I had a recurring donation set up for wikipedia. I really like it. It’s useful. But I hate woke politics. So, yeah, I no longer have that recurring donation.
I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
That was painful to read. If I wanted to promote “knowledge equity” I would focus on education in low and middle income countries, rather than pouring money on affirmative action in the richest country in the world and throwing fuel on culture war in said country and elsewhere.
I used to donate a small amount annually. No more from now on.
So you'd suggest they gave money to, for example, Media Foundation for West Africa: The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) is a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting and defending the right to freedom of expression, particularly for media and human rights defenders, throughout the 16 countries in West Africa
or
Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (US$250,000): The Arab Reporters in Journalism (ARIJ) is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Jordan?
>I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
My perception is that every major ideological group is doing this and has been since civilization started. Most people don't mind as long as the ideology aligns with their own ideology.
Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights.
While those policy areas are not in themselves necessarily negative, they have a clear political slant which is the ground associated with woke activism.
It's not obvious what it has to do with Wikimedia.
Also they sound extremely localised. As someone outside extremely wealthy and rich USA why should my money go to that sort of political organizations there. Why don't they use their own money for it?
None of those sound bad, but one organisation that tries to focus on all of them?
You'll end up trying lots of things but poorly, or find that they cross influence to make things efficient. Why work on labour issues when you can deal with women's labour issues?
And especially if they are being funded via manipulation, such as paying for Wikipedia's servers, means they would lack the oversight from donors which is not an effective way.
> They prohibit people from editing who believe child sexual activity isn't harmful[1],
From the linked page:
> Wikipedia does not tolerate inappropriate adult–child relationships. Editors who attempt to use Wikipedia to pursue or facilitate inappropriate adult–child relationships, who advocate inappropriate adult–child relationships on- or off-wiki (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate relationships are not harmful to children), or who identify themselves as pedophiles, will be blocked and banned indefinitely.
Looks pretty sane to me? If it's only one "party" that draws this line, what are those that don't?
I haven't filled-in a profile page, and I haven't had occasion to make any edit concerning transness, sex and gender. My Wikipedia handle is a name I've used in other places, so a determined stalker could draw inferences about my views; but I haven't used the handle outside of Wikipedia for a decade.
I have opinions about the Middle East that, if expressed in my editing, would get me into trouble - but probably not banned; my edits would simply be reverted in a microsecond.
Editing with an opinion is fine; you just get reverted. Nobody bans you. You get into trouble if you try to take a stand: e.g. revert the revert, or if you take it to the talk page, or ask for admin review.
Neoliberalism is an economic viewpoint, not a sociological one.
I don't know a good word for the "safe", modern, liberal point-of-view. Perhaps that's why everyone calls it "woke", a word that I don't use, because it's usually meant as an insult. In the USA, "liberal" seems to be an insult too.
The viewpoint I'm referring to is that of educated, urban, mainly white people, who sympathize with oppressed minorities, but are scared of any kind of revolution, because they depend on capitalism.
Comments like this make me wonder just how divergent peoples outlook on life are.
I’m with the guy you responded too, making a billionaire lose money is way funnier and interesting.
But even in a normal company, I never really understood this loyalty/ethics thing.
To me, it makes sense to do the very, very bear minimum and “steal” as much time as possible. So you can use it for your self.
A job is you selling time to someone else. It’s simply incomprehensible to me someone would willingly give extra of their time. Equally not attempted to claw back as much as their time as possible.
I suppose there’s an element of game theory, there are points in time where it’s worth to go that extra mile to achieve something that will put you in a better position, but those are the exceptions not the rule.
Not judging you, I’m glad people like you are out there. My life is better due to people like you and I am thankful for that. But, yeah, I guess I’m just fascinated at the differences in outlook.
When you ask you accountant to do your accounts so you don't get hugely screwed by the tax man then you expect/hope that they will do their best work in your interest.
When you go to the dentist and need a broken tooth fixed you hope the dentist will take an extra 15 minutes if it means your fixed tooth will look as straight and nice as possible, even if they could have fixed the core issue in a much faster way and leave you with an aesthetically unpleasant looking tooth.
When you send your children to school you hope that teachers would sacrifice time from their own lunch break if your kid has one more question just before the break so they don't fail the next exam.
If you live in America you probably hope that the person who guards the gate to your child's school would wait an extra 20 minutes if the new guard is slightly late so no crazy gunman could just walk in unchallenged and gun down your child.
When your parents end up frail and end up requiring social care you'd hope that the people looking after them would not just do the "bare minimum and steal as much time as possible for their own benefit" and rather take pride and care when looking after them.
All those people also hope that if you work on a product that serves a public interest that you will do your utmost best to return the favour so everyone can live in a nice society.
People do their utmost because of mutual respect, and because of the expectation of conducting repeat business - not because of honor.
Try telling your elderly parents' social worker you want to gauge their performance, because you're shopping around for someone new, and only A-players are acceptable. Then watch how much care and kindness your parents receive out of honor alone.
Going above the call of duty for "honor" is not a virtue. It's being a doormat.
That's why people consider those real jobs and think people who work at Twitter should not complain about anything. I'm not saying they are right, but I don't think you made your point at all.
But you must understand taking pride in your work. I don't know if I'd have called it honorable, but there is certainly no honor in sneakily doing shitty work on purpose. I wouldn't write software if it didn't give me satisfaction, and doing a shitty job is never satisfying.
Poster didn't even talk about giving additional time, just faithfully fulfilling their end of the employment contract. It's bare minimum respect to your coworkers and clients/users to care about your work and make it as polished as you can.
A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.
I wrote this before and I will write it here again.
There is a burger place.
The burger place offers free burgers.
They are able to do this because Big Lettuce pays the burger place to put lettuce in their burger.
When I go and get a burger from the free burger place, what I do is I remove the lettuce from my burger. I just don’t like it.
I made no agreement with the burger place to eat lettuce.
They assume I will. They try to convince me to. They might even try to make the lettuce hard to remove from the burger.
But what has not happened, unlike you are implying, is an agreement that I will consume the lettuce.
I’m not going to stop going to the free burger place. I really like free burgers. And I won’t stop removing lettuce from my burger either. I deeply dislike lettuce.
So, instead of telling me to stop going to the free burger shop because I like removing lettuce, how about you tell the shop to stop giving away free lettuce?
If people really like their burgers, they will pay for them.
If their burgers aren’t really that good and people consume them just because they’re free, maybe the burger place should go out of business.
As ridiculous as this sounds, it makes sense. We tried the business model and it just didn't work out. We need to innovate ways to support content explicitly with some form of payment. The elusive micro-transactions that economists have been begging for for decades now.
If I had an answer for this I’d be pitching my startup somewhere. I honestly don’t know what the alternative will be. But I am sure there is on. Forcing people to consume ads just isn’t sustainable I think.
As I said before, in your hypothetical you would be undermining a business model that is letting a lot of people eat burgers for free, and that would be selfishly making the world worse.
That lettuce company is making revenue somehow, or it will go out of business anyways. In which case the world ends up in exactly the same spot.
So lets make the analogy closer to real life - the lettuce company funds the burger making because everyone MUST eat a salad at least one a day, using lettuce they have paid for with real money. This company wants it to be their lettuce. So they fund the burgers, and make up for it by charging more for their lettuce.
You see my point? Some small subset of folks might end up getting a free burger, but it's at the cost of many other purchasers choosing to buy lettuce with a higher markup.
The lettuce company (ad companies) aren't some fucking fairy tale good guy handing out free stuff - they're very carefully adjusting the habits of shoppers to make MORE money. They are not good - the world is not less good by avoiding them.
Let's try a different reason for the free burgers: the lettuce company makes money by selling information that's (somehow magically) sent to them from inside my mouth while I am eating the lettuce about how I chew, maybe using certain aspects of my mouth and stomach which allows them to isolate me as an individual.
Given all that, they put effort into requiring that their lettuce makes its way to my mouth with a free burger.
Fine, I'll pay for the burger: Big Lettuce is still adamant about getting their tracking lettuce in my body.
One has to go to great lengths to find a burger place that doesn't have a deal with such a lettuce-provider.
Whatever, I'll just take the stupid lettuce off.
(I agree, it's a weird analogy.)
Anyway, the stakes are different with free food vs. free content, so to the point that one is selfishly undermining the ability for others to get content for free: that decision is not what makes the world worse.
If the content is truly worth seeing, it's likely that someone will be inspired to make it as accessible as possible[0], regardless of the lack of potential profit, and other content will become less available.
(Maybe I'll sing a different tune when Khan Academy is overrun with ads.)
You are assuming that the lettuce-funded buger business is the only possible way to provide free food for those in need. Maybe there are government bugers that are just as good but the burger joint they are served in is not as flashy. Maybe there are people who just like making burgers or want to help others and give them away without insisting on you eating lettuce - or they would if the lettuce-funded burger business didn't have exclusive bun contracts with all the local bakeries that they finance with their lettuce income.
Also, don't forget that big lettuce is not subsidizing the burgers out of the goodness of their hearts - they are doing so because they believe it will allow them to capture more wealth overall. Wealth that people could have used to pay for food.
A slaver to his slave: Your attempts at achieving freedom are undermining a business model that is letting a lot of people enjoy cheap clothing, and that would be selfishly making the world worse.
What’s your thoughts on that one? Genuinely curious.
The way I see it, I’m not “making the world worse”. Waving away the can of worms opened by the notion of “making the world better/worse”, I genuinely cannot understand how refusing to consume something makes me selfish.
I’m not selfish for removing lettuce from my burger and I’m not selfish for removing ads. The problem is not with me. The problem is with the business model.
People not liking something drives innovation. Instead of doubling down on something that is not working and telling people “stop being a bad person and consume the ad” perhaps the business should find an alternative way of monetising.
> A slaver to his slave: Your attempts at achieving freedom are undermining a business model that is letting a lot of people enjoy cheap clothing, and that would be selfishly making the world worse.
This ignores harm of slavery to the slave, but in both the online ads case and your burger hypothetical there are no analogs to the slave.
> I genuinely cannot understand how refusing to consume something makes me selfish.
The argument is pretty straightforward. In your hypothetical, hunger has been mostly solved: everyone can eat as many burgers as they want. But this solution is fragile, and rests on people consuming the lettuce that comes with the burgers. By choosing to remove your lettuce, you increase the risk that this falls apart and we'll be back to the status quo where some people are hungry, and others spend a substantial portion of their income on food.
I am literally harmed by ads. In my case, I suffer from internet addiction you see and those extra load seconds and interruptions are deeply harmful to me. They trigger anxiety and panic attacks.
But that’s just me. Other people are harmed way more! Maybe you can wave away my ad inducted anxiety but can you wave away people with epilepsy? Can you wave away people with ADHD? Can you wave away people with accessibility needs? Can you wave away people unwillingly outed as lgbt by the ads they are served? Can you wave away predatory ads? Can you wave away “making the world worse” through ad enabled miss information?
As for lettuce I am allergic to it. I will literally die if I don’t remove it.
> As for lettuce I am allergic to it. I will literally die if I don’t remove it.
If you're allergic to lettuce, it's very risky to eat a burger that has previously been contaminated by lettuce. Perhaps consider eating anything else?
I think the ad situation is much more complex than your hypothetical, and blocking ads for accessibility reasons is fine. But calls for everyone to block ads, even if they aren't "allergic", are calls for an end to free ad-supported things online, which includes the website we're currently using.
Yeah but those weren’t really “refugees” were they? You can’t call your self a refugee if you cross who knows how many borders from Syria and Afghanistan all the way to Sweden. And then add insult to injury by vacationing in the countries they are “fleeing” from.
Sweden wasn’t “the lone member state that did the right thing” and the illegal immigrants were not “dumped on Sweden”. Sweden made a very bad choice opening up to what is very clearly a criminal cohort going out of its way to abuse welfare.
And the same goes for Germany. Even more so because their incompetent leadership invited the entire middle east to Europe.
If you really wanted to “help out” and “be humanitarian” Sweden and the rest of the EU should have established safe zones in Africa. And end what is essentially a ferry service from Africa to Europe. Migrants go on dingy inflatable boats 5 miles of the coast, issue an SOS and get transported to the EU. If this isn’t incentivising illegal migration, I don’t know what is.
You can’t expect to conduct a policy of ethnic replacement which is what Swedens policy has been for the last few decades and don’t get resentment from the native population. You reap what you sow. The only good news is, the tide is turning.
> We’ve been investigating this case for the past 24 hours, and it's not straightforward. I can’t share more publicly here, but we’re in touch directly with OP.
Can you lay out your version of the events please and give written permission for the Strip guy to lay out his version as well?
OP can you lay out your version of the events please? And also give written permission to the Stripe guy to lay out his version? I want to see how the two compare. Feel like watching some drama this evening.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen this further up. I suppose it might be because it’s less perceived as software but, there were definitely protests against Uber.
Not only was Uber protested against, in some places successfully, but there were pro Uber protests as well.
Also as a somewhat funny anecdote, it wasn’t a protest as you describe, with people on the street but my aunt told me how a few years back there was an upgrade for the OS at the place she worked at. We’re talking completely non technical boomers having to switch from Windows 98 to Windows 7 or something like that. They were pissed! They were arguing with the boss about it, complaining non stop, saying how they don’t understand anything anymore and pretty much did an informal go slow for a few months.
The progressive equivalent is the long march through the institutions. There absolutely was an organised “progressive” drive to increase their ideological base. And yes. The same long march is now happening from the other side. Progress is not always in the direction you like.
Long march through the institutions is a thing made up by a German student activist and has no known organizational heft beyond this. The article itself cannot name a single organization or achievement under this strategy. The Federalist Society is well-documented, in was founded in and organizes within the country we're talking about, hosts multiple conventions with close ties to conservative Supreme Court members, who have known to attend and give speeches advocating for extreme political interpretation, and who has been repeatedly reported to be the de facto gatekeeper for opportunities to judicial and legal positions under Republican government.
I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.