Maybe it will be enough to alert some of them to those issues? If the effects of corruption are felt more strongly, people may be more vocal about it and realise how many like-minded people there are. Then they may come to wonder how these bills keep getting passed if so many people oppose them.

Or they may keep their heads low for fear of sticking out and becoming the next target, or become dog-in-burning-house impersonators: “This is fine :)”

Open another terminal killall vim

I didn’t think that kind of joke would ever :q

Disturbed - Legion of Monsters

You made sure the world will remember the name
But didn’t the thought even enter your mind?
You′d give a new legion of monsters
A reason to take your life

The song originally is about a school shooting, but the point is the same

I sorta do? My employer has been making commitments to improving things, and I’m involved in one of those projects, but they’re a very slow ship to turn and I can’t say I 100% stand behind what they’re generally doing.

I joined out of a mix of necessity, opportunism and the chance to develop new skills, and grew to like the specific job I’m doing. I didn’t have many choices for private reasons, but needed the money when I signed up, so in a way the money was good enough to compromise on ethics.

I got a permanent position now, and again, I stuck for personal reasons, to improve my future prospects and because I like the job, but for all the security a permanent position offers, I’m still planning to start looking for different opportunities when circumstances allow, unless the internal culture makes some masive progress in the next two years.

In the medium run? Not sure. I’d like to think I’d compromise money over ideology, but I also know that I tend to be selfish and really good at mental gymnastics to justify decisions. I would probably not sign on with Exxon, so there’s definitely the severity of opposition to account for, but there isn’t any clear line that I’d swear my life on. On the other hand, if the money was enough to support political causes that I feel (or tell myself) would weigh up the toll on my conscience, I might fold.

In the long run, I hope to get to a point where I can answer that with a firm “No”. Maybe once life stabilises, I’ll grow firmer in my convictions. Maybe once the question of pay shifts from covering necessities to the amount of luxury I can afford, the exact number will lose meaning. Maybe I’ll find a place that I both support fully and earn enough at that any more would feel obscene anyway.

So basically, it comes down to the factors of

1. How strongly do I oppose the company?
2. How much money, compared to what I need to live, and compared to what I need to support a pleasant lifestyle?
3. Where am I on the scale from nihilism to idealism at the given point in time?

On the contrary, I am quite ideologically sympathetic. I’ve always used Open / LibreOffice, I no longer use windows, never had a Mac or iPhone or anything, I argued with stakeholders for making our university project FOSS rather than proprietary, the list goes on. I’ve spent enough time arguing with people why they should care about FOSS.

I’m just also aware of my biases, and of the fact that most people are heavily biased by their UX. Most people don’t want to spend a long time thinking to understand, they simply want to use. And in that respect, bad==proprietary doesn’t universally hold up. Big companies can spend big bucks on user research, on figuring out what does and doesn’t work for their target audience, on developing features that appeal to people. They also can spend big bucks on marketing and cultivating a brand image so that people start to identify with their products, deepening the attachment.

There is also an unfortunate side effect of FOSS when it comes to setting technical standards: If everyone can make their own, plenty of people will do that. Sure, many things have since been standardised, but how often has a common standard evolved as a side effect of some big corporation(s) adopting or outright developing it?

I don’t need to preach to you about all the ways this sucks. The unfortunate pragmatic truth is that proprietary software is a poisoned, but quite appealing apple. The most common answer I got about FOSS is “yeah, it sounds great, but I don’t care, I just want something that works for me.”

Even if their proprietary system of choice got so bad to use that they’d switch to an open one, that doesn’t mean they’d embrace the ideology. It just means that specific system does what they need it to. If iOS becomes unbearable, they may switch to Android, or perhaps to Windows phones, but they’re still gonna install and use apps that feel good to use, regardless of whether they’re FOSS.

The fight against proprietary software isn’t going to be won on ideological grounds. I feel like some developers and advocates of FOSS miss that fact. If you want to be solid competition, worry about being a viable alternative first. Once people start to use a system that allows them to customise more, they may get intrigued by that liberty and become susceptible to the ideology behind, but unless they enjoy using it already, they’ll never engage with it deeply enough.

You mean the magazine would pay people to write a story people would want to read… only to make money for the magazine? Like, they’re doing it for profit, and not out of the goodness of their hearts? Next you’re going to tell me my grocer is only selling me food to generate revenue.

There’s a difference between “just marketing” and “buy this stuff, but also, turns out Lebanon has quite some distance to go in terms of human rights in general and gender equality in particular”. Companies can’t have morals, because they’re not a natural person, but the humans working for them can, and it’s not unthinkable for this story to be both: An expression of moral frustration on part of the journalist that also happens to be profitable for their employer.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/720/

Image for hotlinking https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/recipes.png

I’m aware why iOS is bad, thank you. I still don’t wish restrictions on its users. That’s just not a nice thing to do.

There’s also the argument of lasting improvement: If people switch to other systems, I’d rather see them do it out of a positive motivation (i.e. “this is better”) than a negative one (i.e. “the other one so bad I had to finally jump ship and find a different solution”).

That motivation will bias your mindset, and a positive mindset will lead to a better user experience. If they just switch because it’s not as bad as the other, that will taint their experience. They’ll be inclined to think about what they miss, rather than what the other offers.

Example: Me, trying to wrap my head around the communities thing here after leaving reddit. I miss the relative simplicity of finding topical subreddits, which is harder here both because there’s less traffic overall, and because I had a sizeable collection of subs there that I can’t simply migrate here. Part of me wants to return to the familiar hell, even if I rationally understand why it’s shit, and I feel that sours my experience with Lemmy so far.

Humans tend to prefer the familiar, so if they leave iOS for something better, I want that better thing to land as well as possible, to encourage getting familiar with the new environment and expand their horizons, and to make future leaps in other areas less scary and off-putting.

If they gave people more choices, it would be less of a shity ecosystem though, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? It wouldn’t fix any of the other issues, but less freedom is never something to be glad about.

I hate apple as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I have to hate their users or wish them ill. We should strive to stand above the petty us-vs-them mindset.