The bosses win if winning is continuing to manage the company poorly.

The shareholders lose since cruel treatment reduces productivity and weakens profit margins. It depends on how seriously the business controllers want to actually do a capitalism and create a product and turn a profit.

In actuality, yes, their job is to maximize productivity for the dollar spent, hence maximizing profits, and the best way to do that for most job pools is by improving the QoL of the workforce.

They likely do value control over productivity, but that’s not the job of upper management. A lot of jobs (the bullshit jobs ) are to fulfill a personal need for an entourage, the illusion of business activity. That is a – human – trait.

Our c-suite execs might believe it controlling the workforce is their job, though, if they’re inadequately educated about the current state of the art. Hopefully, their AI replacements will be more current and won’t be interfered with by the BoD or shareholders.

Disappointed this is a parody.

There are actual AI-based services to replace company upper management, and take it seriously, since AI in its current iteration is strong enough to manage companies even when its art is quotidian.

Mr. Whipple’s days are actually numbered.

Crunching does not work!

Instead, it reduces productivity to a fraction (often 10% of normal), countering any time added.

You want to improve your productivity, you make your workers happy. Make sure they can eat, have good healthcare, have adequate family life, etc.

We now have studies that counter the crunching myths and time theft myths.

Because upper management is less checked, they make a lot of human choices, such as keeping a lot of bullshit job positions open as garden hermits (there for scenery, to look busy).

AI tasked with actually increasing profits may run the business better than their human counterparts.

This was the ironic outcome of the Twilight Zone episode The Brain Center at Whipple’s ( @WP ): After the labor was replaced by automation, the upper management was easily so replaced.

FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.

This so tracks.

All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you’re trying to do. Here’s an allowance for expenses!

I use my context menu key as the chording key to control any keyboard macro profiles, so that I can terminate, reload, summon for editing or summon a help file as needed.

There are VPNs that operate in stealth mode so they don’t look like VPN traffic as they’re being used.

Still illegal, but not detectable. No riskier than being a political activist antagonistic to the state.

I thought phrenology was still a science at the time of the German Reich, only made defunct later. Now I have my doubts.

Social darwinism was disproven in the 1900s and supply-side economics died in the 19th century so it’s not like pseudoscience does not spring up like weeds when rich people want to sponsor it.

It makes more sense in response to our (allegedly) meritocratic overlords who insist:

• I don’t take personal responsibility
• I have a preponderant sense of entitlement
• I do not respect my betters
• I do not bootstrap myself
• I do not carry my own administrative burden

I’d happy to retroactively cease existing so that I am not judged.

In the US, internet piracy is not a crime, but a civil infraction. And yes, our media overlords have been trying to make it a crime for decades.

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Copyright maximalists pretty consistently are glad to pirate stuff that isn’t theirs when it is suddenly expedient to do so.

As with when the studios and labels push for legal anti-piracy measures, I call shenanigans.

This is not our first rodeo: when a ten-year-old girl downloads the latest release in her favorite literary series because she’s too poor, and we no longer support our libraries to have current selections, no-one is going to want to prosecute the little girl who wants to read.

Well, maybe some billionaires might, but the media would have a field day with it.

Regicide.

A feline queen reigns over my apartment complex. It’s a fair regime.

The seas of purple / red / gold juxtaposed really does put into perspective the contrived sycophancy and camaraderie that comes with spectator sports. Artificial unity for its own sake, rather than for a common principle or a common goal.

It’s community with artificial colors and flavoring.

This all could backfire on the advertisers hard, especially with some well-placed counter-advertising.

I’m pretty sure (not absolutely) this has appeared in court and even click-wrap licenses, where one clicks to agree to a license with a higher word count than King Lear are not valid due to the end user high administrative burden (reading 20K+ words in the middle of a software install).

There was a period in the 1980s where end users automatically were assumed to agree to licensing, but also licenses were extremely lenient and allowed unlimited use by the licensee without any data access rights by the providing company. 21st century licenses are much more complicated and encroach a lot more on end-user privacy.

It doesn’t take AI analytics to figure out I’m as far left as they get and come pre-radicalized. I’m the ANTIFA overlord they’re looking for.

I’ve practically invited them to breach my door.

This was discovered in the US shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown thanks to The Great Resignation when furloughed workers took to hobbies during lockdown and some of them found ones lucrative enough they decided to quit their (often toxic) jobs.

In fact, there’s been a strong effort by both principal political parties and the ownership class to memory-hole what happened 2020-2022 in which ordinary people were given enough material support to define for themselves their societal role, rather than having it defined for them by major commercial interests (who want them as cheap labor).

This is also how an unconditional socialized or community-centered system would work. (We might even call them socialism or communism if those were not the worst of all slurs in the United States). People can couch-potato and binge-watch TV for about two weeks before cabin fever sets in and they either start fixing and building. Those of us (like me) who can couch potato for longer than that suffer from mental illness (and in my case, have been diagnosed since my early twenties). I stayed in bed for nine months, often without the capacity to literally lift a finger thanks to my avolition. No one wants to be that lazy.

No, the current system is a grift, a scam to force people to engage in menial labor for super-cheap while they suffer abuse by their superiors, hence the RTO mandates, and how crunching development teams in AAA game development is still a thing.

Yes, I’m bitter, but Trump’s autocratic movement may be the last gasp of neoliberalism, and either we’re going to see steps towards a new New Deal or we’re going to see our Tech-Bro oligarch masters try to fascism all of the US and the reprisal will be even more revolutionary (and more violent).

I was the black sheep of my family before it was cool.

…like in the 1970s.

ETA: I have an ancient blogpiece about this, and author Janet Hardy surmised that we weirdos kicked out of our paddling for being the ugly duck often have to go and find a paddling of like-souled ducks who don’t find those traits so ugly. We don’t necessarily grow up to be swans (or even scrappy geese who come back for revenge) but there are folks out there who get you.