Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?

I don’t remember all of the differences, but I think you’re conflating copyright, patent, and trademark here. Software patents should almost not be a thing, but copyright and trademark should still exist.

I have this on my Honda Fit for fuck’s sake.

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Fuck you four eyes

If you look at what many consider to be the golden age

Emphasis mine

I didn’t even say I consider it a golden age, because I don’t.

but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age.

The gilded age was not in the 1950s. Also, gilded age doesn’t mean golden age.

I think we’ve hit the end of productive conversation between the two of us on this subject

Agreed. Maybe next time read and understand some of the responses?

I’m good, thanks.

This is the first post you haven’t been praising the 1950s as a better time for workers.

Isn’t at all, but you’re reading whatever you want into my posts. So keep on keeping on. 👍

I get that you recently read some Marx or some shit, but corporations aren’t just capitalism. They have charters. They were put into existence via law. It is possible to still be “under capitalism” and restructure the laws. Full on gay space communism isn’t required to make any progress on any issue.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to prove here to be honest. Of course there’s been shitty behavior all along. This is America. It’s a country founded by slave owners that wanted to be free. (Carlin)

My point is simple: corporations are a made-up concept and one of the main things people are supposed to get in the deal to allow them to exist in the first place is efficient allocation and utilization of human resources.

It seems to me they are admitting that they cannot do that. In which case, the deal should be renegotiated.

You’ve got rose colored glasses on.

Not really, I expect that I would’ve hated a great many things about the supposed golden age.

This was only true if you were white, male, and a white collar worker.

Of course, people didn’t have anything approaching equal rights at the time. It could be argued that they never actually would up to and including today.

It wasn’t a utopia by any stretch, but in today’s economy Intel will openly celebrate laying people off and having less employees. There has been a giant swing toward people generally thinking that “greed is good”, and an exhaultation of sociopaths.

The wealth distribution wasn’t perfect, great, utopian, or even good during the entire history of the US, but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age.

If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a “company man” was a celebrated one, and companies bragged about how they treated their employees. In that era, unlike today’s, shedding employees was not seen as an achievement but rather either a necessary evil, or a sign that the company was going down the tubes.

Over time and with complacency, we’ve ceded the territory on these things. We can say that is inevitable under capitalism that this happens if it makes you happy, but either way at one point it was a major part of the stated purpose of corporations to employ people and help them live productive lives.

Edit: I agree that what you currently have with corporations are resource devouring, profit-pursuing, psychopathic immortal monsters, but none of those things, philosophically speaking, justifies their existence as legal entities.

The platonic ideal of a corporation that owns everything, builds everything, controls everything, and employs nobody will never be fully realized, because the people it is harming will eventually rise to destroy it, or die trying.

It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.

Somewhere along the line we lost one of the basic things underpinning our current economic structure – that corporations are supposedly better at allocating, distributing, and utilizing resources than a centrally planned economy with a governmental overlord. It sure sounds to me like Intel and other companies that are handing out pink slips for every bit of thing they automate cannot find anything to do with the human resources they’ve got.

To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”. One of their primary functions is to employ people.

It shows

This reminds me of shitty FTP sites with ratios when I was on dial-up. I used to push them files full of null characters with filenames that looked like actual content. The modem would compress the upload as it transmitted it which allowed me to upload the junk files at several times the rate of a normal file.

It’s ultimately driven by the lack of constraints in their market segment. Tech companies will screw over investors as well if they can get away with it.

But I was more talking about how the founder of Duolingo professed specific, world-bettering goals when he started the company that – if held sincerely – would make him ashamed of himself because most of what the company does isn’t in the service of them.

The tech world is rife with founders that ultimately met that exact same fate.

I’ve been using the free version almost exclusively for over a decade. It continually gets shittier all of the time.

The latest thing is you can’t even practice the language to earn more hearts to continue your lesson, you have to now watch ads. I think it’s rather emblematic of their approach overall… it’s not about learning it’s about more eyeballs for ads, unless you fork over a recurring payment for increasingly mediocre lessons.

Duolingo has enshittified so much over the last few years.

Even if I had the ability to become a millionaire tech founder, I don’t think I’d want to because every “I want to make learning new languages free and easy for everyone” becomes a “I have to drive 3% more ad revenue this quarter by charting my users’ every bowel movement”.

I suspect the reality of being a rich tech bro is watching your adult self slowly consume your own childhood dreams, aspirations, and soul.

It’s basically like saying “illegal immigrants” aren’t made up for Trump. Like, obviously people coming into the country illegally exist, but the dude was just making shit up when it came to the actual numbers.

Nautilus shows me that stuff next to each other out of box on Ubuntu. It just doesn’t have drive letters.

So much for Mike Rowes dirty jobs.

(Jk, those things were always a load of shit anyway.)