The later you start learning a language, the harder it is. High school is so late it’s sad.

There’s a few strands of toxic monogamy that are pretty common. Really jealous, controlling, and with poor emotional regulation.

I’m lucky my current partner is very chill about these things. I’m still good friends with two previous partners and it’s never been an issue. We’ve all hung out together.

It’s a shame there isn’t more language education in the US. We had one class on a foreign language starting in sixth grade, which is pretty late.

Most things here are mono lingual. I visited Montreal and I feel like if I was there for a few months, my rudimentary French would really develop. Unfortunately, the one time I tried to speak to someone there who didn’t speak English, it didn’t go super well. She was patient, but we weren’t really understanding each other. All my French is reading and writing, so I have an incredibly bad accent.

I was looking at the costs of raising a child the other day and I don’t know how anyone does it. My job pays garbage with trash health insurance.

I’m just so mad at the management class with their high pay and not doing any actual work. My boss seems fine - I think he knows this is bullshit and goes a little out of his way to make it easier for me. But everyone above him? If I saw them drowning I’d have to think a long time before throwing a life vest.

For any question about “why is this extra bad in the United States?”, racism is probably a big factor. There’s a book “Dying of Whiteness” that’s pretty horrifying. Some people would literally rather suffer and die personally than let black people have nice things.

It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big one.

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.

That can be scaled horizontally and is just a matter of building more data centers.

At one of my old jobs “just” was considered a bad word

I often have to toggle airplane mode when I take the subway. After it loses signal, it won’t reconnect until I do. Older android phone.

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 can’t tell if people who do that kind of thing are lazy and malicious, actually stupid, or stressed beyond their capacity to be decent.

I do think a lot of people are actually only semi literate, and asking them to write is legitimately difficult and embarrassing for them.

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.

I kind of intensely dislike that whole… natural language wrapper thing. It adds at least one whole extra layer to maintain for no real benefit. No one non technical is going to read it. If they were some magic competent person, they could just read regular doc strings.

VC funding.

Also why are you so invested in defending capitalists?

The owner also gets a wage and benefits while the process is running.

And much of the time, they’re spending VC money. Minimal personal risk.

And even so, that doesn’t justify the owner keeping almost all of the proceeds. I don’t care if they put their life savings into it. Labor built it.

But on the flipside, it’s hard for me to stay concentrated while at home.

While I believe that is true for you, I don’t believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.

The office is super distracting for many people.

The laid off workers also suffer the loss, typically.

Furthermore, I don’t think “he gambled” compellingly makes this system fair or good.

Oh, I read your thing backwards then.

I can’t imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).

Can’t relate to it. And I’m a very social person that likes interacting with people.

Every day I’m a little surprised there’s no news story of some workers beating their “no, you have to come into the office” manager to death. They’ve got means, motive, and opportunity, and it’s extra funny because if they’d been allowed to work at home they wouldn’t have at least two of those.

But really we’re ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.

Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming “you made this possible” until they can’t even cry anymore.