alphonsegaston

Thank you.

Labor organization with the express aim of putting an end to Surveillance Capitalism.

Google and Facebook can’t withstand a sustained disruption of their workforce, which is why they spend so much time paying lip service to social issues. They have to create a constant illusion of concern for rights and justice to prevent their employees from actually demanding them.

Any “exchange” that’s premised on the “loss of rights” is just the Capital class leveraging their power to further exploit the poor.

Let me tell you a secret - it’s the drier. Clothes last far longer when you hang dry them.

You’re right that fast fashion has reduced overall quality, but you can still get more wear out if them if you avoid the drier.

It sounds like a cliche, but capitalism = freedom.

And War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.

That you've so internalized this oppressive ideology as natural or just is why I imagine people like Schifter feel so hopeless in the face of their circumstances.

Perhaps think on this before dismissing another's life so glibly.

People are angry at your tone, but you’re correct. The evidence shows that disproportionate gender representation in STEM is the product of social conditioning, not anything innate:

https://www.nature.com/articles/442133a

I often see debates here about how tech workers should or shouldn’t organize because they’re too highly paid, etc. But what if they organized to protect something more simple, like warehouse workers fundamental humanity?

I understand that people have had different experiences working on the tech side of Amazon, some great, some terrible. And yet I would hope that we can all look at this and say “this isn’t something I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.”

Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable

I think he was on his way out to a post in the Clinton administration as Google’s man on the inside. He’s mentioned his political ambitions in several interviews/profiles.

When that didn’t pan out, they didn’t see much use in keeping him around, especially in light of Trump’s penchant for grudges.

I don’t mind the downvotes or anything, but it struck me as strange that on the same day that it’s reported Google is pursuing partnerships with an entity as corrupt and demonstrably awful as the Saudi regime, people see this as outside the range of possibility.

Most likely he was cast aside so Google can cozy up better with the Trump administration. Schmidt was close with the Clinton campaign, which Trump himself noted when they met:

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/12/22/time-right-eric-schmid...

In the face of all of the companies that illegally colluded to suppress developer wages sitting on massive reserves of cash...

It’s the same thing as poor whites clinging to racism because they think it elevates their class position. False consciousness abounds.

You used Lindgren and her story as an example of the "business climate" of Sweden in the 70s and as an implied defense of Kamprad/IKEA's actions. But her critique, when coupled with her continued commitment to socialism, isn't comparable to Kamprad/IKEA's actions.

Essentially, there's an important and material difference between saying, "I'm a socialist, but these taxes, which I'll continue to pay, are excessive" and "I'm an unreprentant fascist who must hide my wealth from these undeserving thieves," even if the latter can opportunistically profit from the former's sentiment to justify their own actions.

Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “Ga”(ガ).

And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring.

EDIT:

My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.

And yet Lindgren remained a committed Social Democrat even in spite of this. Drawing a parallel between her and a tax-dodging, fascist sympathizer is quite the leap. Lindgren despised the Nazism Kamprad embraced and never really fully repudiated.

The parent already pointed out that in a 2010 interview he expressed his unchanged admiration for Endghal. And he was also later show to have remained friends with him well into the 50s, exchanging correspondence and kind regards, a further misrepresentation of the length and character of their friendship.

The 1988 “apology” was obviously just PR.

He also used East German dissidents as slave labor in the 70s and 80s. Pretty despicable.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/16/ikea-regret...

The opioid crisis is probably a more apt analogy, given its class dimensions and origination in the pharmaceutical industy. But see also corporate algorithms commodifying all social interaction into "followers" and "likes" as a way to reinforce hierarchy.

I wonder at what point people will realize that Musk is a shyster who uses his media profile to underpay and overwork his employees. Can you imagine working for someone who engages in media spectacles as a way to induce death marches? "I told every media outlet that we're going to have fully autonomous cars next year, so you better deliver!"

But also for teams to be successful, employees have to be able to trust their managers. I just quit a job after a month because, within that short time, my manager twice misrepresented the scope of a task so he could either leave early or have the day off.

I knew after those incidents that there was no point in continuing. It would be foolish to trust someone in any larger way who would casually treat a new employee in that fashion.

At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a similar vein to "Ancient Egyptians were black!". That is, an attempt to elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them historical achievements they didn't really have any part in.

It would sound less reductionist if you had applied the same characterization to the nebulous, modern fiction of “whiteness” and its invented appeals to Greco-Roman traditions.

Appealing to the values of an ignorant majority is quite an ironic position to take when defending Mencken.

More pragmatically, he was a misanthrope, which, whatever its other charms, rarely serves one well in seeing past ingrained bigotry and bias.

I always suspected that the end goal of the wealthy was to push America into the Authoritarian Capitalist model of China or Russia. I never expected them to be so explicit about it.

Because the modern American economy with its tenuousness and inequality is already pretty close to feudalism? Without structurally changing anything, you’re just compounding this problem.

You can get yourself thrown in prison and have guaranteed housing, healthcare, and a job. That option doesn’t make the dynamics of power in the system any less feudal.

I think the idea behind contemporary UBI discussions is to prevent exactly that kind of populism from congealing. The plan has to be something like introduce UBI as a short term panacea while the wealthy further consolidate their power. Once the stranglehold is in place, take it apart in all the same ways Americans have destroyed their safety nets in the past (means testing, welfare to work, etc). Exactly what they did with healthcare “reform”/Obamacare.

I agree that worker ownership of the economy in which they labor would lead to better outcomes for all.

How is this different from advocating for feudalism? The wealthy get to continue with unchecked power and advantage, while the poor are now serfs?

The idea that you can make high-level strategy choices about security without intimate knowledge of that domain is what needs to go away. That kind of thinking is the product of a business culture designed to keeping rich people with MBAs employed over making sane decisions.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Ripple is trying to position themselves as. Whether they pull it off, who knows.

Well, I read somewhere the other day that this form of error/attack was conceived of in the academic literature back in 1992. I won’t believe it’s intentional without evidence in that direction, but this is conceivably the kind of obscure/complex attack you’d expect of a state actor.