Tankiedesantski [he/him]

12 hours a day, 6 days a week, 4 weeks a month works out to 288 hours, so yeah that sounds about right for some of these places.

Not uncommon for a first year associate to bill out enough to cover their entire yearly salary in the first quarter and the rest of the year is just profit for the firm.

I know accountant/lawyer/engineer types who have to live with room mates and are struggling to save up deposits for buying housing even though they make good money.

Even in these previously prestigious positions junior employees get paid shit and get worked to the bone in exchange for the promise of big (like $10k+ a year) raises. Over recent years the starting salaries have not kept up with inflation and even the raises are getting smaller and smaller. In theory you’re supposed to be financially comfortable “mid career” but that used to be 5 years in and now appears more like 10 or even 15 years in.

Doctors, bankers, top tier lawyers and consultants may be exceptions to this trend, but then again those are jobs where people literally drop dead from overwork so that’s a different type of hell.

I’ve seen stripped down versions of Android on phones intended specifically for the elderly. I wonder if anyone has approached desktop Linux development like that?

That old lady’s name? Albert Einstein.

This is a trap to identify the Fahrenheit users for future re-education, isn’t it?

“May Stalin fuck you”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

If you believe that then I welcome you to follow his example of April 30, 1945.

hitler was probably one of the most evil people to ever exist. However, you can certainly acknowledge that while also acknowledging that he was, in fact, an effective leader.

Effective at what? Taking Germany from the most powerful country in continental Europe to the fifth most powerful country in Berlin?

Google SGE includes … Stalin … on a list of “greatest” leaders

Well at least it got one thing correct. Terrible ratio though.

All I see is two people failing their corporately mandated cyber security training at the same time.

You’re right. Marxism famously doesn’t involve any mathematics. This is why Marxists find volumes II and III of Das Kapital to be light, easily comprehensible, reading.

Even if they’ll sell one to you internationally, you’re probably shit out of luck if something breaks and needs to be fixed under warranty.

One of the functions of colonialism (in this case colonialism via exploitation of labor and resources of the global south economically) is to transfer wealth from the colony to the empire (we call these the Imperial Core regions).

I’m going to use a really simplified example and some made up numbers to illustrate. Say a pound of coffee takes 1 hour of labor to produce. The people producing it in Ethiopia are being paid $1 an hour to produce it. A capitalist from the Imperial Core buys that pound of coffee for $2, ships it to the Core for another $1, and sells it for $5.

The capitalist makes $2 and the buyer gets a pound of coffee for $5. Now imagine if the worker in Ethiopia is being paid $12 an hour. The capitalist cannot buy a pound of coffee for anything less than $12. After $1 shipping and his $2 cut (assuming he does not inflate his cut because he’s taking a percentage of the sale), the pound of coffee is now $15 to the buyer.

The buyer does not have the Ethiopian worker “working for them” in the strictest sense, but the buyer does benefit from getting their pound of coffee for 1/3 the price they would otherwise have to pay.

This is why Marxists say that the current living standards of the so-called First World are being propped up by the economic exploitation of the global south, even if the residents of the First World are not directly engaging in colonialism in the pith helmet and whips sense.

24 cans of soda probably embodies a lot more than 1 hour total work to create for a lot of people. Planting and harvesting the coca, mining the bauxite ore and refining it into aluminum, etc etc. The main reason that much cola is available to you at that price is that the coca and aluminum probably come from somewhere where workers get paid a lot less than $12/hr.

I’m all for people being paid more, but in a just and equitable world a case of soda would probably cost more than it does now.

Trading card boosters are literally analogue loot boxes targeted at children and for some reason everyone is just fine with them.

it beats Reddit’s full time coverage of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

it beats Reddit’s full time coverage of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

I used to do a regular donation ($5 a month or something) but then I found out Jimmy Wales (who was a figurehead of the site at that point) was a weird Ayn Rand libertarian and stopped.

Big advertising budgets that are funded from the value alienated from exploited workers and consumers. Information asymmetry in the marketplace means that even if you make a superior product at a lower price, you could still be outcompeted by an expensive inferior product if more people know about that worse product and don’t know about your product.

That’s for most basic products anyway. Luxury products like bags and clothes are almost all marketing since the cost to create them is so low compared to their sales price. People buy them because of perceptions created by marketing and not any inherent value in the product itself.

India feels like the country equivalent of Elon Musk when it comes to announcements. They always announce some incredible goal (man on Mars, Superpower 2020, whatever) lap up all the good vibes of that announcement, and then drop the ball on implementation. Then they quietly shift the deadline to 5 years later and make a new announcement.