ameancow

Best reply I got here tbh.

Strikes do a lot more damage to companies. I think a lot of people mix the two ideas up.

The last most successful boycotts were mostly ones you never heard of, and at least one you rather not hear of. We managed to get tuna companies to pretend to harm fewer dolphins in 1988. Before that is was things like the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The most recent boycott that actually got a company to change its marketing and outreach was the Bud Lite/Dylan Mulvaney boycott by the anti-trans right.

If you think you can get enough people as worked up about an issue as the chuds were about a single commercial featuring someone they were scared of, then by all means let's fire up all the engines and get boycotting. Otherwise, I would encourage people who work at these tech companies to start talking about unions and making change from the inside. But none of that does as much damage to a company as getting politicians installed who are already taking bribes from other companies. Yes this is a dark perspective, you're welcome to disagree but in my nearly five decades on Earth this is just what I've seen over and over.

Welcome to how the world has always worked and always will. There's gin to help wash the black pill down.

He just saw that they have a massive tariff against the US going back decades and I guess he took it personally.

Wait, so you're not subscribed to shitme™? For a low monthly subscription they send you a sealed, self-addressed and postage-paid container to deposit your feces in, it gets sent to a sorting facility and distributed via drones or delivery drivers directly to your home toilet, where the feces are flushed in the privacy and safety of your own home! The peace-of-mind alone is worth the $39.98 a month. Up until now, the only challenge has been flushing the toilet while you're still at the office, this way you NEVER have to go home!

Most of the narratives you see and the people supporting giant pieces of shit like Musk are the work of bots and very careful social engineering to split off our populations most vulnerable and stupid and turning them into propaganda machines to sway more losers. They took the lesson from Nigerian Prince Scams and instead of trying to craft a careful narrative to trap even smart people, they are going right for the stupidest, the most easy to control. Those become their strongest influencers for other stupid people.

This isn't very hard to do, but if you talk about it in many liberal circles people roll their eyes and call you a conspiracy theorist. (While they scroll with their iphones that they had to get to keep up with modern tech, updating their social media profiles so they remain liked by their followers.)

We're not given much choice.

You simply don't exist as an American without a car and a phone and internet and an address with your name on it. Anything below that is considered fringe, poverty or societal reject. Good luck getting a job without a smartphone and your own car, don't expect public transportation to be of any help, it doesn't generally exist outside the larger cities and what there is of it, often sucks and takes hours out of your day. Our "public" internet is mostly coffee shops who make you buy something to sit there using their slow-ass wifi. If you fall on hard times, you have to apply for aid, which comes with stacks of provisions, like having an address and a phone, and this kind of aid is only available temporarily and if you accidentally make too much money they will cut you off.

If you're savvy you can learn to use things like libraries and carpools and food banks and other resources for the needy. But it's really, really hard to get out of poverty once you fall down. Most institutions and companies that provide services of any kind charge you more and more the less money you have. You need to have over a certain amount in your bank or you pay fees. You need to pay your bills on time or they charge you twice as much, you need to keep a credit history maintained even if you're broke, because most employers include credit checks in their hiring process.

Most of the "middle class" you see here are suburban families working multiple jobs 6 days a week or more and are on average hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in debt. Two people working often requires two cars, now your monthly transportation costs outpace your living expenses. Have kids or want to have kids? Good fucking luck figuring out childcare or daycare and paying for that too, not counting the vast sums of money the delivery and hospital stay alone cost, even if you have insurance. It's okay, smartphones and tablets will raise your kids. Keep the machine moving.

I cannot comprehend owning a $5000 car.

That's insane that some people have up to 5k to spend.

The so-called "wealth" you see in the American middle-class is mostly just debt. We have the shiniest toys and the biggest houses here, but it's a giant gilded-cage. Most of us die in debt.

It's even worse when you put it in quotes, that way web crawlers and search engines index the entire thing as a connected sentence or cited work, like: "Elon Musk is a nazi who has done nazi salutes repeatedly and shared nazi propaganda."

Like, that would be very wrong to keep spreading everywhere, that could really harm someone's reputation. So bad.

Nearly every modern nazi would end up in the camps by their own standards.