I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.
People don’t really like change.
Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.
There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.
The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.
Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.
Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.
Firefox + ublock origin = no ads on youtube. I use the browser on my phone instead of the app for the same reason.
I did find a soundcloud link, though https://soundcloud.com/dead-kennedys-official/soup-is-good-food
Say four guys are sitting in a bar having a sports argument—talking about the upcoming college football playoffs, say. They begin by agreeing that Ohio State is the favorite because it is currently ranked number one in the polls, which it in fact is.
But one of them says: No, Texas A&M is number one. The other three look at him like he’s insane. They reach for their phones, they tap, tap, tap, and they show him the rankings. But he keeps insisting. Those polls are fake. It’s Texas A&M. Everybody says so.
The conversation stalls. The liar has “won” the argument. Not in the sense that he is factually correct; he is not. But he has won in two senses. First, he has shut down what might have been a rational, interesting, spirited debate that proceeded from shared factual premises. Second, he has forced the other three to waste time and mental energy debating a proposition that is not remotely up for debate, and in the process has succeeded in making himself the center of attention and controversy whom everyone else talks about.
Sounds like they should remove the liar from the bar. Maybe not beat the shit out of him and leave him in a sobbing pile of piss and vomit in the back alleyway, but certainly not just letting it slide.
Liars and such get by because people are too polite to do anything about it. This goes for other bad behavior, too.
Someone in my extended friend group got a divorce, and her ex-husband started acting like a creeper. He was bothering the other women in the group. Eventually, another dude in the group pulled him aside and said if he doesn’t behave, he can’t hang out with them anymore. The guy didn’t change, and now he’s out of the friend group.
Of course, there’s so many shitty maga-hats that maybe he went and found a new group of misogynists .
I’ve heard similar numbers tossed around. I’m not sure how consistently people need to be showing up for change to happen. It seems a lot of what we’re seeing now is brief protests, and then back to business as usual (pun intended)
I’m not friends with some old coworkers in large part because they just don’t go to protests or do anything. They’re comfortable just staying home and playing video games. Extremely basic bros.
It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”
These are some of the worst people. It’s a mistake to just let them walk around, take on positions of power, and sleep soundly at night. Someone who espouses such horrible beliefs should be banished from polite society, at the very least.
They’re not even secret about it. They have websites. With their names, faces, and where they go to church on sunday.
I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.
I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.