Truthful but not guaranteed complete isn’t so useful…

Yes, you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of hopelessness and apathy, and it’s only helping those who commit the atrocities.

But before you judge, I’ll state that I’ve been a member of an activist group, progressivecoders dot org, for the last 5 years. I’ve worked on various projects, but overall watched the world situation get worse anyway. Even before that, I’ve done my best to be an activist and ally.

I’ve also been in the software industry for 30 years. I’ve watched it go from a genuinely useful and interesting information processing and delivery system, to a completely shittified ad delivery and surveillance tool. I’ve had to participate in it myself, I was actually part of the team that delivered the first animated GIF that made advertising that much more annoying. I worked for several of the big internet monopolies, and realized that it wasn’t an accomplishment, they just crack the whip that much harder, and I have CPTSD in exchange for free lunches and massages.

So yeah, I’m starting to give up. But it’s not for lack of trying.

By eliminating critical thinking, and polarizing everyone, those in power can do whatever they want, and the rest of us won’t be sufficiently organized to stop it.

I’m seeing positive signs though, labor unions getting successful settlements, and more awareness. So maybe?

I’m hoping we can minimize the joblessness and hardship (which is already happening). People are unionizing, despite the best efforts of the owners of even businesses that had a progressive reputation, and the strikes are getting results! It gives me a lot of hope for fairness without the reset that could lead to mass homelessness and poverty. But having been around the block a few times, I know it will be a close thing.

Capitalism is a Ponzi scheme. Build up debt, and pay it off by transferring it to the next generation of suckers.

I look forward to the crash, and hope it’s not just a reset of the same system.

I haven’t gotten a raise in 10 years (since I turned 50). In fact, switching jobs often resulted in a decrease in salary. From 2018 to today, counting inflation, my effective salary has dropped over 30%.

And no, I’m not mediocre at my job. At one Major Internet Monopoly I wrote a script to refactor several million lines of code, to remove redundancy in some autogenerated structs, with only one major outage that I fixed in a few hours. I than proceeded to modify a data display and write a coefficient calculation engine for an inhouse experiment that ended up saving them tens of thousands of dollars. After the experiment I leveraged the ML platform to generate reports for the data scientists in hours, where they were prepared to take weeks. My evaluation for that period? One step below Meets Expectations.

At another Major Internet Monopoly I basically implemented a major feature to the mobile app, while still in my 90 day onboarding period. Under extreme schedule pressure. And while the other engineers “helpfully” redesigned my code in code review. Once I missed a release cycle because a reviewer blocked my submission because I forgot to add a period at the end of a comment. I’m still burned out from that one.

I’m at a much better company now, at $10k below the Major Internet Monopoly above. In 2 years I got one 5k bonus, but still no raise. And we’re a startup struggling with the current economy fuckery, so no real point asking for a raise.

Sorry, that was 3 things.

I built my own, based on https://github.com/rmd6502/esp_lights

This precisely. Maybe “us vs them” was useful when we lived in caves and resources were limited, but now, we should theoretically have enough food and housing that everyone could be comfortable.

But, Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” has bogarted all the resources, and emphasized tribalism by saying it’s really “their” fault, where “they” are anyone not like “us”. When we’re all struggling together.

I took an old phone and fully reset it to use for all these shitware apps. I’ve looked into buying an anonymous SIM card so it won’t be at all connected to me, but the underlying assumption seems to be if you want that you must be a drug dealer. Best I’ve found is mysudo, which requires payment, but it’s really not much, and only stores the minimum on their side. Gives you an anonymous email and phone number. The other problem with all these apps is the engineers are given at best half the time they need to do a good job, so they’re always buggy, insecure, and have a shitty UI. But some project manager managed to show Impact and get a bonus.