MudMan

I can see that for a security role… maybe. It would have been a massive waste of time and money for what we were doing, though. Plus, this was during the good old times when people weren’t being fired left and right. If anything it was hard to find people with the right qualifications that were still available. People in the field were getting hired directly out of school. If you could pass the tests, do the job and not act like a psychopath during interviews there were very few things that would have disqualified you.

I’ll also say that I’m pretty sure some of what you describe would have been illegal over here, at least for most jobs.

I have hired dozens, maybe hundreds of people in corpo jobs. I can’t vouch for any other employer, but I’ve never called anybody for anything. We had tests to verify skills and the CV was mostly a tool to know what steps to cover during an interview.

I can confirm that I didn’t care about the summer you spent flipping burgers for the much more specific, entirely unrelated jobs I hired for. It mostly only let me know it was probably somebody young and relatively inexperienced padding things out.

But then, we were hiring for a very specific type of industry and… well, we weren’t assholes. I have to imagine this sort of CV micromanagement is a thing somewhere or there wouldn’t be a cottage industry around this nonsense.

Welcome to the past three hundred years of labor movements, friend. It sucks in here, but it sure is better than the alternative.

I’ll say that your proposed alternatives have all the soul crushing artificiality of a customer service call center. I would much rather say nothing at all. I’m not anybody’s parent or marketing representative.

I can tell you what I do for each of those things if you want to hear it, but I won’t pitch somebody else’s product at you and I sure as hell won’t take your pitch unless I asked for it. I find people who try to sell you stuff on the street obnoxious and I’m not gonna do that same thing online.

It’s not general cocaine, but it approximates the behavior of one for some applications. People are still worried about how many resources are going to making this cocaine now, though.

That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.

But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.

The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.

But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.

You could fund half the game’s industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.

So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.

That can’t possibly be a real sign.

And if it is, it can’t possibly have worked.

We won’t indeed. And that’s why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.

We won’t because our set of incentives isn’t infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn’t have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it’s the law.

We’re not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We’re not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.

That’s not the sphere where those choices belong. We’ve been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don’t want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won’t like they will “vote with their wallet” and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn’t a competitor will give people what they want and they’ll buy that instead.

But that’s a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn’t work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You’re meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.

Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn’t get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn’t get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.

So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart’s content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn’t supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.

To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.

What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.

Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.

Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.

But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.

No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.

You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?

You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.

That’s what you can do.

What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.

This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.

Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.

But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.

The ouroboros of social media garbage being thrown at me here would be annoying even if I wasn’t actively trying to filter out US news from my feeds.

I know somebody who used a marbley surface for their kitchen and every time I’m at their place I’m thrown by a part of the pattern that looks just like someone spilled chocolate milk and let it dry in place.

Admittedly that’s because it’s particularly large dark patch. 70s floral patterns in fuzzy materials were way too busy to identify any one thing as a stain. It all became this noisy blur. If anything it had the opposite problem of sitting down on top of the crushed barn flakes because they camouflaged perfectly on your sofa cushions.

Cats, too.

No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.

If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.

How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.

Is this one of those things where sarcasm doesn’t carry over the Internet, or…?

Cozy but hard as hell to clean. The patterns are meant to make that not particularly obvious until it gets really bad, but if dust is a health concern it gets to be a bit much.

“I asked cocaine to make me a birthday card for my nephew. It’s not as polished as the one I bought in the shop, but the cocaine one was a lot cheaper”

It… may not cover every scenario.

“I refuse to watch that one Argentinian TV show that has a shot made with some cocaine”. Better, but bit harsh. Maybe there’s some value to it.

“Cocaine is fairly practical to tell me things I can verify at a glance, but I wouldn’t trust everything it says”. See, that one works worse that the real one.

It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.

But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.

The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.

No it is not.

Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.

Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.

And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.

So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.

I’m on the vertical train, too, for reasons beyond my control and quite physically uncomfortable, unfortunately.

My current choice to split the difference between sore wrists and crappy performance is the Razer Pro Click V2 Vertical. I wasn’t sure about the shape at first, but I got used to it super fast and it’s really comfy and fast enough for gaming.

Those do typically come with the firmware update bundled in the cart.

Ironically this is a security measure because it also closes security loopholes and jailbreaking exploits.

Of course for that you need a cartridge that actually has something in it or whatever, but that’s the idea. You’re more likely to have a firmware update in a physical game than the full playable game.

Because Banana!

But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.

That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.

And yes, I do own a Switch 2.