I guess it’s not premium enough.
It reminds me of Unlimited data mobile services in which the data is not turned off or surcharged but throttled to a crawl after a limited time. We’ve not since been able to get a straight answer from any of the major telecom providers.
Marx predicts enshittification in Das Kapital
Racoon is what I came to after Liftoff died.
Take this object, [new Lemmy client app] but beware it carries a terrible curse…
…But it comes with a free Frogurt!
A company spokesperson said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”
Wells Fargo has been notoriously inconsistent.
I’m going to assume the workers were being over-monitored, and disallowed from normal human activity until this is specifically ruled out by additional reports.
When a company is abusive and toxic to the point workers turn to surveillance evasion, it not only ruins that job, but makes the employee wary of future jobs. It causes social harm.
Yes, it is typical, but requiring employees to hand over personal Facebook account passwords used to be typical until the requirement was outlawed. Employers often act in bad faith, and workers commonly have to tolerate it. So distrust of companies, and of Wells Fargo in particular, is well earned.
This actually may be a good part of a cyberpunk dystopia story:
A desperate loner programmer laces their PDF résumé with the usual batch of AI exploits to get them upsorted. But this time, it includes the parabolic curve batch a fence friend just won in friday night poker when betting got wild.
When the company’s bleeding edge HR AI reads the PCB prompt, our coder is put on the top of the must-hire list. Less one.
As per policy in the company. Short-listers are then run through the unofficial openings list (enforcers, launderers, evidence cleaning, culinary accounting, peer diplomacy, etc.) and our coder ends up on top of the list, less one, for every single position.
So, meanwhile, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to make offerings to certain hedge funds for pushing potential merger. If the merger fails, the company will go bankrupted and get Toys-R-Us’d, and a particular investor who likes to go all Putin on failed minions will choose some of the executive management to make into cautionary examples.
And then there’s a couple of high-risk lawsuits which are keeping all the loyalist staff crunching to bury evidence and silencing witnesses the activites of which are keeping them away from their official duties, meaning the executives are going without their handlers keeping them from doing stupid shit.
The HR lady doesn’t usually do interviews for special hires. Normally these are supposed to be closely vetted by high-ranking actual human being officers, but all upper management are either overworked or beyond being asked. The nature of the job in question is on a need to know basis, and neither interviewer nor interviewee need to know (allegedly).
Our lowly coder completly wows her with their tired, no-nonsense, street-level candor in contrast to years of corporate-culture double-speak. They get the job. But it is not the job for which they applied in the first place. Though the salary(!) is high and the benefits(!!) are conspicuously swanky.
It’s probably better to not ask too many questions yet.
Law enforcement based on the Peelian principles is not a tennable thing. Sure, every US beat officer will learn it in training but they also learn the public is the enemy, which has been the way of things for over a century.
if we could imagine a new age of policing, it would involve much less enforcement and much more prevention, mostly disincentivising people from engaging in desperation crime. Heck, we might even end retributive sentencing for a more restorative system.
If we dropped our current law enforcement – the whole thing – and turned to investigating and intercepting elite deviance (white collar crime) we would save more lives, prevent more damage and more cost by orders of magnitude. Not that law enforcement actually does much to reduce crime.
I can’t speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn’t. Healthy adults just can’t couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to widdle whittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,
I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn’t sleep always; sometimes I’d lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn’t lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren’t actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you’re not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
Historically there have been several instances of anarcho-communist organizations and social movements flourishing.
Most of them were sabotaged by plutocrat agents invoking violence or mischief. Often just giving an angry militants in the region some materiel support and bad intel.
Imagine seige engines.
Software Engineers and UX/UI Designers had a code of ethics. Digital Research specifically created a code of ethics. (I think it was Gary Kildall who did it.) The code of ethics recommended companies that make OSes should stay separate from companies that make applications. It was Bill fuck-the-community-I-want-money Gates that ignored all that stuff in order to seek market domination (and monopoly power).
A combination of regulatory pressure, hackers, and enshittification from within has done a lot to keep Big Mike from seizing the whole market, but it’s gotten pretty brutal multiple times in the last two-plus decades.
Wait. this is Microsoft.
I have a long relationship with Microsoft and its marketing shenanigans.
In fact, they’ve specifically done shit like this before.
Spooky that it still didn’t get the memo (the power-users always report and circumvent their antics, and they lose sales).
The reason we have time theft as a marketing term is because shareholders and upper management feel entitled to your poop time. Meanwhile wage theft is a real issue that costs our workforce billions.
Our plutocrats like to think based on their feels and pay for content that affirms their worldview. Money can literally make you stupid.
Um, law enforcement comes to mind.
Not to say PTSD and unhealthy coping problems aren’t a valod concern, but if we’re going to try to reduce jobs based on how taxing they are on the human psyche, there are a number of fields that are respected that also qualify.
Off the top of my head, schoolteacher and service industry worker. Cooks amd wait staff.
We don’t own things anymore.
Apparently in the time of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette had a play farm where servants would take, clean and replace chicken eggs under the hens so Marie Antoinette could gather them later. Many nobles in France had such play farms. The pond story reminds me of this tidbit.
We know the Qu’ils mangent de la brioche scandal was fabricated (though a lie used to turn opinions against the royal family). In truth it was the failure pf Church and King in the Estates-General to read the room and then the King’s failed effort to escape France that sealed the Queen’s fate in the Place de la Révolution.
Queen Marie Antoinette was by far not the worst of spoiled nobles, just in way over her head.
80% of Americans deal with precarity. Food precarity, rent precarity, job precarity, family precarity, health precarity.
So a lot of us are feeling the discontent.
But we lefties arent used to planning violent protest (say sabotage and mischief. We’d rather not actually kill anyone.)
One possibility is the right-wing doing some sparking. A group of militant extremist reactionaries might load up and massacre a venue to get the civil war started.
Or the government could pass some laws resulting in mass incarcerations of non-violent offenders (say abortion seekers or LGBT+). Once that starts turning into capital punishment of young women protests might turn into arson of police and state facilities. We saw a bit of this with Iran with the Mahsa Amini protests or in 2020 US with the George Floyd protests.
In 2023 we should be at a point where there is actual technique to management, and it’s not just a position where a department leader gets to harrass their crew and make the workplace toxic.
A manager’s duty is to know their crew and what keeps their morale and productivity high, whether that’s letting them text with their kids all day or letting them keep tabs on the Ravens game. People like to be on a team that knocks out task bullet points and reaches goals. They don’t like to be on a team where they have to escape the notice of their managers while trying to complete tasks.
The US has treated upper management and shareholders like aristocracy for so long that workplaces have gone toxic, that office and administration has to babysit bosses who behave like sex-starved pissed-off teenagers and don’t even have a coherent vision for their company. (Case in point, Elon Musk)
You are not a good manager if your crew or HR or admin has to handle you like a drunken politician.
Huh. I do not have a bitlocker account.
Also, the whole point of the TPM (when I looked it up) was to not tell anyone, including Microsoft your decryption key. It’s so the user has ten chances to enter a short PIN or password and then it unlocks the device. That way not even Microsoft or the police can unlock the device without a tunnelling electron microscope with which to crack the TPM.
That way, you see, getting into a device is expensive and something law enforcement would not be tempted to do without an ironclad warrant and maybe a national security reason.
That Microsoft can ask TPMs to break their T makes them not T-worthy enough to be called a TPM. More like a Microsoft Obedience Chip.
1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!
1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.
2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.
2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.
Not our first rodeo.