For-profit prisons…

Evil

It’s such a disappointment. We try to build a system with people to entrust our well-being to and help those in need, but it always goes wrong.

From ancient times and the king’s guard, to modern cops in some town. It always becomes corrupted.

That’s how it always starts though.

People use any device or service they want. It’s a mix of crooks, tinkerers, journalists, etc.

A company or government makes some moral panic and pushes some privacy or civil rights erosion in the name of “security”. The actual security benefit may or may not exist.

Then other companies do the same to keep up.

Then there’s only a handful of companies not doing the thing, so anyone who doesn’t want their privacy or civil rights eroded uses that, including crooks.

Then politicians and the other companies point to the holdouts as “PROOF!” their changes were good, because look how many crooks use that stuff! (The number of crooks hasn’t changed, they’ve just been concentrated to a single location.) The moral panic deepens.

The non-criminal population that cares about their privacy or civil rights speak out, but get accused of secretly being criminals, or some other crap that can be used to dismiss their concerns. “If you have nothing to hide, why are you so upset?” and all that.

Now laws get passed to force all companies to do the same thing, to stop the criminals! But let’s not worry about anyone else. The tinkerers, journalists, privacy-advocates, etc. They don’t matter.

The law gets passed, and now all toasters are legally required to record your breakfast conversations, for a silly example.

Unfortunately, some areas have standardized on Tesla charging stations for all electric cars, so you’re giving him money no matter what.

Nice. What’d’ya get?

To this day, you can still find conservative media that shits on anyone with electric vehicles, for some reason.

Now Musk opened his mouth and said stupid shit, and the other side doesn’t want his cars either. All he’s got left are the people who don’t care, already bought one, or fall over themselves to kiss his feet.

Debranded? Nice. I dislike that modern cars are covered in logos and tacky chrome symbols and words. Give me a nice plain car with nothing but paint on the outside.

I did, but then the company got bought out, all the people who worked there fired, and I had to move back to a different state with family to avoid being homeless. Kill me…

I think that’s a fair point.

A lot of my favorite games are indie titles or from small dev teams.

You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…

Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.

Show off. I have 12 GB of DDR3, and a swap partition on spinning rust.

(save me)

“I’m so used to getting fucked by Chrome and Edge that I just feel like something’s missing if I don’t.”

I wish mine did that. I said one thing about Trump not having as much money as he claims, and my mom got all insulted. She said that maybe we shouldn’t talk about politics, etc, and I agreed to be nice. I don’t like to talk politics at all, even with like-minded people. But she’ll blame a company getting hacked and losing my personal info on democrats, and tell me that she can’t wait until all democrats die off.

But now she just spouts of any shit that comes to her mind without a care, while I’m keeping to our dealt and shutting up. I doubt she even remembers our promise, because the moment it wasn’t convenient for her, she dropped it.

Ah yeah, propaganda and stereotyping.

Wasn’t “woke” originally a good term until right wing screechers took it over at an insult? They do that a lot, every time some positive phrase or idea starts to gain traction. Seems intentional.

I handed in my notice a short while later and everyone was, to my surprise, surprised. I really didn’t understand why the shock…until I learned in due course that most people don’t follow through.

When I was a young adult, I used to work as a lab tech in a plasma center. That involved taking liter bottles of plasma, checking the computer system, filling out paperwork, drawing fluid and taking blood vials to run in a centrifuge, and frequently having to redo paperwork because the barely-trained phlebotomists kept sending them to me covered in drops of blood. Of course, this not only took longer, but meant I had to sanitize the entire area, change PPE, and get shit from the rest of the team for not just taking their biohazard-contaminated paperwork regardless. The room held 50 to 100 donors at a time, and the lab team was just two people.

My immediate boss would routinely just fucking disappear or taking random lunches, even during rushes, leaving me to handle everything on my own. She’d get pissy over small things, and spent time chatting with management in the offices, just hanging out, while I did all the work.

One day, she did something like this and left. I muttered to myself that I was going to quit. I finished the sample I was working on and went into the -40 degree biohazard freezer to store the sample.

Cut to a minute later, I came out of the freezer to see someone from management in the lab, saying “I heard you’re quitting?”

…what?

She said “Fine then. Go ahead and go.” (or something like that.)

I was stunned, but realized that my shitty manager must have heard me on her way out, and fucking told on me. I hadn’t planned on following through, and was mostly just upset at being used, but now?

“Fuck it.” I thought. “I said I’ll do it, so I’ll do it.”

I’m not a good speaker, but I basically stumbled over some short apology like that I would have finished the work day first, but would leave now if she wanted to. Her reply was to get all exasperated, as if she hadn’t expected me to do anything but crumple at being confronted, and she told me “Well, have a nice life then!” as I walked out the door. Never saw her or my shitty manager again. Years later, I did hear my shitty manager had gotten fired or something, for being shit at hear job.

I think I made the right choice.

(Edited for typos, so many typos…)

Oh. Makes sense. To be honest, I really didn’t care enough to bother checking their profile or any other comments. Just saw the response today and wanted to try and offer some sort of olive branch or something. idk

So, let me unpack what happened, from my point of view. I’m not complaining or anything, just pointing out how it seemed from my end.

I made a comment that I personally didn’t like the show because of how many times people around kept saying I was like the main character.

You replied directly to me implying that nerds should like the show because it normalizes dating them. (Which I agree is a good thing.)

I replied to say that doesn’t apply to me, and I’m not sure why it was relevant to my comment.

Finally, you left a comment to call me names.

Do you see how that entire interaction makes no sense from my side of things? I said that I didn’t like a show, and you inserted yourself into the conversation to complain that hot women should want to date me because of the show. Then, when I said that had nothing to do with what I was saying, you insulted me.

So, like, why?

…I don’t want to date women, so I know know how that’s relevant.

“It’s so funny! Sheldon reminds me of you!”

Yeah, never watched it, but heard this enough to hate the show with a passion.