Changes

Well, so much for lack of sleep. After 4 months of irregular pay, no pay all December, and reluctance to change direction into something profitable, such as growing mushrooms, I finally quit my worm castings job today. I said I resigned, and the 1 year notification clause of any inventions in the intellectual property agreement should be counted from today. They did not accept my resignation. What can I do? Now I just hope I can save my other job where I was messing up from not enough sleep.

When you get a job and are asked to sign an intellectual property agreement, what are your choices? Not sign and be out the door, or sign and shut your brain down, especially when the nature of the job is a physical labor type job. They were trying to turn it into a research type position by forcing you to record observations about earthworms, which of course eventually leads to experiments with earthworms, and of course some questions can only be answered by things such as a vivisection. Oh come on, they are only worms! I'd rather be out the door than have to perform vivisections, at least as long as nobody holds a gun to my head, or the other choice being starvation. There is a fine line between experimental research and record keeping for accounting purposes. I squarely refused to do any kind of biotech research from the beginning, but I had to end up doing record keeping type of stuff for the physical labor. By the way, in general an intellectual property agreement is in fact saying that if you come up with anything, you can't do it, because we own the technology, you signed it over when you started the job, and you can only practice it if you purchase a license from us for the stuff that you came up with. It used to be that inventors owned their inventions. Now it's owned, or more like extorted by those who provide them with the chairs, pens, or lab equipment. Or food. Because you have to eat. What's fair? Signing a standard intellectual property agreement that we own anything and everything is a default requirement for almost any job anymore, because they can get away with it. I practically gave up a good paying job over it. I'm looking for only jobs that don't require such an agreement anymore, because I like to think freely, without worrying about oops, there it goes, I had just come up with an idea there, and I should have run to my "owner", or "boss" or "manager" and should have protected his intellectual property for him, because he made me sign an agreement. Freedom of mind is like the most important thing to me anymore. That ip agreement was the worst part of that job, being "forced" to sign that agreement, to acknowledge that thoughts are owned by anyone. Of course you're not "forced", anyone is free to quit a job as soon as they win the lottery, but you're signing an unequal treaty out of necessity. When you have bills, the only way to make it is to have an income, and usually that means having a job, and someone "has to" give you a job, or else you can't pay your bills. Of course they don't "have to," but once someone gives you one, what can you do? If nothing else, it's entertainment - they tell you to dance, or do really retarded and stupid things for their personal entertainment, and you do it, because it's a job, especially in an economy where you can't find another job, or the other ones go even deeper against your conscience. What's wrong with entertainment?

On the computing front, I've come across the Loongson cpu, and the Yeelong laptop used by Stallman too. "The world's first laptop which contains completely free software. All system source files(BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free, no close firmware needed." It's not very beefy, not enough power, but it's surely beefier than a Microchip microcontroller, with similar freedoms. Did I say freedom to do whatever you want on your computer in the privacy of your own home? On more than just a microcontroller? I'm salivating. Too bad I can't afford one right now.