I really don’t understand how so many people are unwilling to be mildly uncomfortable

One of my friends won’t get off Twitter “because that’s where the good memes are”. I’m like ma’am you can live on slightly stale memes.

I’d be okay with getting even on my behalf.

It just takes one industrious plumber.

I don’t especially want to live in a world full of stochastic terror, but if we’re going to have some I’d prefer billionaires were on the receiving end sometimes.

billionaire could pay off someone’s $500,000 mortgage, their $30,000 car, pay off $50,000, give them $100,000 in cash and forget about it the next day

They could, but they won’t, and that’s part of the problem.

If billionaires walked around clearing people’s mortgages and paying for everyone’s dinner, they’d be less hated. They’d still be a problem, but they could buy popularity.

But they don’t. Because they’re assholes.

Maybe this will scare some of them into changing the behavior. Maybe it will get some of them killed.

You all remember that “you are Jeff bezos” game, I hope: https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos

This is saying if you have a module with public functions A and B, they shouldn’t call each other, right? But it’s not saying that module A shouldn’t call module B’s public functions. That’s what I thought it meant at first, but that seems crazy.

Middle managers like to set targets and goals because it counts towards their bonus, and it looks less like they’ve got their dick in their hand when the boss comes calling.

It’s the same problem all over. Capitalism. You have people who don’t do work keeping the benefits from the work.

Most people aren’t going to give themselves stupid or useless metrics. Software people aren’t going to impose “tokens used” or “lines of code” metrics on themselves. They know those are stupid.

It definitely seems like we’re setting ourselves up for a dystopia, where no one knows how to do software anymore. Like the time machine or Idiocracy. Management just wants short term gains, and they don’t care if there’s no one around in 10 years with any experience

. The net result is that everyone has learned very quickly to praise executives on their visionary AI prowess, or they will be gunned down in the proverbial streets.

Once again, the people making the decisions are idiots.

Labor should keep the profits of its work. The owners just sit around and make bad decisions. Fuck them. They’d be lucky to walk away, if there was justice in this world.

Maybe we can work together with Gen z to overthrow the capitalist hell scape that has made a handful of people disgustingly rich while the world burns.

This shouldn’t be allowed. We need to stop letting corporations consolidate.

That aside, I don’t think I’ve ever used either of these. I used to use seamless for restaurant delivery, but not so much anymore. Shit’s too expensive.

I hope the ultra-rich lose everything. I hope they weep.

I thought this was the onion. This is real? What’s the opposite of eating the onion? Crying?

I thought (but not very hard) that by not paying the workers taxes, they would be denied their full social security payout , or be on the hook in some other way. But you’re probably more correct than I am.

Jail time is unusual for wage theft, but heavy penalties are probably the only way to get people to stay in line.

It’s a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who’s kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.

I hope no one reads that top-down and comes away with “Don’t vote. Delay today”. That’d be a silly way to read it.

There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.

We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.

There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.

The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.

In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.

So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.

They are prioritizing the financial interests

Sums of why a lot of things are bad

I think that’s my least favorite brand of Christian. Ignore all the sheep and goats, good Samaritan, give to the poor, parts to be smug little shits.