“Things used to be worse” is, in no way, helpful to me. I’m not selling fear. I’m living in it. Am I starving, am I being raped by a feudal lord, or am I being tortured by a king? No, and I’m aware I’m not.

This changes very little about everything happening right now… and frankly, it’s ignorant of you to assume that runaway technofascism or a decade or two of runaway climate change, the effects of which we are only theorizing about, won’t leave us in a world just as hostile as humans have faced in the past.

In my mind the ideal product maintainer for an Lemmy approved product has to be part of the LBTQ+ community, has to be some people of color, atheist, vegan and must subscribe to the EXACT same flavour of leftism the individual Lemmy user has sold his soul to.

Maybe I’m in the minority here, but as long as the maintainer isn’t a hateful person championing movements I consider grossly immoral (fascism, racism, lgbtq+ hate, hypercapitalism, etc.) or committing acts I consider to be grossly immoral (abuse, rape, torture, human trafficking, etc) I’m happy to support a good product.

most stuff they use was created by people that they would absolutely hate in person.

This is largely true. If it’s a personality thing I don’t mind, but deeply held beliefs and actions are another thing entirely. I’m trying to change where my money, time, and effort gets spent to avoid enriching or benefiting fascists that want to immiserate, harm, or eliminate from existence me or those I care about. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to pick my battles… which is kind of fucked up when you think about it.

To be fair, I also hate to be left alone with my own thoughts for even 1 minute… I’m just considerate enough to use headphones.

Obviously their part of BLM… because… <gestures broadly> you know …and that’s basically ANTIFA!

I would be absolutely shocked if these cameras had any actual impact on these kinds of experiences. They’re more likely to use it to track “ANTIFA terrorists” (aka, progressives) with it than improve the quality of your business ride.

The OP said:

Pretty much every company I’ve been in or know of values a vertical trajectory instead of a horizontal one for its employees i.e becoming a manager nearly always means a faster salary progression than becoming an expert in one or multiple fields.

Why is expertise valued less?

I simply explained what someone might have meant regarding seizing the means of production being a potential solution to expertise being valued less than being manager.

You still need leadership in any system.

Eve your argument “seize the means of production” only happens with leadership.

I didn’t say we don’t need leaders. An owner or a manager may be in charge but that doesn’t make them a leader.

The structure and values of the underlying society revolve around individuals amassing power and wealth for their own benefit rather than any kind of collective good. Often the boss, the owner, the one in charge leans on their wealth and power. They were born with resources or hoarded them and feel that the most valuable contribution anyone could make is risking their own wealth (investing). As such, they themselves deserve most of the control of the organization (company) and deserve to be rewarded with most of the fruits of their worker’s labor. They control the means of production.

If you have good social skills and exude confidence - this comforts the boss. Now the boss likes you and you get promoted and more money. If you are capable of doing great work but don’t know how to kiss the boss’s ass or don’t make the boss believe you know what you are doing - you aren’t as obviously valuable to the boss because the boss doesn’t understand all that technical stuff. Toss in some Dunning-Kruger for good measure too.

Get rid of the boss and decide how to do things democratically among your peers? Now you’ve seized the means of production.

I drive by a school with those signs on my way to work. I slow down because, obviously, kids. The cars behind me get enraged that I’m not going 40 and then they pull into the school and drop off their kids.

Do your police exist to harvest revenue from the population in order to support their budgets, or do you have a logical, reasonable method of funding law enforcement?

Going by the official/intended definition of enshittification, it’s not “how shitty is the product” for consumers, that’s just a part of it. It’s a whole process:

1. Capture consumer clients by offering great service to users at low cost or free
2. Capture business client market by abusing captured users in favor of business clients
3. Fuck over captured business clients and consumer users for maximum profit/power.

Seeing as how the governments would qualify as a type of business client… the process is likely to, in the end, involve the government getting fucked.

The actions of the state of Israel definitely work, intentionally or unintentionally, to increase antisemitism across the globe. Equating criticism of Isreal, which is actively committing Genocide, among other illegal atrocities in the region, with antisemitism is absurd. Using that logic to shield their actions from criticism is, frankly, a crime against Jewish people everywhere as it reduces the seriousness and sincerity of any legitimate claims of actual antisemitism.

However, I don’t think that’s particularly relevant to my comment. Ashkenazi is an ancestry - not a state, not a religion, not a tradition. It conveys no information beyond who your parents are and who their parents were and where they all came from. Discrimination based on such things is just racism.

Trust me - I’m not the guy who brings this up very often - but Ashkenazi or Jewish does not mean Zionist or Israeli. I get that it’s a cute joke but that actually feels more antisemitic to me than simply critical of the state of Israel or Zionists.

Prison/slave labor, usually. Rotten, maggoty food ain’t free y’know and you don’t want them getting comfortable lazing around or they might not self deport.

GEO Group’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, runs on immigrant labor. Detainees cook, clean, and repair the facility for as little as $1 a day and sometimes for nothing at all.

• The American Prospect

Technically, no. However, in today’s society if you aren’t making more profit this quarter (line go up) than last quarter you are seen as failing to meet your fiduciary duty to shareholders. More accurately, if the rate at which your profit is increasing isn’t increasing (line describing line go up) you are likely seen as failing the shareholders.

It’s no longer acceptable to deliver to your customers, make a steady profit, and be sustainable. Now you must cut every possible corner, deliver as little value and use as little labor as possible, make more profit, and “stay competitive” or your company may as well be failing… in the eyes of investors.

Unless you claim you are working on a technology like AI that can eventually let the company fire all of its workers and make all the money without having to pay humans for labor… in which case ignorant investors will light money on fire for you until they think someone else is definitely going to do it better or they think you can’t deliver.

I think the idea is that it is not something separately securable? I don’t disagree, I’d like to be able to disallow any app not explicitly granted permission to use any method to determine my location. Unfortunately if Google can scan WiFi and figure out your location, anything with access to WiFi can too maybe?

I don’t know. I love technology but this fucking surveillance state situation is really getting to me. Routers using WiFi signal passing through your body to identify and locate you regardless of whether or not you are carrying any tech and all the other shit I don’t know about… ugh.

It’s actually a bit informative. I believe Android approximates location using the SSID/WiFi information, so it’s not just network that it’s used for.

Reminds me of when I first tried to play Quake (I think? some old arena FPS) over dialup. I tried for a few minutes hoping my ping would even out. At one point I had ~4,500 ping. That’s 4.5 seconds between my input affection what I saw on the screen. Needless to say, I was often gibbed before I got to see my inputs manifest.

If a sufficient portion of the population is ignorant or ambivalent of the fact of our creeping, kleptocratic, fascist, psychopathic, pedophile overlords robbing of us our rights and prosperity then nothing changes. People giving a shit does matter more than facts these days. That’s not a valuation of opinion over fact, more of an observation of how our propagandized population works.

Is there not a future in which the AI bubble bursts, and we are in a glut of datacentre memory and storage with no buyers?

There is. Unfortunately, not even the chips on the memory used by data centers is compatible with consumer hardware. They use extremely high performance, expensive HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), we use DDR memory. Unless consumers start getting affordable devices that are compatible with such memory, there is not much hope of buying what has been or is in the process of being made for data centers.

Nobody needs any entertainment, but some people enjoy hobbies like gaming.

no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices

Prices are going up rapidly thanks to AI data centers exploding demand by orders of magnitude more than retail customers. There is no end in sight to the price increases.

If you want a gaming device, buy it sooner rather than later. That’s all I am saying.