In the background, a man is sat atop a pile of cookies behind two other men who are seated at a table. This man is Rupert Murdoch, a former Australian and now American; the owner of a large swathe of right-wing journalistic and entertainment media whose empire has contributed to the distrust and downfall of democracy across the Anglosphere.
Pictured on the left is a dark-skinned and bearded man sat looking despondently down at the empty table in front of him. Across from him is an Anglo-Australian man who is wearing a safety helmet and hi-vis vest - a nod to the working class of Australia - with a plate and a single cookie on it. Rupert is saying to the Anglo man: “Careful mate… that foreigner wants your cookie!”
It’s a fantastic political cartoon and a great nod to the way that right-wing media and politicians have consistently convinced significant amounts of working class people to turn their frustrations at their lack of share in capital towards immigrants and foreigners as opposed to the billionaires who hoard all the wealth.
On the left you see a format popular on tiktok, where a clip from a videogame, some ice cream video and a Family Guy clip share the screen, playing simultaneously.
On the right you see a news anchor with weather info, a ticker and stock data also sharing the same screen.
The tiktok format is supposedly for low attention span kids which (also supposedly) need three completely disconnected things happening on screen at once in order to not lose interest in the video. The other one is… the news as it is common in the US.
“They are the same”: you could say that both of these formats serve the same purpose.
It’s not the same, TikTok is shit content crammed into a very small box where as the bullshit on Fox and whatever else is bullshit crammed into a much bigger box.
Yeah they’re both fucking trash but they don’t have the same impact over a long term, but go off I guess
You should see the Japanese TV then. It’s not only cramped, it’s completely different programs at the same time. I don’t even know what the reaction clips are reacting to or which is the main program.
This would only be the 24 hour “news” networks that deliver entertainment and opinion under the guise of factual information. Local newscasts don’t often do this. However there are some ownership groups out there that try to model themselves after the big cable companies.
Just so you’re aware, the TV broadcast is (Canadian) CP24 Toronto, and they have this so that you don’t have to wait through commercials and other random news segments to get weather, traffic, headlines and stock tickers. This is a common channel to have on in waiting rooms and the like.
On the left side of the image, you will notice a prevalent format that has gained popularity on TikTok. It features a composition where a brief snippet from a video game, a delightful ice cream video, and a scene from the animated television series Family Guy coexist on the same screen, all playing simultaneously.
Conversely, on the right side of the meme, you’ll find a news anchor delivering weather information, a continuous news ticker displaying various updates, and real-time stock market data, all competing for space on the same screen.
The TikTok format on the left is believed to cater to individuals with relatively shorter attention spans, particularly younger viewers, who supposedly require the simultaneous presence of three entirely unrelated elements on screen to maintain their engagement with the video content. On the other hand, the right-side depiction represents a quintessential depiction of the news presentation format that is commonly seen in the United States.
The phrase “They are the same” is a humorous commentary on the meme, suggesting that both of these seemingly disparate formats ultimately serve a similar purpose, albeit in very different contexts.
For those who might still be grappling with comprehension:
On the leftward portion of the provided image, observers can discern a particularly prominent format that has seen a meteoric rise in its acceptance and widespread use, especially on the social media platform known as TikTok. This format encompasses a unique assemblage wherein a fleeting segment extracted from a video game, a visually captivating video that showcases the delightful intricacies of ice cream preparation, and a notable moment extracted from the well-known animated television show, “Family Guy,” are all juxtaposed to appear concurrently on a singular display screen, thereby playing in unison.
In stark contrast, if one directs their attention to the rightward section of the meme, it becomes apparent that there’s a news anchor, immersed in the task of conveying meteorological updates. Accompanying this, there is an unbroken stream of a news ticker, diligently broadcasting a plethora of diverse news highlights. Additionally, there is a live feed that presents the ever-fluctuating dynamics of the stock market, with all these elements vying for visual dominance within the same confined screen space.
The format emblematic of TikTok, situated on the left, is postulated to resonate more with individuals possessing attention spans that might be characterized as being on the shorter end of the spectrum. This is especially true for the younger demographic, who, it’s hypothesized, necessitate the concurrent exhibition of three wholly unrelated visual stimuli to sustain their levels of engagement and immersion in the digital content being consumed. Conversely, the representation on the right encapsulates the archetypal portrayal of how news is traditionally presented, a style that has become somewhat of a hallmark in the realm of American broadcasting.
The overlaying text, which reads “They are the same,” provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary, insinuating that, despite their apparent differences in presentation and context, these two formats converge in their overarching intent and purpose, each catering to the specific needs of their respective audiences, albeit in divergent manners.
For those who, perchance, remain ensnared in a web of puzzlement and seek further elucidation:
Upon the immediate leftward expanse of the visually rendered image in question, astute onlookers and discerning individuals would undoubtedly identify a distinctive, yet increasingly ubiquitous format that has, with the relentless passage of time, surged forward, embedding itself deeply into the cultural zeitgeist, primarily through its proliferation on the digital social media behemoth known as TikTok. This inimitable format is a testament to the modern era’s digital craftsmanship, where it harmoniously amalgamates a transient and ephemeral segment meticulously plucked from an interactive video game, an exquisitely framed visual documentation that indulges viewers in the delectable journey of ice cream artistry, and a poignant, perhaps even evocative, fragment extracted from the annals of the widely recognized and critically acclaimed animated television chronicle, “Family Guy.” Astonishingly, all these disparate elements coalesce, seamlessly cohabitating the very same digital canvas, and serendipitously unfold in synchronized harmony.
Yet, if one were to meander their gaze, redirecting their ocular faculties towards the diametrically opposite side, specifically the rightward flank of this meme-centric artifact, a starkly contrasting tableau emerges. Herein, a seasoned news anchor, donned in professional attire, appears deeply engrossed in the solemn act of disseminating pivotal meteorological prognostications. In tandem, and perhaps adding to the sensory overload, a ceaseless and inexorable news ticker cascades downwards, acting as a conduit for a veritable cornucopia of timely news briefings. Augmenting this already bustling visual cacophony is a real-time, dynamic representation of the financial market’s pulse, showcasing the capricious ebbs and flows of stock indices, all of which jostle, compete, and clamor for the viewer’s fleeting attention within the confines of a singular, constrained screen territory.
The quintessentially TikTok-esque tableau, which graces the image’s left hemisphere, is conjectured, hypothesized, and postulated to resonate profoundly with those individuals whose cognitive proclivities lean towards possessing what might colloquially be described as abbreviated attention durations. This observation rings particularly true for the more nascent generational cohorts, who, as prevailing societal narratives suggest, ostensibly require an intricate ballet of simultaneous, non-correlated visual stimuli to perpetually fuel and stoke the fires of their engagement and sustained interest in the ocean of digital content they so voraciously consume. In juxtaposition, the tableau on the right harks back to and encapsulates a time-honored, venerable modality of news dissemination, a paradigmatic archetype that has entrenched itself as an emblematic mainstay within the bastions of American televisual broadcast traditions.
The superimposed inscription, which succinctly proclaims “They are the same,” injects a dose of sardonic wit, playfully insinuating that, beneath the veneer of their ostensible disparities in thematic content and contextual backdrops, these two visual formats, in their essence, might indeed be converging upon a singular, unifying teleological nexus, each meticulously tailored to satiate the nuanced appetites of their distinct viewership, albeit via markedly divergent stylistic avenues.
I just said “Can you rewrite this passage to be even more verbose? {your comment}” for the first one and then “Can you make it even more verbose? I’m going for excess levels of verbosity” for the second one. The very first line
For those who, perchance, remain ensnared in a web of puzzlement and seek further elucidation:
They suck at propaganda because the claims are unverifiable lies? That’s not really the point of propaganda. Did it scare a number of employees into voting no on a union? If yes, then they propaganda’d just fine.
I’m not sure how you can spin to be convincing through your arguments… It’s a pretty indefensible position intellectually
This is actually part of a pretty valid strategy. The trick is to flood them with the conclusion - they don’t need to be able to recite talking points, they just need to think “a union could be troublesome”. I’d also spread stories about Union busting (not with a paper trail!) And have dozens of these posters with different, unmemorable arguments
If you convince someone “unions are bad because they have problems with corruption”, they can be sat down, shown the numbers, the transparency measures, and how members could democratically boot out leadership if things go wrong. Their concern is dispelled, and if they accept the argument they’re solidly on team union and distrustful of management.
If you flood them with weak arguments that make sense on the surface but fall apart if you think about them, they’re left with the impression of an argument against unions. They aren’t going to remember it, and if they do it’ll sound like it couldn’t be right to say it out loud, but they felt that way. And they’re smart, so they must have been convinced by a better argument they just can’t remember clearly.
This is what subliminal messaging actually looks like, this shit is evil
When a company spends money to discourage collective bargaining, whether that's in production of "training" videos, or closing facilities, or punishing organizers (who are more likely to call foul on that illegal activity), it means that they think that will cost them less than bargaining with labor in good faith.
They know they're taking advantage of labor, and it costs them less to keep the bootheel on than it does to negotiate. Seize the means of production.
sure sure seize it, then who's gonna manage it afterwards, and how much will they get paid, more, less, the same, for what sort of responsibility, who determines that, do managers count as much as front line assembly staff, do they have to work more or less. sooner or later the pigs become the man and the man becomes the pigs. seize it, we'll all be back here in a hundred years telling people to seize it from you.
It’d be managed democratically by the workers in the way that best fit their needs. You act like those are all questions that couldn’t be discussed and voted on.
as evidenced by how successful the ussr, china, cuba and venezuela, and every other fucking group who has ever tried it, have been in their efforts in this regard, yeah yeah i know, you've got a "better plan". see you in a hundred years.
Im not as familiar with Venezuela but the first 3 you listed massively increased the quality of life for their citizens versus how it was pre revolution. Cuba today is still a massive achievement considering the embargo. Just like capitalism didn’t achieve its optimal form when it first came to being, socialism hasn’t been perfect either but we learn from past mistakes and strive for something better than thinking that the current system that only benefits the global north at the expense of the global south is somehow the peak of how human society can be.
A lot of people don’t realize the USSR went from being relatively technologically primative to launching satellites into space within 35 years. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination but what other country can claim the same?
China and the USSR didn’t “try” it. They just claimed that thsy do it in the workers’ interest. Don’t know too much about Guba and Venezuela, but I’d wager that the same happened then.
Hurdy durrrrrrr what about Guba, the Ruskies, and Vuvuzela?! Where’s your Karl Marx now?! He’s dead, another victim of Gommunism! Checkmate, libtard!
It’s like there’s a playbook for how to sound like someone with issues with, but no actual knowledge of, alternate economic systems and you’re quoting directly from it.
Idk if you noticed but unions arise naturally in free markets in democracies. There’s a reason dictators like hitler tend to go after unions and labor organizers - they don’t like workplace democracy similar to how they don’t like fair elections.
Right… since people never step in to fill a power vacuum and no matter their intentions become corrupt… because absolute power corrupts absolutely… and once you get a taste historically people want more…
Seizing the means and fantasizing about a functional democratic version of communism in the workplace is absurd…
The real goal should be to regulate the wage gap. Because the top won’t voluntarily shrink the wage gaps laws need to be in place or bargained for that set a limit to the gap between the top and bottom… i.e. the CEO can only ever make 30% more per year than the lowest paid employee in their business. That way when the business is more successful everyone is brought up. There is recognition that various roles have more or less responsibility (and should be compensated as such) but everyone in the org benefits equally when the org does better…
I mean under that same logic capitalism is always going to be corrupt because at its core it concentrates wealth and thus power at the top in the hands of a few. I’d rather at least try a way of organizing that puts the power in the hands of the people. No matter how much you try to regulate capitalism the rich will always try to gain more wealth and power.
I mean… I’m not anti Union… have lived and worked in TX and CA… TX is as anti union as anywhere and it sucks because of it.
I’m anti corrupt unions, anti blind faith in “unions”, I’m anti overly simplistic internet bullshit rhetoric that sounds good in a vacuum but isn’t helpful in the world we live in…
But you do you Boo… nothing much our internet discourse here will accomplish other than both of us being annoyed and feeling morally superior to the other for no reason. 🍻
I’m anti corrupt unions, anti blind faith in “unions”, I’m anti overly simplistic internet bullshit rhetoric that sounds good in a vacuum but isn’t helpful in the world we live in…
We agree on all those points, even if you're implying that my position is "overly simplistic internet bullshit rhetoric that sounds good in a vacuum but isn't helpful in the world we live in."
One way to make sure that no unions are corrupt is certainly to have no unions at all, but I highly doubt that that would reduce overall corruption in business. I believe it is better to have strong unions first, and address all corruption, wherever it hides, than to abandon unions and kneecap their ability to fight corruption in ownership. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And you’re right. Elimination of unions across the board would absolutely not lead to a positive outcome.
I’ve just become cynical and disillusioned with society and that leaks out sometimes… but you’re right, we should not let perfect be the enemy of good. 🍻
Understanding what conditions lead to business unionism, in which the people at the top of the union no longer represent the rank and file members, is a vital part of the current labor movement. Every other post you have made in this thread lack any nuance whatsoever.
Rank and file union members need a militant approach to business owners. Being apart of a union isn’t just paying dues and expecting other people will take care of it. No full time union staff should take home more than the average union member wage, keep their skin in the game and give them a reason to fight. Unions power doesn’t come from a leaders ability to negotiate with the bosses, it is in fact the opposite, unions leadership ability to negotiate comes from the power of the rank and file members.
And they’re engaging in one of my favorite logical pretzels: presenting their ignorance as proof in and of itself that their opponents are ignorant. “I don’t know what your plan is, which means you don’t have one!”
I think they also referenced Animal Farm, a book written by a socialist.
I agree… unregulated capitalism will always be corrupt. We’re seeing that now…
But again… you literally can’t place power in the hands of the people because someone (or a small cabal) will always rise to the top and assume control and we end up in the same spot under a different name…
If you looks at history “regulated” capitalism eventually deregulates because it’s in the interests of the rich to do so and even “regulated” capitalism has exploited the global south for decades and decades. I reject your idea that a few will always rise to the top and be malicious with the power, but even saying that’s true how is that any worse than the current state? I would rather at least try to find a new way to do things than resigning the world to having this be its peak where millions are hungry and destitute.
Yes, we've already seen that in every version of "owners taking advantage of labor" from feudalism to capitalism has tended to produce corrupt people at the top. It's kind of built into that kind of system. People are incorrectly assuming that changing the fundamental system to "labor produces and is compensated for it" will experience the same corruption. Maybe it will, if corrupt people gain ownership of that system, and take it back to "owners taking advantage of labor."
But how about we fucking give it a try and see what happens? You're right; it can't be worse than what we already have.
Management of labor resources is labor. So is accounting, and marketing, and training. Ownership is not labor. Stifling collective bargaining serves the purposes of owners by ensuring that more of the compensation for work product is taken away from those who labor and given to those who own.
Everyone forgets that things like leadership and management provide value, and deserve fair compensation. Simple ownership can provide some value, if the owner(s) are putting real capital at real risk in order to operate a business which creates a product or service.
For large companies, there is no real risk. They regularly get bailed out by government (i.e., taxpayers, all of us). "Privatize rewards, socialize risk," you know.
Owners ultimately determine the direction of the business, and the compensation of all labor. When executives have giant compensation packages, where a huge proportion of that compensation is in the form of company stock - more ownership - and they're protected by giant golden parachutes, so that they get a big cash out even if they fail miserably, those owners take on no risk whatsoever. Executive ownership inappropriately pits labor (that which adds value but does not have control) and ownership (that which does not add value, but does have control) against one another, in the same person, high on the power ladder of a company. Executive owners are incentivized to serve the purposes of the ownership portion of their roles, because that is what brings them personally more wealth.
Not only should "regular" labor see a greater share of compensation, the amount that anyone is compensated with company stock should be limited to a very small fraction of their overall compensation amount. If you want to add a stock incentive to someone's compensation, it should really be in the form of options.
the amount that anyone is compensated with company stock should be limited to a very small fraction of their overall compensation amount.
I don’t understand. Why? Wouldn’t more stock options to regular workers be a form of seizing the means of production? Always sounded like a good idea to me.
Let's first clear up the difference between a stock option and a stock grant (in the US).
A stock grant is "Here's some stock, you own it." It is taxed as income at the price it has when you take full ownership of it. Many employee stock plans also include a vesting schedule, where you have the stock, can vote with it, and receive dividends on it - but you cannot sell it until it vests. In that case, you would pay taxes on its price when it vests.
Stock options, on the other hand, are the ability to buy the given stock at the price it had when you were issued the option. You pay no taxes upon receiving an option, you pay no taxes when you exercise the option (choose to buy the stock at the option price). You do pay taxes on the profit made between the price at purchase and the sale price, as with any stock trade. Options can also expire, and if you don't exercise them before they expire, they are gone.
For regular people, you would do a trade which exercises and sells your options at the same time. Option price $5, current price $10, exercise and sell, and you have $5 cash. This requires no outlay of funds from you. It is also possible to just exercise the option and the hold the stock, which has a tax benefit if you hold it longer than a year, when it is taxed not as income, but at the lower capital gains rate. But regular people don't have the liquid cash to be able to lock up for a year like that.
Anyway, the amount of stock grants that are given to regular workers are an absolute pittance compared to what is given to executives. There is no practical way to wrest corporate power away from primary shareholders by increasing the amount of stock granted to employees - especially since the primary shareholders are usually the CEO and board members, or some capital organization (venture capital, holding company, what have you). The primary shareholders would never let that happen. Even if they would, employees who need that wealth to live right now are far more likely to just sell their stock grants when they vest and pay off loans and bills, do home/car repairs, maybe go on a short vacation. They're not going to hold the stock and wield their ownership votes - which are far too few to challenge anything anyway.
I think that, for public companies, separating control of the company direction from ownership is the best choice. Shareholders (really the primary shareholder) should be able to vote on corporate board members and executive committee roles. And that's it. The board and executive committee should have control over the company's direction without being primary shareholders.
Just so you know. This idea is literally the same idea the evil guys have in the book 1984. They convince the main character that revolutions never make anything better, they only change who is in charge, and so there is no reason for anyone to change the dystopian system they have created.
I find it funny that the protagonist’s arc peaks at him realizing (what he already knew) that the one thing that will free people is the lower class learning class consciousness but somehow* it’s the big gobbunism bad book.
People don’t want to accept that Orwell was a socialist. Probably because of Animal Farm. Being disillusioned with the Soviets didn’t make him less of a socialist.
And the bosses have no vested interest selling this idea to you. Corporate media has no vested interest feeding this narrative to you. Worker owned co-ops are a thing, and seizure from a corporation can be successful.
sure sure seize it, then who’s gonna manage it afterwards
The people the workers choose to be managers?
how much will they get paid, more, less, the same, for what sort of responsibility
They will be paid by what the workers and the individual agree is fair?
who determines that
The workers…
do managers count as much as front line assembly staff, do they have to work more or less.
I feel like all of that is hard to apply to every situation… the whole point is that labour will able to come to a consensus about all of these organizational theoreticals you’ve erected.
later the pigs become the man and the man becomes the pigs. seize it, we’ll all be back here in a hundred years telling people to seize it from you.
Lol, are you saying that certain people are inherently the management and owner class? And after a hundred years of a system with a completely different organizational hierarchy, they should somehow still inherently perceive themselves as a higher class?
Do you hold the same insane opinions about other political hierarchies. Do you think there are like a group of deposed Royals that people are just aching to put back on thrones?
Believe it or not, there’s actually a lot of books about all of those things, and even better, they aren’t fantasy books used by North American and other capitalist schools to make young kids think communism is bad and drive them to inaction.
Inherit a business that been successful for over a hundred years, and be the one to fuck it up so badly they have to close it down? Maybe they should feel bad.
I have no sympathy for anyone inheriting entire businesses.
I was just casually commenting that I don’t want to be in charge of a company because I’d rather the risk be on someone else’s shoulder, and then when it was implied CEOs take no risk I clarified that the type of immune to failure CEO you’re talking about are different from the average business.
Could’ve been a long time coming. Could’ve been that the previous owners were unethical and the current ones were not. It could be any number of things. It’s not necessarily as simple as them “fucking up” and having to shut down.
I ran a DnD campaign where an important shop was under the same owner for over 1000 years, a friendly copper dragon shapeshifted into a halfling, who discovered trading with adventurers was the best way to amass a hoard, they would go all over the world finding interesting things that they have no idea of the true value of, could you believe they’d trade this neat spider statuette that may or may not be mildly cursed for a boring old ring of protection because it “has no practical use” and it “makes them dream of the whisperings of elder gods”?
Just a pet peeve of mine, it’s like complaining the Jedi couldn’t stop Palpatine and that means they’re all idiots with a silly religion or something.
They were the guardians of a multispecies Republic for ten THOUSAND years, and they curb stomped the Sith Empire everytime it tried to start shit. They clearly knew what they were doing.
What was the alternative? Seizing direct control of the government? Executing every Senator that looked a little corrupt?
Palatine played a game they couldn’t counter without destroying themselves in the process. Sometimes you just lose…
was it 10 thousand years now? in the movies they alternate between saying “a thousand years” or “a thousand generations.” i mean, either way i think your point stands, but still
Disney has canonized the Rakatan Empire so for now it’s assumed all the Old Republic works and timelines are canon(ish).
The Old Republic was actually 25,000 years old, I misremembered, but there was a period about a thousand years before the OT it was dissolved and then a different Republic was formed that… did everything exactly the same?
The result is people largely ignoring that stumble in its timeline.
Sorta. The Last Jedi apparently had an easter egg reference, a kyber crystal he used, and the Rakata and their empire are specifically referenced in Andor.
Which is a small continuity problem since it was a literal plot point of Kotor that it has been so long the galaxy had mostly forgotten about them, but whatever, the current consensus is Revan’s general story is canon if not necessarily specific events from the games.
If there’s one thing Star Wars does well, it’s applying a history to every single fuckin thing on screen. In this case the multiple references to the Rakatans makes it fairly likely Darth Revan will be outright canonized eventually, especially because there just really isn’t a point to the Rakata without his plotline.
Like, what, we’re supposed to give a shit they maybe made Centerpoint Station?
The thing I dislike most about Atlassian products is that each of them has a completely different formatting engine and markup syntax. You’d think they’d be consistent but noooo
Atlassian doesn’t even have consistency within single products! I’m using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira’s own notation (e.g. {code} to start a code block). It’s always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn’t support it for some inexplicable reason.
Microsoft got screwed by antitrust officials for only putting it’s browsers in new windows installs 20 years ago. Antitrust enforcement is a fucking joke in this country now.
Ironically, the larger market share of macOS (compared to back then), mobile platforms, and the fact that Chrome is now the #1 browser means there’s a much weaker case for there being a monopoly now.
It was early access for like 3 years. Which allowed them to release a fully finished game, or the closest we had from that state since no one remembers when actually.
Considering the amount of labor goes into growing beans, curing them, and sending them all over the world:
I don’t know what the fuck else could be the definition of a luxury, but that’s a fucking luxury to have the result of a plant that mostly grows in the tropics readily available to be purchased and used at supermarkets worldwide.
Like, when East India Tea company ruled the waves, did people not think tea was a luxury? Because same deal, the amount of labor involved was gargantuan. It was absolutely the definition of a luxury.
Just because capitalism has made it “cheap” means nothing.
As areas warm up we’ll just move tropical fruit production to areas previously incompatible. We’ll be enjoying the French coffee industry because grapes can’t grow there anymore!
Is it history? 400 years of Asian/African colonialism
Privilege? Amazon, any official manufacturer site and PayPal don’t work here. We just got Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Slavery? The word slave originates from the word Slav and we had nothing to do with colonialism.
I’m a white European and I am way less privileged than any US minority, technically we Slavs are also POC in the US.
So I technically can’t punch down on Americans. These kinds of things are dumb since you can’t know someone’s ethnicity, race, sex, country, etc. online.
Ah but what is enough money for you or I is not enough money for the bigwigs. And since they’re obviously more important, as they’re at the top, we have to have sure they get enough money even if that means you don’t.
But they’ll get you a ping pong table so you can stop thinking about how you don’t know what you’re going to feed your family tonight
You may be fine with $1000 a month. You have everything you need: food, bed, apartment, electricity, etc.
Now you get a new job and have $2000. You try out more expensive food options and realize you like them better. You move into a bigger apartment and start enjoying the freedom.
You may never wanted this if you didn’t try it, but now that you have, you don’t want to go back. You may not have noticed that your mental and physical health was degraded due to your previous living conditions until you get better after raising your standards.
I’m like mid-career and I can’t afford vacations. There’s always some other priority for the money and I would feel guilty for spending it on something that is by nature temporary and ephemeral.
That question isn’t the best way to frame it, because yeah… 2x “enough” is pretty reasonable. That’s still well within the high returns of happiness phase.
Do you need 1000x enough, though? Or 1000x that? I’d love a high end espresso maker, or a nicer car, or to be able to afford to take more time off, but there comes a point where more is just pointless.
That was the case even 19 years back. Ubuntu nailed it back then. You could install it without knowing anything about your computer. Before that, there were text based UIs which required deep understanding and lots of decisions.
I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.
Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).
Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.
That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.
Yeah, all my Linux installs after about 2003 were liveCDs. I used to carry my Gentoo CD around as my diagnostic tools for a while helping people fix their windows machines (or just backing up everything off it before reformatting).
I think Knoppix was the first live CD I used. It was mind blowing. Now you can just carry around a whole personally configured system on a USB stick. Pretty cool.
I was going to say “but ventoy only mounts the filesystem as readonly. Great for testing new distros, but not great for rolling installs you carry with you to use on different computers”
Giving you, if you were lucky, VESA graphics and maybe a mouse pointer because XFree86 somehow insisted on being told whether you have a PS/2 or USB mouse. 3d acceleration only with nvidia and that required manual installation because nvidia never provided anything but blobs. IIRC ATI drivers were simply non-existent (didn’t have an ATI card back then), that only changed when AMD bought them. Whippensnappers won’t believe it but once upon the time, nvidia was actually the company to go with when running linux. And Epic didn’t hate Linux yet, UT2004 came with linux binaries on the dvd.
It hasn’t change since mid-2000s if you only talk about the installation process itself. Usually you would have at least some piece of hardware that wouldn’t work out of box and it used to be a lot of work until getting everything in place
Nvidia has become pretty painless in the last few years. A year ago a guy told me to try wayland so I did and surprisingly I’ve been on wayland ever since on my desktop. The last time I don’t think I was even able to see my desktop. Now the 555 drivers made things even better.
Modems in general were either entirely PnP or a total goddamn nightmare in my experience. There was no in between. I remember setting up Slackware in the late 90s and my serial modem just worked. Even after I changed it, it worked. Even after I installed an internal modem, it worked. A few years later I set up Debian or one of its kids (probably knoppix, but I won’t testify to it) and couldn’t get a modem to work to save my life. It was so bad that I just didn’t use any Linux until I got DSL.
Also, if this is an organization setting, I’m extremely disappointed in your PR review process. If someone is committing vendor code to the repo someone else should reject the pull.
Pretty sure they meant to not have review. Dropping peer review in favor of pair programming is a trendy idea these days. Heh, you might call it “pairs over peers”. I don’t agree with it, though. Pair programming is great, but two people, heads together, can easily get on a wavelength and miss the same things. It’s always valuable to have people who have never seen the new changes take a look. Also, peer review helps keep the whole team up to date on their knowledge of the code base, a seriously underrated benefit. But I will concede that trading peer review for pair programming is less wrong than giving up version control. Still wrong, but a lot less wrong.
Well, to share my perspective – sorry, I mean, to explain to you why you’re wrong and differing opinions are unacceptable:
I find that pairing works best for small teams, where everyone is in the loop what everyone else is working on, and which don’t have a bottleneck in terms of a minority having much more skill or knowledge in the project.
In particular, pairing is far more efficient at exchanging information. Not only is it a matter of actively talking to one another just being quicker at bringing information across, there is also a ton of information about code, which will not make it into the actual code.
While coding, you’ve tried two or three approaches, you couldn’t write it as you expected or whatever. The final snippet of code looks as if you wrote it, starting in the top-left and finishing bottom-right, with maybe one or two comments explaining a particularly weird workaround, but I’d wager more than 90% of the creation process is lost.
This means that if someone needs to touch your code, they will know practically none of how it came to be and they will be scared of changing more about it than at all necessary. As a result, all code that gets checked in, needs to be as perfect as possible, right from the start.
Sharing all the information from the creation process by pairing, that empowers a team to write half-baked code. Because enough people know how to finish baking it, or how to restructure it, if a larger problem arises.
Pairing is fickle, though. A bad management decision can easily torpedo it. I’m currently in a project, where we practically cannot pair, because it’s 4 juniors that are new to the project vs. 2 seniors that built up the project.
Not only would we need to pair in groups of three to make that work at all, it also means we need to use the time of the seniors as efficiently as possible and rather waste the time of the juniors, which is where a review process excels at.
Yeah… Usually if you join a company with bad practices it’s because the people who already work there don’t want to do things properly. They tend to not react well to the new guy telling them what they’re doing wrong.
Only really feasible if you’re the boss, or you have an unreasonable amount of patience.
Usually, the boss (or people above the boss) are the one’s stopping it. Engineers know what the solution is. They may still resent the new guy saying it, though, because they’ve been through this fight already and are tired.
Dude, put content warnings on this. I have trauma from shared drives and fucking Jared leaving the Important File open on his locked computer while he takes off for a week, locking out access to anyone else.
I actually heard something about that in class not long ago
The story is that Android’s security heavily relies on the compartmentalization of apps that lives in the android layer, over the Linux kernel. Apparently, that functionality works in part because only this layer can perform operations that require root access, no app or user can. So software that allows you to root your phone apparently breaks this requirement, and makes the whole OS insecure. He even heavily implied that one should never root their phone with ‘free’ software found on the internet because that was usually a front for some nefarious shit regarding your data.
I’m just parroting a half-understood and half-remebered speech from a security expert. His credentials were impressive but I have no ability to judge that critically, if anyone knows more about this feel free to correct me.
I’ve been using android since 2010, and it’s gotten significantly better over the years. There’s only a few things it doesn’t back up, like text messages and app data, most of which you don’t need.
Mine backs up my text messages, but I would prefer to backup my app data, authenticators, wallpaper, themes, games, etc., not every app is a shitty front-end to a website.
It is not Android that is backing up most things though, it is mostly done by Google Services. That means that your data is effectively vendor locked-in if you want to use Android as an actual open source project. Google gutting the AOSP to this extent should be illegal (maybe even is, but might is right).
Isn’t saying that allowing apps to have root lets them access anything just describing what root is? A rooted phone doesn’t have to give superuser access to every app.
I think he was trying to say apps get access to “root features” through an abstraction layer/API calls that is controlled.
They don’t/wouldn’t have carte blanche root access to the underlying system. It’s kinda like a docker container or VM or flatpaks/snap packages on Linux. They are sandboxed from everything else and have to be given explicit premission to do certain things(anything that would need root privileges/hardware access).
A rooted phone doesn’t have to give superuser access to every app.
Sure, but apps that run as superuser can access anything, including the data and memory for banking apps. A big part of Android’s security model is that each app runs as a different user and can’t touch data that’s exclusively owned by another user.
It just means you need to trust apps that you give root access to, or only give elevated privileges during the very specific times when apps need them. Root isn’t something people who don’t know what they’re doing should be messing around with, I guess. But I’d think a lot of people who root their phone know and accept the risks.
People like you or I may know what we’re doing with a rooted device, but I think the issue for the banks is that they can’t guarantee that someone with a rooted phone knows what they’re doing or isn’t using a malicious app, so they have to be cautious and block all rooted phones.
An app that requires root may look like a normal app but it could be a trojan that modifies banking apps in the background (eg patches them on disk or in RAM so transfers done through the app go to a different recipient). There’s been malicious apps in the Play Store in the past, and rooted apps have way less oversight - some are literally just APK files attached to XDA-Developers posts or random blog sites.
I take your point, and I’m sure you’re right about the banks’ rationale, but in my own view it does not seem like it should be the banks’ decision to make.
This is a good point. The bank needs to do as much as they can to reduce fraud risk, and they’ve probably found some correlation between rooted phones and a higher likelihood of fraudulent transactions. Some banks block VPNs for a similar reason - when logging in from a VPN, it’s harder for them to tell that it’s actually you vs if it’s an attacker that uses the same VPN service as you.
Your risk exposure is that you could lose your bank account balance. The banks risk exposure is that they could lose every bank account balance exploited by the same rooted phone vulnerability. So they evaluate risk differently than you do.
bro I gave my nana root on her eye phone and by the end of the week she had hacked half of North Korea - the other half thought her actions were a good example of juche ideals. It was crazy ngl
The problem is very simple - the majority of people are technically illiterate. Apple and Google saw the Windows XP security fiasco, looked at how many people use smart phones today and decided that giving users any rights is not worth the risk.
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