Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

God this is peak liberal policy:

• Take a real problem: Tech companies fucking with people’s brains for profit.
• Create a needlessly complicated policy to “address” it.
• The policy only applies to this specific group, between these hours, if they haven’t filled out some forms… etc. Thus leaving everyone else to still deal with the problem.
• It ends up not solving the problem even for their narrow target.
• All because the goal was never to actually solve the problem, it was to accomplish whatever, in this case more privacy violations.

Just throw a committee in somewhere and we have bingo.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

With their shitty AI this belongs on not the onion.

Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.

I mean, how we got here probably can inform us as to how we proceed. But ok, fine. Ignore the first part. Answer the 2nd part.

There are struggling “capitalists” that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business. And then there are rich as hell “workers” like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can’t. And I think most people don’t have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.

These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.

Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.

There’s also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.

But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.

More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn’t fall from the sky. It isn’t just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.

So how do you address the problem: “Rich people don’t pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much.” I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can’t make the government adopt these policies?

This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you’re doomed to keep asking the question “Why don’t they just do this?” It’s not a new idea, but it’s still relevant.

If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.

The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.

Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.

Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.

Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.

Use _bribes campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.

No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.

Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.

…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?

Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.

I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.

Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.