They're running employee testimonial ads about how great it is to work at their warehouses on national broadcasts pretty regularly now. That's all I needed to know that it's going downhill faster rather than slower.
That just means that they have a PR problem. It doesn't necessarily indicate a problem with their actual warehouse conditions, though there may be one; it's enough that people believe there's a problem.
But these adverts raise even more suspicion. I had a very awkward feeling when I saw them the first time in the German TV. Everybody knows that adverts are the poster-child of lying. Why should this be different? And if those are real workers being interviewed (I doubt that) who in his right would voluntarily step in front of a camera and say "this is a great and safe place to work". If they are for real, I'd think they are coerced. If they are not for real, what's the point?
This isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete something within it's estimate.
A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important than actually being productive.
I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug.
So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this point.
> It really feels like democracy is slowly dying all over the world.
If it seems that way, it's because we've stopped fighting for it. Any regime without some basic level of true democratic representation and civil liberties should be the subject of official embargoes and individual boycotts. Unfortunately, many have sold out democracy to please the all-important shareholders or just to take advantage of cheap stuff.
The supremely naive "end of history"-era thinking has a lot of inertia. Now it's unclear who's left to fight for Democracy as the old champions are all dead and current generations have no concept of what that would even mean since they've just been reaping the rewards their whole lives.
Ah yes, all us youngings reaping the rewards of those that have come before us. Insane housing and real estate prices that few can afford, insane university tuition that few can afford, the pharmaceutical industry pushing dangerous drugs with impunity, the war on drugs costing trillions of dollars and leading to the militarization of police and a massive amount of incarcerated non-violent offenders, the destruction of the environment being covered up and lobbied for by massive oil and gas corporations, social security being depleted before I'll ever get to utilize it, huge downturns in the economy caused by irresponsible spending and lending, and countless other "rewards" from the older generations that we now have to fix while simultaneously getting whined at about how we're all lazy slackers that are really causing the downfall of society. I don't buy into the "end of history" thinking, but it is incredible how many people take no responsibility for things that happened during their life time and completely ignore all of the extreme negative impacts those had on younger generations and society as a whole
And what have we done about that? I'm technically Gen Y, and I'll be the first to admit that with regards to protesting my generation seems:
- Uninformed
- Undisciplined
- Lazy
- Uncoordinated
People were self-organizing large civil society organizations and marching through clouds of tear gas and worse in the 1960-90s... and yet this current generation seems to think that posting a rant on Facebook is valuable?
Most of us just don't think we CAN do anything. It seems the world is run by the rich for the rich. We vote but we don't feel that anything we can do actually will effect any change.
One could make the argument that wealth inequality is higher than it was in previous eras.
But there's always been a major disparity between capital owners and everyone else. Even in the 60s. And certainly at the turn of the century (1850-1920), when US antitrust law was actually first created.
So maybe media centralization? But the 1960s featured a limited number of media channels controlled by a few owners (albeit with some paragons of objective, journalistic integrity). And the turn of the century was the heyday of centralized newspaper control.
I'm honestly casting about for an external why and am hard-pressed to enunciate a coherent narrative.
And in lieu of one, the only thing that's left are that people simply aren't actively protesting.
Whether they're making that choice because of hopelessness or laziness, I don't really care. Because ultimately, it's a choice.
Make the other one.
(And it seems we might finally be, with regards to climate)
The end of history claimed that basically all countries will turn to liberal democracy once they see how awesome it is. You can look at China to see how well that worked out. It doesn't really have much to do with US internal policies.
The system is just being pushed to its limits. There is no perfect political system, and given enough time a political system will be gamed somehow. Simply, the means of gaming this particular system are even easier now.
This is how processes naturally strengthen themselves. A system (democracy) becomes unstable, sick, dis-eased - which highlights the gaps and weaknesses, which is in part is a lack of attention - lack of individual health, strength, leading to lacking community. Trump for example was a wakeup call for the potential energy that has been building. Hong Kong is now a wakeup call for us - and we globally need to take an economic stand against the tyrants in China's leadership as an act to punish bad behaviour + as an act to strengthen ourselves with the stresses it can put on us.
Edit: Especially curious if downvotes in heavily political, democracy vs. tyrant topics are legitimate or suppression; another reason downvote mechanism is terrible: if you have something legitimate to counter, then spend any effort writing something qualitative.
In the context of China's facial recognition capabilities, social credit score, and general ability to make people it doesn't like disappear, to me it's a lot more than just a face mask ban.
I wouldn't say that democracy is dying so much as freedom is dying. You can always vote yourself into oppression, but you can only shoot your way out (2nd amendment) if you first fail to talk (1st amendment) the masses out of voting for their own oppression.
True. But those in power can suppress voter turnout through a variety of means, whether thats spread of misinformation ("voting is [wrong day] at [wrong location]!"), literal voter suppression (intimidation tactics at places of voting, illegally collecting and destroying mail in ballots), to structural rigging, like gerrymandering.
We're definitely seeing a mixture of both. Democracy is certainly facing a lot of challenges. Many of them have been around for years, but are finally having a light cast on them... while others are newer, more nefarious.
The most potent way to suppress is to control money. Deny any unwanted opposition access to funding and suddenly they don't exist as they are unable to compete medially.
(Obviously this means that any party not pandering to rich is doomed to lose, unless there's a general uprising.)
This! I had an hour plus commute living outside of Beantown when I first got out of college. I just don't want to do that again.
Also one of my friends just bought for the first time and he indicated it's expensive as hell. As a single person I'm not sure I want to get into that type of financial commitment when I have a sneaking suspicion the economy's about to collapse.
The insurance companies are for profit corporations who pay politicians so they can keep taking your money when you're healthy and cutting you when you're not. The army is not, as far as I know, a for profit enterprise.
"Shutting down thinking." Reporting on transgressions and laws designed to hold parties accountable is designed to shut down thinking now, and how those who would be affected by it are literally trying to kill the bill is considered "shutting down thinking." This is literally what you just said.
You proved my point ironically. It is all about "punishing the bad ones for their past sins" as opposed to going forward the impact of the law - the part to actually think about. Instead straight to emotionally knee jerk driven narratives of "they are bad and must be punished" instead of what the law is actually about. See emotions come out and the thinking on the topic like "would it actually help with Cambridge Analytica 2.0" go kaput.
It is an old trick narrative for pushing terrible "tough on crime" laws for advancement. If you point out that it isn't a well thought out idea you support bad people!
I assume it looks bad if a candidate someone hires ends up being a terrible fit. This is basically how it goes everywhere else at larger companies. Visibility is more important than getting things done.
Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.
Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.
On the one hand, I believe it's definitively a good thing that these services will be allowing for creation of niche content. I have long believed that your broadcast networks / USA / TNT just straight up cannot make good content because their expectations viewers wise are so high they end up trying to please everyone and make really, really generic television.
So yeah. I like that. But what's the endgame? Is this high profile Battlestar reboot supposed to generate enough subscriptions to cover the cost or is it just getting people involved in the NBC / Peacock ecosystem? Like, this is the same company that routinely cancels (nearly) every good show on SyFy (where, you know, I would kind of expect a Battlestar reboot to actually be) because they aren't getting enough viewers.
Now that it's a streaming service and their collecting the money directly from the viewer rather than going through Comcast does it make that much of a difference?
1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important.
2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS.
3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.
Warframe is pretty guilty of the many resources trade off, and starting out the game you're basically forced to pay for more warframe slots because you don't really have good enough loot to grind the good loot that people will trade plat for. It's a strange design decision because one of the main draws is how fun/different the different frames and weapons are. I'm hopeful they will address that in the future new player experience rework because I believe they make the majority of their money from the primes and cosmetics.
They support the hell out of their game though. I just started playing again and there's so much new stuff to do.
