When will rich people learn do with less?

We’ve got billionaires and mega millionaires stinking up the place like dragons sitting on their hoards. Seems like there are some easy fixes that don’t involve turnips.

Most people don’t care about things. They just want the convenience. Eat the marshmallows now. Getting a stomach ache later is some future problem.

I just had a flashback to one of my first office jobs.

They had weekly reporting that needed to be done, and someone non-technical had been assigned to do it. They had like gone into the database and copy-pasted records into excel, and the whole operation took a full day.

I was like, “Hold on. What? You know you can script all of this, right?”

Luckily my boss liked me, and let me go ahead. Changed the task into an hour, including making whatever charts and slide-deck management wanted that month.

Though I do wonder if sometimes doing things badly is a weird pro-labor move- They get paid the same if they take all day versus an hour, so why bother speeding it up?

I need to find a better phrase than “cargo cult” but I see a lot of that at work. People who don’t understand why a system is the way it is become fanatical about doing it particular ways.

Like, you have to do “file -> save as” into the directory. If you save it somewhere else first and copy it that’s NO GOOD

I feel like a lot of people involved in the hiring process are incompetent and shouldn’t be there. Like you have HR people who can barely use Word asking if you know Java or JavaScript

I think this is a big factor. A lot of people are racist, and a lot of people are like pathologically anti-social.

Capitalism has always sounded great in theory,

I dunno, “People who don’t do the work get rich” sounds kind of shitty.

People use the word “capitalism” to mean different things.

If you ask someone “Should someone who doesn’t do any work get money from people who do?”, a lot of people would say no. And they’d probably think you’re talking about welfare or communism. But that’s capitalism. The guy who “owns” the company can sit at home and watch netflix while all his office workers make stuff, and he keeps the profits. If you frame it right, you can get people to agree with you or suffer some cognitive dissonance.

But none of that is what some people are thinking of when they think capitalism. They think “free markets” and “competition”. They often don’t really think about how that trends towards monopolies or cartels. Either because of magic, or “the government will prevent monopolies.” But not too much regulation. There’s got to be a few decades of suffering before an intervention, typically.

There’s also a lot of binary thinking. Either capitalism, or total state ownership and oppression.

I’m pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code

I feel like it should be expensive because of the externalized costs , but I don’t have any real data for that

Capitalism. The people calling the shots and keeping the profits are not the people doing the work.

It’s bad and will continue to be bad for everyone except the top layer of rich people.

They probably assume a good chunk of their audience is people not really paying attention, or who tuned in halfway. For someone watching all day it’s repetitive, but for someone who just showed up it’s fresh. If they did something deep that needs context, the people who arrive 35% of the way through are going to be lost.

I have thought about writing a story about someone who kills all the leadership ghouls who force return to office, no holiday pay, and so on. Not sure what I could do to raise it from revenge porn to something deep.

Legitimately aggravating. Well done.

This one maybe ? https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Criminal penalties for decision makers. Jail time. Disgorgement of profits.

This is refreshing. I’m so tired of right wing people being like “the government can’t do anything right and I’m going to prove it by sabotaging and starving the government”.

I recently read “People’s History of the United States” and it paints a much grimmer picture of the early US. It didn’t take long for the alien and sedition acts to be written, despite the grand language about freedom. There’s also many, many, years of labor asking for more than dirt and being violently suppressed.

Seems like most people don’t really care about or understand stuff like “private platforms enshittify”. Certainly not enough to be inconvenienced. People will be like “that’s where the good memes are” or “that’s where my video games post”. Heavens forbid you miss the hot memes.

Renting would almost make sense if it was dirt fucking cheap. The reality is it often costs an amount comparable to a mortgage, but without any of the benefits.

Personally I think housing should be a right and everyone entitled to it, and should not be used as an investment or vector for wealth.