Somewhere amid all the Congressional hearings called for by all of this, though, someone simply must find time to break Elon Musk on the fucking wheel.

The dream.

Be fun if they held it hostage. Don’t bring email back up until demands are met. Worker ownership. CEO exiled to a remote island.

I lost a lot of respect for a coworker over this.

This was pre pandemic. They brought a nurse into the office to give everyone who wanted a flu vaccine. She wouldn’t do it.

I said to her that if she got the flu, she’d probably live, but she’d also pass it on to other people. She’d be contagious before she knew she was sick, so she might be on the subway and infect a bunch of vulnerable people. Old ladies. Little babies. Anyone.

She was like no that’s not how it works. That’s not going to happen.

I was like, why not? In what way is that not how it works?

“I’ll just stay home if I’m sick”

“What about when you’re contagious and don’t realize? Or if it hits when you’re already at work?”

“That won’t happen”

Just denial.

Can’t convince people with facts. You have to play on their emotions. Make them feel good about themselves, or reinforce something they believe in. I can’t always figure out how to do that

If we had some sort of new Nuremberg trial he might die in front of a crowd.

I had a similar thought. A nice HUD for navigation would be nice. But we live in the bad place, so it’s all privacy invading enshittifying trash.

Things being illegal doesn’t mean they don’t happen. And, again, if people were redlined in 1960 and now a neighborhood is mostly black, that didn’t magically go away in 2026. The consequences are lasting.

Furthermore, as an individual, fighting more powerful institutions (eg: banks, the government) is not trivial. Shrugging it off with “you should report is” is technically true, but not a complete solution nor especially practical.

Breaking everything down to racism is naive

Well that’s not what’s happening in this discussion, so okay

focusing on what actually keeps people segregated, like socioeconomic status.

Deeply tied into race, historically and presently.

Regardless, the point stands that there’s few to no good reasons for an employer to know your address during the application process, and a lot of bad ones.

This isn’t the 1960’s. There’s no more segregation and people can live wherever they afford.

Redlining is less of a thing, but there are still areas that are predominantly populated by different ethnic groups. Furthermore, the consequences of housing segregation are still felt today. It’s not like the people who were forced to live in “undesirable” neighborhoods in the 1960s got reshuffled around.

To say “there’s no more segregation” is naive.

And even furthermore, it opens the door for unfair judgements like “oh they live in a bad neighborhood”, which might not be first order racist, but are still undesirable. There’s no need for it. Only unfair things can come from the information.

If I was in charge, I’d make some changes to the job process

• you must post the salary
• if you post a job and it’s determined there was no intent to fill the role, you must pay every applicant a year’s salary. Whistleblowers also get a payout.
• making the applicant fill out a form that duplicates information on the resume (eg: name, phone) is illegal.
• asking for the applicant’s address is illegal. They were going to use this for racism. You can ask about time zone and willingness to commute to the office
• employers must pay workers for their commute at their normal hourly rate.
• Ghosting an applicant (no response without a rejection or hire for a month) results in a fine. Pay the applicant 3 months salary.

All other fines now scale with wealth of the perpetrator

Class solidarity

There’s a thing in our culture where we simultaneously tell people to work hard, and to become the guy at the top who doesn’t work.

CEOs and managers and such often don’t really do much work. They’re not in the weeds making the thing go. They don’t spot that O(n^2) algorithm and fix it so the site doesn’t go down under load. They send a message that says “site seems slow”, and someone actually fixes it.

This is a problem all over. The people we let make decisions aren’t the people doing the work. They don’t know how things work.

AI creates a smaller version of this. It turns you into an idiot leader, but without the benefit of taking all the profits from labor.

I get most of my music from Bandcamp, on bandcamp friday’s. It sucks they sold out and are probably circling the drain, but for a long time they were a solid independent source.

Buying directly from the band at a show or through their label is also cool.

It’s more of an up-front cost, but after years of doing this I have a large drm-free library.

I really thought this was the onion. Satire is dead.

Where does “I did a web search and found an answer on an AI generated source” land? I feel like the Internet is increasingly infected, and finding actual answers to stuff is hard.

Sometimes my cat will whine and try to get in my lap, but if I pick him up and put him there he leaps off. It’s only good if he climbs up himself.

True, true, an individual can do little. But I hope that every so often someone will read a post about how the owners keep all the profits without doing all the work, and move leftwards.

Anyway. Good chat. Let’s all continue doing the best we can.

That kind of capitalism is not the only way for a society to be.

In actual small business I’ve found it’s common for the employees to earn the same or more than the owner.

Ehh. It still has a structural problem where the non-owners get a wage, and the owner gets a wage plus indefinite profits. The people who built the thing will eventually leave or be fired and stop profiting, but the owner can cruise or sell. Like how a baby tiger is cute, but it’s going to grow into something dangerous.

felt nice to support the team

I think most places are capitalist orgs, so your money is just going to shareholders. The developers got paid a wage, and maybe some stock options.

Really small teams, purchases probably go to people doing the work. But for a larger company, especially something like Microsoft (who own overwatch), buying stuff only kind of sort of through several layers of indirection helps the team.

It’s kind of a bad system, honestly, because people who don’t work on a thing keep profits from that thing

I don’t do microtransactions. Fuck 'em. They made the game shittier so they can try to annoy me into paying money. They know that once you spend any money, you’re more likely to spend more.

A big chunk of that is capitalism. People who aren’t doing work make decisions and keep profits. A self directed team might blow their budget on famous voice actors, 8k graphics, and executive retreats, but probably not.