Mysterious ways, I tells ya!

Y’know… I’d have found all this “coconuts floated from Asia to the Caribbean” stuff pretty far fetched…

But not two years ago I was fishing, and a goddamn coconut floated right down and bumped me in the leg.

In the Monongahela River.

In Pittsburgh.

I’m starting to think maybe the username isn’t just a username, and the account is literally for a wall panel to express its views.

Of the entire list, I guess I’d pick Grassley.

At least he’s from the old school of partisan bickering.

Remember when Obama wearing a tan suit was enough to keep the right frothing at the mouth for weeks?

Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.

All they do is make prices jump for consumers. It doesn’t put domestic goods at an advantage because the domestic producers of those goods increase their prices artificially to achieve parity with import pricing.

So prices go up for the consumer with the extra money going to either:

1. For imported goods, to pay the tariff, a tax, to the government, which in this case wants to use that tax revenue to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

or

2. For domestic goods, it’s pure straight profit for the unethical corporations who are price gouging their domestic customer base. They’re not giving the consumer a break on price and they’re not sharing the profits by giving employees raises. Hell, they’re not even taking advantage of the competitive advantage to ramp up production and create jobs. They’re just pocketing that extra cash for doing exactly what they’re always doing…passing it on to, you guessed it…the wealthy.

Uh…great story?

Which is why we need an update to the tax system to add brackets to cover the entire range of income, then redefine them based on percentages off the median, with the highest bracket set at 95% or more for the highest 5% of earners.

I think you misunderstood them…

Said another way:

“There’s an unspoken lack of trust that comes with forcing people to come (back) into an office. Basically, it’s the employer telling their employees that they don’t trust them to do their work unless management can physically see them at their desks in the office.”

Can you give examples?

Both clock and auto?

Because other than time, I’m having a hard time seeing what else a clock is telling you by being analogue.

I just first want to say kudos for having a well reasoned point that you’re defending with logic, patiently and consistently, with respect for all.

That’s rare on the Internet, and Lemmy in particular, which is severely prone to the group generally deciding on one “right” position and mercilessly punishing dissent.

All that said, I think I broadly agree with you, and further, think that all of this DEI stuff is essentially “affirmative action for a new generation”.

It’s so hard to nail it down and defend it because (it seems) proponents don’t like to explain so much of how it works (and how it works differently from not incorporating it), and rather tend to answer with what it accomplishes. In theory at least.

The problem, of course, being that this subtly shifts the criticism and defense from DEI itself to its goals.

You can say “DEI means that the company is better by getting the best employees and also helps historically disadvantaged demographics get better jobs” without at all describing how that happens, and suddenly disagreeing on the merits of DEI gets misconstrued as “companies should only hire white guys and maintain the status quo”, at which point they’re more easily targeted with ad hominem and lumped together with true bigots and racists.

Regarding the issue itself, from everything I’ve seen, DEI should be less “this is an initiative we’re doing and have a team on it and track it’s metrics” and more just, “We’ll hire the best person for the job.”

Because ultimately, anything other than “We’ll hire the best person for the job.” means, by definition, “We’ll pass on the best person based on their, or the other candidates’ race, gender, religion, etc.”

If that means an overwhelmingly white male workplace, that’s a social indicator, not a problem for the company to fix. Also, hypothetically, what’s the desired end goal in terms of workplace diversity? To match the local area as closely as possible? If so, what happens when the most qualified candidates happen to be overwhelmingly from a minority? Are they going to start hiring less qualified white guys to balance it out? They shouldn’t. But they also shouldn’t hire a less qualified woman just because they only have one other woman in the whole building.

Ultimately, the only extent I could see a DEI policy actually having merit and being worth talking about would be something sort of like the Rooney Rule. A company saying, “For any position we post, we’re committed to interviewing at least X candidates from historically underrepresented minority demographics. We may still end up hiring a white guy…but this will ensure that we don’t get so used to seeing nothing but white guys that we forget to look elsewhere.”

It’s also not their place to level the social playing field, yet here we are.

Because he thinks it makes him look cool and edgy, especially in an environment like this, where the way to gain popularity is to be the most extreme far left voice in the crowd.

People like that are the vegans of politics: even if you may agree with them in many ways, their repulsive attitude and conduct more than overrules any common views you might share.

Legally it’s totally okay, actually.

I know this is all very unpopular opinion here on Lemmy, but it’s fact.

Same picks for the same reasons.

… although I’m less proud to admit that I read it as “Known Father” the first time, didn’t catch it until I came to the comments, and he still didn’t make the top 2.

I just kinda figured that “Known Father” meant he was always talking about his kids and experiences with parenthood, and that was enough to eliminate him.

I kinda get it though…it’s not like these armed forces are producing the movie themselves.

The studio wants to make a movie about/involving these entities. They want it to be as realistic as possible and the entity itself has the authority to give them access that it could also deny.

If you’re in charge of, say, the Marines PR department, you’re constantly trying to make the Corps look good and boost recruitment. If you can do this for next to nothing against your budget by granting access to a studio making a film that will give you essentially free PR, that’s a great move. The bigger the movies potential, the more the entity in question is motivated to support it.

On the other hand, if the film is going to make your organization look bad, no PR person with a functioning brain is going to help that project in any way.

Idunno, I feel like these organizations do enough actually bad things, that I don’t feel the urge to crucify them for cultivating image and working to generate positive PR.

That’s totally fine.

It’s also easy to say that when you’re the living embodiment of the luxury and excess of the establishment/status quo.

Like… dude…of course you don’t want to see revolution… every single fucking element of the system tilts not only in your favor but also in favor of perpetuating and furthering your absolute stranglehold on wealth, power, security, etc.

The more interesting answer would be to the question: if, as a society, we became so united in our acceptance of this that it literally became commonplace for CEOs to get whacked and then for juries to nullify the charges and for the killer to walk free…and it was happening dozens of times every year, or month…

…would you support a revolution to change the status quo that was literally killing people like you with zero repercussions?

If not, you’re an absolute idiot, or you’re actually on our side in this.

If yes, then you know damn well what’s going on and, shocker, you’re playing dumb for a cheap attempt at sympathy.

Well okay then.

If my only options are, “Continue eating all the meat you want and the planet is fucked.”

…or, “Stop eating all meat and go completely vegan…and the planet is still fucked unless everyone else does it too.”

Well…

… fire up that grill, man, I’ve got some steaks and burgers in the freezer.

God, seeing the comments from some people that I’m even nominally on the “same side of the aisle” makes me see how the other side finds it so easy to not only ridicule, but automatically unite in opposition against it.

Like, nothing brings me closer to being understanding and sympathetic to the people I’d normally be ideologically set totally against…like visiting Lemmy and seeing the shit flowing from the people I broadly tend to align with.

This is the thing.

While I doubt it’ll have any actual difference being seen by anyone anywhere, if this killing were followed up by a few more, or even a dozen more in short order, you would see change.

Most of it not the kind we’d hope for (tightened security, lockdown corridors for high profile individuals, even less access and interface with these people, etc…not concessions to decency, honesty, civility, humanity, etc.) but you bet your ass that it’d be living rent free in the back of every CEO and billionaire on the planet for a long time.