#fuck venture capital

[dekaydk]

"And for fuck's sake stop ordering from Amazon." And big company food delivery. And ride sharing.

All of these app-based instant gratification businesses are built on exploiting people in order to pay a few people at the top and the investors outsized dividends they neither earned nor deserve. That's it. When you hear the word "disruption" that simply means "using investor money to operate at a loss long enough to drive competition out of business." All of these businesses have unacceptable societal costs: food delivery companies rip off both customers and restaurants, Amazon imposes middleman costs, ride sharing companies clog cities and pollute the air with empty cars cruising around, AirBnB drives up the cost of living by converting permanent housing into party venues. Above all:

There is no way to operate these businesses at a profit without disposable labor.

Even if you aren't part of the disposable labor pool, paid poorly, given little to no benefits, your employment based on the whims of supervisors or capricious customer ratings—these companies' continued success at making employment precarious makes more employers think it's a model worth trying. Whether that's by creating fear with layoffs, bringing in some AI tools to replace human work, hedge funds buying and deliberately running your company into the ground, or just the inevitable result of less competition as almost every industry consolidates, they will come for you, and your comfortable position safely above the disposable level will disappear.

Every time you spend money with these companies you are contributing to the exploitation of other humans, and you are accelerating the speed at which your own employment is disposable.

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

[barrydeutsch]

Why US Health Care Is A Terrible System

Transcript, blog post, comments, yadda yadda at https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-u-s-health-102682231 .

Help us keep making cartoons at patreon.com/barry. Because if these cartoons aren't supported, that would be a DISASTER! I'm talking about comets hitting the earth and no life other than the cockroaches being left and COCKROACHES DON'T EVEN READ COMICS those jerks!

[nando161mando]

[chasethedinerwhale]

There's a whole host of wonders in the Sears catalogue.

[the-everqueen]

y'all are cowards for using the verses of "eat your young" for romantic dreamling fics instead of using the chorus for a fic that grapples with hob gadling being a hedonist who has always valued his own survival above anyone else.

[brbgensokyo]

circling back to my hater thought from earlier, it really bugs when fandom disengages from a story and activity ignores its themes and message in favour of unsalted porridge bland shipping and surface level engagement bait

[toytulini]

"why are people mad about AI being pushed on them when they SHOULD be mad about all the privacy erosion??"

1) plenty of us bitches are mad and annoyed about both, actually.

2) the privacy erosion has become the normalized state of existence for the average person for the last 10 fucking years at least, its snuck in, they disguise it as Convenient Features to Help You Shop Better, and thats IF they bother telling you theyre doing it, instead of just opting all your shit in without asking, its so fucking normalized that yeah, a lot of people do not bother to question it, they just sigh in resignation and go, yeah, i guess, do i even have other options? and they do, but theyre an investment of learning and time you dont have capacity for at the moment, or maybe you do but you feel like you dont bc it feels like a bigger hurdle than it is, and computer stuff is already kind of intimidating, cos man, what if you hit the wrong thing and brick your expensive ass machine? easier to just let it data harvest, you guess, it cant be THAT bad, can it? plenty of people live like this, put up with this, seek this out, its easier not to resist the privacy erosion. fucking whatever, i guess. yeah, i guess twitter i mean X, or walmart, or facebook, can just have all of my contact info and my phone number and my birthday and phone contacts and bank information and fuck it, give them my ssn while im at it. less effort later. this is just how tech has been for the last 10 yrs. no one can effectively get rage clicks on this topic anymore bc we all fucking know. it sucks and we know. what do you want me to fucking do about it? i have other shit to deal with more urgently. etc

3)

you cant turn anything on or log onto anything or go anywhere without hearing about whatever new shit theyre throwing AI at for no real reason, no one will fucking Shut Up about AI, and its Annoying, man

[anissapierce]

The weed store than opened up in my county had a bbq with free food on their opening day n like an owner tht was so charming tht im considering weed for the first time ....

[carnivalls]

everyone (barely) awake; post wes normalgirl

[iamidentical]

autostraddle... yikes

[maladaptations]

just pirate everything and read books

Source

Source

[nando161mando]

Capitalism in a nutshell

[sophie-frm-mars]

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

[drakulateeth]

Is there anyone who has experience with publishing scientific articles? I have so many questions that I want to pose before I decide if I’m going to do it or not

[jonnywaistcoat]

hey jonny, i just thought you'd want to know that character.ai has an ai-generated imitation of your voice and i'm not sure what other websites might have it or where it originated :(

Yeah, it's a fucking garbage state of affairs but, as a somewhat well-known performer with a pretty distinctive voice it doesn't exactly shock me. Needless to say I think anyone who used this is a mediocre waste of skin and if they ever tell me in person they've used it then 50/50 I punch them in the teeth.

I can't wait for a couple of years when it all collapses just like every other niche-but-interesting-technology-with-limited-use-cases-sold-as-a-universal-panacea-to-gormless-CEOs grift (blockchain being the best example). Because the thing is, none of these things actually make any money and cost a vast amount, so as soon as all the dumb venture capital funding dries up and AI is required to actually start paying for itself, the bubble bursts and the whole industry is fucked.

That said, it's gonna be rough when it happens - a lot of companies have invested very heavily in AI and they're going to be hurting badly. I know of more than one media company whose idiot executives invested ridiculous amounts into NFTs and ended up laying off massive swathes of workers when that obvious fucking scam collapsed. I suspect the AI crash is gonna be even worse than that. And by then it will have drowned the Internet in slop. We'll see, I guess.

Anyway, anyone who uses AI is a soulless fucking husk of a person who cannot tell half-digested vomit from culture, and I would pity them if they weren't making the world such a measurably worse place to exist.

[toytulini]

"why are people mad about AI being pushed on them when they SHOULD be mad about all the privacy erosion??"

1) plenty of us bitches are mad and annoyed about both, actually.

2) the privacy erosion has become the normalized state of existence for the average person for the last 10 fucking years at least, its snuck in, they disguise it as Convenient Features to Help You Shop Better, and thats IF they bother telling you theyre doing it, instead of just opting all your shit in without asking, its so fucking normalized that yeah, a lot of people do not bother to question it, they just sigh in resignation and go, yeah, i guess, do i even have other options? and they do, but theyre an investment of learning and time you dont have capacity for at the moment, or maybe you do but you feel like you dont bc it feels like a bigger hurdle than it is, and computer stuff is already kind of intimidating, cos man, what if you hit the wrong thing and brick your expensive ass machine? easier to just let it data harvest, you guess, it cant be THAT bad, can it? plenty of people live like this, put up with this, seek this out, its easier not to resist the privacy erosion. fucking whatever, i guess. yeah, i guess twitter i mean X, or walmart, or facebook, can just have all of my contact info and my phone number and my birthday and phone contacts and bank information and fuck it, give them my ssn while im at it. less effort later. this is just how tech has been for the last 10 yrs. no one can effectively get rage clicks on this topic anymore bc we all fucking know. it sucks and we know. what do you want me to fucking do about it? i have other shit to deal with more urgently. etc

3)

you cant turn anything on or log onto anything or go anywhere without hearing about whatever new shit theyre throwing AI at for no real reason, no one will fucking Shut Up about AI, and its Annoying, man