uriel238

Of...course he does? Maybe with an evil laugh?

Musk is essentially as close to a supervillain as IRL gets.

I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.

I also have a hypothesis that a lot of company budget and material goes towards handling and pacifying upper management (e.g. the way a binky pacifies an infant) since they are accustomed to being coddled and not accustomed to actually managing.

To be fair, I've only been able to observe the relationships between clerical class and management class in a handful of companies, including a small one-store CD-Rom reseller and Bechtel Corporation circa 1990, but my observations have been consistent between them.

When I was six and in first grade, the teachers directed me to the school psychologist. But it was the early 1970s and people had just seen The Exorcist and believed it was based on a true story, so when it came to me, I was just a bit odd.

It would turn into a diagnosis Major Depression in my early twenties, severe enough to get disability benefits. It would become Anaclitic Depression in my late twenties. Around fifty, I was the subject of my psychotherapist's PHD thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it. I'm now enby, though through most of my life I was [M] because that's what it said on my state ID. Whatever.

When I was in a partial hospital program, the fine doctors who answered questions explained some models regarding sanity, that almost everyone has to contend at very least with neuroses, which are characterized by internal conflicts. Those are like:

• Wanting to be a kind person vs. wanting to adequately compete in the corporate sector to gain some upward mobility.
• Wanting to be civil (and within the constraints of legality) vs. wanting to fully express outrage for local or national injustice
• Wanting my daughter to grow up with a healthy sexuality vs. Not wanting her to express her adulthood just yet.

This was in the nineties, in which the US was undergoing an epidemic of mental illness, featuring a lot of major depression. There are reservations in the academic sector as to opine why -- I expect -- for the same reason climatologists who are willing to discuss the expected outcome of the current climate path are rare: It leads to come uncomfortable truths that our society is not ready to address. In the case of everybody crazy, the hypothesis is that it's intergenerational. We're not meant to exist in a society where every adult is required to work forty-plus hours a week (plus breaks, plus commute). We're also meant to have parents who are not exhausted all the time. The madness is intergenerational, with cumulative family dysfunction getting passed down, as people not only neglect their kids, but self medicate to cope, so they're even less available.

So, no, the possibility that everyone is crazy is not crazy at all. It's a product of the industrial age. What's worse is the psychiatric community is expected to treat it as a medical issue. Toxic work life and toxic home life making you depressed? Here, take some pills. If you can afford to sob at a therapist one hour a week, do so. In any other situation we'd remove the patients from the hazardous area but that would cause the economy to collapse, because that's the entire workforce.

There are some capitalists who are aware they get better productivity out of their workforce by acknowleding they are human beings, not machines, but those are the rare exceptions. The rest of them believe J. D. Vance has a point. So we're not going to move towards any rational solutions for a while.

I don't have any solutions to this.

For my own case, I've reframed my own life as a renegade in a society that has, itself, gone entirely rogue. We are the punk in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in. This is your YAF coming of age story where the ministries try to mold you into a solder or laborer for some billionaire's vanity project, to be used and discarded like a disposable part. Find a way to escape and run!

Or if you're my age, find the places where Big Brother is blind to your thoughts and actions, and subvert the system from within.

When McConnell blocked the confirmation of Garland to SCOTUS, he also blocked over a hundred federal bench appointments, so many, that the Federalist Society was struggling to find enough to fill the seats, so yes they were scraping the dregs at the bottom of the conservative barrel. So in only follows that a lot of conservative appointments were given a position above their level of competence.

Curiously, in movements like the white Christian nationalist movement that had been commandeering the GOP since the 1970s (which is not to say they were much better before that), the shift from principle to personal loyalty results in brain drain, since competent officers with dissenting opinions are swapped out for incompetent ideologists. The German Reich also had to deal with this kind of problem.

Party like it's 1789?

My comment? Huh. I can still see it (which contrasts to previous times I've gotten controversial on Lemmy). I wonder if Lemmy has shadow-banning capabilities.

This is curiously noteworthy in The Federalist Papers. Hamilton puts a lot of faith in the human conscience all the while pointing out that if men were angels we would need no government noting that we do need checks and balances.

The Electoral College is a dead giveaway that they didn't trust the public to self-govern, and hence there needed to be back doors where gentlemen (men of means) could override the system should someone like Jimmy Carter get elected.

Hire a third party to do your tune-ups, specificly one that is jailbreak and hack friendly.

I'd hoped that BMW (and the rest of the automotive industry) would have learned from the subscription heated seats debacle.

Oh well, no Beemers for me.

The reason to have courts at all is to have an alternative to violence to resolve conflicts of interest.

This is why black market negotiations are done featuring a lot of well-armed guys.

This is also why the public needs to be able to trust the courts are impartial.

This is why even the appearance of misconduct cannot be tolerated.

So at the time your goons kill their goons to resolve the dispute, kill the corrupt judge as well, because its his fault you had to resort to violence in the first place.

When the labels held an oligopoly on access to the public, it was absolutely coercive when the choice was between having your work published while you got screwed vs. never being known ever.

This is one of the reasons the labels were so resistant to music on the internet in the first place (which Thomas Dolby and David Bowie were experimenting with in the early 1990s and why they hired US ICE to raid the Dotcom estate in New Zealand because it wasn't just about MegaUpload being used for piracy sometimes. (PS: That fight is still going on, twelve years later.)

I'm not mad, but disappointed. Remember how history is all about the proletariat being a sucker for the bourgoisie. We were promised heaven in the afterlife for the whole middle ages.

In the new world an honest day's work for an honest day's pay was the American dream.

Then the California gold rush promised us we could get rich quick with luck and pluck.

By the great depression (about a century ago) what we noticed was this is how the industrialists like it and they resented FDR's New Deal. (A lot of us were thinking that whatever Lenin was doing in USSR was better than the cardboard + paint can shelters we were living in and eating flour paste.) It was a stopgap to let capitalism have another chance. One it didn't deserve.

So when they'd see our homeless crisis and fast food swamps, they'd nod, knowingly. We should have socialized then.

The GOP thought it had the upper hand when it pushed Reagan in and started killing unions and rolling back regulations. Reagan won with a landslide due to the Moral Majority, hopped up on anti-abortion rhetoric. It taught campaign managers the public could be manipulated.

Then George W. Bush took the White House with a procedural couo d'etat. Then Trump showed us the only way the GOP can win is by shennanigans.

It's harder for the masses to organize. But there are more of us than them by orders of magnitude. When we see the police killing the public, more people move from bystander to sympathist, from sympathist to activist. From activist to rebel.

This isn't our first rodeo. And our ancestors would recognize the same dirty tricks used to keep them from a new revolution have gotten better. But then insurgency tricks are better as well.

Harris is at that precipice moment when she has to get more radical than FDR to hold society together. Because we know Trump and company are the baddies. We know we can justly resort to violence against a Trump administration because they've already declared the public illegal.