps that use both, because both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The folks that will choose one or the other and be biased about it are either:
1) BSD folks that tried out linux in 1994, and still have the impression stuck in their mind. They seem to think that linux hasn't changed at all since then.
2) Linux folks that at some point of their complete n00bness went into a BSD channel in efnet and asked some lame question like "since linux is unix, where can i get the FreeBSD RPMS?" and got flamed so hard that they had to crawl out of a hole in the ground. Therefore, they think that BSD users are all crusty assholes that cling to a "little used" OS that is fading into obscurity like people that try to ride out hurricanes. Hence all the "BSD is dying" bullshit.
And it's really sad. Both have their merits. Both share many of the same goals. I wish they could get along and do great things together.
My $0.02USD + tax.
Re:Funny you mention automakers...
on
Paranoia
·
· Score: 2, Funny
They make phone-enabled phones now?! Where can I get one of these high tech gadgets?;)
Yes!! so now, instead of spending 30 agonizing minutes keying in "HLO HW R U?" you into those tiny lil buttons on the phone, you can just call them!
This introduces new bugs and abandons all the small fixes and tweaks that made the original version work so well. It also often introduces incompatibilities that break a sometimes huge existing userbase.
Microsoft has created an entire, successful, multibillion-dollar-a-year-profiting business model off of this!!
Sarcasm aside, while I could maybe grant that there isn't a very large market in commercial compilers for Linux in the embedded space, there is definitely a market for Linux itself in the embedded space.
but would you say that the linux embedded market is increasing or will increase? I don't know exactly what a lot of embedded stuff runs, but i assume a real small bare-bones OS as a controller that's not much more than a fancy 64K asm program?
As stuff is expected to become more "intelligent", will we see more linux embedded stuff (or netbsd for that matter)?
Over the last year there have been a lot of criticism in the press about linux. Now, i do understand that linux, in its infinite forms, will still never be a "be-all, end-all" perfect solution for everything. It's an OS, it's got its faults like any other.
However, why suddenly all the criticism and negative press? I have a few theories:
1) The SCO case introduced linux to a lot of journalists that previously had never heard of it. Kind of hard to swallow, since "linux" *is* damn near a household name now, even for joe sixpack. Maybe the SCO case has introduced it in an unfavourable light, or maybe not.
2) Is linux not the holy grail we thought it was? I have as hard a time believing this as most any other slashbot. Linux is free, it's good, and it's fun. But maybe it's not what *other* people wanted. We (the geeks) love linux as a free re-implementation of minix that is fundamentally quite "unix-like" on purpose. It invites tinkering, experimentation and all the things that appeal to the ADHD crowd. But Joe Sixpack or Journalist Types might be lead to believe the whole "linux is going to kill microsoft" hype. They go into looking at linux expecting "a free windows" and come away with the impression that it's "antiquated, crude, ugly, dificult to use" etc. I do not know where this "linux is going to replace windows on the desktop/linux will kill MS" stuff is coming from. That's not the point of linux. If that was going to happen, FreeBSD or Apple would have done it years ago.
3) ????
4) Profit!!!! MS/SCO/SUN is funding these journalists to present negative data about linux, be it factual or not. The common conspiracy theory. Yes we know that MS *is* guilty of doing this sort of thing, but in many cases it shows up relating to "linux is the poorest choice for X", where X is a market that MS doesn't seem to care about.
You know, extortion tactics like this aren't entirely new. I am sure there are hundreds of examples of where "smart" people leverage some sort of thing similar to FUD to make "dumb" people give them their money.
There's insurance fraud, there's the nigerian oil scam, there's "Call Chloe For Your Free Reedin's", there's the Lottery, and on and on. In the 1800's people were scamming those unawares with magic hair tonics, snake oil penis enhancements and horny goat weed, etc.....
The funny thing about this all along, is that the tables are turned. Instead of "smart" people trying to outwit "dumb" people, we've got someone who greatly underestimates his target.
You don't go talking IP and code and OSes with PEOPLE WHO LIVE AND BREATHE THIS SHIT DAILY. We wrote this code, we know what we've got and what we can do. Many of us have also worked with UnixWare and well, quite frankly, they can HAVE it.
I'd like to see someone who doesn't know a lick of physics go storming into a major automobile manufacturer's engineering office and demand they pay you $X for suspected stolen technologies in their seat springs or something. Those guys could let you have it in such a way that would make your head spin.
Something tells me that Darl knows all this. He's smarter than what he's letting on, and that he's got an agenda, or is getting funded by someone (insert favourite pump-n-dump/{MS, SUN, HP, Apple} is behind all this, etc conspiracy theorem.)
I wonder if this means the lyrics writers and all the other "little people" behind the scenes will get paid twice - finally the value of what they are worth...
Hey man, Hobbits prefer little folk to little people. Where is your Slashdot-Enhanced Political Correctness?
Oh, wait... you were referring to the starving taiwanese children that assemble the cases and run the printers for the album inserts?
Is it just me, or is this an attempt at blatantly copping-out by capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria that has been rampant recently?
The GPL certainly hasn't been tested in court (yet), but that doesn't mean it hasn't been tested. A large number of out-of-court settlements (some of them rather expensive) prove that corporations are willing to respect the license, and that its defenders are willing to enforce compliance.
You said 100% better what i wanted to say. I reached for mod points but i had none.
Sorry.
"capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria" hits the nail on the head.
Critics be damned, I like it. I used to light my apartment with thousands of white christmas lights on the ceiling. Made for some relaxing "soft" lighting, but this really takes the cake.
Plays hell on CRT monitor screens though:-(
I used to have to tip my monitors downward to keep the little reflections off.
In my experience, ATI rehashes and re-uses elements of their video card names frequently. Even the names of old, obsoleted chips will get reused years later on something new and completely different.
If it makes anyone feel any better, i recently tried hunting down a video driver for a customer's machine... Win2K identified the driver as a RAGE 128 PRO, the part number on one side of the card identified it as an Xpert 2000, and the part number on the other side of the card identified it as a 3rd party clone using licensed ATI parts/design. Also, it would not accept any of the drivers on ATI's site- We ended up replacing the card with something we knew we had the correct driver for.
Also, my test box at home is a K6-II with an old ATI card in it. Solaris identifies it as a RAGE PRO TURBO. Various implementations of XFree86 and/or lspci have identified it as such: Xpert 98 Xpert 99 Xpert @ Play Xpert @ Work Rage Pro II Rage Pro Turbo Rage Pro Turbo II Rage Plus Rage Ultra
Maybe I am just a retard and can't identify a piece of hardware correctly, but maybe the model of card that is being reported on some of these laptops is incorrect vs. the actual set of chips?
Ok.. Your union story is a triumph, and congratulations, as i feel teachers (and teacher's assistants) hold the key to our future as a human race. I'm not chiding, i'm being sincere. Good for you.
Now,
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, i tried to go to work for several Union shops (auto and OTR truck repair industry). With many, joining the union was a condition of employment (it was the same union from place to place, mind you).
Funds were tight, i didn't want to pay union dues. I finally found a place that would hire me without having to join the union. I noticed on my checks, that union dues were being garnished from them anyways. I went to speak with my supervisor, and he referred me to his union representative. The guy flat out told me, (and i quote):
"You can join the union or not, but you are going to pay union dues to work in this garage. If you don't like it, hand you your ass on a platter and you'll never work in this town again."
So i folded, i grumbled, and i joined their union. I worked there for 18 months, paying 17% of my take-home to the union, until the union rep got into a spat with the owner of the garage. So now we are on strike, and getting paid peanuts. The garage owner simply hired a bunch of ppl (scabs) to replace all of us, and we were all out of a job.
Our union rep was no help to us from then on. We were all out of work, broke, and left in the cold by the union. Some guys there had paid into it for 25 years or so.
I've seen manifestations in other places too. As a delivery driver, i could pull into a dock of a Union shop. In order to get a crate off my truck, i would have to confer with a Lading Op, a DockMaster, a Forklift driver, a Warehouser, etc etc... one our to remove a crate, when in a non-union shop i could grab a pallet jack and have it off my truck in 10 minutes. Time was money, and the union shops wasted a lot of my time, with a lot of frivilous jobs and things.
And this isn't isolated to my experience. There are similar stories (some even worse) from people i know in a lot of different trades.
I am happy to hear that your union apparently does something for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm a Mozilla Firebird fanboy. Small, fast, slick, everything I need. Well, almost.
Sure, me too. I'll even use Lynx in the console with my headless machines and be happy with that.
But quite frankly, we're talking about people here who don't know the difference between a browser, a webpage, the internet itself, or a webserver. I advocate Firebird and Thunderbird to everyone i know, regardless of their platform, because i truly feel it is the greatest thing since sliced disks, but to walk someone like this through a browser installation over the phone because they're too afraid to read and click "next"? Naw, no thanks.
...is the public's misconception about pop-up ads. Due to the slick marketing of AOL and Earthlink et al, when their screen becomes full of ads, they call up their internet service provider and give them tons of grief. I see my (less than savvy) friends pay fees to companies like AdsGone (i think it's $50/year to use the software) to get rid of "popups" by automatically closing them when they open.
But the other issue, is that 99% of the time when someone is getting the shit hammered out of them by popup ads it is because they've got about 15 parasites embedded into IE that sits and serves them all day.
True "pop up ads" only occur when you enter a site, or leave a site, and shouldn't just pop up spontaneously whenever the computer is on, regardless of whether or not you are on the inet. I've seen computers so laden with these that they are completely useless- you start the machine up, and it serves so many ads in the first minute that it crashes. But once again, the customers do not understand this, they simply blame their ISP.
Finally, the latest thing that i'm seeing (i work in tech support if you haven't figured this out yet)....
people will call up yelling and screaming and bitching and moaning about all these pop up ads they're getting. So i look at their computer and i start pointing to such things as Precision Time, or WeatherBug, or all these other "adware" programs they've installed as the culprit. They understand it when i tell them, but then i get things like "but i LIKE my Desktop Calender, i don't want you to remove it." or "but i LIKE my Huntbar." or "but i LIKE the MYWAY software, i want to keep it." and stuff. They will bitch about the ads, i tell them why they are getting them, but they don't want to fix it. However, this still doesn't stop them from calling up and bitching about the ads every other week.
It's a no-win situation for all concerned. I hate blanket statements, but the fact is, most of the people on the internet don't deserve to be there and will always be miserable, no matter how much you try to help them.
OS X is dying....
too much Karma is bad for you anyways. It causes corruption.
"From Takara, the folks who brought you Bow-Lingual the dog translator
This isn't that email i get 15 times a week proclaiming "Amazing Breakthrough In Software Technology! Turn Woofs into Words! Free Download!" is it?
stare at a photograph of what you want to dream of (Natalie Portman maybe) and record the dream plot. When you fall asleep, this gadget waits for REM and then uses your voice recording, lights, music and aroma to help direct your dream."
It's probably not recommended to have a device cooking up some grits when there's no one there to keep an eye on it. But in other news, i did hear that they are selling perfume that smells just like natalie portman!
...and call this flamebait, though i don't mean it as such.
....are the new hordes of OSX users that go around trumpeting "I AM A BSD POWERUSER" or "I HAVE A HIGH-END UNIX SERVER" "MY APPLE HAS PROTECTED MEMORY, PREEMPTIVE MULTITASKING AND UNIX, WHICH IS SOMETHING YOUR STUPID WINTEL PEECEE WILL NEVER HAVE" that have never seen the inside of a terminal window, init script or log file. Essentially lifelong Mac nuts.
What i think is a *real* issue for the BSD folks to consider if they are being misunderstood..
(and i mean this as informative, not scathing)
In other words, the BSD community just inherited a whole new legion of zealots, who will have the side effect of causing people (who probably also aren't very knowledgeable) to associate "BSD" with bad flamewars, etc. The difference is that some of these folks don't have a clue, and they spout a lot of dumb rhetoric.
Sure, there are zealots in *any* camp, and there are kind, knowledgeable, helpful folks in every camp too. I'm not saying that all OSX users are zealots, or clueless, or that all BSD users are assholes, or anything. Good and bad in all.
I see a lot of folks in both camps that use both, because both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The folks that will choose one or the other and be biased about it are either:
1) BSD folks that tried out linux in 1994, and still have the impression stuck in their mind. They seem to think that linux hasn't changed at all since then.
2) Linux folks that at some point of their complete n00bness went into a BSD channel in efnet and asked some lame question like "since linux is unix, where can i get the FreeBSD RPMS?" and got flamed so hard that they had to crawl out of a hole in the ground. Therefore, they think that BSD users are all crusty assholes that cling to a "little used" OS that is fading into obscurity like people that try to ride out hurricanes. Hence all the "BSD is dying" bullshit.
And it's really sad. Both have their merits. Both share many of the same goals. I wish they could get along and do great things together.
My $0.02USD + tax.
They make phone-enabled phones now?! Where can I get one of these high tech gadgets? ;)
Yes!! so now, instead of spending 30 agonizing minutes keying in "HLO HW R U?" you into those tiny lil buttons on the phone, you can just call them!
My gawd i haven't laughed that hard at a /. response ever.
Thanks.
I wish i had modpoints
At one point (about 3 years ago) i coulda swore i read that Peter Mayhew had died. I was bummed.
Nice to see he's in good shape otherwise.
Congratulations!
:-/
I've been waiting to see how long it would take for someone to bring that up. After 2 months, you are the first!
Sorry that i don't have any prizes, unless you want a Cyrix 150Mhz POS i'm about to throw away.
This introduces new bugs and abandons all the small fixes and tweaks that made the original version work so well. It also often introduces incompatibilities that break a sometimes huge existing userbase.
Microsoft has created an entire, successful, multibillion-dollar-a-year-profiting business model off of this!!
Sheesh.
Sarcasm aside, while I could maybe grant that there isn't a very large market in commercial compilers for Linux in the embedded space, there is definitely a market for Linux itself in the embedded space.
but would you say that the linux embedded market is increasing or will increase? I don't know exactly what a lot of embedded stuff runs, but i assume a real small bare-bones OS as a controller that's not much more than a fancy 64K asm program?
As stuff is expected to become more "intelligent", will we see more linux embedded stuff (or netbsd for that matter)?
Over the last year there have been a lot of criticism in the press about linux. Now, i do understand that linux, in its infinite forms, will still never be a "be-all, end-all" perfect solution for everything. It's an OS, it's got its faults like any other.
However, why suddenly all the criticism and negative press? I have a few theories:
1) The SCO case introduced linux to a lot of journalists that previously had never heard of it. Kind of hard to swallow, since "linux" *is* damn near a household name now, even for joe sixpack. Maybe the SCO case has introduced it in an unfavourable light, or maybe not.
2) Is linux not the holy grail we thought it was? I have as hard a time believing this as most any other slashbot. Linux is free, it's good, and it's fun. But maybe it's not what *other* people wanted. We (the geeks) love linux as a free re-implementation of minix that is fundamentally quite "unix-like" on purpose. It invites tinkering, experimentation and all the things that appeal to the ADHD crowd. But Joe Sixpack or Journalist Types might be lead to believe the whole "linux is going to kill microsoft" hype. They go into looking at linux expecting "a free windows" and come away with the impression that it's "antiquated, crude, ugly, dificult to use" etc. I do not know where this "linux is going to replace windows on the desktop/linux will kill MS" stuff is coming from. That's not the point of linux. If that was going to happen, FreeBSD or Apple would have done it years ago.
3) ????
4) Profit!!!! MS/SCO/SUN is funding these journalists to present negative data about linux, be it factual or not. The common conspiracy theory. Yes we know that MS *is* guilty of doing this sort of thing, but in many cases it shows up relating to "linux is the poorest choice for X", where X is a market that MS doesn't seem to care about.
Your thoughts?
You know, extortion tactics like this aren't entirely new. I am sure there are hundreds of examples of where "smart" people leverage some sort of thing similar to FUD to make "dumb" people give them their money.
There's insurance fraud, there's the nigerian oil scam, there's "Call Chloe For Your Free Reedin's", there's the Lottery, and on and on. In the 1800's people were scamming those unawares with magic hair tonics, snake oil penis enhancements and horny goat weed, etc.....
The funny thing about this all along, is that the tables are turned. Instead of "smart" people trying to outwit "dumb" people, we've got someone who greatly underestimates his target.
You don't go talking IP and code and OSes with PEOPLE WHO LIVE AND BREATHE THIS SHIT DAILY. We wrote this code, we know what we've got and what we can do. Many of us have also worked with UnixWare and well, quite frankly, they can HAVE it.
I'd like to see someone who doesn't know a lick of physics go storming into a major automobile manufacturer's engineering office and demand they pay you $X for suspected stolen technologies in their seat springs or something. Those guys could let you have it in such a way that would make your head spin.
Something tells me that Darl knows all this. He's smarter than what he's letting on, and that he's got an agenda, or is getting funded by someone (insert favourite pump-n-dump/{MS, SUN, HP, Apple} is behind all this, etc conspiracy theorem.)
... is one more fuckwit American trumpeting around the world arrogantly making the United States look bad. :rolleyes:
I wonder if this means the lyrics writers and all the other "little people" behind the scenes will get paid twice - finally the value of what they are worth...
Hey man, Hobbits prefer little folk to little people. Where is your Slashdot-Enhanced Political Correctness?
Oh, wait... you were referring to the starving taiwanese children that assemble the cases and run the printers for the album inserts?
Hurray!
As the Stomach Turns, so do the days of our SCO life!
How's that. I just loaned you a (+1) Insightful. Sometime when I need a modpoint to give, maybe I could get you to loan me one. :P
:oP
Hurray for Joshua Rogers!
I owe you one, bud!
but I'm curious as to why the mplayer folks were using "strings" on the KISS module(s).
Granted, if what they say is true, it *does* look like something's not right there.
But why they were even looking to see how KISS's stuff worked is a bit curious.
Is it just me, or is this an attempt at blatantly copping-out by capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria that has been rampant recently?
The GPL certainly hasn't been tested in court (yet), but that doesn't mean it hasn't been tested. A large number of out-of-court settlements (some of them rather expensive) prove that corporations are willing to respect the license, and that its defenders are willing to enforce compliance.
You said 100% better what i wanted to say. I reached for mod points but i had none.
Sorry.
"capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria" hits the nail on the head.
Isn't today ShutUP or PutUP Day for SCO?
:o)
How long until we know how this shakes out in court?
Critics be damned, I like it. I used to light my apartment with thousands of white christmas lights on the ceiling. Made for some relaxing "soft" lighting, but this really takes the cake.
:-(
Plays hell on CRT monitor screens though
I used to have to tip my monitors downward to keep the little reflections off.
In my experience, ATI rehashes and re-uses elements of their video card names frequently. Even the names of old, obsoleted chips will get reused years later on something new and completely different.
If it makes anyone feel any better, i recently tried hunting down a video driver for a customer's machine... Win2K identified the driver as a RAGE 128 PRO, the part number on one side of the card identified it as an Xpert 2000, and the part number on the other side of the card identified it as a 3rd party clone using licensed ATI parts/design. Also, it would not accept any of the drivers on ATI's site- We ended up replacing the card with something we knew we had the correct driver for.
Also, my test box at home is a K6-II with an old ATI card in it. Solaris identifies it as a RAGE PRO TURBO. Various implementations of XFree86 and/or lspci have identified it as such:
Xpert 98
Xpert 99
Xpert @ Play
Xpert @ Work
Rage Pro II
Rage Pro Turbo
Rage Pro Turbo II
Rage Plus
Rage Ultra
Maybe I am just a retard and can't identify a piece of hardware correctly, but maybe the model of card that is being reported on some of these laptops is incorrect vs. the actual set of chips?
Fwiw, i think ATI is teh h4rd suX.
ymmv.
hth.
I thought that everyone jumped to the 2.6.0 by now?
Oh wait, it's been 2 weeks already,
TIME FOR A RECOMPILE!!
So there's my union story. What's yours?
Ok.. Your union story is a triumph, and congratulations, as i feel teachers (and teacher's assistants) hold the key to our future as a human race. I'm not chiding, i'm being sincere. Good for you.
Now,
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, i tried to go to work for several Union shops (auto and OTR truck repair industry). With many, joining the union was a condition of employment (it was the same union from place to place, mind you).
Funds were tight, i didn't want to pay union dues. I finally found a place that would hire me without having to join the union. I noticed on my checks, that union dues were being garnished from them anyways. I went to speak with my supervisor, and he referred me to his union representative. The guy flat out told me, (and i quote):
"You can join the union or not, but you are going to pay union dues to work in this garage. If you don't like it, hand you your ass on a platter and you'll never work in this town again."
So i folded, i grumbled, and i joined their union. I worked there for 18 months, paying 17% of my take-home to the union, until the union rep got into a spat with the owner of the garage. So now we are on strike, and getting paid peanuts. The garage owner simply hired a bunch of ppl (scabs) to replace all of us, and we were all out of a job.
Our union rep was no help to us from then on. We were all out of work, broke, and left in the cold by the union. Some guys there had paid into it for 25 years or so.
I've seen manifestations in other places too. As a delivery driver, i could pull into a dock of a Union shop. In order to get a crate off my truck, i would have to confer with a Lading Op, a DockMaster, a Forklift driver, a Warehouser, etc etc... one our to remove a crate, when in a non-union shop i could grab a pallet jack and have it off my truck in 10 minutes. Time was money, and the union shops wasted a lot of my time, with a lot of frivilous jobs and things.
And this isn't isolated to my experience. There are similar stories (some even worse) from people i know in a lot of different trades.
I am happy to hear that your union apparently does something for you.
HTH