Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it’s really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can’t even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they’re literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
It’s worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
At least WeChat is firmly under the state’s thumb. It’s basically a public service at this point. They should just nationalize it.
It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.
I don’t get this sentiment. If anything happens to WhatsApp, they’ll just switch to another IM. WhatsApp wasn’t the first to come along, and won’t be the last. How exactly does Meta have them by the balls?
In some of those countries, it’s not really a choice. Like, WhatsApp is the only way of contacting a company’s customer care (via chat bots that run on it), colleges and universities may have study groups on it and teachers may hand out notes etc in those groups, also apparently it’s also the only way to contact even some government agencies.
it’s a shame.
I know, I’m from those countries. Like I said, we used other IM apps before WhatsApp came along, and if something changes we can use a new app. WhatsApp currently leads the market due to the network effect, but it doesn’t have us ‘by the balls’.
(Though the most likely successor would be WeChat, which is arguably much much worse in many ways)
Do you require WhatsApp to contact certain government agencies? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to customer support? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to lecture note? No? Then you’re not from one of those countries.
Yes, yes and yes. Yes I’m from one of those countries
Which means you can’t really switch to other apps then, which means Meta has you by the balls.
I suppose that depends on your definition of by the balls. Like I said, it’s not difficult for everybody to switch if they piss everyone off. On average people here have 2-3 IMs installed.
So many people use it, that the barrier to change to another application is high. They would need to fuck up on very large scale.
Yes, they currently have the market share, and network effect keeps them there. Nevertheless, my point was it’s not a monopoly, so how does Meta have everybody 'by the balls"?
I remember listening to a podcast that talked of how in the Philippines (I think it was), Facebook is the internet, because Meta/FB effectively subsidised the carriers into allowing FB access to not use up any data allowance. As a result, if all you do is go on FB, you don’t pay a penny. If WhatsApp is included in this, then yeah, you’re locked in with no real alternative.
Oh right. Not quite nowadays, they get subsidised from multiple companies, including Google (YouTube) and such. I hate to say this, but WeChat would probably be happy to jump in and grab some market share if Meta does something egregiously dumb
Talk to some older folks about what it was like when there was only one phone company and the alternative was snail mail.
I was there. It was fine. You didn’t need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn’t have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren’t expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don’t really get a choice in the matter.
Whatsapp is just a text service that gained popularity because it bypassed expensive text messaging rates, and it’s superior to SMS in most ways anyways. If meta starts charging people will go somewhere else. It’s odd to hear this take that people are somehow dependant on it. It’s more replaceable than a pair of shoes.
That may be the case where you and I live perhaps, but these countries that I speak of, have an entire ecosystem built around WhatsApp. Many companies there no longer provide a customer support number that you can call for instance, they expect you to interact with a bot run on WhatsApp, which can further lead to chatting with an actual agent speaking to them, but that’s all done via WhatsApp. Also many teachers in schools and universities share lecture notes and study material via WhatsApp groups. Doctors and medical labs may share electronic copies of your reports via it. Some restaurants accept reservation requests solely via WhatsApp. It can even handle payments now, and besides using it as a means to send money to someone, some companies have even built entire e-commerce platforms around it, using interactive bots and the payment features. So for you and I, WhatsApp may be just another messaging service, but in these countries WhatsApp is quickly turning into an “everything” platform, and it’s not trivial for someone to just replace it, unless they want to go live in a cave and cut themselves off from modern society.
Wow, that’s news to me. I didn’t realize it had gone so far in some places.
Wait, WhatsApp has payments too? I haven’t used WhatsApp in years, so I wasn’t aware they are basically becoming WeChat…
This is an issue with the bourgeois character of American society and government. Monopolies are not a problem if workers control them.
And if they’re managed well on top of being worker controlled, but that’s usually been a mixed bag historically
There are plenty of free and open source messaging alternatives, they just don’t have the branding money to make sure a user base appears. To some degree the people using the apps are choosing the proprietary option.
We collectively need to be doing more to support and promote free open source software to avoid this issue. Secure peer to peer communication protocols should be more more ubiquitous than even http.
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How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don’t have me go through a service to figure it out
Likewise, the IRS already knows everything about me. If I qualify for, say, food stamps, just have the IRS send me the food stamps. Don’t make me jump through hoops when I’m already destitute, come on.
This would make tens of thousands of jobs redundant and make many social programs much more efficient.
And save trillions of dollars, especially if we extended this to Medicare for all
But using resources efficiently isn’t the goal, suffering is!
If Democrats actually wanted to win every election from now until forever, this would do it for them. Imagine worrying how you’re going to feed your kids and then the mail arrives “BTW you’ve qualified for food stamps for the last 18 months, here they are”
But they won’t
Materially improving people’s lives is authoritarianism sweaty it needs to be balanced against legalizing violence against marginalized people
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Tipping.
I feel like that’s a hard one. Whenever I argue against tipping with coworkers (we don’t work in the service industry) they will mention how they are all for it and mention how during peak times they made double their usual amount. I feel like it’s really been drilled in that it’s good for the workers
Absolutely, those who get high tips stay in the industry. Those who get low tips are fired. Places don’t keep those who aren’t tipped well because it means they have to pay more out of the budget. If you aren’t getting high tips you are seen as lazy or not doing enough as a waiter. In reality tipping has more to do with who you get as customers (and what they find attractive) than quality of service. https://scroll.in/article/860274/does-tipping-really-ensure-better-service-probably-not
Just another way to divide. Typically FOH staff get all or most of the share, while cooks get screwed, in my experience.
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Tips = To Insure Prompt Service It’s a slavery term
In Norway, restaurants started to implement applications or websites to order at the restaurant. Scan a QR code or download an app (yuck) to order the food and preemptively pay for it. While that might be fine, I find it really strange when I’m asked about tipping when I place my order. I have literally not seen a waiter, I have just sat down and looked through a website, and now I’m asked if I want to tip? Why? What for?
Luckily, 0% tip is very common in all services in Norway, so it’s not considered rude to refrain from tipping.
Cars. Fuck cars.
So tired of being here in the states where people think you need a car, like it’s required to live. It’s only needed because we allow our infrastructure to be so lacking that we depend on cars. There are places both built up and as rural as the states where they don’t need cars, where driving for 3 hours for a road trip is considered ludicrous.
I use a car about 4 times a month. On those 4 occasions I need that car. When buying my house I considered some extra criteria like proximity to a bus stop, train station and a good cycleable connection to daily goods stores. Even 10 years ago that caused my house being 15 to 30% more expensive as houses in different areas.
I am lucky to be able to afford such a thing but now I don’t own a car for about 4 years and the cost of owning and maintaining a car seems to be far more expensive than the extra I had to invest in my house. Cars have become a lot more expensive while inflation made it easier to do the downpayments on my house.
Yup in the same boat, and I’m baffled that you get a downvote for this very mild opinion lol, shows the weird car focused culture we have, that someone telling us how they like living without a car is worth downvoting.
I choose my home on walkability and ease of access. I’m “lucky” that in the states I have a coffee shop and a few restaurants that I can walk to, and a bus stop a block away. We aren’t at the “No cars” yet unfortunately, I’m in Seattle and while it’s easy to go a lot of places without a car, unfortunately the surrounding area is very car centric. But, we are moving towards being a one car household
It’s not even a mild opinion, it’s a reality that more and more of my friends are living in. I’m in my mid 40’s so it’s not that it has anything to do with strong opinions, it just makes sense. 9 years ago we bought an electrified cargo bike. That was the first step in realizing we don’t really need a car. I just added it all up and it made sense.
Well good luck making them change that In the meantime, I’m using my car so it doesn’t take 2 hours to walk to the grocery store and only bring back what I can carry.
No one is saying you can’t if you don’t have access, we’re saying it’s ridiculous that we don’t have actual decent transit infrastructure. You should use your car if it’s the only option, but it’s ridiculous that it is the only option.
If you think about it, they’re absurd. To go buy some groceries, someone has to use enough power to move a ton of metal, plastic and rubber around.
People don’t notice the absurdity because gas is so incredibly cheap, but gas is only so incredibly cheap because we’re not paying for the long-term consequences of burning it, only the short-term costs of getting it out of the ground and refining it.
If anybody has trouble seeing the absurdity of cars in cities, imagine a hockey game, except each player has a Zamboni instead of skates.
Work to live.
For me it’s that for a culture that fetishizes “freedom” we sure are fucking willing to accept a reality where we have to give it up for most of our waking life just to be able to live and provide for our families. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
How is that an absurdity? Humans have needed to work ever since we evolved from other species.
Yeah, it would be more correct to say “work for others to live” is absurd.
People always had to do some work to survive, but in a world were all the land is owned, if you are one of the majority which is born landless you generaly can’t work for yourself (even to open your own business you need starting money) just enough to live by with (say, build your own house and do subsistence farming), so unless mommy and daddy have lots of dosh you’re going to have to work for others within the constraints of the existing system (or become a criminal, in which case the system will punish you) and unlike when just working to provide to yourself, working in this system means competing with everybody else - and were, again, how much support mommy and daddy can give you makes a massive difference - to such a level that you have to run just to stand still.
Compared to plain old subsistence farming the whole way work is done in the current system is absurd, mainly because it has to produce way more than what is actually needed to provide for all, since a tiny slice of the population are massive money hoarders leeching out of the rest so tons of extra wealth has to be created just for them.
Whatever the optimal system is for “the greatest good for the greatest number” (which would be more than just everybody doing subsistence farming), mathematically it’s clear it can’t be one were some people have control over billions of times more resources than others.
Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just “capitalism” or its consequences.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t think about the root causes of these problems. So there’s a lot of focus on the symptoms without thinking about the underlying dynamics of capitalism that cause these issues.
Trump
He’s a heckin’ cheeto!
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”
Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
I’m paying some guy’s mortgage but he gets to keep the house at the end.
Someone paying $800 a month for their rent is gonna have paid $470,400 by the time they retire. That’s like two fucking mortgages for the “service” of not being homeless.
It’s just restructured feudalism at this point. We’ve abstracted away the direct relationship between landlord and serf, but over half our labor is still going to some third party doing none of the work.
If you like your feudal lord, you can keep them!
If you don’t like your feudal lord, you also keep them!
The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most successful proletarian revolution resulting in almost perfect redistribution of land.
Fun fact, the benefits persist to this day. Nearly 90% of people in China own their home http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-05/15/content_15295765.htm
Feudal serfs got way more vacation days than us
Those were not vacation days, just days where they could till their own fields instead of their lord’s. For most people life then was full of backbreaking labour, illiteracy, disease and the constant looming threat of starvation. There is no need to romanticise feudalism.
I’m actually seriously considering selling and going back to renting to get my flexibility back. I really despise being tied down to physical location, and the constant threat of having to move for a different job makes it even worse.
Probably won’t sell in the current market, but when it makes a bit more sense.
People who worry about “flexibility” are aliens to me
How are you in a material spot to just bounce around because you want to?
This person admitted they won’t actually carry through with it, they just want to sound like a wealthy person.
They clearly are wealthy enough that their brain is half rotted, causing them to say things like “I’ve seen many people living in poverty because they refuse to move”
Absurd
Moving across state lines is simple. Just reserve a U-haul box truck and off you go!
Literally, when I told them they were detached from reality they responded “what? No I’m not, it’s not expensive I just rent a truck and move!”
I got a new job after the pandemic and got 3k in relocation compensation, and that didn’t even cover the most bare bones of a move.
I like the flexibility too, I just wish I could have it without giving some leech half my paycheck.
It’s not that I necessarily want to. Jobs just usually end one way or the other after a while. In my experience, renting really opens up the job market. Move wherever the new job is. That’s a lot harder when you own.
I just can’t imagine leaving my community so easily for a job I guess, but I imagine plenty of folks must do it all the time.
congrats on having a community.
i hate it here get me out
Find a big queer city >:) even if you aren’t queer there’ll be plenty of fine folks and communists abound
Yeah, I guess everyone has different priorities. I just refuse to let myself or my family live in a crappy situation because I want to stay in a specific location. I often see people living in poverty because they refuse to leave a place to take a job elsewhere. Doesn’t make sense to me, but everyone has their own life.
People don’t live in poverty “because they refuse to move”
They live in poverty because they are stuck there, and moving to somewhere else is incredibly expensive and difficult
Your worldview is utterly detached from the reality of the common person
Not sure how that’s “detached from reality.”
I’ve moved a ton. It has never cost me anything other than the cost of renting a moving truck and sore legs for a few days. Certainly beats living in a place with no job or some random low-paying job.
Yeah I mean, I came from a very poor region and it was hard to move for me, but it was made easier because my family was beginning to cut me off for being queer anyway and I had the privilege of WFH too. I know lots of people who’d move out of their region if not for their family supporting them in some way they can’t get elsewhere (or they don’t think so, atleast).
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What would you do if you lost your job and couldn’t find anything in your current location?
In the current high-interest market I’d probably rent out the property and rent something else wherever the job is located. But then you have to be willing to be a landlord. Some people aren’t.
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Got it. That’s just not the situation of most people. They have to move for a job or live in a terrible situation. I’d move in an instant rather than live in crap.
Destroying our only habitable planet.
I feel like this should have way more upvotes.
Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.
our strange treatment of animals
we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who’ve had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.
[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]
lack of body autonomy
hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:
your body, your choice.
it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the one right effecting all these issues. newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain’t worth the air its vibrating through.
slippery slope gatekeeping laws
making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y. if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.
“Your body, your choice” has a limit once a super dangerous pathogen shows up and people start refusing the best tool we have to stop it for increasingly batshit reasons.
If you choose not to vaccinate, you’re directly putting everyone else you interact with at risk. So there’s a limit
Eh, “your body, your choice” still holds. The rest of us just also get to use our bodily autonomy to say “fine, but stay away from society”. Go live in the wilderness and avoid the 5Gs or whatever as you die of a stubbed toe because of your choices.
when anything is that important, the medicine must be opensourced 1.
if so, and it’s handled correctly, you can still have body autonomy in those situations due to the resulting freedoms - much akin in nature to the software foss freedoms we all cherish. and in that sense, would not be a limit of “Your body, your choice". while still maintaining, if not increasing, the public protection to such threats.
it was really refreshing to see some discussion in public health policy from some very smart and relevant people for opensourcing those medications. unsurprisingly it was swiftly shot down, but it was nice to at least see it taking place - which is a small positive change.
1 naturally we decouple authentication and traceability from commercial interests. and ofc it does not mean noone gets paid
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There is no limit. Even in those cases they could be treated without vaccination. And the unvaccinated could be banned from spaces where they would be a danger. I mean come on, you’re not even liberal? This is a super basic liberal principle baked into our society snd you just… disagree with it.
Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.
Religion is a collective delusion and college graduation shocks me by how ritualistic it still is
To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.
My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.
