It feels kinda cringe/privileged to admit, but I only started to take leftists positions seriously after I graduated college and was struggling to find a job in the field I studied. My whole life I internalized a type of meritocratic worldview, where having credentials is enough to make a place for yourself in the world, but through job hunting in the Real World I found that you’re basically selling yourself on a market, and because of these market dynamics, you have to mold yourself into the perfectly optimal commodity, with the exact perfect skillset (they call it a “stack” in tech, and there are many stack permutations possible, though some companies will also go for someone who will perfectly perform on all their coding puzzles) that matches exactly what they’re looking for.

It’s not enough to be someone who is knowledgeable enough to grow into a job, you have to already be The Guy to even be considered. I did eventually become a type of Guy who some companies were willing to hire, but the whole process was enough of a shock to lead me to question why it’s like this at all, why a college degree and some Gumption isn’t enough to get a decent job even though that’s what I was led to believe my entire life, and why being a worker means constantly prostrating yourself for employers if you want to survive.

All this led me towards people like Richard Wolff, who offered explanations for why it’s like this (in summary this period of my life was when I realized the interests of workers and employers are not the same, ie. I learned about class conflict), as opposed to the chuds I was hanging around who blamed it on “diversity hires” (this was a few years before DEI became the buzzword), which didn’t make sense to me, because despite whatever fuckery may be happening on that end, US tech labor is still like 85% male and 70% white? or foreigners stealing jobs, which also didn’t make sense to me, because “get a job doing something in demand” is the general response to anyone anywhere who’s struggling to make money, so how can you fault these foreign workers for wanting to learn to code?

that’s just The Doctor’s Barely Disguised Fetish

heartbreaking:

I like the melancholy vibe combined with the heavy sound on this song 👌

ummmm, you’re albanese :nick-mullen:

Goblin androgyny: you’re small and horrible and you’re pretty certain that ‘gender’ was a kind of beetle you ate last week.

didn’t realize trump had an account here

ManSuper-13

How user friendly is the installation process? I’ve never tried, so I don’t know. I’m curious now; just based on how people talk about it, I always perceived it as as distro that requires a lot of technical knowledge to use like Gentoo, which I unsuccessfully tried to install way back in 2010. I’m more knowledgeable and patient these days, so I may be able to work with arch.

god hired DEI guardian angels

there might be a conflict of interest going on…

there is none in most of the country, most cities just have buses where you might have to spend up to 30 minutes walking to the nearest stop to wait up to an hour

“All lives matter” fuckheads when faced with people who actually believe it

he’ll yeag

it’s funny you mentioned that because I didn’t realize until I looked it up just now but the character with the most overtly political dialogue is black

I always travel with some seashells