More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

This is definitely a play they’re considering.

The only defense against it that I’m aware of is to get the popular vote SO FAR in favor of Harris/Walz that Congress won’t be willing to risk their vote being so blatantly opposite and misrepresentative of the will of the people, lest it lead to reform they don’t want.

Yeah, I saw “Gay student says coach” and went “oh no, not AGAIN?!?!” Then saw “Tim Walz” and was briefly all “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” until I read the rest.

How bad is it that headlines about terrible abuse are so much more common than positive stories that my brain just went to bad first thing.

One day I want to see news as something other than filler to grab ad revenue.

I’d like institutional reform in the athletic sector too, but I can’t decide which is less likely to actually happen.

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

Seriously.

Like, the Democrats finally learned ONE EFFECTIVE THING with “weird”.

It would be super cool if we didn’t ONCE AGAIN torpedo the ever-living fuck out ourselves by saying PROVEN STUPID SHIT THAT ALWAYS GUARANTEES THE SAME RESPONSE.

We have at least ten more years before talking about gun control will have the opposite effect it does now.

Currently even mentioning it does nothing demonstrable FOR the person who says it (because it’s typically hand waving instead of problem solving) but it sure as hell drives up ammo sales and gun afficianado panic levels.

It’s a footgun, not a soapbox.

Right now they’re just waving fistfuls of money in Trump’s direction and he gets to pick up whatever falls out of their hands as they’re waving. It’s definitely big money that he’s getting, but it’s ultimately castoffs to the people who attempted to BUY GOLF ON A PLANETARY SCALE just because they felt like it.

Right now any mumbling about climate change is status quo for them.

Drawing direct ire would be an INCREDIBLY STUPID CHOICE right now. Get into office FIRST, then go after the oil barons.

Publicly call out poorly designed cities, under funded public transportation, and corporate resistance to working from home.

Do not publicly call out the oil barons by name.

Not right now.

Do not summon what you cannot banish.

You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!

Fahhhhk, thank you.

I swear I remembered dog people from 2nd edition and was super confused when I started playing DDO and they were some kind of dragonkin. Then people who started with 3rd were telling me kobolds had always been lizards.

Somewhere my old 2nd edition books are still around in a box, but damned if I know where.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I mean, the lead up to the tea party’s core ideals was already there with stuff like that Imus wanker openly calling the WNBA “Nappy-headed hoes” on his national news show in like 2004-2005. The current hard right, isolationist, bigoted downfall has been going on since rush limbaugh hit the airwaves in the late 80’s. Before the rush era, there was some serious bullshit, but that was the start of not stowing the hoods UNDER the pickup seats anymore. Saying the bigoted parts out loud, in public, and nationwide with blanket tacit approval from roughly half the country really grew legs with that fucker. I think that was 87. Pat Robertson running for president and everything.

The concepts of “us” and “them” started getting real widespread traction with otherwise middle-of-the-road people when rush hit.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

That’s the official state rifle of the school shooter TODAY! Anyone who’s seen a gun enthusiast magazine knows they have MUCH more ridiculous stuff in the pipeline.

No, nor should they try, nor should they stick with their current seemingly nonsensical policy ideas about guns.

The “gun problem” as it stands is really more of a symptom of our mental health crisis, our ridiculously confrontational “news” cycle, and a number of other HUMAN factors that aren’t going to be solved by banning a particular model of gun, though and no one seems to want to hear that.

Screeching “Ban the right’s favorite model of toy” right before an election is beyond tone deaf, and an incredibly dumb move politically that won’t do squat except mobilize the NRA voters to vote the other way, which we DO NOT NEED with democracy in this country at stake.

I can personally count multiple handfuls of coworkers and acquaintances who might have voted for him that will now vote trump or stay away from the polls over this.

Holy deep fried frankenfuck will the Democrats NEVER LEARN?!?!?!?!

AFTER!

You talk about guns AFTER the election!

What in the actual pogostickingpopejohnpaul is he THINKING?!?!?

The optics are 1000% awful here.

Uvalde wasn’t enough, but a potshot at the planet’s most notorious living felon is?

I accidentally wore a wolverines starter jacket around Columbus for a week one winter while I was on a business trip. Couldn’t figure out why the waiters were all so curt with me until one of the locals made a comment on the job site.

In retrospect it’s a miracle I didn’t get accosted by a season ticket holder.

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)

Fox News isn’t talking about that. The few moderate Republicans left are still likely watching Fox News. Some on-the-fence voters are likely watching Fox News. They’re not hearing any of this.

They ARE hearing a ton of lies about some mythical “Biden crime family” though. And about how joe is both the mastermind AND a doddering fool.

And if one part of that looks even marginally true, it’s a tiny bit easier to swallow the rest of what Fox is spitting.

Because he’s doing good things for the populace at large and pundits sound bytes are purchasable by those negatively impacted by those good things.