chisel

Engagement bait

Every company starts out privately owned. Being publically owned means you are legally required to put shareholders’ interests first and thus essentially be purely profit and growth driven, leanding to an unsustainable cycle of infinite growth which is a major cause of the enshitification of everything as we know it today.

Private companies can at least set their own goals and do things other than chase profit. Typically, that’s either “chase profit so the owners can cash out” or “focus on providing an actually good service/product so that profit/growth will follow”.

Private Equity is probably what you’re thinking about, where a PE firm purchases a company that’s either already private or they make it private again. There are many PE firms with many different management styles and goals, but the overwhelming majority have a goal of squeezing every last penny out of a company using any means necessary and fucking over the employees as much as possible before divesting it and moving to the next one.

For context, here’s an article about another pump.fun streamer: Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000. Regretably, I don’t have any articles on-hand about the tens of thousands of people that are losing money to this scam.

The article says he is a pump.fun streamer. That’s not even real crypto. It’s literally a pump and dump website where anyone can make a new fake token by giving it a name and a picture. Then the price is set algorithmically until it gets enough people buying it that it converts into a real token. There are no fundamentals or differentiating factors between the tokens. It’s all a scam built upon the greater fool theory. At least different crypto currencies have different attributes and reasons to use them over others.

You wouldn’t want cold storage of any tokens on that site since they’ll be worthless the next day.

But, tbf, I don’t know if it was pump.fun slop that was stolen or a real crypto currency.

There is malware that can infect you simply by opening an office document. One of the cooler security trainings I’ve been through was a recorded demo of it. Opened a doc on one computer, enabled editing, then another computer was able to extract credentials from ram or something.

I hate this move and love my sideloaded apps. However, there are plenty of self hosted apps on the play store. It’s just putting in a unique address at setup, not compiling a whole unique app for each server.

By “first-party” here, I mean sites that make the product they’re selling. Like I wouldn’t trust the reviews on Samsung’s website for a Samsung phone. Amazon is separate enough that the conflict of interest isn’t really there, but Amazon reviews are so targeted by illegitimate reviews that they’re not S-tier trustworthy.

I never trust reviews on first-party sites. However, reviews on other sites can be very helpful. Maybe not yelp lol.

Is leaving a review really free labor? I view it more as community building. Nobody has reviews shoved down their throat without asking, they are sought out and helpful for the consumer. And so sellers like reviews because consumers like reviews and it makes them more likely to patronize their business.

I enjoy leaving good reviews. Helps my fellow humans find quality things that I enjoyed and helps the business I like make more things I like. It’s a win win win situation. This is especially true for small business, many of which live or die on reviews.

Yeah, H1B people are people too. They’re capable and looking to better their lives. It’s a better deal for them to come and work in the current conditions than it is for them to stay home, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. But the problem is, they’re stuck in their jobs under threat of deportation, and companies know that treating them like shit is still better for them than going home. Companies use it as a way to extort them, pay them paltry wages, and to lower the leverage of citizens so they can pay them less too. So we either need to make the H1Bs less appealing to companies so that employing H1Bs is not preferrable employing citizens (i.e. add massive cost), or give the H1B people additional leverage so that if companies treat them like shit, they can work elsewhere.

They already can. How is hiring an H1B any different than outsourcing? For a higher cost, you get a local workforce in the same time zone with a higher quality of work. That’s the same proposition as hiring citizens. Sure, if H1Bs didn’t exist, or were made more equitable such that H1B workers are fairly compensated, some percentage of the current H1B jobs would be outsourced. But I bet it’d be a low percentage since that option already exists yet companies have decided that a local workforce is worth an extra cost.

They can’t make up the difference, they pay them less than $100k. This could work out if it makes hiring H1Bs more expensive than hiring citizens. After all, the reasoning behind H1Bs is that the skills are so specialized that companies can’t find citizens to fill the positions, so it’s only logical that such skill would cost a premium (it doesn’t because it’s being abused to exploit immigrants and suppress wages for everyone).

H1Bs are temporary, the workers are going back at some point. And with the job market as competitive as it is, do we really need to bring in more workers?

I’m sure this will be astonishingly poorly implemented, if it ever gets past the “say random shit to distract from other issues” phase. But the core of the idea is solid.

And Samsung just got rid of ads in their apps, like Samsung Health, a few years ago. One step forward, two sprints back.