Was recently ejected from a job along with a whole lot of other ship subsystems. Something about “downsizing operations in engineering”? Starfleet meatbags can never make up their minds.

Anyway, “has seen some shit” could easily sum up huge swaths of my CV.

For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

Possibly the grossest thing about all this, is how the RNC wasted no time trying to turn this into something it’s not.

Those who resort to violence to undermine our state and nation must be held accountable

While in principle I agree, nobody was hurt. That’s because this was arson, not assault.

Today, we see the same dangerous tendencies play out in new forms—attempts to suppress free speech, silence dissent, and use fear to control the political narrative.

Ironic, no? Nevermind the whataboutism regarding the old DNC and GOP roles back in the early 20th.

This is exactly what had me scared straight for the longest time. It’s not the drug, it’s the system that punishes use of the drug that’s the real threat.

The fact that ex-convicts (people that have paid their debt to society) aren’t a protected class in the hiring process is beyond me. At least insofar as non-violent offenses go, there’s no cause to throw someone away like this. This goes especially considering the current state of political affairs around here.

Maybe, but as I recall, it was a Civil Rights protest. I had to look it up. Back in 1963:

https://sandersinstitute.org/event/bernie-sanders-arrest-at-chicago-civil-rights-protest

Edit: maybe the most based human being alive at this point.

I did this once. Only way to get rid of it was to sell my house.

Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.

I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?