‘A ten’ or just ‘ten?’ Rather worrying.

capitalism was pretty OK when we had unions

That’s kind of the trick. People who collected loads of capital then spent loads on developing an ecosystem of media, ‘academics,’ and political manipulation that has steadily chipped away at those unions, and the ideas and circumstances that make them possible. The glut of overpriced degrees with distorted prospects, the idea that schooling is for getting a job rather than advancing knowledge, the union busting activity, the system of HR, the mergers on top of mergers that build monopoly, all paid for by capitalists who already had more money than they could use.

‘Just quit’ is pithy, but misses out on the fact that survival without a job is not an easy prospect. It doesn’t even punish the management who are making their workplace awful. It all gets displaced onto the other employees and the company machinery. Hell, it can serve as a reward in some places. If they throw work at someone until they quit, the employee has been doing all that work until then, so no worries there, the work can be shoved off onto the other employees on the team, and most people aren’t going to quit over a small extra ask when the alternative is months of job searching with no unemployment. And for however long that manager can spin that out, they’re just adding to their bonus. And then, ironically, they can do exactly what you are talking about and quit, going over to the next company saying ‘look at this, I cut costs at my old job by XX%.’ and getting the job-switch payraise with a premium for doing things that harm their former team and employer.

‘I’m 40% Markov chain.’

‘I want you to make me a Facebook-killer app with agentive AI and blockchains. Why is that so hard for you code monkeys to understand?’

LinkedIn is Poe’s Law for corporatism made into a lifestyle.

Game publishers: We aren’t predating on children fast enough. How will we ever achieve infinite money if we don’t predate on children faster?

Discord management: We can help with that.

It changes one kind of stress for another in a lot of cases. If you annoy everyone you come into contact with, you end up alone, which isn’t great for your mental health, and turns every interaction into an annoyance, so you end up stressed by the necessity of interacting with people you don’t want to interact with. There is no escape from humanity when you are human.

Uhoh, now the anaconda is going to want some.

Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn’t want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can’t even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder’s dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how ‘it’s your fault. Don’t you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don’t you just move to a bigger house? I’m morally superior because I’m complaining about your complaining about something you can’t fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don’t you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can’t afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don’t you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?’

Most people feel obligated to at least pretend they like their family.

I remember a talk about this exact concept. KDE Eco was announced a ways back but it’s KDE’s initiative to remind people that Linux offers a more environmentally friendly option for computing, preventing the creation of E-waste, a godawful source of toxic pollutants in itself, but also in many other ways that play out across the computing hardware lifecycle. Anyone who claims to care about the environment, the global south, or even just the affordability of personal computing should be on board.

• Sneakily work together in secret, private meetings to manipulate people’s beliefs
• Have direct influence over which companies make money
• Have direct influence over which politicians are elected
• Have direct influence on which laws are popularized vs vilified
• Make obscene amounts of money by parasitizing others’ work
• Lie constantly
• Perpetually working to worsen society for their own benefit
• Have space lasers (okay, not this one, as far as I know)

You know, most of the crap anti-Semites say about the jews is actually true of the marketing industry.

*gestures vaguely around*

Find the readers. Postman was right. It will only get worse.

What risk? Sometimes government officials have to do somewhat unpopular things. Elected officials are just supposed to represent their constituency, though. If they aren’t willing to take a risk to serve their constituents, they shouldn’t be in a position of power. If you really believe it has to be done, and you really are in it to serve, you’ll accept the cost/risk. If that scares you too much, you’ll stay home.

And you can bet there’d be FAR fewer collisions if the spikes were present. Driving isn’t a right any more than having political office is, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect people to accept the risk if they want the benefit.

Also, you’re going to have to add on Saturdays for that second term so you can coordinate with management to handle training for the one-termers.

One of my little ideas for ‘fixes’ for political problems has been ‘if you get voted in, you have the job for life, but can be fired at any time,’ as in out of a canon, at a brick wall. Better keep those approval rates over 66%. Donors come and go. The canon is forever.

You get a second term as a ‘reward’ for your special skills.

I haven’t seen it. It’s disappointing that it was cancelled.

Quite disappointing.

If the homeless all end up in prison, there are no more homeless, and a fresh supply of profitable slave laborers.