I mean, it comes back to Dunbar’s Number. We care much more for individuals in our immediate circle than for “people” in the abstract.

There’s a spot in Houston’s Chinatown with a big gallery of claw machines. I think my success rate was better than 50%. Even got two at once on one try. But when its $2 to play and you’re winning toys that are worth less than $1…

Incidentally, they have a desk at the front where you can trade back your winning toys in bulk for bigger prizes. But they’re all random dodads you could get on Temu for a few bucks each. Like, you can turn in twenty stuffed animals for a cheapo touch pad. Basically a fancy kind of Chuck’e’Cheese ticket, when considered in bulk.

But if you’re looking for a dog’s chew toy or a way to bloat your 2-year-old’s stuffed animal war chest? Hard to beat the value in bulk.

Arguing in general is pointless.

To borrow a scene from “Thank You For Smoking”, it isn’t pointless but it is performative. The reason to argue is to get in front of a neutral or uninformed audience and state your case better than your opponent. Your goal is not to change your opponent’s mind. Your goal is to change your audience’s mind.

The DebateBro gambit is to raise personal exposure. The more you can get on TV and reiterate your views convincingly, the more people hear them and are swayed in your favor. You’re a salesman and the Debate is your opportunity to gather a crowd and entertain a public through conflict. But the goal is to sell your ideas to the crowd, not the target of your conversation.

I’ve found that arguing with conservatives isn’t about arguing with an individual. My father-in-law is a staunch libertarian, we go back and forth all the time. His positions change. My positions change. Yadda yadda.

But then the conversation ends, he gets back in his car, he turns on the Talk Radio, and he gets an earful of information and ideology that I never hear. And I throw on my leftie podcasts, getting a perspective he doesn’t hear. When we meet up again, we’ve had our brains saturated in information and ideas totally alien to one another. So the brief conversation we had a week ago doesn’t move our political alignment in any meaningful way.

Per David Graeber in “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, people used to record debt with “Tally Sticks”. You’d notch the debt you owed at the end of a branch. Then you’d bend it in half. Creditor would get one end. Debtor the other. When you wanted to call in your debt, you’d hold the sticks up together to confirm they matched and that’s what was owed. This practice goes back to the Paleolithic Era.

Incidentally, the Tally Stick would often be longer on the creditor’s end. This was the stock of the stick and thus designated its recipient the “stock holder”.

But assignment and collection of debts isn’t the same thing as assignment and collection of rents and interest, which is at the center of the capitalist economic system.

Humans were constrained by their material conditions. Now that those material conditions have changed, their behaviors have changed to match. This is not a fixed state of affairs. Humans continue to transition between stages just like every other living being.

Greed is as much a part of modern human nature as fear and love. And it is the product of a social condition that rewards growth, punishes disobedience, and requires a larger community to reproduce itself. It is a consequence of social conditioning executed iteratively from parent to child. And a consequence of statistical survival and prosperity played out over populations.

What defines human action is not the basic libidinal impulse, but the interplay between people and their environments over lifetimes and generations. That’s not socialism or capitalism at its root. Socialism and capitalism are simply fruits grown from the post-industrial branches of the tree of human history.

I mean, tell it to Jeffery Epstein. The man was pulling strings halfway around the world with his endless supply of blackmail and bribery.

“If this password doesn’t work, I’m going to break your thumbs.”

“Uh…”

“Yeah, its not the real password. Lets break his thumbs and ask him again.”

your full disk encryption will pay off one day

They day you fuck up your password one too many times and lock yourself out of your own computer.

check the IP logs

Its all encrypted? This guy uses VPNs and Tor?

Presuming that Mossad can be topped with a subscription to ProtonVPN or a Tor browser is adorable. Hell, presuming nobody in the intelligence services is familiar with Linux is even more adorable. “We’ve got everyone at the NSA fooled because we’re Arch users”. Yeah, sure buddy. What do you think these professional computer nerds are doing in their own free time?

Where do you even think encrypted applications come from?

It’s been the bedrock of American business since at least the 1960s.

Our country is flush with very wealthy fascists, many of whom obtained the position thanks to their ancestors crawling across the ratlines and embedding themselves in the nascent tech sector.

It predicts people with business school degrees getting six, seven, and eight figure salaries to blow smoke up the asses of the investor pool.

This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.

The dark art of sociology is recognizing how poverty impacts human behaviors and then calibrating your business to profit off it.

The gamification of hiring is largely a result of businesses de-institutionalizing Human Resources. If you were hired on at a company like Exxon or IBM in the 1980s, there was an enormous professionalized team dedicated to sourcing prospective hires, vetting them, and negotiating their employment.

Now, we’ve automated so much of the process and gutted so much of the actual professionalized vetting and onboarding that its a total crap shoot as to whom you’re getting. Applicants aren’t trying to impress a recruiter, they’re just aiming to win the keyword search lottery. Businesses aren’t looking to cultivate talent long term, just fill contract positions at below-contractor rates.

So we get an influx of pseudo-science to substitute for what had been a real sociological science of hiring. People promising quick and easy answers to complex and difficult questions, on the premise that they can accelerate the churn of staff without driving up cost of doing business.

Nice to have that kind of solidarity

Gamers

it would be much better for all of us to make new companies together

Companies need clients. That’s sort of the secret sauce in business. If you don’t have good relationships with the management at your client firms, you can’t win the contracts that give your work recognizable monetary value.

We can spin up an opensourcebusiness community here on Lemmy to do it together (Have no idea how to make/manage Lemmy communities and have projects already if any people would like to pick up this initiative. I can assist however I can in spare time)

:-/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

My office just ditched it’s Wednesday work from home policy. I mentioned to a co-worker that we could start a petition and vocalize our displeasure as an office wide unit.

She shot it down, because so many of her co-workers were insisting “actually this is great, we love being in the office” in front of management. And the more unreliable folks were consistently the biggest kiss-asses.

Office politics is a bitch.

What I’m hearing is that there’s 100s of GW of solar power trading at below-market rates.

Excited to hear New Labour’s position on chemically castrating one of the greatest scientists in history. Perhaps we can get some Guardian Op-Eds explaining why it is both necessary and good to drive the nation’s finest minds to suicide with constant verbal and physical abuse.