Google should be broken up and its leadership fined into oblivion for anti competitive behavior

I don’t think anyone credible sincerely thought the cyber truck was going to do well

I’ve read that if you want to kill someone, the best way to do it is to hit them with your car. The authorities will just be like “Oh, well, he was walking and you hit him what a terrible accident. Well, couldn’t be helped.”

Maybe Kraft has a murder fetish. Probably he’s just a scumbag, though.

A couple months ago I ran into a guy collecting signatures for Cuomo by Atlantic center (a major transit hub in Brooklyn). I was just like “why?? Why are you doing this??” But sadly I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to engage with him very long

I had a job that paid stupid well. I’d give some money to almost anyone who asked on the street. They need it. I have plenty. I’m not going to notice the $1 or $5 or even $20 that I gave away. I make more than that in interest every day.

Rarely, I’ll talk with them a little. Ask their name or their story. There’s a regular around me that seems delighted that I remember his name.

Sometimes someone will seem unsafe, but most people are alright. It helps that I’m a bearded man, so certain classes of danger and harassment are rarely pointed at me.

I got laid off in February. I still give to people who ask, but I carry less cash so sometimes I don’t have anything to give.

When I’d be out with coworkers, before we all got laid off, none of them would give anything to people asking. I know they made as much or more than I did. I don’t judge people for not giving cash out when they’re in debt or struggling to pay rent, but I do judge my coworker for like wearing a high five figure watch and never helping the poor.

That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.

It doesn’t matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.

“We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!”

“Customers are complaining about how they can’t save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?”

“No that’s not a priority”

I eat lunch mostly alone. Dinners maybe about half or 2/3rds with someone. But I’m well older than 18-24 :(

At my local bars, I tell them I’m (still) unemployed and then ask for the saddest, cheapest, beer. Usually it’s High Life or a sad little green can I can’t remember the name of. $4 or $5. One of them’s a local enough bar that I know most of the bartenders now, at least.

The whole “return to office” thing is a cocktail of like… “Feelings Driven Leadership” and “The Cruelty is the Point”. Oh, and “I’m incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too.”

Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don’t care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.

And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.

The last point, there are some people who just can’t manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can’t work from home because he’ll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you’re an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don’t make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you’re trash tier at self control.

Companies demanding return to office is such a twist of the knife. It’s a pay cut, making someone spend an hour or two commuting without paying them for it. But the boss doesn’t care

People aren’t paid enough. The rich have too large a portion of the resources.

Eat the rich. Bury their collaborators.

Most people can’t or won’t do that

They’re stupid and corrupt.

Yes, I am very aggressive about turning off notifications. The use case I had in mind is texts from friends, and I don’t want to turn those off. Like someone texts me something that requires thought or online connectivity, but I’m on the subway or at a concert. I want to snooze the message so it’ll remind me in a couple hours.

Sometimes for really important stuff I’ll set a timer myself, but that’s more steps than if the OS just had a “remind me later” built in.

Mostly backend for web development (django most recently), though I’m moderately proficient at react and JavaScript for frontend. Also testing and QA.

I’ve been applying to all of full stack, backend web dev, and test/QA. No bites. Learning more languages might help, but I feel like having 0 years experience in (say) Rust won’t get a lot of traction.

Maybe it’s imposter syndrome but I feel like I’ve always been a sort of middle of the road engineer. Good at some things , bad at others. It feels like with all the layoffs and AI, there’s less room for broadly competent people. There’s just going to be the top tier, fighting and getting paid less.

If you own the company (or a lot of shares), you gain wealth by doing literally nothing if the company’s value increases. On top of probably just keeping the profits. Plus the “use my stock as collateral, give me a low interest personal loan, that’s not taxed as income lol” wealth back.

I’m not talking so much about the petit bourgeoisie that’s working hard every day making donuts to sell. I’m talking about big C Capital that buys something and just takes the profits.

The CEO at my old job can’t code. He can’t do UI design. He doesn’t do sales or customer service. He sometimes talks to other rich assholes to fundraise, but mostly he makes questionable decisions and hurts morale. But if the company goes big, he’ll get filthy rich and the people who actually built the thing will not.

That said, higher taxes on the wealthy (plus closing loopholes like the loan thing) would help. So would universal basic income.

It’s funny because conservatives cry about “welfare queens” that just take money for nothing, but it’s the rich who can do that. If you have a few million, you can just coast on investments. Little to no risk. Once again, projection.

You could also have salaries 🤷

The problem to solve is a handful of people who aren’t really doing much work get most of the profits. There may be other solutions.

so what will be the point of failure

It feels like a lot of the maga hats will die cheering and waving trump flags. I don’t know if that’s historically precedented.

It’s going to be hard to make any fixes when like 30-50% of the country wants hell on earth.

Job market is brutal, at least for tech. Every job gets 100s of applicants. There’s a lot of AI slop. Offered salaries are down. For some reason, management wants people to go into the office (which is among other problems a pay cut compared to WFH).

I’ve been unemployed since the winter. Had a handful of phone screens. Haven’t made it to a technical round yet.

My old job laid off all but one guy and a contractor.

Honestly, I kind of want to get out of tech but I don’t know what I can do that doesn’t require like a degree or is terrible.

Unemployment runs out soon. Not that the pittance the state gives is enough to live on. I asked what I should do when it runs out and they were like, awkward shrug.

Meanwhile there are billionaires living content lives of luxury.

How would you quantify ongoing projects where workers come and go and each of their specific contribution might not be easy to measure?

Probably some sort of collective ownership, profit sharing, with negotiation and consensus building. Other people more well read than me have spent a lot of time thinking about this. My starting position is that the standard capitalist model of “I pay you $10 to make a widget, and I sell it for $1000 and keep all the profits” is not okay.

Do they all also assume financial responsibility for any failures or lawsuits?

Do the owners assume financial responsibility now? I think that’s what LLCs and other corporate structures are for- to shield individuals from liability and responsibility.