Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.
Tibet. Their ongoing border disputes with India. Island disputes along side their bullying of nearly every maritime neighbor in the region. Stationing destroyers outside of Australian cities as a show of force.
Plus, their current antagonistic relationship with Japan, where they make direct public threats to Japanese leaders who respond by seeking nuclear weapons.
They are currently probing for weakness in their neighbors because of territorial ambitions. Just because they don't invade countries on the other side of the world like the USA does, doesn't make them pacifists. They just have different goals.
yeah they really shouldn't be blockading their neighbors while claiming every country around them is their sphere of influence and openly interfering in their allies domestic politics while leveraging their size to force other countries to accept asymmetric economic deals...
Please spare us. China invaded Vietnam to protect Pol Pot while he was mass killing millions of innocent civilians. They have territorial disputes with over 10 countries, which they've been unable to decisively act on because those neighbors either have nukes (India) or are protected by a more powerful country (US). Not because their government is some benevolent entity. They're basically an authoritarian dictatorship that's kind of cornered at the moment (like Saddam after the Gulf War) but would kill a bunch of people and expand if the US wasn't around.
China has resolved a lot of its border disputes already. The border disputes with Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Tajikstan have all been resolved
You’re not mining coal, get real. Either use efficient techniques to make people do the intellectual work necessary to achieve whatever goal you have in mind, or you’re just deluding yourself thinking you’re some kind of “reality expert” while being an asshole, meaning they might still do it, but it would be despite your leadership, not because of it.
Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems).
But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck more. Every human deserves to be treated with dignity, and a base level of respect.
Suggesting that someone is fragile and weak, because they object to being insulted, or object to the careless and needless stripping of dignity and humanity from people is a wild take.
I started working on srctree 2 years ago because of how awful github has become. I don't think there's much creativity in this trend line... But the question was; "why is insulting people doing intellectual work bad". Not, "do you think the changes at github are creative", but I do think that the changes require a bit of intellectual work, and that no matter how shitty github has become, it's unreasonable to attack people when unprovoked.
Ok, but that’s still not effective as a leadership course of action. Calling people names might make you feel like a big man inside, but that’s it, it won’t accomplish anything, that’s only for your personal benefit, not the project, not the product and definitely not the team.
Actually if you completely rule out the possibility of harshness then you are giving license to let yourself be walked over and for standards to drop to zero. It might make you feel like a big enlightened man inside to do so, but the proper application of firmness and pressure is absolutely effective in leadership.
That might not be relevant to OPs use case. A lot of nurses get tied up doing things like reviewing claims denials. There’s good use cases on the administrative side of healthcare that currently require nurse involvement.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)
Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
For tech hubs? Because tech hubs tend to be in some of the most traffic nightmare cities. I have worked in DC and Atlanta. My commute for all my jobs except 1 was an hour. The one exception was 20mins because it was a small weirdly placed company that just happened to be in the suburb one over from me.
For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low price (when young) or great schools (when older) don't mix often.
Yeah, I know the median commute in these areas is low, but they are counting retail workers and teachers. I bet the median for tech workers is pretty high because of the reality of how they tend to be placed.
In a real tech hub, it's definitely going to be a longer commute. Nashville, for instance, is not a tech hub. Yet it has some of the worst commute times for people who have an office there.
Big tech serves exactly three purposes (real, not stated):
- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)
- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)
Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want. In the case of Uber that's great because I will never even think about doing business with the cab cartel again. I don't owe them a damn thing. Nor do I owe my own local culture any loyalty over what I can watch on Netflix. You could argue that the algorithmic feed on social media is a negative, but the idea that there is some underlying agenda is ridiculous. At worst it's like a drug dealer saying "I have what you want... heroin!"
It's remarkable to me that even after all the scandals and whistleblowing going on in the last decades about intelligence agencies, the US government, and big tech collaborating to surveil and control their own citizens or other nations, the recent, full public alignment between the big tech billionaires and the executive branch, not to mention the whole history of US imperialism, which you can boil down to violent expansion of private markets and capital to the detriment of other peoples, there are still smart people like yourself that don't question it in the slightest. In fact, embrace it. Hopefully you're benefiting directly from it, otherwise, you're just a frog getting slowly boiled in a pot of crumbling social environment. Also, did you ever ask yourself where your "preferences" or "wants" come from or how they form?
And none of that is profitable. It's quite the opposite. They do it because the government forces them to do it. Big tech companies don't want to do this, and didn't do this before the spooks came knocking. This is why government regulation will only make matters worse. These things are done because of, not in spite of, the government.
The government is them! Can you not see it? They are intertwined so hard, it's difficult to distinguish who wants what, because they MERGED. The state is ruled by the economic elite, and that's done via the government.
If the government were controlled by billionaires, we would be a lot more competently governed than we are. Democracy works, and I know it because the government's competence resembles its average citizen.
Give me one example of a social media regulation being approved without "due process" or whatever that means. It's annoying when I stub my toe on the couch or when I drop my slice of bread butter-first. It's a criminal attack on the sovereignty of another nation when the US tries to interfere.
> Brazil’s supreme court has ruled that social media platforms can be held legally responsible for users’ posts, in a decision that tightens regulation on technology giants in the country.
> Companies such as Facebook, TikTok and X will have to act immediately to remove material such as hate speech, incitement to violence or “anti-democratic acts”, even without a prior judicial takedown order
Twitter was blocked immediately, without a public hearing or appeal process.
> In early May 2023, when the bill was about to be approved, Google and Telegram used their own platforms to express their opposition to the bill to their Brazilian users, and soon after were forced to back down by government institutions.
>The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, temporarily banned Elon Musk’s social media platform X last year after the billionaire refused to obey court orders to suspend certain accounts.
>On May 11, the president of the Chamber of Deputies requested that the directors of Google and Telegram in the country be investigated for their actions against the bill, describing these actions as forceful and abusive of the companies' hegemonic positions in the market, motivated by economic interests, and cited possible crimes against democratic institutions.
I'm not even a supporter of the current Brazilian administration, or even the political system for that matter, but these companies MUST obey court orders and MUST refrain from using their positions to attack governmental institutions or to prevent legislation that goes against their economic-political gains. They may be above US law, but they will have to lobby harder if they want to go over some of them here.
Author: Larry Liu (Morgan State University, Baltimore)
Abstract: There is an increasing public discourse of automation for white-collar professional jobs due to improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) capacities, raising the question about the contours of the future of work. Marx and Ricardo’s framework of technological labour displacement helps us understand the future of work in the context of AI. Marx’s discussion in Capital and Ricardo’s discussion in Principles of Political Economy reveal the common thesis that technology-induced worker displacement and precariousness of employment relationships are built into the internal logic of the contemporary digital capitalist economy. There are three important differences in their theoretical framework: (1) Marx did not believe that high technological unemployment is possible within capitalism even with very advanced technologies such as AI, while Ricardo saw technological unemployment as a serious threat while he acknowledges countervailing employment-creating tendencies; (2) While Ricardo’s explanation for the falling rate of profit is limited to rising wages, Marx traces the profit decline to the rising organic composition of capital and automation itself; (3) For Marx, a desirable future of work is not found within a capitalist framework but in communism, while Ricardo sees no alternatives to capitalism.
