Ah, thankyou for bearing with me, I see what you mean.

I just assumed there must be a large military office nearby and they were targeting the procurement personnel who do the actual contract and tender work, plus maybe the manufacturer headquarters is nearby and this is part of one of the more revolting symptoms of a highly militarized capitalist culture. I didn’t get quite as far as drawing the connection to targeting politicians and staffers who likely can’t put a meeting with missile sales reps on their publicly documented calendars, but that makes a lot of sense.

Help me out, the coffee isn’t working today and I still don’t get it. How does bribery fit in?

And sadder still, no friend or family can feed and house me. Economic coercion is very effective.

Even worse, this is still better treatment than when I worked state sector.

Imagine if you had to abandon your social life some years ago for the job and the only people you talk to on a daily basis are your coworkers on Slack.

Thanks for the reminder that my life is garbage, I guess. Unless you count the pleasantries I exchange with the person who makes my coffee in the morning?

I’m not employed by automattic, but this thread still cut deep with similar work culture.

For anyone else also interested, I went and had a look at the links Dessalines kindly provided.

The source on the graphs says “Sources: Daniel Cox, Survey Center on American Life; Gallup Poll Social Series; FT analysis of General Social Surveys of Korea, Germany & US and the British Election Study. US data is respondent’s stated ideology. Other countries show support for liberal and conservative parties All figures are adjusted for time trend in the overall population.” Where FT is financial times.

It’s not clear how the words “liberal” and “conservative” were chosen, whether they’re intended to mean “socially progressive” and “socially traditional” or have other connotations bound with the political parties too, and whether the original data chose those descriptions or if they’re FT’s inference as being “close enough” for an American audience.

Unfortunately the FT data site is refusing to let me look at them without “legitimate interest” advertising cookies so I can’t tell you much more or if there’s any detail on methodology.

That has also always been my gut feel about Carmack, but it still sucks to see the evidence. I wish that gut feeling would stop being so dammed accurate, but it gets a lot of practise.

Doom was definitely christofascist fantasy porn. At least Quake you were defending invasion from the most literal manifestation of eugenicist Space-Nazis possible. Yes I am choosing to disregard the inherent US military fetishism because I don’t want to ruin my formative media which I deep down always knew was problematic.

sigh

Can I at least keep the soundtracks as pleasant and untarnished memories?

Ugh. Thanks, yeah that’s good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for “Tim Sweeney conservative” only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the “stop being so divisive” / “no politics in art” dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn’t think to include Musk after skimming today’s shitty Google “search” results.

Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.

Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.

owned by a right-wing asshole

Wait, what? Can I get some info or even just the right search terms to force Google to give me useful info? I know he’s done the eye-roll-worthy “no politics in my artform” bullshit but if there’s more I’ve missed, I’m keen to know.

Yeah, that works for me. I’ll check out some more of them. Thanks!

Borked link. Possibly unthrottled invidious version

I prefer less pop and bop in my industrial, but I am glad to see anybody else still enjoying this with the word industrial in it.

I don’t toil in the mines of the big FAANG, but this tracks with what I’ve been seeing in my mine. I also predict it will end with lay-offs and companies collapsing.

Zitron thinks a lot about the biggest companies and how it will ultimately hurt them, which is reasonable. But, I think it ironically downplays the scale of the bubble, and in turn, the impacts of it bursting.

The expeditions into OpenAI’s financials have been very educational. If I were an investigative reporter, my next move would be to look at the networks created by venture capitalists and what is happening inside the companies who share the same patrons as Open AI. I don’t say that as someone who interacts with finances, just as someone who carefully watches organizational politics.

How convenient that a counterexample can’t be named

I feel like Luthor was a better counterexample for this before the model for his billionaire redesign was elected President of the USA.

Even so, Luthor hasn’t had quite the same volume of appearances as Iron Man, Batman, Captain America and the other rich superhero tropes.

People have grown up reading comic books and watching movies about generous billionaire superhero saviors. They want to believe that exists because it’s what they’ve been taught justice looks like.

If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.

He’s still a party member, it’s listed in his candidate information sheet. Badly Scanned PDF

So long as you don’t care about whether they’re the right or relevant answers, you do you, I guess. Did you use AI to read the linked post too?

Some provide screen-reader instructions, but most places barely remember blind people exist. It’s another example of people with disabilities being ignored and marginalised.

And then even if they do remember blind people exist, they probably forget there are people who aren’t blind who can’t do their tests for other reasons, like dyslexia or dexterity impairments.

And then you have hCaptcha who makes disabled people to sign up to their database to use their cookie.