bad-joke

You may find community organizing rewarding. Depending on your comfort level, you can try things like: - Volunteer work - Participating in city/town board/council meetings - Direct action (eg the TN chapter of the DSA replaced tail lights for free, since broken tail lights are the most common reason for minorities getting pulled over) - Canvassing for candidates, referendums, etc. - Solidarity actions (eg joining strike members on the picket line)

If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.

Note: Be very careful /how/ you invoke your right to counsel in the US:

> And when a suspect in an interrogation told detectives to "just give me a lawyer dog," the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a "lawyer dog," and not invoking his constitutional right to counsel.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...

> which helps technological change, which leads to a more efficient economy

You made a leap of logic here. The technological innovations in finance directly contributed to a more volatile economy that crashed and inflicted massive losses on huge swaths of the global population, many of whom never recovered.

The first citation on the page[1] mentions researcher Markus Krajewski who reviewed Phoebus records and concluded "It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales [...] Economics, not physics."

Cursory searches of Markus Krajewski yield an IEEE Spectrum article[2] with further references to his work:

> The 2010 documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy explores the Phoebus cartel as an early example of planned obsolescence and includes interviews with Markus Krajewski. For more on the cartel and planned obsolescence, see the author’s "Fehler-Planungen. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der industriellen Obsoleszenz," in Technikgeschichte, vol. 81, No. 1, p. 91–114, 2014, and "Vom Krieg des Lichtes zur Geschichte von Glühlampenkartellen," in Das Glühbirnenbuch, edited by Peter Berz, Helmut Höge, and Krajewski (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).

Hope this helps!

[1]https://outline.com/JYvASt [2]https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t...

That confused me too. Internet Archive has earliest at 10/17/2019[1] and the page contains a link[2] to the Sudo team security alert on 10/14/2019.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191017233613/https://resources... [2] https://www.sudo.ws/alerts/minus_1_uid.html

That 401k isn't going to be very useful if you can't afford healthcare.

The modern drug war was designed to be a cudgel aimed at political enemies, not a public health effort. Quoth Nixon's advisor John Ehrlichman:

> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

I'm not talking about price lists for procedures, I'm talking about price lists for deductibles and premiums on health insurance plans.

Visit healthcare.gov and navigate to your state marketplace. They typically provide a detailed price comparison based on several adjustable factors (expected income, expected visits, number of medications, etc).

If readily available and detailed price comparison tools haven't stopped health insurance deductibles from tripling in the past year[1], why should we expect price comparison tools at the point of healthcare service to reduce costs?

[1]https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-health-insurance-...

Price lists and comparisons are available for health insurance plans. That hasn't stopped premiums and deductibles from rising to the point of popular furor.

Hundreds of people applied to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Not if you've installed Linux on it to run Folding@home!

> If instead of almost 8 billion humans there were 4 billions we wouldn't be in this mess either.

I'm not sure your logic follows. The US outputs roughly 13% of global CO2 emissions despite having 4% of the world population.

If the ratio of population to CO2 output was scaled in this case, 7.5 billion US citizens would output 118,000 Mt of CO2 per year. Halving that (to less than 4 billion humans) would be 59,000 Mt of CO2 per year, and the current global output is 37,000 Mt per year.

To counter your anecdote, cyclist deaths have risen lately in NYC to the point of public protest:

> Aster Ryan, 25, of Wingate, said “this summer has felt especially dangerous.” In addition to the three cycling deaths that took place within a week, Ryan said she was hit while riding her bike a little more than a week ago on Dean Street, and also watched another rider get hit by an opening car door recently.

https://www.amny.com/transit/cyclist-die-in-washington-squar...

Perfect example. The Europeans moved on the Americas before they understood disease pathology, resulting in the deaths of up to 90% of the indigenous population.

The executives are rewarded lavishly for owning the company. They should receive equally lavish punishment when that company inflicts damage.

> If the subsidy were eliminated and insurance untied to employer you would have a huge step in the direction of unleashing market forces.

That's exactly how things were in the 1930s. Healthcare was unaffordable to the degree of public outcry, which is why universal healthcare legislation was introduced repeatedly and stifled by the AMA every time. In fact, early health insurance programs were designed to bypass pay-as-you-go medical fees because they weren't meeting the needs of the hospital or patients. It wasn't a tenable system.

It seems we're regressing.

Our society is not geared towards sustainability. It rewards overproduction and overconsumption and harshly punishes those who fail to outcompete their neighbors on these terms.

Given these constraints, what provides a greater return on your investment of time and energy? Carving out your own sustainable lifestyle within a system geared towards suppressing your efforts, or getting involved in political organizing to change the system?

> Just that was the only way to access music back then?

It wasn't the only way to access music back then. You had recorded media and live music.

I'm not actually from around that time but I've been playing around with a Walkman recently. For me it started as retro foppery but I noticed a few distinct differences:

- You're not in total control of the radio. You can pick the station you like but you can't reorder the playlist, select specific tracks, rewind, or repeat anything. This evokes a feeling of surrender, of "letting go." While listening to the radio, you're freed from the responsibility of curating your own collection and selecting the best music for the occasion.

- Much more than the targeted algorithms of services like Spotify, you're at the mercy of the DJ. Compared to the algorithm, there's absolutely more of a connection there. If you enjoy what's on the radio, then you're sharing that enjoyment with the DJ. It's a direct analog precursor to the "space of flows," a pleasurable social bond formed between two people who don't share physical space or even traditional spoken word conversation.

- You're off the grid. The radio doesn't track your favorite artists or your location. It doesn't correlate your listening habits with your recent purchases. This makes the experience feel more elective. When you can decide to turn something on, that means you can decide to turn it off. It's different from our always-on, always-connected everyday experience.

- The endless sea of digital media sometimes induces analysis paralysis. The bigger your MP3 library, the more mental resources you must dedicate to mentally searching for the music most appropriate to your mood and surroundings. Narrowing your selection to a handful of radio stations, each one playing only a single song at a time until it ends, frees up a lot of mental resources.

- Paradoxically, being exposed to music you don't like actually refines your taste. Further, suffering through a bad song on the radio heightens your anticipation of the next song, and if you end up enjoying the next song it's a huge, satisfying relief. Compared to Spotify where you can skip past an unsatisfying song, or be reasonably sure the next song will be more to your liking based on whether you just skipped, the emotional experience is more varied and granular. It's more exciting. It's also closer to reality: contrary to what the countless ads and offers claim, you can't always get what you want and you won't always be satisfied. Annoyance, boredom, dissatisfaction, and disappointment are going to find you eventually. There's nothing better for practicing acceptance of life's unpleasant, unskippable moments than suffering through a terrible song on the radio.

Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail. That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work.

If you're worried about the well-being of these people or believe their service is a public good that should exist regardless of profitability on the market, you should allocate public funding for them.

Medication, exercise, and mindfulness meditation were game changers for me.

Meditation was effective because it sharpened my ability to detect when I lost focus and course-correct. With daily practice, this habit (mind wanders -> notice mind wandering -> gently redirect focus back to original intent) became automatic. I was surprised to notice myself "waking up" and clicking back into place over and over throughout the day, whereas before meditation I seemed to "wake up" only at the end of the day with nothing done.

At work I listen to ambient music and use Pomodoros to pace myself. I also asked my supervisor to start requesting daily status updates on my projects. Without the extra accountability, I let things slide off the radar too easily.

It's difficult sometimes. Russell Barkley likens these habits/calendars/medications as a sort of prosthesis. That framing helps me to accept these things as one part of a unique life experience instead of a debilitating setback.

It's surprising in light of the prevailing idea that markets enforce competition towards the lowest price. This idea forms the basis of the claim that market-driven healthcare benefits consumers by lowering costs.

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that co-ops are supposedly more profitable than autocratic workplaces. Co-ops still compete in the marketplace but they distribute ownership and profit among the workers in a democratic fashion, typically on the basis of their contribution.

The parent comment asked how Amazon could stop systematically oppressing their workers, not how workers could stop being the targets of systematic oppression. Amazon could accomplish this goal by distributing corporate ownership among the workers and giving them a democratic platform to make decisions about their workplace in an egalitarian way.

> In your view, what should Amazon do to not systemically oppress the working class?

Convert itself into a co-op:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Definition_...

> Otherwise the most vulnerable among us will just get pushed further to the fringes.

The most vulnerable among us? Like the homeless?

Amazon suspended part of its expansion plans in Seattle pending the outcome of a City Council vote on a new tax on large employers that would have funded programs aimed at providing affordable housing and helping the homeless[1].

Under pressure from Amazon, the city repealed the tax[2].

[1]http://fortune.com/2018/05/03/amazon-seattle-building-homele... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/12/seatt...

> The reality of the business world today is that employment is at-will. There's nothing stopping employers doing the things described in this article. So I offered up a way that people I know have managed to improve their career outcomes.

Here's a way to improve career outcomes: roll back at-will employment laws and give labor more leverage in negotiations with management.

> 1) Neurogenesis halts in your early 20s. After that, no new neurons for you, sorry. Although the connections may change.

This statement as written is almost total nonsense. A cursory internet search yields abundant studies on adult neurogenesis. Even small amounts of cardiovascular exercise increase brain volume, stimulate neural growth, and create synaptic connections in adults well into old age.

At best, one could claim that neuron growth slows as we age, but it absolutely doesn't halt.

> Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.

Well that really depends on a) whether someone (including you) wants or needs ditches (farming irrigation? undertaker? dog hiding bone?) and b) the amount of time required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. If someone really wants a ton of ditches, and you can dig faster and deeper than anyone else, is your labor more valuable? As programmers we should hope so.

I don't mean to sidetrack the conversation but let's not make sweeping statements of fact without thinking about them!

I tend to "think" in Logo. Often this comes down to shouting "forward" at slow pedestrians but thankfully my family has learned to keep me away from the reptile exhibit at the local zoo (I have been ejected several times).

It's really quite stunning how many people have difficulty thinking of things in terms of birds and turtles.

1. The frustration you're experiencing is normal. Even if you switched to another field where you had an easier time at first, you'd eventually encounter the same frustration at a certain point.

2. You will get better with practice.

3. Nobody is born knowing how to code. It's fairly absurd to imagine Nature carefully selecting the ability to configure Dockerfiles. There may be genetic markers for neurobiological traits that accelerate learning in certain fields, but this acceleration is only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within a lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline. If you really want to code (whether out of personal interest, financial interest, or some other motivation), you can do it as long as you practice correctly and put in the time.

4. Practicing correctly is important. I'd recommend the "Learning How to Learn" course. I personally keep this quote taped to my computer:

"The most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors."

From here:

https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

Relatively speaking, the majority of people have the capability to do almost anything. It's only a matter of time and resources.

Natural abilities and genetics can accelerate the learning process, yes, but accelerated mastery is really only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within your lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline.

What I'm saying here is that artists can probably develop software just as well as anyone else here if they're willing to put in the time and resources.