Right.

Honestly for as much “woe is me” that they crammed into this piece, my takeaway was mostly just, “Hmmm…good.”

Like…I love rural PA, I’m just not wild about a lot of the people who live there. They vote against my own interests (and theirs), disproportionately influence state government, and welcome corporations that proudly destroy the environment while taking a hostile stance toward anyone not like them.

This isn’t down to every last person, of course, but broadly speaking, the ones who aren’t fitting that template are also not the ones doing most of the dying.

So the piece is reading, to me, more as, “the people most responsible for keeping the shitty aspects of Pennsylvania shitty are dying faster than they’re breeding”…which is good news for the more reasonable residents of the state.

Are you from rural PA?

So you just don’t work at all?

Knocked it out of the park with this comment.

Sincerely,

Someone originally from the same town as you, basically.

Sitting here at 5 months out from election day…when will we finally get some good quality pandering?

It’s not like he’s got credibility consequences for lack of follow through at this point.

Implying there was ever a point where this wasn’t true.

But you’re working in that scenario because you’re being paid.

If you had that job where your employer only had a say in what you deliver (ignoring the obvious pitfalls of that arrangement), and they suddenly stopped paying you, or started only paying you half…would you still be okay with it?

If not, then you’re working because you like being paid, not because you want to work.

On the flip side: if you had some sort of situation where you got paid a comfortable living that allowed you to cover all your expenses, indulge some luxury, and save…and you got this money no matter what, just for waking up…would you still work every day? Or work until your employer was satisfied with your output each day/week/pay period?

Some might…most specifically (I would think) people whose jobs provide some sort of personal fulfillment like teachers, caregivers, etc. but I think the vast majority of people would take the money and live lives that offered personal enjoyment and fulfillment, doing what they wanted to do, not what an employer (who at that point isn’t their source of pay) would like them to do.

But let’s say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day’s worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park…would you still choose to work every day?

Right?

“Nobody wants to work anymore!”

Like no shit man.

News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it’s because you either aren’t willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it’s not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.

Or both. In lots of cases it’s both.

The more the old lies are proven as lies, the closer we get to the truth:

Just as important as “getting the job done” is the notion among many employers that they truly believe that with their payroll they are buying human lives and happiness. That if they are paying a worker for their time and labor that they are entitled to also dictate how that person feels about it…and if that worker is not sufficiently miserable, then they can be squeezed further.

I used to think that it was purely about money…that the idea was that if a worker ever got “all caught up” and had free time, then they should be generating more wealth for their employer in some other way…but then we had the pandemic.

The pandemic where lots and lots of workers had to suddenly do the whole work from home thing. And in that time, these employers were thrilled to go along with it, since it meant continuing to make money. And in that time, most office workers eventually turned out to be happier and even more productive.

…yet in the wake of the pandemic, many of these employers have chosen less productivity in exchange for bringing their employees back to offices. The only explanation for bringing employees back in who were happier and more productive from home is that these employers value the image of control and the ability to make their workers unhappy more than they value productivity and money.

Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…

…in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.

At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.

Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.

Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.

Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.

Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.

And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.

I went from IE to Firefox back in that same timeframe, then by the time Chrome came out, my Firefox just had too much clutter and Chrome was way faster.

Within the past year, Chrome managed to enshittify itself enough that I’ve gone back to Firefox on PC (still using chrome on mobile) and it’s the same sort of “lighter, faster” feel that I got years ago when I left it for Chrome.

There’s also the whole ad blocker bullshit too, of course. YouTube ads were the last straw for me.

Oh yeah that’s a good one too.

The old “you embarrassed the company, report to the principal’s office”.

I’m only drafting for career not hobby at this point, so it’s all industry standard software.

One of these days, when I have a house, I might get into 3D printing, but not for the foreseeable future.

For 3D stuff, I’m good with Inventor, but it certainly has it’s quirks.

The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% “just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with”, 20% “you are wrong for wanting that in the first place” or “you are wrong for having this issue”, 15% “this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching”, 4% “OMG yes I have this issue too!”…

…and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it’s a known issue.

This

And when I run into issues, I would rather be using the OS that is the most common so that I have more options to get good info for a fix. I don’t want problems that nobody’s ever encountered, or for which the fix is beyond my limited technical ability.

It’s somewhat amusing when I see people on Lemmy proselytizing for Linux and literally while laying out their points to convince someone how easy it is, they’ll talk about doing shit that is already beyond my ability. And I’m not some 90 year old who struggles to turn it on. I’m just a user that doesn’t care to use any OS that I’ll need to take time to learn to figure out how to use it.

When I start a Windows machine I just do what I need to do.

When even a Linux cheerleader is trying to convince someone how easy it is, they’re already indicating more effort than I want to put into it.

“Intuitive” is basically telling you what you want and being right about it.

The opposite of telling you what you want isn’t being intuitive, it’s being flexible and customizable.

He’s nasty!

The only cure for “unable to eat diarrhea” is to put the patient into an induced comma.

Explains the irritability.