Well, you’re more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right.

The whole internet feels like it’s in a state of irrecoverable rot, and the last ten years have really tanked my confidence in governments to do anything about the clearly harmful, consumer hostile behavior inflicted on us — mostly because they seem to benefit a lot from letting Meta et al. do whatever they want. Like, EU fines, to date, have looked more like the organization wanting to wet their beak rather than fixing anything. I don’t know.

I was counting from when Facebook et al. became a clear problem — because, again, while I’m glad the EU is looking at this, it’s the US that has needed to take action. Their refusal to do so has left it to the EU to try to do something, and I’m skeptical that whatever they end up doing will make a difference. Like, if the price of the crime is a fine, then the crime is legal for a company as big as Meta.

Justified? Absolutely. Timely? Hardly.

My point was it’s more than a decade too late, and all the EU will do is levy a minor fine that Meta won’t even blink at. The only country that could impose real consequences is the US, and they have no interest in anything that doesn’t benefit these nightmare cyberpunk megacorps.

This is like an article declaring, “EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm” – the people they’re trying to protect don’t use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.

Don’t get me wrong – fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I’m sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there’ll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.

The FTC will take ten years to accomplish nothing of value – and even whatever fig-leaf ruling they issue will be sued into oblivion, or voided by the Supreme Court.

Privacy is dead because killing it was in the interest of too many wealthy and powerful companies, government agencies, and individuals for it to have ended up any other way.

deleted by creator

Don’t buy shitty Chinese EVs, buy the somehow even shittier American EVs!

Yeah, if it says Crypto on it, it’s a scam. Full stop.

Almost no one reads the fucking article.

You are describing the human species. Through its entire history.

“Unknowingly”

I’ve heard that before, too. I’m in the US, so I’ve got reason to be pessimistic about the reliability of the courts when it comes to holding wealthy people and corporations accountable.

Yeah, but do they, though? I’ve heard this before, and they’re as indifferent now as they’ve ever been.

You know, it’s almost like the justice system has… I dunno. Problems or something.

That’s fair – those aren’t things I ever used.

Do these people proclaiming Reddit’s data as a “treasure trove of human-generated information”, or Spez claiming “We know your dark secrets” not realize that most of what people say online is at least partially a lie? Most Reddit comments were either low-effort echolalia parroting old memes or outright bullshit of the, “Yeah, that happened eyeroll” variety.

I mean, taking risks sounds great and all, but what specific, actionable things could someone do – even if they’re risky – to thwart collusion between an unelected supreme court and these massively powerful corporate actors to further curtail my civil rights?

I’ve reached such a state of pessimism politically that, reading this article, I came away with the assumption that declaring the NLRB “unconstitutional” is basically a fait accompli at this point, and there’s very little anyone can do about it.

My schematic for interpreting the news has become, “Imagine the worst case scenario. Make the impact 10% less severe. Put the stupidest person you’ve ever met in charge of the solution.”

This is, like… you don’t hear yourself, do you?

Me: “People are miserable about the specific thing you’re pointing at to try dismiss discussion on this topic.”

You: “That’s because discussions on this topic are a distraction from problems that I deem more important.”

Me: “Okay, but you do realize that people don’t agree with your perception of the situation, or your prioritization of the problems, and that by insisting on this point in a pedantic way you come across as smug and dismissive.”

You: “Yes, but what about my perception of what’s an actual problem?”

You can shout from the rooftops that we have bigger fish to fry – and I might even agree with you – but people can’t even think about bigger problems as long as they’re struggling to pay the bills! People report having trouble paying the bills! Large swathes of the American public are drawing on their retirement savings to get by! Whether you think the inflation situation and its aftermath is an “actual problem”, telling people they’re wrong and throwing numbers at them is just not going to be an effective strategy here.

And I’m telling you that your approach to doing this is, rhetorically, disastrous. You come across as both smug and dismissive of people’s suffering and anxiety – and your response to reading me say that musn’t be, “Well, this person is irrational and not willing to engage with data.”

Yes, people are dissatisfied with basically… all of how modern nation states are organized and run, from government to business to day-to-day social interactions.

But the whole premise of democracy is that the people, in aggregate, know best how to direct our lives. And what poll after poll says is, people are frustrated in particular with the perceived decline in their purchasing power. That perceived decline comes directly from making more money and yet only being able to afford the life they had before the round of inflation started. The very “wage growth” that you are claiming has mooted the issue of inflation.

So, even if it’s true that, on average, people’s spending power is the same now as it was before the pandemic – which may not be true, depending on whether the already wealthy, to whom most of the gains have gone since the pandemic, are skewing that average – that is not a victory. It is, at best, a depressing reminder that people live in a system that cares more about aggregate statistics on a balance sheet than it does about their actual lives.

That you don’t seem to get what we’re saying is amazing. What you are talking about does not matter to most people – their own lived experience of not being able to afford basic necessities, or having to draw on savings and retirement income to afford them, are all they see. You can shout numbers at people all you like, but all they – and I – hear is, “Your own lived experience is wrong, and I know better than you do about your day to day life.”

So, let’s grant for argument’s sake that the numbers you’re citing actually say what you imply – that wage increases have made up for inflation for most people, and therefore no one has any reason to complain. You do realize that desperately job hopping to try to stay where you started economically is enervating and miserable, right? To spend three years post-pandemic finding new work, retraining, striking, and all the rest, only to find yourself economically no better off than when you started? What a nightmare.

I get that you have a pile of numbers that say everything’s rosy – but most regular people appear to disagree with you, judging by consumer sentiment polls and other surveys. The answer in that case isn’t to double down and declare that people are too stupid to know whether they’re doing okay financially – the answer is to ask yourself whether your measures are wrong, or your data isn’t capturing something critical.