Definitely! However if your first experience with HR is being discriminated against, raising concerns about discrimination can be dangerous. Who do you go to when HR is causing the issues? HR is there to protect the company, not you. If the easiest way to protect the company is to fire someone, HR will probably do that.

I’m not trying to talk OP or anyone else out of going to HR, they aren’t always sharks waiting to fire someone. It’s just good to be careful here and OP and their wife should be aware of the risks before taking any action. Definitely document this incident. If this becomes a repeat issue, documentation can be the difference between getting fired and winning a wrongful termination lawsuit.

They say something like “Lower Decks was made by people who aren’t Trekkies”. TLD has so many bizarre obscure references to past Trek series that I have to assume it was written by the biggest Trek fans ever. Anyone who thinks it was written by non-fans has clearly never even given it a chance.

It sure sounds like racism and poorphobia to me. HR trying to make sure her surroundings don’t look like what a “typical poor person” would have (clutter, children, signs of disability, “drugs”, etc.) It’s not super common, but it’s common enough that I hear about it every so often.

I can’t offer any kind of legal advice, but it sounds like this job will be potentially problematic and HR will definitely be one to watch out for.

ETA: There’s a lot of paranoia in the US right now about “laptop farms”. Remote jobs are paranoid about people getting remote work to send money back to North Korea. It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s causing issues for a lot of people, mostly marginalized people. I think it’s useful context to know why this kind of thing is happening more lately.

deleted by creator

IA is not a sustainable project, and is built as a single point of failure. It has no transparency and no recovery plan if things go bad. Compare that to Anna’s Archive, a project that open sources all of their code and data so that things will continue running even if everyone involved disappears.

Ask yourself: if IA’s data was silently modified, would anyone be able to tell?

Hang on, I’ve read this book before

I told you bro. I fuckin’ warned you.

People have called me “paranoid” for years for pointing out that this kind of thing was going to happen, and it’s so much worse than I thought it would be but at least I’m vindicated.

Tech companies will literally murder or enslave you if they think it would be good for their bottom line. We know that’s true because tech companies are murdering and enslaving people in the global south because it’s good for their bottom line. Stop giving them money. Stop buying wifi-enabled garbage that spies on you for the police state.

Maybe it’s a good thing that people with entirely too much money are being forced to rock their own crying child instead of having a machine do it. Using robots to soothe your child is a Phillip K. Dick-esque dystopia. Obviously a crying child take a huge mental and physical health toll on everyone in a house, but in a country where poor people are being forced to give birth, maybe the rich people should have to suffer a little bit too.

That’s my gender. I didn’t pay for this clipart.

deleted by creator

If you’d rather have any amount of bad journalism over trying to fix things, then we hold such fundamentally different values that I don’t actually know how to talk to you. You’re also moving the goalposts a lot, you seem like you have your mind made up that somehow ads promote good journalism, which is just not true.

And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues

This issue already exists and has for as long as modern sensationalist news has existed - decades.

IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century.

You don’t actually think that, you just weren’t actually around for the media of that era so you don’t know what it was like. You’re blinded by rose-colored glasses. I’ll remind you that Rupert Murdoch built his media empire in the 1980s, and Murdoch’s one of the empires currently destroying media. There’s also the bit where Reagan couped multiple countries and the USAmerican public still thinks it never happened because it wasn’t covered.

Browsers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our ads!

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

Ad companies have lists of banned topics, effectively leading to news organizations being unable to talk about those topics without losing ad revenue. It’s called keyword blocking, so you’re actually getting biased news because of ads. It’s a well-known advertising strategy to just avoid controversial topics entirely.

Every youtuber I’ve watched recently has opened a patreon and asked people to donate there because youtube ad revenue is worth almost nothing. Every small journalism site I’ve seen asks for donations, and even the big ones admit their ad income doesn’t pay the bills.

Sometimes it sucks knowing that you’re indirectly removing revenue from someone. But personally, I prefer my time, attention-span, privacy, and security over giving one ten thousandth of a USA cent to someone. I started using an ad blocker because flashing advertisements were giving me headaches. I kept using them because autoplaying video ads were sucking up all the bandwidth that I was paying for. I continue to use ad blockers today because every single ad is either a scam, malware, or some weirdo far-right political pundit telling me gays are bad. Sorry to the independent journalists relying on ad revenue, but you gotta diversify and get revenue from a source more stable than the adware industry.

The corporate internet you are talking is more about sites like Facebook, insta, reddit etc who doesn’t view the content posters are creators and they definitely doesn’t share profits. I am not talking about this type.

Youtube is owned by google, and is definitely part of the corporate web. Most news sites are part of the corporate web, being owned by just a handful of companies or politicians. The vast majority of sites you would consider small content creators are most likely part of the corporate web. In fact, I haven’t seen a single non-corporate website that serves ads.

When I say I want the corporate web to die, I’m talking about seeing places like the fediverse, tilde sites, and neocities sites thriving. If facebook and google die and all that’s left is a few sites written by weird mentally ill queers who whost blogs on gemini and gopher, I’d be very okay with that.

deleted by creator

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.

The corporate web wouldn’t be what it is today, the internet would be fine. This is an important distinction to make. The internet is run by a bunch of nerds going to “internet peering conventions” and paying for BGP cross-connects in data centers. They would be fine, because ad-blockers don’t hurt them.

The corporate web, on the other hand, would die. I’m very okay with that. In fact, I see that as a feature, not a bug. I hate the corporate web, and I think the world would be better without facebook and google creating monopolies on communication. But either way, if the only way technology can survive is ads (and it’s not the only way), then let it die.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It’s not like they know what they’re missing.

lolno. We should be doing everything we can to protect ourselves and those around us from malware, surveillance capitalism, and predatory advertising. Even if you don’t care about other people, herd immunity to malware and surveillance capitalism are very real things. It’s a lot harder to get infected by malware on an immunized network, and it’s a lot harder for facebook to surveil you (remember shadow profiles?) when nobody around you is having their every step tracked.

Consider why those people don’t even know about extensions or ad-blocking. The web was built to be extensible, but ad companies (google) have done everything they can to keep people from realizing they can just change websites however they want, including blocking ads. People aren’t ignorant about privacy because they want to be, they’re ignorant because a lot of money and manipulation has gone into keeping them unaware and unempowered.

Solidarity and support are the only real weapons we have in the war against surveillance and malvertising. If not for those around you, then at least do it for the sake of your own privacy.