Karu 🐲

Some time ago, I met an HR person at my job. She wasn’t actually part of the workplace HR team, rather, she was more like a classmate of mine, but she had worked as HR in the past and wanted to continue to do so in the future. She was kind and polite, so I never had any beef with her, but she consistently had the shittiest, most inhumane takes on how to manage and interact with people I had seen in a while lol.

Meeting her made me arrive at the conclusion that you just said. Empathetic people that get into HR with the idea of helping make the world a better place would eventually resign or, at least, be very ineffective as HR. The only people capable of staying in HR for a long time are sociopaths who don’t mind lying and being obtuse in job offers, and ruining someone’s life so their boss can squeeze a couple of extra cents. The profession itself only serves to make companies more ruthless and adds nothing of value to the world.

Just chiming in to say that this is the kind of thing on Lemmy where you just know that OP is from the US, even if they don’t state it directly. Most electoral democracies have a lot more than two options.

In my country, the current Parliament formation is representing 11 distinct parties, including those that only get like one seat. The electoral race always feature like 5 major parties and then some, and they are definitely not the same 5 parties from 40 years ago. It always baffles to think about how the US has only ever been governed by either one of the same two parties, and I find kinda sad that third parties aren’t viable there.

I find kind of funny when a Lemmy user from the US attempts to be generic but their assumptions that the US is the norm are very telling. I don’t think it’s ill-intended or evil or anything, but it’s still funny, and I see it often in here.

I mean, he did recreate a cataclysmic event in the process, and the projected crisis was bound to happen in 1000 years… One can never be too prepared I guess.

What is that even trying to say? That there is such thing as going too far when fighting the energy crisis? lol

Formally, “hubiera”/“hubiese” is only used within subclauses, i.e «si lo hubiera visto, habría hecho algo» etc. They never stand as the only verb and don’t appear in simple clauses. You can’t say “hubiera hecho algo”, it’s “habría hecho algo”. Here, the subjunctive (hubiera) is doing the same job as “were” in english, and the conditional (habría) is equivalent to “would”: «if I were luckier, it would have worked out». This is the case with subjunctives in general, they mostly only ever appear in subclauses other than very specific exceptions (such as negative imperative or vestigial expressions like «Dios quiera que…»). The trick is learning which subclauses use indicative and which use subjunctive :)

Informally, though, natives will tell you that it doesn’t matter because it truly doesn’t. The formula “if (subjunctive) then (subjunctive)” is understood by everybody with the same meaning as “if (subjunctive) then (conditional)”, and you can even use it in formal settings such as when talking to your boss, at least in Spain.

Source: Am native, from Spain. Good luck with the language learning!

For me, it changes every few days.

Right now, it’s “Like Chimeras” from the Cassette Beasts soundtrack. Well, to be honest, I’ve got a bunch of songs from the game stuck in my head, but my brain keeps ending up on that one always.

And all I can say is this:

No, you fuck off. “People liking something that they do not” is obviously not what prompted OP to claim astroturfing.

It probably has to do with how far this thread, and YTPremium conversations in general, are deviating from the average conversation on Lemmy. Stances on convenience, privacy, and blocking ads are harshly different in this context compared to any other thread about anything else. I mean, this is the userbase that will umpromptedly talk about the benefits of using Linux, Firefox, uBO and SearX because of privacy concerns in almost every other thread.

And this is happening in Google’s favor, no less, a company that has shown time and again to not be above things like this.

In fact, why does YTPremium discourse keep coming back? Why not the other million premium subscriptions? Why do we not keep talking about Twitch Prime, which is in a similar situation? Why are the alleged lurkers so eager to stop their lurking and talk about all the benefits of YTPremium every once in a while?

There may be many reasons for this, both assuming honesty and otherwise, but one of the possibilities is certainly that an astroturf campaign may be going on at the moment. If, in addition to this, @Sheeple 's claim that many of the accounts supporting YTPremium are weeks old (tbh I don’t care enough to check if this is true), then it is, with all probability, astroturfing.

Or maybe it’s not, and everyone here is just sharing sincere opinions that just happen to align a little too well with YouTube’s own marketing campaign. But you got to understand that, given all these factors, at the very least it’s sus as fuck.

Not to be rude, but I’m struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?

I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to “if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads”?? what??? Also, what’s with comparing adblocking to stealing???

My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won’t be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don’t consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.

“But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!” I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is –almost– the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren’t any options. But I will resist Google’s many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.

That said, it’s really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don’t understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won’t see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.

Is the kanji the name of the period the year belongs to or something? That looks interesting. Where can I find out more?

It’s possible that it eventually ends capitalism, or at the very least forces it to reform significantly.

Consider that the most basic way a company can obtain profit is by extracting as much surplus value as they possibly can, i.e spending less and earning more. Extracting high surplus value from human workers is easy, because a salary doesn’t really depend on the intrinsic value of the service a worker is providing, but rather it’s tied to the price of that job position in the market. Theoretically, employers can all agree and offer lower salaries for the same jobs if the situation demands it. You can always “negotiate” a lower salary with a human worker, and they will accept because any amount of money is better than no money. Machines are different. They don’t need a salary, but they do carry a maintenance cost, and you cannot negotiate with that. If you don’t cover the maintenance costs, the machine will outright not do its job, and no amount of threats will change that. You can always optimize a machine, replace it with a better one, etc. but the rate at which machines get optimized is slower than the rate at which salaries can decrease or even become stagnant in the face of inflation. So it’s a lot harder to extract surplus value from machines than it is from human workers.

Historically, machines helped cement a wealth gap. If there was a job that required some specialization and therefore had a somewhat solid salary, machines would split it into a “lesser” job that many more people can do (i.e just ensuring the machine is doing its job), driving down salaries and therefore their purchasing power, and a specialized job (i.e creating or maintaining the machine), which much less people can access, whose salaries have remained high.

So far, machines haven’t really replaced human workforce, but they have helped cement an underclass with little purchasing power. This time, the whole schtick with AI is that it will be able to, supposedly, eventually replace specialist jobs. If AI does deliver on that promise, we’ll get stuck with a wealth distribution where a majority of the working class has little purchasing power to do anything. Since working class is also the majority of the population, companies won’t really be able to sell anything because no one will be able to buy anything. You cannot sustain an economic model that impoverishes the same demography it leeches off of.

But there is a catch: All companies have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI which can replace specialist jobs. Having those would give them a huge advantage for them in the market. AI doesn’t demand good working conditions, they don’t undermine other employees’ loyalty by unionizing, they are generally cheaper and more reliable than human workers, etc. which sounds all fine and dandy until you realize that it’s also those human workers the ones buying your products and services. AI has, by definition, a null purchasing power. So, companies individually have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI, but when all companies have access to it… no company will be sustainable anymore.

Of course, it’s all contingent on AI ever getting that far, which at the moment I’m not sure it’s even possible, but tech nerds sure love to promise it is. Personally, I’m hopeful that we will eventually organize society in a way where machines are doing the dirty work while I get to lead a meaningful life and engage in jobs I’m actively interested in, rather than just to get by. This is one of the possible paths to that society. Unfortunately, it also means that, for the working class, it will get worse before it gets better.

Besides what you have already been told, there already was war in both Ukraine and Israel. Ukraine’s open military conflict with Russia has been active since at least 2014, and Israel has been in conflict with Palestine and neighbours since its foundation following WW2.

Wesern media not covering them until it was relevant to the US national interests and them not happening are entirely different things.

I didn’t know about Nostr, and honestly, thank you for letting me know. I find the idea behind the protocol to be pretty interesting, but wouldn’t use it myself. I’m not keen on the idea of removing moderation altogether.

However, I do think that it’s about time we rethink how moderation works on the Internet, and the fediverse should be a good place to start doing so. Perhaps my biggest gripe with the fediverse is that moderation works exactly the same as in corporate social media. Right now, moderators are picked under discretion of whatever the criteria of the admin are, and they are not subject to “the will of the people” so to speak. If a mod or admin acts in bad faith, the only recourse for the rest of the users is to leave, and maybe setup your own instance if you have the technical know-how. And while corporate media admins are somewhat constrained by investors, fediverse admins don’t have to respond to anyone. Which is better than being bound by investors, but here, admins can and do take harsh decisions on a whim without having to justify anything to anyone. Which is honestly not a good thing.

So, while I imagined the fediverse as some network of interconnected small, self-managed communes, what we actually have is a network of petty fiefdoms, some of which do listen to their users even though they are under no obligation to do so, and others outright don’t. I don’t mean to say that centralized services are better at this, but in the end I’m having some of the same problems regarding arbitrariness of moderation and admin decisions here that I had on Reddit and Twitter.

I see the fediverse as the future of social media, but not in its current form. The way it currently works keeps us bound to drama and petty feuds between admins of instances, and that is unavoidable while large fedi platforms are hosted by single people or very small groups of people. Perhaps the way that this could be avoided would be by using a protocol that enforces decentralization of hosting, like Nostr does. I imagine it would work sort of like a torrent, where we are all sharing and hosting the instance or the communities we use, whether completely or only partially. Or perhaps an instance is made out of multiple relays which are hosted separately. This way, we wouldn’t have issues such as admins unilaterally defederating instances because of a disagreement or stuff like that, since we’d all be admins in a way.

I wouldn’t want to do away with moderation, but decisions such as who gets to be moderator, who gets to keep being moderator, and who we ban, fed with or defed from, is consulted via democratic process enforced by design. Otherwise, it’s not going to be meaningfully different from centralized media once the big instances become big enough.

I’m missing r/vexillologycriclejerk. Sure, it always was the same joke for like a month, but it used to be one of the highlights of my daily Reddit experience.

A Lemmy post showing a Mastodon toot covtaining a Bluesky post screenshot

Marvelous