willington
@willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on How ICE is watching you: A rundown of some of the tech the government is deploying to identify and spy on us 1 day ago:
Never forget for a second that it is because of the billionares, free market fundamentalism, private property fetishism, wealth consolidationism/royalism that the ICE (and many other bad agencies) exists.
They want us angry at ICE while the consolidationists are trying to convert the world to rent-only slavery, because they want to be trillionaires and make the line go up forever, no matter what.
Every time I see “ICE” I think fuck all the billionaires.
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 2 days ago:
If only instead of each one micromanaging our purchases there could be a system set up to thwart the bad corporate behavior in a broad and systemic way, with the dedicated pros doing oversight professionally.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 2 days ago:
If the billionaires are hard to target, their help will be easier. Once people learn that associating with the billionaires can be bad for one’s health, two things will happen:
- Less available help.
- Much more expensive and much more short term help, to make the risk/reward sensible. If I can work for a month doing risky bodyguard duty for a fascist scumbag and get paid 20 mil, if nothing bad happens to me in that month, I am set for life. That kind of calculus can work up to a point. Just imagine managing this process tho, lol, looking for risk-hungry new fools every month. Not fun, not good for the morale.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 2 days ago:
We can make shit that wears out after a week of use. Then we need an endless amount of shit.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 2 days ago:
Powerless?
Or is it learned helplessness?
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 2 days ago:
They tend to hire body guards.
- Comment on You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift 3 days ago:
A saying I love about this:
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 1 week ago:
The bigger the asset, the more sacrosanct are that asset’s interests.
That is a system of nearly unlimited milking of anyone who is not themselves represented through a multi-hundred billion dollar asset.
Fighting this in the business or legal arena is a complete waste of time. Those battlefields are favorable to the biggest assets.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 1 week ago:
And fixing this problem is going to require a similar attitude from the people tired of this.
- Comment on TikTok uninstalls are up 150% following U.S. joint venture 1 week ago:
Whatever the
current “administration”billionaires touchesturns to shit, dies, and rots.FTFY
- Comment on Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse 2 weeks ago:
It’s winter here, and I wear two or three layers with a sweater on top, because I am saving electricity.
We’ll have ourselves our first trillionaire, and silly me hates all the people at 500mil+ net worth, and their bootlickers.
- Comment on Iran plans permanent break from global internet, say activists 2 weeks ago:
Doesn’t triangulation depend on an antenna that broadcasts 360°?
If the signal is silent in most of the space most of the time, it won’t be easy to find.
Let’s say it transmits a directed 5° beam to 278° for 1 sec, then random seconds later to 96° for a sec, then after a random interval a beam to 28°, that won’t be fun to look for. Then after an hour of this it rests for 5 (also randomized) hours, while a different transmitter elsewhere takes over.
Besides nobody says people should just sit passively while someone is triagulating them. We have been damn obedient all this time because we believed in the system. What if that belief goes away? Is everyone going to just volunteer obedience? Even if only a few break the norms, while the majority supports those resisters, at some point it will be too costly for the olygarchs to keep raping their way to trillions damned be the bottom 99.9%. The fucks have been ruling us on the back of a buy in from us. Only.
- Comment on Iran plans permanent break from global internet, say activists 2 weeks ago:
Not if Elmo owns all the sattelites, then it won’t be the Internet.
- Comment on Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! 3 weeks ago:
Yes, yes, yes.
And drastically redorm or reimagine all the IP laws.
Copyright: 5 years, one optional 5 year extension.
Patents: 5 years, no extensions. No business methods, no algorithms, no gene expressions.
Owned only by individual humans and groups of humans. Cannot be owned by trusts, funds, corporations, estates. Cannot outlive the last human owner in a group.
All licensing is non-exclusive only! All licensing is irreversible (once you license out the patent non-exclusively, no way to halt midway through the licensing term).
That way pattents cannot be hoarded by the patent troll entities. Since all exclusive agreements are forbidden, no way to corner the market! Inventors are free to license their inventions all over and cannot be strong armed into an exclusive deal.
In other words, ownerships, paywalls, and corporate control must be severely curtailed.
- Comment on Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI 3 weeks ago:
I can get used to the billionaires begging me.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow proposes how to break free from US digital domination 4 weeks ago:
Patent trolls.
- Comment on Big Brother Is Watching Your Online Criticism of ICE Crackdowns 1 month ago:
Any universe has at least one sentient being.
Rights aren’t circumstantial. How people are treated IS circumstantial. Rights as a concept is not about outcomes. Rights is what is rightly DUE. Rights get violated all the time. That means we tresspass on the minimums that are due. Someone is due privacy, but we spy/surveil them instead. Rights are worth defending. Without defending, rights will get violated. Whether we defend rights or not, they exist as defined. Anyone can just start defending rights at any time, and it doesn’t mean you’re building rights at that time.
It’s like counting. Whether you count or not, number 3 exists as a distinct meaning. Rights are like that. Rights exist and have meaning. You can even live a million lifetimes and not know a damn thing about rights in all that time, and this would not negate rights any more than if even every sentient being stopped counting and forgot counting, but counting concepts exist, are real, are ever available, and their use can be resumed at any time.
- Comment on AI Surveillance Startup Caught Using Sweatshop Workers to Monitor US Residents 1 month ago:
Let the unregulated “free” (for some!) market ruled by the winners decide.
The billionaires are the winners and the deciders that our wonderful free market system has given us.
/s
- Comment on Big Brother Is Watching Your Online Criticism of ICE Crackdowns 1 month ago:
Rights as a concept I described correctly.
I have my interests and my dignity. I prosecute my interests. Where did I get all that from? Interests and dignity, what is that if not another way to describe rights? The fact that I will prosecute and defend those regardless of your opinion, what is that? Rights again.
When we say Nature “gives” we don’t mean it transfers something to us. It’s just a way of saying we have some qualities or properties as beings by way of simply us being what we are. In this case “gives” is not literal.
As for Gods not being real, I won’t bother arguing for God being real in the interests of time. I purposely included Nature as an alternative to God.
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 1 month ago:
Here’s one of the best traders talking about the same issue:
invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=bMK8ct6ybjQ&t=1918
It eloquent and funny at the same time.
I included a timestamp to jump (almost) directly to the most relevant bit (also 33m, but 31m sets up a better context for an extra 2min of time compared to going directly to the 33m mark). But the whole video is worth watching.
- Comment on Big Brother Is Watching Your Online Criticism of ICE Crackdowns 1 month ago:
Rights always exist. They come from God or Nature. Our fellow men either respect or ignore those rights. But even ignoring a right or disrespecting it doesn’t make the right just vanish.
It is not our fellows who give us rights. Nor can our fellows take them away.
- Comment on The Supreme Court Is About to Hear a Case That Could Rewrite Internet Access 2 months ago:
No, don’t challenge the state. The state is too weak as is.
Challenge the billionaires who buy our government instead.
Decouple billionaires from politics.
- Comment on The Supreme Court Is About to Hear a Case That Could Rewrite Internet Access 2 months ago:
Selective enforcement.
- Comment on Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government 2 months ago:
But they will kick back to me 30% of a fat contract. And when things go south I will blame Deloitte. So why would I change my highly lucrative for me behavior?
I won’t.
- Comment on Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government 2 months ago:
I think these consulting firms exist to help the upper/top management to embezzle money and to shield them from personal responsibility (“Deloite said so, I could only follow this industry standard guidance, don’t ask me why every project has crashed, lol”).
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 2 months ago:
Who said “have to?”
Can.
We can just acquiesce. That’s always an option.
As for coercion, it’s a spectrum. Killing the bags of bones is only one small slice of that spectrum.
Regardless. Conflicts of interests exist. Coercion exists. We can just try to sleep through it all and hope for the best hopium. Or we can do the adult thing. Admit reality. Prosecute our interests vigorously and sophisticatedly.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 2 months ago:
Imagine if every muscle cell in my biceps wanted to self-actualize. I want to grab a cup of coffee, but every muscle cell in my arms has their own ideas. Something that normally takes a second, now takes 10 years of negotiations. It would not do me a lick of good if I had the strongest muscle cells in existence if I could not control them.
Of course people should not be regarded as mere muscle cells, but the point here is to show how obviously valuable and vital control can be when you want to serve some ambition.
Should workers be controlled like they are soldiers?
Whose interests does the business prioritize? And how heavily?
In a worker cooperative workers are the owners. Workers hire and fire their managers at every level of management. All power flows are bottom up. The workers are the entourage. In this case workers are better positioned to self-actualize, because there is no capricious, lazy, ignorant, spoiled silky pants tyrant at the top.
But what about a more typical business? Well, there is either one or a tiny cabal of owners, and everyone else is just a resource, a means to an end. And you have to exert control over the means of labor to benefit the entourage at the top. If the entourage can figure out how to produce things without workers, they will get rid of them immedeately, why? Because the workers are just a means, they are incidental, they exist because slavery was deemed too toxic, and because no one figured out a way to get rid of the workers yet. That’s the only reason workers exist in capitalism.
Managers want to give orders and see those orders followed immediately. They don’t want debates, challenges, counter proposals, etc. If workers want to self-actualize, that’s a huge problem for a top down power flow. That’s why it is essential to beat the desire to self-actualize out of workers early. That way mindless servility is assured, which is good for control.
Also, if your workers work 80 hour weeks, they won’t start competing ventures in their spare time. Again, control.
I kinda feel sorry for all the workers out there, because self-actualization is a heavenly mandate for every sentient being, and yet they are plugged into and slotted into a structure where worker (out group) self-actualization is a huge obstacle for the (in group) entourage.
Getting everyone happy can be a slow and messy process. What if you make wrapons and your workers decide it is unethical to make weapons? You are a manager of youtube and you order workers to censor channels for entourage’s benefit, but they have their own ideas, and they pretend to be censoring while actually not censoring? There is no end to such possibilities. Hence why the soul of many people MUST be crushed if the top down power flow is to be served in full measure.
Every so often there is an oddball manager like Ricardo Semler. But Ricardo Semler is the exception.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 2 months ago:
Please watch this video, and think about everything.
Don’t do anything stupid and treasure your own life. Thinking has to come first, or there will be regrets later.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 2 months ago:
Slaves got no pay. They still worked.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 2 months ago:
You can’t get cash rewards for consuming less. Spending is the least important variable in the accumulation game. All else being equal, spending less means you can spend more at other times. So if I penny pinch all year, I can splurge on New Year’s eve, that sort of thing. That doesn’t make you rich. That doesn’t elevate your status in societies where all the needed and useful resources are paywalled.
Income and time is what matters. And if you can get income while keeping all your time to yourself, that’s what elevates status. In other words you don’t trade your own time for income. That means there must be some slaves or extremely poor people that are constantly exploited to enable the elite living conditions.
A society doesn’t need parasitic elites. But if you want a better society you will have to pry it from the elites’ cold hands, because they won’t go along with a scheme that makes the world a happy and healthy place at their expense.
If I have 400 billion, but in a happy and healthy world I can only have 100mil max, which is 3 orders of magnitude less, I would rather burn down the whole planet than lose 1 cent. My interests are everything to me. My personal conditionsis what I experience first hand, while the rest of the world is just a theory, a story on a newspaper page, an image on TV, etc. I won’t accept tangible personally felt losses for gains which to me are theoretical.
Of course I am inhabit a worker instead of a billionaire, things are different, the calculus is different, but crumbs are crumbs. Whether I am a worker or billionaire, man or woman, I refuse to crumb myself. I want a 10 course dinner, with hookers and blow to boot, with every trimming.
If what you want is in a tree, you have to shake that fucking tree. If you want fish you have to catch it.
Some assholes wanted to exploit people, so they killed, threatened, organized and propagandized and accomplished it. We need to understand this and take notes.
If we want something else, there will always be people that are super happy with how thing are now. These folks will block our way. They are the tree, the fish, they are the soil that we have to plow and sometimes pave, to get to where we need to go. It will be ugly. It will not be without struggle.
If we just remain passive, and modestly undemanding, we know exactly what happens next.