But again, hacking is a tool when they want to go after something in particular - a single lemmy server is minuscule. Even the full scale of everyone on lemmy is a very small target… They might go after it if they have specific reason to, but they’re unlikely to do so when there’s plenty of work to be done on bigger platforms
Be careful what you say - don’t call for violence, definitely don’t make threats of violence against specific figures, especially ones in office, and as a general rule don’t spread personally identifying information
Past that? Let’s say there’s a crackdown. They’re going after low hanging fruit to instill fear. By nature, the fediverse is hard to tie back to individuals… But if they’re looking for you individually, they can find you
I wouldn’t worry too much. Dissatisfaction is insanely high… They’re more likely to do a great firewall and kill the fediverse long before they bother looking into lemmy accounts
Yeah we do too… Just for some reason we never got around to making that actually illegal. It’s just frowned upon
You had me at communication. That’s like 95% of any relationship… Literally everything is up in the air … Except being on the same page
Yep… My first “career” job was for a mid sized company. In my onboarding they gave me my employee number but said “you’ll never need this, here you’re a name, not a number”. One time I emailed security saying I forgot my badge because it was with my lunch, and one of the founders called me up and gave me his prepackaged lunch because he said he usually doesn’t get through them all. When we closed a big deal, they called us all upstairs to have champagne during the workday. Our mission was unambiguously to help people
Then we got acquired… They gave me my new employee ID and told me I’d be using it for everything. They just milked our contracts and refused wages until we all left
And unfortunately, mid sized companies can give an equally good experience with much better pay and job security… But they’re being bought out to secure contracts and gutted at an insane rate.
It’s late stage capitalism… If you want to keep growing but you’ve already destroyed your ability to complete, buy them out to take over their contracts
Oh absolutely… There’s tons of petty tyrants out there too, which is different, but also bad or even worse. They might also be just staffing something just as soul crushing too, so it could just be worse in every regard
But small business means your boss is probably there to stay. Ideally, you meet the owner in your interview, often they’re the same person. But if you find someone loyal to their people, you can actually give them your loyalty and they’ll see you as a person
IDK if this would be viable with an H1 visa and I’ve seen many other options I’ll be looking into, but here’s what I normally tell people in this position: small businesses are built different
They’re harder to find, they usually don’t pay amazingly, but they’re way more human. It’s not all run through spread sheets, you work for humans who get to know you and (can sometimes) actually be like a family…(If they say that phrase it’s a red flag though)
It’s hit or miss, you likely would be working on legacy stuff or have to wear many hats… But it’s work where you know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for
I mean, true, although I thought they were pretty upfront on wanting to produce the fuel in-house and specialize two reactor lines
Which, yeah, isn’t ideal… But if it works, they can’t patent an element. They won’t be able to monopolize the tech forever
It seems like a very elegant solution… If they can overcome the engineering challenges. There’s probably far better designs that could be made from the core idea
They’re different - when I say “brush” my tongue stays in the middle of my mouth against the bottom and the back spreads slightly on the r, when I say “blush” it touches the top of my teeth before flicking down on the u
They’re slightly different phonemes, if you don’t hear it naturally it’s difficult. But if you focus hard enough on the details you can eventually learn to hear it - you have to listen intently to the comparison over and over until you can hear the difference. From there, you can practice to make the sound yourself
Those are all true things, but they’re what I’m talking about - this isn’t a cohesive plan, this is a bunch of very rich people doing what’s best for them at any given moment
Europe built back so beautiful because they organized to optimize from the organic layout they developed slowly before cars. They designed the cars into transportation, but they didn’t compromise the cities for the cars. They can have a suburb that is surrounded by parks and nature, that mixes all sorts of housing together, because they don’t let money do whatever it wants
Here, they’ll set aside a nice bit of forest and say it’ll never be developed… But there’s constant pressure to do it anyways, and now the planned community is out of balance
They’ll plan out a commuter rail line, and a billionaire will block it. They’ll plan out a bus route, and they’ll manufacture consent about crime or something. They’ll talk about mixed used zoning, and people will worry about their house prices
Yes, there’s a lot of planned aspects to this, but this wasn’t designed to suck - it was a million little concessions to money.
This is what happens when you don’t plan, when you aren’t organized - companies are organized, and they’ll get a great ROI if they manufacturer consent. Each for their own issues, for whatever is best for them at the moment, with no concerns for what it leads to. All they have to do is block things that hurt their interests and whittle away at things they want to make money off of
Cancer. Cancer isn’t trying to kill you. It’s not planning on disrupting your organs. It’s just trying to grow without regard to anything else
Because of when they were built, the sheer scale, and the commodification of housing
In Europe, do developers buy several acres of land to build on all at once? Do they do that continuously, for decades on end?
People never want inconvenience, they want quiet “safe” neighborhoods where their children can play and their house goes up in value. Developers want to continuously build the most valuable ROI, which right now is a neighborhood of hastily thrown together McMansions, and they’d rather build stuff at the fringes of an already built community so they can mooch off existing infrastructure
The overstuffed communities grow in a decade, and all these people now have to commute further to do anything, so they want bigger faster roads. The original layout is now cut into segments by more and more 4 lane 35-45mph roads to alleviate traffic
I’ve seen it happen in real time, and I’ve also experienced what the planned European communities are like. This is what happens when you don’t force better designs, when you don’t regulate growth. It’s cancer
I mean, yes and no
It started out that better off people get conveniently located nice houses with a yard. That became “the American dream”, and so when the middle class was suddenly strengthened it was very in demand… So they kept building them, further and further out, until distance became insane
A lot of them were originally planned communities, so it wasn’t too insane. You might’ve had a walk to get out of the neighborhood, but nothing like it is today.
The car centic infrastructure came in later - the sprawl kept growing, people had to travel further, and so they keep making faster roads with more lanes. Which are the opposite of walkable
Add in the death of mom and pop shops… You can’t have a warehouse in every neighborhood. Corporations want to go big, a Walmart replaces 100 other shops. And add in the parking requirements, which are like full fire code maximums minus employee count (which is basically arbitrary nonsense) , and your land requirements become insane
This wasn’t designed like hoa’s and redlining, this was organic, like cancer. They played hand in hand, but this was a natural development…a very bad one, but one that emerged indirectly
I mean, yes and no
It started out that better off people get conveniently located nice houses with a yard. That became “the American dream”, and so when the middle class was suddenly strengthened it was very in demand… So they kept building them, further and further out, until distance became insane
A lot of them were originally planned communities, so it wasn’t too insane. You might’ve had a walk to get out of the neighborhood, but nothing like it is today.
The car centic infrastructure came in later - the sprawl kept growing, people had to travel further, and so they keep making faster roads with more lanes. Which are the opposite of walkable
Add in the death of mom and pop shops… You can’t have a warehouse in every neighborhood. Corporations want to go big, a Walmart replaces 100 other shops. And add in the parking requirements, which are like full fire code maximums minus employee count (which is basically arbitrary nonsense) , and your land requirements become insane
This wasn’t designed like hoa’s and redlining, this was organic, like cancer. They played hand in hand, but this was a natural development…a very bad one, but one that emerged indirectly
I think the CIA has used them pretty extensively, but I don’t think they set them up directly
What the US did is force Mexico to join in on the drug war. We threatened to block all pharmaceuticals to Mexico if they didn’t ban marijuana, which they really didn’t want to do
The idea is they’re marketable worker replacements
If you have a call center you want to switch to ai, it’s easy though to make them pull up relevant info. It’s harder to stop them from being misused
If your call center gets slammed for using racial slurs, that’s an issue
Remember, they’re trying to sell AI as drop in worker replacement
I will say, cruise control makes driving much less tiring. I can put on something to listen to, change up how I sit, and just zone out with my thumb over the cancel button so I’ll immediately slow and have time to slam on the brakes. If my cruise control would also match speed with whoever is in front of me and keep me in the lane, it would be even less tiring
That being said, the only way I’m using Tesla self driving is if I’m hyper alert and ready for my car to decide it wants to do some offroading
I mean… They’re not exactly hiding it. The expressed purpose of belts and roads is to invest in their infrastructure and partner with them to build industrial capacity. Conveyer belts and roads. They openly state they’re doing it to build up trading partners and global influence
It’s literally the same thing… Will they be better partners? Hopefully, it’s not exactly a high bar
They’re not Marxist-Leninists at all though… They’re just a highly regulated form of capitalism.
The government doesn’t own Tencent, they just keep a strong grip on them. They have their own billionaires, the factories have owners, companies bid to fulfill government contracts, you apply for a job and get paid what they offer. It’s just capitalism
Their government does a lot more than in the US and has a lot more influence, and they do influence the market more… But that’s just regulation and public services
They basically do what we did to tik tok. The US government can revoke a corporate charter for any or no reason, China just actually uses this authority actively
Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I’ve even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful…I couldn’t, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it’s probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there’s bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways
They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn’t need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already
Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers
Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That’s after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they’re kept in perpetual debt as leverage
It’s a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn’t hidden, it’s just spun in a positive light
That’s wasteful and dangerous
Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs