Or, if the business is 24/7, make sure they have an explicit on-call policy with designated shifts. (e.g. who is allowed to call you, what is the expected response time, is an issue disruptive enough that it needs resolving at 3am on a holiday, etc.)

My current job (IT for a non-profit research facility) pays a sweet daily bonus just for having my phone on me, even if I don’t get called over a week, plus double overtime pay when I do get called afterhours. I’ve had 13 shifts over the past couple years, and was called only 7-8 times, 3 of those on the same weekend for the same issue (couldn’t make a permanent fix until the following Monday).

In any other job, I definitely wouldn’t accept a manager or random coworkers sending me messages out of the blue on a weekend and getting mad when I don’t respond.

No, you’re absolutely correct! I meant it more along the lines of the “We take nothing by conquest” rhetoric, which is equally hypocritical considering the reality. I didn’t really want to add an “/s” to the statement… Yes, the US killed a lot of people in Mexican territory, but then they made up a treaty and paid $15mil for half of the land 🤷 (heavily simplified).

But it’s 2025, and I’m honestly not sure if the geopolitical climate is in a better or worse state than it was 170 years ago. And if not worse on average, it’s definitely widely polarized.

Well you’re not wrong, I think some dummies would say “acktually we bought it from Mexico”.

I liked this article from a couple months ago on the whole situation: https://www.dal.ca/news/2025/01/09/united-states-canada-state-51st.html

Is it bad that I want him to try?

Historically, the US has never acquired territory by force, and even then Emperor Clementine would need a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate to ratify and prove the annexation was legal, which I doubt he’ll get.

F*ck around and find out, as it were.

During a high school English class, we had a section on fairytales and their origins in old European folklore (think stories that inspired The Witcher, the gorier version of Cinderella, etc.)

One of the assignments was to write our own short fairytales, but apparently I was the only person that got a memo that these should have a darker style and tone as well… I don’t remember the whole of what I wrote, only that it involved trying to kill a witch, if you failed you died, and the winning method was using a pencil (this was 3-4 years before John Wick).

After I read it to the entire class… well if there wasn’t a whispered “WTF” to break the silence, there should’ve been.

I think I got a B minus.

I’ve actually been investigating Postgres cluster configurations the past 2 weeks at work (though we’re considering CloudNativePG+Kubernetes on 3 nodes spanning two physical locations).

One thing I might recommend is to investigate adding a proxy like PgBouncer in front of the databases. This will manage request differences where write-queries must go to the primary, but read-queries may go to any of the replicas as well.

It should also better handle the recycling of short-lived and orphaned connections, which may become more of a concern on your stage 3, and especially on some stage 4.