These monsters crave power. They see oppressive regimes all over the world, stepping on people in a variety of ways, and think: “yeah, that’s the stuff.”

By “traveling community” and “travelers”, does the article author actually mean Romani (“gypsies”)?

I ask since the article may have lost something in translation. It also puts the police’s actions in a different light if true.

From the charging hole.

Can do, boss! Not sure what this means though.

Story time.

It honestly feels like about 264,000 gallons of that were spilled at a placed I used to work. I still have no idea who the culprit(s) was.

No kidding, the problem was so bad that building management stepped in and… added chamomile scented floor mats beneath the urinals to catch and deodorize the… ugh (gross)… drippings. It was such a strong smell that it wafted out into the hallway with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This prompted some of the women in the office to remark at how unfair it was that the men’s room was obviously getting all this extra attention. I almost can’t describe the mixture of disappointment and disgust on their faces once I explained why this was happening.

I also once had to explain to my wife that the above situation, along with the smell of urinal cakes and most gas-station-restroom deodorizers, are the reason why chamomile tea is a hard pass for me.

This is it. This is how mobs operate. A culpable employee is a loyal employee.

As a bonus: his sin isn’t even tied to the organization. So blowing him up would be essentially risk free - a quality hire if there ever was one.

Edit: dammit, this is going to really happen, isn’t it?

That’s easy: you don’t go to high-school anymore.

Could you help me understand something? Is this person also… dumb? I don’t mean to be disparaging or judgemental, but I’m trying to navigate all this and I’m having a hard time understanding how someone can lack this much self-awareness and still function in society. Unless, they can’t do that either? Thanks.

For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company?

I’ve been thinking about this all week. I have no idea if that exists or not. A few things sprang to mind though:

• It might be possible to have lightweight companies that all adopt the same incorporation boilerplate, not unlike a computer operating system. That, in turn, would be developed by a distinct entity and would publish updates to improve said OS over time. So, open-source but for legal docs that matter. This would make companies unified in principle, but ultimately, distinct.

• It’s possible for companies to operate “at arm’s length” but still share useful information or coordinate towards similar goals. One must be well-versed in anti-trust law to do this though.

• A franchise is the only existing model I can think of that comes even close. But that’s still centralized. I suppose a non-profit parent company and for/non-profit franchise operations might come closer.

The part that bothers me the most about this is how the re-institution of child labor points to the damnable confusion of moral, ethical, and legal, activity. Clearly this isn’t moral or ethical, but it is legal. So, undoubtedly some will point at the law and reassure themselves and others that this alone makes it okay to do. While there’s no stopping people that lack moral fiber to do the right thing, it’s everyone else that decides on the wrong side of moral and ethical conflict that make this so much worse.

On another note: how does one effectively boycott this behavior? No doubt, a lot of this labor will happen sight-unseen.

i did not know what all those bins of tiny electronic hobby parts were for, but I desperately wanted to learn.

From what I understand, prior to the personal computer boom of the 1980’s, HAM radio was kind of a big deal with nerds. The parts were there for all manner of electronics tinkering, but a big mainstay was building and modifying radios. Yeah, you had people tinkering with computers in the 1970’s too, but it was more niche (until it wasn’t).

Do a campaign about prescription opiates or meth or something useful.

Poking at the opioid crisis would be worthwhile subversion of things.

This is exactly what had me scared straight for the longest time. It’s not the drug, it’s the system that punishes use of the drug that’s the real threat.

The fact that ex-convicts (people that have paid their debt to society) aren’t a protected class in the hiring process is beyond me. At least insofar as non-violent offenses go, there’s no cause to throw someone away like this. This goes especially considering the current state of political affairs around here.

How… how do they not have a smooth on-ramp for what is basically a straight upgrade to the same service?!

I was gonna say: we didn’t vote for him! Approval rating should be at 0% on that point alone as zero voters approved of this.

I agree. The environment in which this must function is corrosive to the very idea, hence why I’m asking it openly here. It’s a pretty dense minefield.

I’m no lawyer, but I’ve mused a lot about some kind of legal “dead man switch” that somehow renders the company value-less if it deviated from the intended path. Something built into the company’s charter and founding documents, not unlike some kind of constitution.

Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.

I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?

That also sounds like the kind of prank that Cards Against Humanity would pull if they had access to as much cash. I love this so much.

Especially these days. Current-gen x86 architecture has all kinds of insane optimizations and special instruction sets that the Pentium I never had (e.g. SSE). You really do need a higher-level compiler at your back to make the most of it these days. And even then, there are cases where you have to resort to inline ASM or processor-specific intrinsics to optimize to the level that Roller Coaster Tycoon is/was. (original system specs)

Not all jokes are what they cream to be. That said, this one really whipped the competition.