willington
@willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on The Supreme Court Is About to Hear a Case That Could Rewrite Internet Access 2 days 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 days ago:
Selective enforcement.
- Comment on Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government 4 days 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 4 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 6 days 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.
- Comment on Replace your boss ... before they replace you 6 days ago:
Control your boss before they control you.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 6 days ago:
The priviledged class will trade among themselves.
You can have a society with 7.5 billion people that are fed, clothed, sheltered enough to stave off early death, and 500 mil people with property rights trading among themselves.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 6 days ago:
Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
- Comment on Google’s Sundar Pichai says the job of CEO is one of the ‘easier things’ AI could soon replace 2 weeks ago:
Because job difficulty and job pay aren’t correlated under capitalism.
The easiest job is to own assets. Not manage assets. Own them. Which is to say get your name on a title of a sufficiently large asset, and the money just rolls in while you sleep in bed. You sleep, your asset works.
Owners need lieutenants to look after their assets. That’s what a CEO is.
So why are CEOs so highly paid? Because if you do not, they will embezzle (steal) money from your asset since they control every aspect of your asset’s daily functioning! So you need to cut the CEO in on the grift of being a big asset owner.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 2 weeks ago:
That’s how meritocracies actually work.
- Comment on Breaking: Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions! 3 weeks ago:
Lots of companies feel the need to serve their users on their way up.
Once they feel they got much or most of the market on lock, they no longer need to justify themselves to their users, and a cycle of pure valueless exploitation begins, aka enshittification.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 weeks ago:
You didn’t read my message.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 weeks ago:
That’s just a longer way to say, yes, shareholders asked for it.
Just because they didn’t ask it in letter form or explicitely that doesn’t mean much.
Look, if M$ does this ‘agentic’ move and its shares drop 20% overnight, then, and only THEN you’d be right to say the shareholders did not ask for it.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 weeks ago:
Billionaires, looking for more mass control.
It is not for our benefit.
- Comment on FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site 3 weeks ago:
Owners win.
If have a plot of land with some cherry trees on it, I can get a landless person to pick most of them for free.
I make an offer “for every 100 pounds/kilos of cherries you pick for me, I’ll let you keep 1”. If the person who receives such an offer has no land of their own, the have to agree to avoid starvation.
That’s why our system needs a huge class of the landless, resourceless, and assetless people. Then for the priveledge of touching a privatized resource you have accept the privateer’s conditions.
Fencing off resources and protecting the fence by the threat of death is how this scam works. And it is impossible to fix this societal problem by simply trading more and better as an individual. The ruleset of the game is tuned for mass free energy extraction from the assetless class at the macro level.
- Comment on Elon Musk says Optimus will 'eliminate poverty' in speech after his $1 trillion pay package was approved 4 weeks ago:
There needs to be a hard cap on wealth at around 100 mil, but defined relative some multiple of a median yearly salary.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
If I were assuming I would not need to converse first.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
In a democracy there will be persusion in the form of arguments.
But in a democracy the demos is not actively or low-key campaigning to give away their power, to put the interests of economic royalists ahead of their own.
In other words, the quality of energy is not defensive when someone tells you to be more proactive, faster, more zealous in defending your own interests.
The first functioning democratic governance was practiced by the pirates. Why? Each pirate could kill half the crew at night. And they all knew this fact about each other. So they did the rational thing: nobody’s voice can be ignored, or there are dire concequences.
The only way democracy works is if most people will want to govern, make policy, make and change the rules of the game, own the game, and not merely passively playing the ruleset they inherited from their ancestors.
Once you encounter someone who lacks that hunger to be an administrator and not merely a passive and reactionary player, more arguments is the wrong way to go. These passive people cooperatively bind to economic royalists and their entire view of life is not 1, 5, or 10000 arguments away. They together with the economic royalists are an obstacle, not some harmless loyal opposition, but basically a team of rapists and their enablers.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
That’s fair. Then to me you are neutral at best, assuming you are largely apolitical.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
Your thinking sucks.
I want a comrade who will help me govern my world.
I don’t want a dead weight that requires a lot of persuation before they can even let out a fart.
I am thinking ahead. I can persuade you now, and tomorrow I will have to persuade you again. Anytime I want cooperation I will need to persuade you. And you are just one person. I am going nowhere fast with that approach. The default for you becomes one of passivity. And then I have to start persuading you after thing have gotten already very bad.
That will not do.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
No. We need to start thinking and talking like me first. There must be anger and a demanding atmosphere.
Courts are not the only way.
Other ways: legislation, direct action, economics.
We have to impose our will. Don’t act lke a warmed over fish.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
Because he or she works for Google’s image and status management interests.
Does not matter consiously or unconsciously. Does not matter paid or free. Dependent or independent. Good faith or bad. Bot or human. None of it matters.
What matters is the result of their action/speech, and the priorities. And it is loud and clear what those are.
“Google must be trusted and given all the information first. Then, if you can find mismanagement, try to procecute your grivance after an injury has occured and was proven.”
^^^ We need to flip the script here.
- Comment on How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device 4 weeks ago:
I disagree that we need to find mismanagement first.
Never mind that Google is 100% opaque from outside and is not subject to inspections by its users.
Even if Google had an open door policy inviting and empowering any and all citizen auditors, I would still disagree that Google gets the benefit of doubt by default, and only after something blows up can we begin asserting our interests.
I think we can assert our interests any time, for any reason, and for no reason at all, with arbitrary aggessiveness, limited only by our own practical considerations.
Instead of waiting for things to go wrong, we can protect our interests before there is even a chance of things going wrong.
Can.
Will we? Each person has to consider their situation pragmatically, but if they considered everything and decided to assert themselves, we would be idiots to insist Google gets the first dibs, they have the initiative, and so how dare we want to limit Google in any way without first PROVING harm. Horse. Shit.
I take the same view toward any monopolies in general. We should not bother proving harm. We should break all monopolies as a matter of principle, even if they are “harmless.”
And Google shound be given as close to zero information as possible. As a matter of principle.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
- Comment on The Value of NVIDIA Now Exceeds an Unprecedented 16% of U.S. GDP 4 weeks ago:
Then you want real and enforced competition.
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 5 weeks ago:
For me it will depend on what that foriegn country is, how it is governed, its cultural norms, things like that.
I don’t have more trust in Chinese government than I do American.
How about some real privacy rights instead of making me choose my surveillers.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 1 month ago:
We’ll just wait to be picked up.
Or not.