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Mantra: “We should focus our actions, time, and resources on Direct Action, Mutual Aid, and Community Outreach… No War but Class War!”

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  • 195 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 5th, 2023
  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.worldtoAntiwork@lemmy.world•The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity
    86·
    1 month ago

    "You know what they want?

    They want obedient workers.

    Obedient workers.

    People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs, with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it." – George Carlin

    David Graeber’s book on bullshit jobs blew the myth of office productivity wide open several years ago. The elites have been promising us shorter work weeks for more than a century now. We have the technology to make it happen. As we speak, they’re bragging about their new AI minions.

    Of course, that article even admits that onsite employees aren’t more productive. They just find different ways to “goof off,” like shopping online or scrolling their phones. The real ire seems to stem from envy, that remote workers are capable of meeting their responsibilities while also doing healthy things and taking care of themselves, like taking a walk in the middle of the day or (gasp) even a nap. Ironically, wellness articles have been telling bosses to let their employees take walks or naps in the middle of the day for almost 20 years.

    Many news outlets finally came clean last year and reported that a big chunk of companies might simply be using office return mandates as an excuse to lay off employees and “restructure” their workforce.

    Anywhere from 12 to 20 percent of office space remains vacant. It’s worse than the 2008 recession. If these landlords can’t find a way to make money off their corporate real estate soon, they’re going to start defaulting on their loans. The landlords will go bankrupt, and banks will wind up with giant office towers they can’t sell. More than $1 trillion will go poof.

    According to a piece in the Harvard Business Review, the $1 trillion will come due between now and 2026. That explains why CEOs keep making these edicts, and newspapers keep trying to trash remote work. As the piece explains, “The damage could metastasize into a full-blown financial crisis if scores or even hundreds of small and midsize commercial banks fail simultaneously.”

    The Federal Reserve’s misguided war on inflation has made everything even worse over the last couple of years. By raising interest rates, they’ve motivated more companies to ditch their office leases. Now commercial real estate is in a death spiral that could tank the economy (again).

    Major cities have spent the last several decades catering to these corporate landlords. Now their entire downtowns rely on workers for commerce. We’re talking about all those restaurants and coffee shops that serve breakfast and lunch to white-collar workers, and all the bars where people used to go and complain about work before they spent an hour commuting home.

    Once again, the elite have gotten themselves into big trouble. They want the rest of us to bail them out. If they don’t want our tax money, they want us to give up our freedom and autonomy. They want us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of capitalism to protect their fortunes.

  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.worldOPtoNew Communities@lemmy.world•SponsorBlock (and DeArrow) - SponsorBlock is a crowdsourced extension to skip sponsor segments in YouTube videos; DeArrow is a crowdsourced extension to replace titles and thumbnails on YouTube videoEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    TIL, cool for them.

    I use other YT forks and systems that already implement similar techniques even if they are “good” or “bad” ads.

    I am also for Sailing the High Seas.

    We have a difference in opinion on this matter, but thanks for the small chat and the link!

    This is the section you are talking about:

    SponsorBlock

    This year, a developer worked on implementing support for SponsorBlock in NewPipe. SponsorBlock is a crowd-sourced database listing sponsored sections in videos, which are automatically skipped by clients such as web browsers, using extensions.

    While SponsorBlock’s implementation apparently takes care to preserve user privacy (you can, e.g., download the entire database for offline use, and its regular querying system is also well made), it targets an ethical advertising system. Its purpose is to help users, who probably don’t realise that sponsorship is one of the most ethical ways to fund their favorite content, automatically skip sponsored sections of videos.

    Morally, it’s a very questionable system. Of course, some sponsoring may be of little relevance to the user, or maybe even intrusive or hidden. But SponsorBlock doesn’t differentiate between ethical and unethical advertisements. It just skips all kinds of sponsored sections.

  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If Necromancy suddenly became possible, can the undead be called as a witness during court proceedings?
    2·
    2 months ago

    It would depend on the type of necromancy, but at the end of the day, I think it would still be a conflict of interest since the person bringing them back would have great say, unless they are considered some type of expert witness necromancer.

    Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination; imparting the means to foretell future events and discover hidden knowledge.

    The necromancer’s capacity to create minions and command them to fight for him or her is generally enough to satisfy even the most critical of viewers. As necromancers might easily be termed one-person armies, they are usually compelling and feared. The fact that they dabble in magic and the supernatural does not help their image as upstanding citizens.

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