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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • Workers skeptical of unions in a survey of 1,900 tech professionals conducted by the career site Blind cited specific concerns: that unions are “not meritocratic,” “prevent innovation,” and “hold back earnings of top performers.”

    Looking at my non union job where idiots make millions and it has taken years to get even the basics of ci/cd implemented.



  • I know most christians do a mix of cherry-picking and complete fabrication (what portion of christians do you think confuse dante’s inferno and paradise loss with the bible?). It’d be nice if they cherry-picked the Mark 10:21

    Jesus looked at him and loved him. He told him, “You’re still missing one thing. Sell everything you have. Give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then follow me!”

    or the Matthew 25:40-46

    40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

    41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

    44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

    45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

    46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

    But mostly they just use it as an excuse to be jerks. It’s a big book with ample support for that, but they could choose the nice parts.





  • How about labor getting their fair share of loss if business they work in fails. No? Why not?

    If the business fails, the workers lose their income and their shares are just as worthless as anyone else. The workers should have shares. (Or some other mechanism so there’s not a handful of fat cats living a life of luxury due to the labor of many others)

    The person who started the business can always go work somewhere else. It’s not like he’s put to death. And if the concern is that “someone who loses their money might suffer and die” then we should fix that problem more generally, because there are many other ways to end up there.

    And you haven’t proposed any better system. It’s always the same when I ask that question.

    That wasn’t the question or the point. A fairer system off the top of my head is profit sharing with a union. But that wasn’t the point.

    If someone says “X is bad for A, B, C” saying that Z isn’t better is not a rebuttal. We haven’t gotten that far. We’re trying to reach agreement that X is bad. Then we can talk about replacing or fixing it. Maybe Z does suck.

    It’s a common mistake. Someone will be like “windows sucks” and someone will be like “well apple is expensive”, just blazing by on that express train of thought. Take the local train.

    But I’m still in favor of capitalism. Because my parents and grandparents lived in socialism and told me how their life looked like.

    So you have generational trauma skewing your views.

    Long story short: It was an inescapable poverty and no free speech.

    Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this economic system. And let me remind you of all the people fired because their employer didn’t like what they said, where they risk falling into poverty and worse.

    The way capitalism manifests in the US is a set of tiny tyrannies. Your boss tells you when you can piss, what you can wear, what you can say in public. Maybe you don’t care because you are the boss. You give your people time off?

    I am a capitalist. I run super small business. If you think it’s sunshine and rainbow, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s more work, there’s no pay guarantee, competition is ALWAYS ahead of you, in capital, scale and know-how, you’re sweating shitless on any change in costs, because raising prices always comes at the risk of losing customers, meanwhile you’re required to do shit ton of government mandated paperwork.

    And the dream is for you to make it so big that you don’t have to work anymore. Your business expands. You buy out or out compete everyone else. You sit back and let other people work. Then you raise prices, lower wages, and buy a private jet.

    The end state of capitalism is a rich asshole who doesn’t work, and a shitty world for everyone else. Maybe it takes years. But enshittification is pretty widely understood.

    Maybe a worker owned collective would enshittify, too. But as a small consolation, you’d at least have thousands of rich people instead of a billionaire.

    Now, I wrote this on the toilet so it’s not the most coherent or polished. I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth even though we disagree.



  • Failing businesses is irrelevant to the argument that labor is entitled to a fair share of what it creates.

    Your analogy to generalizations and an old timey Godwin’s law is laughable.

    The capitalist system “works” at tremendous cost to many people. Many such systems work. Chattel slavery would “work”.

    And you haven’t clarified why you’re so eager to defend this system. Are you a capitalist? Do you employ people while keeping the bulk of the profits?

    I don’t think I can take you seriously


  • VC funding isn’t free money. Usually you have to have alredy prospering business for anyone to even talk with you. Companies like WeWork or more recently AI companies are extremely rare exception.

    lol. Many people get funding for their companies because of their connections. Zoom famously got funding even though the investors thought it was stupid to try to address what they saw as a solved problem, but he was their friend so they gave him a few million dollars.

    The last business I worked for started with his daddy’s money, which (surprise) came from previous capitalist exploits. The first one was similar.

    Why not?

    Capitalists have done incalculable harm to our environment, society, and individuals. They don’t need your defense. They have almost all the money and power.



  • I had an interview a few weeks ago (one of like 3 this year) where it was revealed they still write these.

    They asked how we kept all the stuff organized at my last job. All the cucumber stuff. I said we just kept the tests next to the file they’re testing- foo.py has a sibling test_foo.py- and we didn’t find much value in adding extra layers. If you want to test the API returns 403 when you request another user’s file, you can just write like

    
    def test_403_when_requesting_other_user_file() -> None:
      response = requests.get("whatever/etc")
      assert response.status_code == 403
    

    You can be pretty to the point.

    We used docstrings to explain non-obvious things. Swagger shows the API docs in a nice webpage for anyone curious and authorized.

    He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.


  • Many people operate primarily on the emotional level. That’s a polite way of saying they’re stupid. Idiots. Like a child who’d rather have 4 shiny pennies than one tiny dime.

    If we’re not going to round them up (which, give me the infinity gauntlet and…) then we need to appeal to their idiot emotions. Find something they consider in-group, and frame whatever reasonable policy they’re opposing so their benefits are foregrounded.