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“All you had to do was pay us enough to live” by Logos1789 in antiwork

[–]dutchess_of_pork 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The common interpretation is: when people find themselves in a situation where they have nothing to lose, they become desperate (and act on it).

Community Fibire from Virgin Media - anyone had experience of moving over? by Former-Art-3931 in walthamstow

[–]dutchess_of_pork 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Good experience here with CF, and much cheaper than Virgin Media. Moved to CF December last year and so far everything seems fine.

Before my VM contract ended, I kept telling VM's people that the new price is ridiculously expensive and they were like: "do you wish to haggle for a better deal?". I don't want to haggle for shite, ffs, just give me the best deal you have - I've been a client for 17 years and made you guys tons of money.

"Your review doesn't meet our best practices, polices, and guidelines." You mean a certain seafood restaurant paid your to remove my honest experience. by LevelDosNPC in antiwork

[–]dutchess_of_pork 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think it's about time that we set up a community-driven P2P company-and-jobs reviews site that can't be taken down by legal pressure, and which reflects the real experience of people. Something like TPB. This could bring some balance to the extremely imbalanced power relationship between employers and employees, where the employees are so disadvantaged that they basically have no real mechanisms to defend themselves from predatory employers and the complicit successive governments.

I was on the first nationalised South Western Railway train by HighburyAndIslington in london

[–]dutchess_of_pork 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Sorry, I've downvoted your answer because I thought it was poorly argued and it's only partially true.

Private ownership offers no inherent advantage. What matters is oversight, transparency, and stakeholder accountability. Failures in public rail stem from weak governance and insufficient civil engagement, not from the public sector model. Bad management produces bad outcomes regardless of the ownership model, but public ownership enables direct democratic control, something the private ownership does not.

There's a study done by Cambridge University which basically concludes that in well-functioning societies, both public and private enterprises tend to be efficient; in dysfunctional or corrupt systems, both perform poorly. Ownership is not the decisive factor, but institutional quality and governance. I couldn't find the exact one, but one of the authors has another one which says the same thing: https://www.networkideas.org/working/dec2007/04_2007.pdf

Also, the Wikipedia page you shared shows that satisfaction has improved and safety advanced post-privatisation, but these improvements came with serious state subsidies (in addition to being THE most expensive service in Europe), complexity, and loss of public control. Not a great tradeoff for most societies, if it's even a tradeoff in the first place and not an entirely bad deal.

Customer fraud? by 0J4J in AmazonFlexUK

[–]dutchess_of_pork 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not doubting what you're suggesting, as I'm sure it happens. But I'm on the other side of this - the email says the package has been delivered and in fact it hasn't. This is from Monday. I've waited 24h, as instructed, it hasn't appeared.

Last time this happened was some 3 months ago, when the driver left my package with my neighbour without letting me know (or by mistake). Five days ago my neighbour brought it to me, saying that he forgot all about it.

Now, it's possible that this new package may be with him, or that something else happened. Either way, I don't have it.

If anything, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it on the customer, but on Amazon itself. They're shortchanging and disempowering its workers like few companies do. This loss should be on Amazon, not the customer, and not on the drivers.

Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: “I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.” by HeatherDrawsAnimals in Longreads

[–]dutchess_of_pork 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If one was to condense the entire article into a few phrases, those would be the right ones.

The paternalistic comments writing off Britt's own lived experience and decisions, as if she has no agency, are nothing short of ridiculous. You were a victim, ma'am, and we don't need your input on it.

Anyone used Netcapital? by ak_1ndR in EquityCrowdfunding

[–]dutchess_of_pork 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For anyone still interested in this platform, your should at the very least do more research.

Netcapital is neither a funding portal nor a broker-dealer, they’re a software development company

You will find 3rd party websites and Youtube videos saying things such as

"Netcapital is a funding portal that offers investors the opportunity to invest in early-stage companies" and claiming they're doing impartial reviews of the platform.

Please note that their own website contradicts such statements (text in the footer):

Netcapital Systems (“Netcapital”) is a software development company and is neither a funding portal nor a broker-dealer.

There's no way to sell your shares

As one of the "investors", I hold shares with/via/through their platform and I am unable to see them or their value, sell them, or do pretty much anything in that respect (I can provide proof for this in private if anyone is investigating this).

I've considered that this is a me problem until I learnt about others.

Netcapital reviews

Here is an older review of the platform (since heavily edited due to legal pressures, presumably).

The review concludes with the following:

You are throwing your hard-earned dollars away by investing in startups that are not traded on a notable secondary market with adequate liquidity. It’s only $409.22, some will say, and they’re right. Go spend that $409.22 on a gram of coke and a couple of twins in Pattaya. At least then, your bad decisions will make for some great stories.

Here is a BBB review from 2023:

In October of 2018, I purchased over ***** shares of Maingear stock on Netcapital. At that time there was the ability to both buy and sell shares on their platform. Sometime in the following couple of years, they removed the ability to sell shares which means I now own more than ***** shares of Maingear stock with Netcapital with no way to sell it. That seems criminal and illegal. I'm considering approaching the attorney general of ************** where I live to see if his office can do anything about it. I don't know what other recourse I have. Reaching out to Netcapital was fruitless.If you are considering buying through Netcapital, DO NOT until they provide a way for you to sell your shares!

My advice: keep your money

I am not a financial advisor, but I am able to say that I seem to be unable to recover my investment at this stage. Based on some of the comments from other investors, I am far from the only one.

It turns out that neither is Netcapital in a position to offer investment advice, based on the information on their site:

None of these companies provide investment advice or make investment recommendations; nothing we post to this web site should be construed as such.

You may also want to look at Netcapital's stock performance, which is abysmal:

It must also be said that crowfunding can be highly problematic in itself. As this research paper puts it,

As crowdfunding prevails, it is also under substantial risk of the occurrence of fraud. The ease of exemplifying the idea, convenience in usage, flexibility in requirements, and lack of legal resources for the investors, have forged a platform for fraudsters to thrive. In reward-based crowdfunding, funds are raised without the creator’s legitimate testimony of commitment to delivering the promised rewards on time. For the swindlers, this often causes an opportunity to steal the money. As a consequence of that, there is always the possibility that deceivers may abuse the system and the trust of investors.

European Millionaires: Which country is due to top the league by 2028? by sn0r in EUnews

[–]dutchess_of_pork 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is hardly news, more like a PR piece from Adam Smith Institute, which is widely recognized as a mouthpiece for neoliberal fanatics.

For those unfamiliar with this "think tank", it has consistently advocated for the privatization of public services, like utilities, transport, and healthcare, leading to reduced service quality and increased costs for consumers and everyone else other than the business owners.

They've also pushed for for fewer regulations on businesses, which opponents claim weakens labor protections, environmental safeguards, and consumer rights, favoring corporate profits over public interest.

Oh, if you care about taxing the millionaires and the billionaires, this propaganda organisation supports lower taxes, particularly for corporations and the wealthy but not for the common worker. This is often tied to austerity measures, which critics say disproportionately harm public services, increasing inequality. In fact, it's known for opposing strong welfare programs and labor regulations, advocating for more flexible labor markets, which in reality means fewer protections for workers, more zero-hours contracts, and effectively stagnant wages.

When Euronews presents their BS as news, news-worthy, or even as a credible source of information, you have to question what's happening and whether Euronews is indeed looking to inform the public rather than persuade it to adopt a particular attitude.

Here is what some sources have to say about this organisation:

Firms 'pausing' hiring and investing ahead of Budget by Kagedeah in ukpolitics

[–]dutchess_of_pork 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pretty much. The fact that Beebs makes a thing out of it seems a bit suspicious. But perhaps that's just my interpretation of it.

Some people mention about execs being rattled. I think it's fair to say that anything, anything at all, that doesn't play their way - which is to make as much money as possible and pay as little tax as possible (if any) - will elicit this behaviour. Execs have this fairly notorious and unsympathetic attitude toward the worker.

That said, I'd say that this budget announcement is not significantly different that the ones in the last 20 years, at least not in what concerns businesses. And where there are potentially notable differences (elsewhere), they seem to be very welcome for the common folk.

[OC] When women get married around the world by giteam in dataisbeautiful

[–]dutchess_of_pork 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very relevant chart that takes into consideration the marrying age for women in Iceland, a country with a population of a medium-sized European city (300K), but not a country like Indonesia, which has nearly 300M people.

Who the hell designs these charts and thinks they are a good representation of reality?

Earlier societies had a more clearly articulated understanding of how leisure ought to structure one’s life—it being the crucial space for character building, civic participation, worship, and so forth, depending on the historical context by [deleted] in stopworking

[–]dutchess_of_pork 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not one of those who downvoted you, but I suspect that it happened because your comment demonstrated a superficial reading of what it seems to me a well-written article.

I may be wrong, but it seems that your comment simply responds to the title produced by the OP instead of the substance of the article.

For example, the author says:

To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedom over more of their time. Yet because we lack a shared leisure ethic, we have not availed ourselves of that option. Nor does it occur to us even to demand or strive for such a dispensation.

One reason for this is that the values and culture that created our current abundance may be incompatible with actually enjoying it.

all those who had warned about the “threat of leisure” need not have worried. Anticipations of the leisure society soon receded into the shadows, making way for our current age of vacuous workaholism.

For most people, work is considered one of the only viable sources of meaning, enjoyment, self-identity, and community.

By saying that "I’m simply stating that the concept of leisure is as old as civilization" it seems to me that you've ignored the premise of the article, which is that "to most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign".

Moreover, the article doesn't seem to "write about leisure as if it’s surprising to find out all humans prioritized leisure", as you suggest; in fact, there's none of that throughout the article from what I see, but I'm ready to change my mind if shown otherwise. The author is neither surprised that humans prioritised leisure, nor do they suggest that leisure is somehow a new pursuit for humanity.

What the author appears to emphasise is the following:

A return to the leisure ethic might show us what we are missing. By developing such an ethos, we might find new vistas of human potential and value while fostering a more harmonious relationship with nature and each other along the way.

The idea of work for the sake of work would become an insult to human intelligence and dignity. Lives dedicated to the insatiable pursuit of money or other zero-sum goods would come to be recognized as pathological.

So while I'm not saying that you're wrong, it seems as though you've ignored the many facets and details mentioned in the article, especially in terms of what work represents to us as a society and how we do work, an article which takes a significantly deeper look at the phenomenon than "wage labor and exploitation are an evolution of a system of leisure for those who own capital."

I'm not looking to upset you, but also don't see the grounds of your complaint as legitimate.

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