• 0 Posts
  • 602 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • intensely_human@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•The Automated Bot of Experian support phone line, refuses to let me talk to a real person... 🤬English
    3·
    6 days ago

    The problem with previous epochs’ methods of tyranny was that they relied on overpowering the body. They relied on the hardness of metal and the power of weapons to enslave and imprison people.

    The human spirit transcended that tyranny to create freedom, by organizing our physical power into structures that overcame the literal chains and walls of our imprisonment.

    The mind seemed to be ephemeral, insubstantial compared to the steel and concrete that controlled us. But the mind allowed us to conceptualize of an existence without these things, to see freedom as a possibility and to seek it, and not to stop seeking and reorganizing our efforts until counters to these mechanisms were found and implemented.

    The new tyranny, on the other hand, presents obstacles to the mind in the way that the previous tyranny presented obstacles to the body. The new tyranny is based on incomprehensibility, on preventing the mind from finding purchase.

    If the victim cannot even form a comprehension of what is going on, then they cannot resist. Instead of chains and weapons, the new tyranny uses lies and complexity to imprison us. Just like bronze introduced a material that human hands couldn’t break, AI introduces a technology that the human mind cannot comprehend and navigate.

    Breaking the mind of the prisoner is an old technique. It predates AI. We see it in brainwashing, in lying, in lobotomy, and in the administration of drugs.

    But just as barbed wire enabled prisons to scale to house entire populations, AI enables mental imprisonment to scale to encircle billions of souls in an incomprehensible whirlwind of bullshit.

  • intensely_human@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•"You can't have our trash because we don't have a way to charge you for it"English
    19·
    8 days ago

    Unfortunately most local managers don’t actually have the ability to negotiate. Their job is to administer the machine, and avoid getting sued.

    It sucks because it often means they can’t make decisions even if they would make the store more money.

    I worked at a big box store for a while and my department was turning away customers simply because we couldn’t serve them. Hiring more help would have brought in revenue far beyond their wages, but my stores hands were tied by centralized corporate policy that dictated how many people they could hire.

    I had like $500k in the sales pipeline. I had an excellent conversion rate on the customers I actually had time to work with. But I was forced to spend my time stocking shelves and cleaning while my customers called in frustrated why I wasn’t helping them.

    People say it’s all about profit but that’s not actually true. It’s about maximizing the ability of the central corporate office to model and predict the money flows. I wish it were all about profit.

    I’ve worked for startups and other small locally-owned businesses and it’s so great to see the flexibility they have. Working for a huge corporation sucked because it was like twelve layers of command structure to get to someone who could make a decision.