Is this a game to you? Do you see the dead-serious commitment on this man’s face?

Great, now I’m Team Old-Testament-God

:(

Old comment by now, but you’re a lovely engineer for that and I, for one, appreciate you lol

I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with a vendor like this, it’s awful. In my case the vendor was supposed to be a fast moving tech startup - the only thing that moved fast there was the revolving door of engineering talent coming and going.

Even worse, my boss had been convinced by their founder that he had all this pull with the company, and since the company was super cool, that made him super cool, and I dunno if you’ve ever tried to criticize something that has made a middle aged nerd feel cool for the first time in his life, but let’s just say it was not a fruitful endeavor.

The number of things I effectively fixed for them via email, the abominations I had to construct to work around the things they refused or failed to fix…bad times.

I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I’d like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.

How does a communist society as you’ve described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you’ll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?

I hope you’ll update us if you chase this down. I like 404 Media and I want to keep liking them, but only if the reporting is good. Hopefully it’s a typical tech journalism mistranslation where they use Tesseract OCR to scrape PDFs and the author just misunderstood, or something like that.

Edit: after looking, I don’t have any issues. Looks like just a raw list from whatever source, I don’t need 404 Media to try to “curate” that or remove elements that seem irrelevant, they can leave that to us.

Lol I forgot about that! Yeah fuck em both of course, but I feel like most folks would put their money on the ex-KGB agent who seized and kept control of freakin’ Russia over nepo-baby “gamer”, “engineer” Musk. What a goofy threat. And I say that as a middling gamer and engineer myself lol

That’s really impressive, I hope you realize that. A little inspirational if I’m being honest, cheesy as it may sound.

Any big surprises / snags along the joirney that you wouldn’t want others to have to learn the hard way?

Thanks very much for the well thought out (and sourced) response!

I occasionally watch videos by a YouTuber named Benn Jordan (just a coincidence with my own Lemmy username to be clear), and he gives what look like pretty damning arguments to me that the numbers Spotify is publishing are misleading and not telling the whole story, and that their treatment of artists over time is growing worse.

Here’s one of the videos I think I remember being fairly compelling - https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU?si=p5EVxsFaAU6MsQjT

I thought there was a more recent one but I’m not finding it. Anyway with that said, I’ve got no dog in this fight and I only watch some of that stuff recreationally, I lack a ton of info.

I don’t know how to codify this idea into something that isn’t already on your growing and already amazingly extensive list of succinct recommendations. You even have things I often see very neglected.

The idea I want to contribute is that the state of readiness, in many things you want to prepare for, takes time to cultivate and needs to be already in place by the time it’s use is needed. People who lack direct experience with the items on this list they want to focus on, often mistakenly think they can do the adapting and learning quickly, like a movie montage.

Identify the things that call to you on this list, and put weekly direct IRL effort toward them now, lay for yourself the work and belief in your own convictions that leaves you prepared if the worst comes, and distrust your brain’s tendency to mistake the thinking and talking about it for direct active engagement with your IRL goals.

I’ve had enough of Spotify’s anti-artist practices since being an early adopter, I pay for a premium family account and I’m ready and willing to jump to any service with a not-narrow range of music that treats artists better. I’d rather not just sail the seven seas cuz I find the management of it all annoying, but I’m real irritated with Spotify and ready to consider maybe even that if there’s just nothing else.

Is it? Speaking from experience? I’ve heard it both ways and trying to get a better idea of how it works out financially.

I really wish people would drop this idea that Trump and Musk are stupid. They say and do stupid things, and I’m not claiming they’re some god-tier intelligence playing 5D chess, but they are just so obviously not dumb, and thinking of them as dumb gives them useful cover for their malice. Trump in particular uses that cover to incredible effect.

Idk if I’m just Lemmy-ing wrong but that link doesn’t produce a comment thread for me. It’s a single comment (post?) by SLVRDRGN that doesn’t mention Tesla.

Yeah cool, thanks for your input

I think you are essentially projecting (and I hope you don’t read that as an attack, I don’t intend one). I think because it seems impossible for you yourself to ignore this stuff, you’re making incorrect assumptions about others. But maybe yours is more accurate and mine is less, I’d certainly prefer your version!

One Trump voter that I know - she’s been pretty shocked by some of the things I’ve shown her post-election - but she has also told me that she’s not watching much news or keeping up right now. And she falls into the “merely foolish” Trump voter category, not even the hateful kind. My sense is that the vast majority of important info that’s coming out, she is either tuned out from, or rationalizes as “can’t be that bad”. And I bet that is exceedingly common right now.

This is powerful stuff, I mean it put this guy in the White House twice despite the mountains of evidence of his bankrupt morals, bankrupt businesses, outright scams, and straight up felonies. If you think they can’t successfully cover for him post-election, I just fundamentally disagree. Though it’s interesting to hear even Fox has been critical, I would really love to be wrong here.

The other thing this leaves out is that the kind of personality who is drawn to Trump is very often the kind of personality that cannot handle admitting fault for any reason. So we have that lovely human tendency to try to overcome, too.

But yeah, agreed that the problems might get big enough that it becomes impossible to out-propaganda reality.

I think people are really naive about the kinds of stories and evidence Trump voters are seeing post election.

Trump voters consume media that makes him look good, that’s why they voted for him. It is impossible to make Trump look good without enormous efforts toward deception. Therefore Trump voters consume media that successfully lies to them, and in major ways.

Before the election, that media convinced those people that he isn’t an obviously amoral con man, and even more incredibly, that our country needed him to save us. That is a miracle of deception - a nat 20, a coup de grace. And what, we think that media just stops after the election? The disinformation never, ever stops. Real world consequences will reach some, but not nearly enough to counteract that.

Thank you. Stated goals and actual goals for these people are always entirely independent, if they align it’s just coincidence / convenience. People need to stop being so credible and debating this shit on its stated terms, fascists don’t debate in good faith.

That, plus it seems very likely that he and friends are just manipulating the market to trade on the predictable moves he’s causing. Ya know, the kinda stuff that earned Musk some mild hand slaps and theatrical pearl clutching (in addition to giant financial benefits) in recent years.