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  • Isn't this the origin of the police?

  • That's the thing, you correctly see the difference in available time after work. That difference stacks over time. Having read this or that makes you understand terminology, patterns, builds confidence and over time that marginal extra time I have had has made it possible for me to grok a manual in 15 minutes but my father who hasn't had that time takes 45 minutes from his shorter available time. Then there's all the modifying details around kids or no kids, how much more hours the lower parts of the working class have to do to pay rent today vs earlier and so on and so forth. Everyone really but it's just much worse for the lower sections.

    And then there's the problem of availability of products without extensive research. There's few brands owned by few large corpos that spend a lot pushing them left front and center on their digital platforms. That increases significanty the amount of work anyone has to do to avoid surveillance in this case. And as you understand, increasing the amount of work, increases the amount of time, and there's hard cutoffs which lead to the work not being done, which leads to the marketing campaigns succeeding in getting dad to buy a Ring. These people study, research and know well how to get people who seemingly have choices to choose their product 8 out of 10 times. Especially when transacting via their digital platform.

    Which is why we're fighting a losing game if we rely on the individual when they're standing against the corporation which acts as a large collective with collective resources aligned to achieve their goals. This is why individualism is profitable and therefore encouraged. Consumers, employees have to also act as a collective which pools their resources like time, expertise to counteract this. E.g. by having people, supported by the normies, digest, analyse and spit out the results in trivial form (when posaible) that also takes very little time for everyone else to grok, so they make the right decision. Example that come to mind is Consumer Reports.

  • Always has been and it falls on the ones that aren't defeated by the pamphlet to help the rest, since the labour of the rest allows the standard of life pamphlet interpreters enjoy. 😂

  • Of course it will work. But it has to also do a publicly-owned distribution centre/network. Loblaw now owns a significant part the distribution side and independent grocers end up buying from Loblaw. This is a great hack that lets Loblaw say their retail margins aren't that high, while making money before the products even enter the retail side. And of course it allows them to make money from smaller competitors.

  • Wages have to rise for the market economy with positive baseline inflation level to not collapse. You want others' wages to also go up, not public employees' wages to not go up. Someone else's wage going up creates negotiating leverage for the rest to demand higher wage too. Most wages have little to do with skill or job difficulty and a lot to do with specific market conditions and leverages that people or firms use to drive wages up or down. And while you talk about certain public employees getting raises, you don't consider the wage freezes for tens of thousands of nurses in Ontario that lasted many, many years and were only removed after a long legal fight. So things aren't always good in the public sector and in fact there are more than a few jobs that are better paid in the private sector.

    Public corporations are no different than private corporations in that they take money from people and they pay people to do work. Sure they take more of their income from taxes than Loblaw or TD, but that's not fundamentally different than the subscriptions, commissions and prices you pay for things you generaly can't afford not to pay. Of course most large private corporations also get paid from taxes in some part. But that's not the interesting bit. People lower than the very top of the income scale spend most of their wages in their local economy. That's the income of most local busenesses and the wages of their neighbours. Money collected from the profit margin of Loblaw disappears from the local economy of the store and it gets distributed to few at the very top of the income scale who own Loblaw. It disappears from the local economy geographically and functionally. It is not available to fund any other local business and labour. Of course thats even worse with Walmart where the money doesn't even stay in Canada. With this framework in mind, even if the prices of a public grocer are the same as Loblaw, the revenue would be flowing through higher wages of employees into the local buisness owners and their employees. This is why the two are not the same and why you might want a well paying public grocer over a Loblaw's.

    Finally, at least in Ontario, the public LCBO stores are some of the best run retail stores and they're a joy to be in. Interacting with their staff is typically great.

  • Say no to sweet pickles, choose full sour salted! Should be available by Moishe's at Costco. Possibly in the refrigerated section. 😄

  • Likely. The joke about the bird in cow shit applies though. Not everyone who shits on you means you harm and not everyone who pulls you out of the shit means you good.

  • But this maybe implies that there's a possibility to change this behaviour. Which is infeasible. For many of the same reasons why we don't have people specialize in more than a couple of areas.If you're not implying that and you're just saying that in vacuum, then yeah sure. That said it's not the only reaaon why things suck more and changing this behaviour is not the only way to not have things suck, For example a government in a more democratic system might serve its citizens more than its corporations and ban these practices.

  • No need. This isn't formal logic class. Knowing someone's position and track record on an issue is a useful fact in judging the hypothetical slop they have produced on a different day. It's not deductively valid, and therefore it's not infalliable, but it doesn't need to be.

    To be clear I'm saying this in general. I'm not judging the information from the article.

  • What you're saying makes me think you aren't aware of the technical knowledge of your typical smart doorbell or cam user, which is basically little to none.

  • Yeah. It's crazy. I would choose neither because I can DIY something secure but for non-technical folks in North America today, the Chinese gov't having your video is safer than a private US corporation. I didn't imagone I could make this judgement back in 2022.

  • In all likelyhood the adversary isn't taking my apartment. It's taking the factories I don't own. Maybe working conditions would be worse afterwards. Maybe they'd better. Gotta check who's invading.

  • Seems like stillbirth to me.

  • Yeah, which is why I prefer it to any of the much less studied alternatives, if I have to use artificial sweetener. It's funny how that works.

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