I taught myself programming in the 80s, then worked myself from waitress and line cook to programmer, UXD, and design lead to the point of being in the running for an Apple design award in the 2010s.
But I cared more than anything about making things FOR people. Making like easier. Making people happy. Making software that was a joy to use.
Then I got sick with something that’s neither curable nor easily manageable.
Now I’m destitute and have to choose between medicine and food, and I’m staring down homelessness. (eta I was homeless from age 16-18, and I won’t do that again now, with autoimmune dysautonomia and in my mid-50s, even if the alternative is final.)
Fuck these idiots who bought their way into nerd status (like Musk) or had one hot idea that took off and didn’t have to do anything after (this fucking guy). Hundreds or thousands of designers and programmers made these companies, and were tossed out like trash so a couple of people can be rock stars, making more per hour than most of us will see in a lifetime.
For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.
If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
As a designer, programmer, and music engraver/editor, I've always paid for all media I've consumed because I've strongly believed creators deserve to be paid.
But after the Napster, Ticketmaster, Netflix, and dozens of other egregious examples of corporate sadism, I’m proud to sail the high seas now.
So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
So this is weird: my ancestor in the US in the early 1600s tried to sell Bronks Farm (now the Bronx) to foreign investors and got his left ear cut off, hanged till nearly dead, then banished to New Jersey. That was apparently a punishment at the time.
You’re kidding, right? You think that aid is because of trump, when you’re responding in an article that says his stated motives are the opposite of that?
Much of that aid was already secured before he took office. Shit takes time – especially in a war zone. Wait a month or so and get back to me on whether aid from the US continues. The US has been giving aid to many places that will continue for a short while until the new policies filter through.
Listen to what the new moron-in-chief says, and notice that some policies take a bit of time to take effect. Like the US economy, for instance. Large systems don’t turn on a dime.
Great fucking job, bothsiders. Now you get Genocide++.
I really hope you’re happy that your conscience is clean now the guy who’s main spokesman said Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’ and who himself declared it ‘could be better than Monaco’, clearly with an eye towards beachfront real estate, has the power to make that happen for his own gain.
This was entirely predictable, and we told you this would happen. Trump told you so himself. The dems weren’t perfect by any stretch, but Kamala absolutely wasn’t looking at the situation as to how she could personally profit through real estate development if the Palestinians were just wiped off the map as quickly as possible. Trump likely had the choicest property mapped out, with property developers already submitting proposals.
If you abstained because of both-sides re Israel, fuck you. You at best were played and at worst helped to play others, and now we ALL get to suffer.
Joke’s on them. Project 2025 plans to dismantle NOAA and gut/privatise the National Weather Service.
Who will pay for their weather forecasting once nobody will give them that data for free (under zero government funding)? They could just stop doing weather entirely, I guess, but millions of people rely on local weather reports to know whether to go to school or work. How do they plan to pay for that data?
I can’t believe how short-sighted some CEOs and mgmt types insist on being.
LillyPip @ LillyPip @lemmy.ca Posts 44Comments 1,726Joined 2 yr. ago
You’re right. I forgot about the lawsuit and settlement (for $65m). They’re both frauds.