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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • I saw someone drown in a pool when I was 11. I noticed there was someone sitting at the bottom of the deep end, told the lifeguard who hadn’t yet noticed, but it was just barely too late. Later learned they had experienced a seizure and sank.

    I mostly just remember how pale they were, and being annoyed that pool time got axed for the remainder of summer camp. I never felt much about it. Shit happens, people die, just the way it goes.


  • I’m talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won’t even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you’ve been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn’t get in school.

    Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you’ll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.



  • I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.

    Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.

    If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.




  • I can understand that. I think we should try to work toward a more democratic workplace, although I don’t think any existing solution is something we can just apply in the USA. A good stepping stone would be to incentivize different ownership structures and improve the bureaucratic mechanisms for handling them. There’s a couple worker owned grocery chains in my city that are a great asset to the community (and have the best beer selection) and I’d love to see more support for people who want to make companies like that.


  • Obviously one would choose democratically elected politicians over unaccountable dictators and autocrats. What’s the saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” or something along those lines.

    Regarding workplace democracy, the idealized form of this in a capitalist framework would be having lots of competitive companies in every field. You would then be able to “vote” by taking your labor elsewhere if you don’t like what your employer is doing. Now, I of course understand that we don’t live in fantasyland, and for many sectors, that might not be possible. Many sectors have unique challenges that would need to be addressed with tailored legislation, but that’s beyond the scope of an internet comment.

    For land, easy, land value tax. It effectively is an implementation of leasing land from the government and solves a lot of housing issues by encouraging development of high value parcels so you don’t end up with dozens of parking lots taking up 50% of your urban centers, and doesn’t regressively place burdens on the poor.

    If we manage to get to a post scarcity society where we have a lot more people than labor to get done, then I would put my bet on UBI or negative tax rates being an effective way forward.


  • Democratically elected/accountable doesn’t necessarily beget quality. See: politicians.

    Point is, people act like moving away from capitalism would suddenly fix all life’s ails. Sure, it would probably fix some stuff, it would probably cause some problems capitalism doesn’t too. It’s much more effective to focus on tackling specifically scoped issues rather than whinging about capitalism and proposing no solutions other than tearing down the entire system and hoping whatever rises from the ashes is better.

    To make some very specific points, I believe that if we simply fixed outrageous housing and healthcare costs, the overwhelming majority of domestic complaints about the USA would be solved. No need to ditch capitalism to fix those problems.


  • I always find it funny when people use the phrase slippery slope, not realizing that it is literally a logical fallacy.

    The far right can get bent for what it’s worth, but most of the issues people attribute to capitalism are very far from exclusive to capitalism. No matter what socioeconomic framework you go with, you’re probably still going to need to go to work, deal with shitty bosses, insane bureaucracies, mid life crises, not having the motivation to read that book you bought 3 years ago, your furnace dying in the middle of winter, etc.