This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they’ve been paying them 18$ or less for years.

This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren’t even willing to go over 19$… So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.

Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver’s side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.

What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they’re supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.

Unrelated rant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$…

I think a large part of it is the internet. Like everything else, popularity ruins everything. I grew up with the internet, my family was one of the first I knew with a computer. For a long time, it was fun as fuck, play videos games, post on forums, chat with friends, MySpace, etc…

But over the years it’s become a shell of what it once was. Everything is about engagement, predatory algorithms, ads, fear mongering, censorship, control, bots, etc… Capitalism and greed sunk its teeth into it and ruined it for profit like it does to everything else.

Instead of it being a way to escape and have fun, it’s a place to get depressed, demoralized and preyed upon.

I’ve grown to absolutely despise my employer over this. I work for the federal government as a “manager” in a call center, and over the last couple of years we’ve gone from full‑time WFH to being forced back into the office 80% of the time.

I understand that a lot of employers are doing this to push people out, especially now with budget cuts and mass layoffs happening in the government. But that wasn’t the original reason. They did it because corporations and wealthy business owners complained about losing downtown business in major cities. (They wrote an open letter to the government lol)

The fact that my employer is willing to make employees’ lives worse just to appease the rich is revolting. Fuck them and fuck the rich.

What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can’t fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.

Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. The idea of being used as a pawn to make the rich happy made me furious. So I just didn’t go. And I didn’t enforce the rule with my team either. For a while, this worked. My boss would talk to me, I’d explain that I was at least 60% less productive in the office, I’d promise to start going, show up for a month, then stop again.

Eventually they escalated things and dragged me into a fact‑finding meeting with HR. At that point, I had no choice, they were monitoring my attendance daily. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area. But simply giving in wasn’t an option either.

So I started calling virtual doctors until I found one willing to properly fill out a duty‑to‑accommodate form. It cost me $150, but it worked. They approved me for full‑time work‑from‑home for medical reasons.

It sucks that it had to come to this, and it sucks even more that other employees weren’t willing to push back. But my mental health couldn’t handle going to the office just to be less productive and to satisfy the demands of people who already have more than enough.

I’m sure this will help with the increasing number of homeless drug addicts everywhere. One more win for the war on drugs!

I tried this and it didn’t work. If I rub the spoon on the touchpad, it moves the cursor. But leaving it there doesn’t seem to do anything.

I tried this and it didn’t work. If I rub the spoon on the touchpad, it moves the cursor. But leaving it there doesn’t seem to do anything.

Unlike many others in this thread, I can’t download any programs on my work laptop. I just don’t have permissions.

So I found a much lower tech way of staying green. I go to the chat with yourself chat. Then I put a 3 pound weight on the backspace button. This keeps me green forever.

With my old work laptop, I was able to press backspace then wedge a set of tweezers in the key to hold it down.

Whatever works lol.

I feel like that’s not harsh enough. He needs to suffer the way he made others suffer. Maybe something that involves a horse and tons of internal bleeding.

I’ve felt that way since I switched to Lemmy after the Reddit API fiasco. It’s kind of annoying and I’m not the biggest fan of it. But I don’t feel like every interaction is this way, just way more than Reddit.

That being said, Lemmy is much better when it comes to engagement. I can post something and actually get comments, likes, and replies. On Reddit, it felt like a drop in the bucket. Half the time, you were too late to the post and it already had so many comments that yours would barely be seen by anyone.

Obviously, that didn’t apply to the smaller subreddits but I like that on Lemmy I don’t need to go to small niche communities just to feel like I’m part of the conversation.

The comments on this post actually made me think “Do I prefer the way Reddit was” and the answer is no. Thinking back, Reddit posts would consist of the same joke, one liner or low effort replies at the top. There was very little originality and tons of shitposting.

At the end of the day, everything has its pros and cons. Just choose the one that works best for you.

Canadian here:

Some provincial governments are purposely underfunding healthcare in their provinces in order to make it worse. The purpose behind this is to try and push for more private healthcare. They figure if everyone thinks the current healthcare system sucks, it’s easier to sell them on private. I’m fucking tired of this shit. The world is just full of greedy selfish assholes.

I’ll probably get hate for this but most Fromsoft games. I just have never been able to get into them at all. It has nothing to do with it being hard, I enjoy hard games and always play on the highest difficulty. I just can’t get into the combat, it’s not fun for me.

Hard disagree on Cyberpunk, that game is fun as hell. But I agree with you about Witcher 3. Tried at least 3 times to get into it throughout the years but quit like an hour into it every time. Just not for me.

The /s was a mistake right? It actually is better.

If it’s going to happen either way, isn’t it better that it’s not real? Can you explain how it’s not?

I hate to say it but a 28 Days Later type outbreak in the US might actually help…

No you won’t. This whole defrost conversation always bothers the hell out of me because people leave out a very important factor. Will the defrosted item be consumed right away or will it be cooked first?

Cooking it kills the bacteria that would’ve came about during defrosting in the “danger zone”. I’m not saying you can leave it on the counter for a week but it’s not as bad as a lot of people on the internet make it sound.

deleted by creator

This is such an incredibly stupid take. Like working from home has anything to do with how massive Microsoft and Google are, they were huge before WFH.

You also seem to be under the assumption that everyone takes public transit to get to work. The reality is, many of them will commute to work in their car. This is terrible for the environment and clogs up the highways with people who don’t even need to be on the road and can just do all their work from home.

You just sound like one of those people who works a job that can’t be done from home and is just jealous of the ones that can. Work from home is a huge benefit for employees and the environment, saying “Microsoft bad” doesn’t change that.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Comparing a lifeguard to stocking shelves at a grocery store, that’s a fucking reach lmao.