Zitron’s posts are generally pretty good.

He doesn’t really propose effective solutions, though, I don’t think. Like, yeah you can tell people that the internet sucks because some assholes made it that way. But if it wasn’t these assholes, it’d be some other assholes. And we’re not going to get most people to care about things.

The problems are structural.

The megacorps need to be broken up, at the very least.

The ultra rich need to not exist anymore. Either because they were taxed down to size, or they met the guillotine.

Without touching those parts of the problem, nothing’s going to get better.

I feel like a lot of people look at a bad system and go “We should change!” and then accept any change. But that’s stupid. If you have a machine that often breaks down, yeah you should change that. But you shouldn’t replace it with a machine that shoots rusty nails out every couple minutes while filling the room with toxic gas. Yeah, that’s a change, but a change for the worse.

Or like if you realize you got on the wrong train. You should change because you don’t want to go where this one is going. But don’t go on an express train going to the same wrong place!

He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years – reduced on Friday after an appeal – for organising road blocks on the M25.

This is exactly what myself and many others said would happen. If you punish peaceful (but disruptive) protests as hard as, say, murdering the CEO of exxon, you might as well go for the murder.

I don’t really want to live in a world where vigilantes are murdering the entire board of oil companies, but i also don’t want to live in a world with big oil companies destroying our climate.

Anyone else thinking of that book “a libertarian walks into a bear”?

Trump voters are some of the stupidest people alive. Just vibes voting that trump will somehow “end inflation” despite there being no evidence that any of his proposed policies would do so. Many of them will suffer as a result of his changes, but as they are unbelievably stupid people, I don’t think they will reject conservatism or capitalism. They’ll just be conned again.

Yes. Unfortunately, if you try to slug a nazi a bunch of pearl clutchers will pop up saying violence is never ever ever acceptable oh dear we need to compete in the marketplace of IDEAS and follow the LAW we might not like that the law says the [outgroup] are to be forcibly relocated but it is what it is oh dear.

I don’t expect everyone to be on the front line throwing a molotov, but I would like if more people wouldn’t actively support the oppressors.

Right wing does not argue in good faith. I’m reminded of that Sartre quote

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I often feel like we as a society let “everyone is entitled to their opinion” go too far. Like when it’s “I like vanilla and you like chocolate” that’s fine. Let people enjoy their flavor of choice. But when it’s like “I don’t think those foreign people should live” that’s just the same kind of thing at all.

And closely related, when someone’s like “I just don’t believe in vaccines” we shouldn’t just let that be.

I think at least New York now requires jobs to post a range. I haven’t even seen bullshit like “$50k - $500k” - maybe the law was written strongly enough that they can’t loophole it that way.

Been doing the job search and it’s frustrating how bad most of the job postings are. There’s so much filler nonsense.

I pretty much just want to know like

• tech stack
• team size
• big picture what the company does
• if they’re assholes about in-office mandates
• salary range

Some postings are like “must know Java, go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or rust” and I’m like do you use all of those?

“I want computers to do my laundry so I can do art. Instead computers are doing the art.”

All of this AI stuff would be fine (or at least less bad) if we didn’t live in a capitalist dystopia where people might have their basic needs (food, shelter, etc) threatened so some rich turd can become a little richer.

unless they’re going to do some successful July 20 tier stuff, i’m not sure it’s going to save the day.

I’m not a young man so I can’t really talk about the youths, but from what I’ve heard and seen a lot of people are just bad at dating. Garbage profiles, poor message writing, poor in-person behavior.

I don’t really like this article’s “both sides are equally bad” subtext. Well, text. It’s kind of just there in the text.

If we’re waving magic wands around, change the tax laws to limit how much you can inherit.

Changing the step up basis thing is actually pretty low hanging fruit.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp

https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes

I don’t want to be a goat farmer but I do find people that work hard to make management richer are insufferable.

“”" A man is walking into the office when he sees his boss pull into the parking lot in a brand new sports car. “Wow! Nice car! How’d you afford that?” he says.

The boss smiles at him and says, “Listen. If you work hard, hit all your numbers this quarter, put in some overtime, then I can buy another one next quarter.” “”"

Every time this comes up (which is too often) I’m like “Who is buying this?” How can we make them stop? Do they need help?