Then you should head on over to 4chan.org, where you can be an obnoxious child to your heart's content.
fiasco
joined 2 years ago
We'd need to see their financials, which is tricky since they aren't public yet. There's also the issue, Steve lies about everything, so should we believe he's telling the truth?
But my guesses would go like this:
Since they've been spending other people's money, they probably haven't been watching expenses closely. Their P&L is probably dominated by payroll and rent. I can't help but feel that programmers are drastically overpaid, which is a symptom of the same issues, that there's a lot of other people's money chasing a finite supply of techbros.
The reason I think programmers are probably overpaid, by the way, is the number of man-hours they allegedly put in, versus the quality of their output. Reddit is a particularly shocking example of this.
In any case, the other people's money doctrine is to grow into profitability, which means burning money on spurious shit until some magic happens. Not exactly a winning business model.
Individual instance owners can block Meta instances from federating (exchanging data), and they absolutely, 100% should do so. If enough instances block Meta, it'll be like they don't even exist.
The bigger issue is that corporations can present a united front, while federations cannot. This is why hegemonic forces tend to win; as the author says, there's already division among kbin/Lemmy users about whether blocking Meta is a good idea. You can be damn sure there isn't similar division among Facebook leadership about whether to destroy kbin/Lemmy.
Is it better or worse that I think someone made this by hand?
The castles are renovated into gaudy commercial establishments—one is a café, one is a privately-owned museum, one is a residential condominium, and one is torn down to make way for a strip mall.
You should read the full essay. Bertrand Russell was not a socialist, and he doesn't speak kindly of the USSR—or of the czar for that matter.
The basic problem is that the morality of work is so heavily ingrained that, even when progress is made, it pales in comparison to the magnitude of the problem. The Soviets had to propagandize people on the nobility of work to get their Five-Year Plans to fruition, and that's a bell that isn't easy to unring. Which meant that the Soviet system was still one of overwork and exhaustion, just with different structuring.
At the same time, we shouldn't believe US propaganda that labor organization is ineffective—it's tremendously effective. They want us to believe it doesn't work precisely because it does work. And you echoed some of this propaganda, that "everything devolves to labor representatives" line. Even that devolution was not really caused by the unions themselves, but by the federal government, FBI infiltration and Pinkerton murder and so forth.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed a sort of oscillation: oligarchs push workers too far, workers push back and score some modest concessions, this makes workers complacent, oligarchs regroup and claw back the concessions they made before and start pushing too hard. We do seem to be getting back into the labor activism phase of this, which is good at least.
As a final point, the US government is not very oppressive. Its problem is that it's an enabler of other forms of oppression. Most of the heinous things it's done domestically have been done in the name of enabling private sector oppression.
The funny thing about asking, who watches the watchers? is that people seem to take that as license to not watch anything. But I'll give you an answer that's less glib than the question.
Overwork is arguably the biggest cause of political disengagement. When you're working two jobs and barely scraping by, you don't have time or energy to understand what's really going on. If you read the entire essay, Russel also points out that overwork pushes people to passive forms of leisure—he was writing a hundred-odd years ago, so he talked about the cinema and the radio. But the passivity of engagement with the world is much broader than that; it also causes passive engagement with world affairs, i.e., news as entertainment.
It should be all of us watching the watchers, but we don't have time or energy.
As for your first two questions, you're effectively conceding that industrial work is slavery.
That makes at least a little bit more sense... Not to imply it makes sense, it just makes a little bit more sense.
I remembered after posting, the children of 4chan were implying the fake sinking thing was some sort of insurance fraud. But that only works if you also take the ship out of service, since otherwise the insurance company will be left wondering, well where did this other ship come from?
But this is one thing at the heart of conspiracy theories: they don't actually think about how the world works. It's like, one of the big conspiracies on 4chan at the moment is ESG—environment, social, and corporate governance scores in investing. They think that this is a social engineering effort, as though Blackrock cares about anything other than money.
If you're curious what ESG is really about, it's a con to make stock-buying more palatable for millennials. But since the children of 4chan don't know anything about anything, it's gotta be Jewish social engineering.
Do you know what the deal is with that? I couldn't figure it out, and one of the problems with /x/ is that they assume you already know what's going on with their conspiracies.
Seatbelts don't eliminate the possibility of dying in a car crash, but you should still wear one.
It's a staggering display of stupidity that some people think vaccines must completely eliminate risk, or else they're useless. The unredacted portion is just about how some people do get symptomatic COVID despite being vaccinated. Never mind that their symptoms are, on average, much milder than those of unvaccinated people, or that their chances of getting "long COVID" are much lower.
This is, in any case, the perspective of someone who's never had to take any responsibility for any single thing in their entire life.
What else are they gonna put in their tailpipes?
When I was looking at conspiracy theories about the submarine, this was basically the metatheory. That they've so heavily brainwashed us that we can read something like this and go, yeah that seems realistic.