yeah, we’re vaguely aware of some of these. hopefully, when we reach out to OCF they’ll be able to hand us off to one of them or something like that–but obviously, it’s a good idea to have a backup plan, and you don’t just want to have the single basket of eggs after the rug gets pulled out from under you like this
today is apparently just a bloodbath day in gaming generally. Deck Nine is also laying 20% of its staff off, and esports company ESL Faceit Group is laying off 15%
technofetishism–if there’s anything local politicians love it’s sounding hip and getting Cool Headlines over boring but practical technology that actually works
actually, i guess i should say that some corporations get a carve-out here, since worker co-operatives also fall under the banner—i think you can trust most worker co-ops to serve your interests in principle when you interact with them. but i would otherwise sustain that yeah, you should just be adversarial with corporations and assume that what they’re doing is ultimately intended to fuck you, nickle-and-dime you, or just generally treat you like dirt. i’m just not sure why a corporation like Wendy’s should ever get your benefit of the doubt or presumption of acting in your interests as a customer, ultimately.
the premise of a “win-win-win” scenario is necessarily predicated on the belief that a corporation would ever let such an arrangement occur versus just shamelessly exploiting its customers and telling them to love it or leave it, which is a form of trust. in my mind that is trust that is severely unearned by literally any current corporation—and i would firmly assert that even outside of a vacuum the vast majority of corporations will gladly tell (and right now are in the process of telling) their customers the latter
on principle i will never trust any corporation to do good things unless compelled to by a higher power such as the state, and i certainly do not trust them to do good things when the corporate-speak being used to describe those things is “enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling.” reeks of grift
i think this is a very good illustration of how better things are legitimately possible, even in America where the infrastructure can be truly doom-inspiring.
this is definitely undesirable in a number of contexts, but as far as we’re aware this is a Lemmy thing we can’t change and don’t really have control over.
One might find disappointing the disjunction between UATX’s tantalizing marketing and its conceptual yields. UATX had tweeted, “Dare to think with us,” had promised that they were “Not your typical summer school…,” had titled their program “Forbidden Courses.” But what was aired in this particular Forbidden Course were opinions neither audacious nor surprising. They were platitudes about the nature of man and woman, of the kind encountered in bad romantic comedies produced in the aughts. “Women are more complicated than men.” “There are things that women want that they don’t like that they want.” “With boys, their bodies and their desires are one.”
it’s… incredible how not-transgressive and not-marginal these opinions are
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court’s decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission’s proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users’ messages.
i wonder if the best way to think about self-help as a genre is as a sort of placebo genre, where the act of engaging with the genre is a more useful act toward whatever you want to do than actually reading any particular book.