At this point does Google ever do anything that isn’t awful for the consumer?

Eject, friend, eject!

Not going to agree with the commenter above, but I want to point out that this happens a lot:

A person who holds views that are detrimental to others comes to a community of those people and cries “why, when I am not quite like other people who hold these views, but agree with them on the detrimental stuff about you, do you not accept me?”

The people in the community try repeatedly to explain why holding views that harm others is harmful and that the person asking may need to revaluate their own views.

The person then says they’re being attacked. Everything they predicted about this community is coming true! They feel like they’re being kicked out!

And they are! Because when they came to engage then didn’t change, let alone evaluate, any of their own views, the community rightly showed them back to the door until they are ready to actually listen and put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

I am sure you feel like you have been badly treated at this point. What you do with that now is up to you. I’ll say this: I have no hate for you, I would like nothing more than to give you some feedback that might help change how you view some things. I hope there is enough food for thought here for everyone.

FWIW: these types of password rules are discouraged by NIST -

1. Eliminate Periodic Resets

Many companies ask their users to reset their passwords every few months, thinking that any unauthorized person who obtained a user’s password will soon be locked out. However, frequent password changes can actually make security worse.

It’s difficult enough to remember one good password a year. And since users often have numerous passwords to remember already, they often resort to changing their passwords in predictable patterns, such as adding a single character to the end of their last password or replacing a letter with a symbol that looks like it (such as $ instead of S).

So if an attacker already knows a user’s previous password, it won’t be difficult to crack the new one. The NIST guidelines state that periodic password-change requirements should be removed for this reason.

As an outsider with no horse in the race, I thought this a good discussion.

In the end, I think maybe Quebec gets what it wants: I have no interest in visiting a place that tries to police its “culture” that much.

The sad truth is it will need to get much worse until conservatives will admit there is a problem and let progressives solve it.

It has always been this way. You either live in a progressive, upwardly moving state with improving quality of life or you get stuck in a conservative, stagnant or downward trending place where people are more concerned with “others” than they are with doing anything productive as a society. As a species, we seem to slowly wobble back and forth between these extremes. It’s maddening.

How much do you think you’d need to get out? (Asking, in a kidding way, as a Californian who is tired of these memes about how it’s bad to live here when you’re just describing any major urban center in the world.)

Edit: you’re not wrong about the challenges, it’s just that they’re not unique to California.

In 10 years you haven’t made any professional connections who would want to work with you again?

That is the single best avenue to other jobs: foot in the door through someone you have worked with who can vouch for your professionalism and ability.

If you’re not making those connections, something is wrong. It could be the kinds of jobs you’ve taken, eg: if they’re all solo contracts and you don’t interact with anyone on anything other than deliverables. Or you are taking roles where your output is used only by a small sunset of the company or something?

If you’re taking reasonable roles and have decent interaction with co-workers and no one is willing to refer you for a job, then you need to think about what your relationships are like at work and why they aren’t positive enough.