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strangerpeace · 10 months

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So this is a long venting post about my life, but I don’t really have other places to vent on the Internet and maybe some of you will find this amusing. This isn’t a bit. All of this is stuff that has me pissed off, awake at 6:38 AM EDT, typing on a porch, ready to cry and scream and fight God.

Life sucks right now.

And I’ve been making so much lemonade out of lemons that I am now the Citrus Deity.

In no particular order:

- our landlord has been super patient with us, but we owe like 3k of back rent and are like this close to being evicted. that’s great.

- i’m unemployed right now, due to a bunch of academic political bullshit and the fact that when it comes to having resilience in the face of bigoted co-workers or passive aggressive office culture who in no uncertain terms let me know that they hope I die, I’m a wet paper towel made of crying

- there’s a whole ass interpersonal drama between me and a long time friend

- i have really bad acid reflux and it hurts like the dickens

- and then there’s the fucking ghost, but we’ll get to her

- i was accidentally a dick to a bunch of my streaming friends because of prior interpersonal drama and it sucked a lot. apologies and understanding is there, but also god damn it, why am i like this?

- every day i wake up and i just continually feel like, wow—there’s no way to get out of this failure spiral is there? I’m 39 going on 40, a PhD dropout in philosophy and theatre, my streaming career is stalling because my headspace is all fucked, my TTRPG development is also stalling because my headspace is fucked and it feels like I’m shouting into a void, i’ve had to do fundraisers just to get our phones back?, so like another fundraiser for rent is just… alado;mal;sdjfalksdjf

- don’t even get me started on the system shit (yes, i’m a system, etc. etc.)

- and then there’s the fucking ghost, the newest addition to Mount Fucklife. I’m so mad, I’m not even like… spooked out or creeped out. This fucking OLD LADY with a creepy fucking distorted face glitches my phone camera and of fucking course the video is corrupted and somebody in the system decided “nope not dealing with this” and deletes it. But it doesn’t actually matter if anyone believes this, the important part here is that last night, my long time partner ends up taking a swing at me in her sleep!?, quickly apologizes, and says she had a dream where an old woman wouldn’t stop yelling at the two of us about how we’re sleeping in the same bed and we’re not married. And my partner got so mad that she had to punch to get out of the dream. I asked her to describe it and lo and fucking behold, oooo spooky, it’s the same old lady.

Ya’ll. I am being haunted by a fucking old lady who is soooooooo upset and can’t update her fucking retrograde ass beliefs about sexual ethics and relationships during everything else. Like for FUCK’S SAKE, lady, READ THE FUCKING ROOM.

I do NOT have time, energy, or the spoons to somehow explain 21st century sexual and relationship ethics, or polyamory, or interracial relationships to a motherfucking old racist biddy ass conservative motherfucking PHANTASM.

YOU SPECTRAL BINT, I HAVE ACID REFLUX. GET ME SOME FUCKING PEPCID AND TUMS AND THEN MAYBE. MAYBE WE WILL FUCKING TALK.

Anyway, unprofessional language and questionable metaphysics aside, if you need an educator or tutor in English, Philosophy, or any other humanities, please reach out and contact me via DM. If you would like to donate, I also have a Ko-Fi (ko-fi.com/strangerpeace). ok i need to get some sleep.

#venting #irritation #seriously wtf #i have acid reflux #i do not have time for ghosts #or eviction #or unemployment

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bedlund · 1 year

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#but i do love impending unemployment<3 #me.txt

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dostoyevsky-official · 2 months

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just one more graduate degree bro. i promise bro just one more graduate degree bro and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more degree bro. please just one more. one more graduate degree and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just get one more graduate degree bro i promise bro. bro bro please you jsut need one more degree

#bro this is a different graduate degree bto uts a different one this is a master of science bro this isnt master of arts #this will not make you unemployable and unnaproachable just stry it bro i swear just do the courses bro #please bro it's a different graduate degree bro

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animentality · 3 months

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#twitter #economy #us politics #work culture #jobs #unemployment

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probablyasocialecologist · 7 months

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Last July, The Intercept obtained an internal Bank of America memo that stated “we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.” Translated into English, this means the bank was rooting for there to be fewer job openings. Likewise, a California real estate CEO said on an earnings call last year that a recession could be “good” if “it comes with a level of unemployment that puts employers back in the driver seat and allows them to get all their employees back into the office.” Around the same time, an anonymous Texas businessman told the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve about his delighted anticipation that “the workforce pulls its head out of its rear when a correction or recession makes jobs scarce and people start to feel the pain or fear of not providing for their family and loved ones.” He did have one concern, however — that the government might “jump back into the fight and pay them to do nothing again.” Even Janet Yellen, the current secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Fed during the Obama administration, wrote this in a 1996 memo: “Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.”

#capitalism #unemployment

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american-boyboss · 1 year

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#youtube thumbnails #unemployment #multipost #moodboard #gaming #video games #mario #skyrim #elder scrolls #nintendo #legend of zelda #resident evil #work #any austin

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joeywreck · 10 months

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“the economist, a journal that speaks for british millionaires”-vladimir lenin

I think it’s safe to say today it’s the american billionaire.

#lenin #the economist #socialist #socialism #communism #unemployment #labor #economics #labour #economy #poverty

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virfujiwara · 8 days

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rip international fans

#I got that third world country swag 😎 economy in shambles attitude 💫 currency conversion charisma 🥰 high unemployment rate vibe 😉#watcher entertainment #Watcher

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theonlycabbage · 8 months

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these people unironically need to have their heads paraded around the streets on pikes

#economy #economics #politics #unemployment #poverty #socialism #communism #capitalism #fuck this dude and his fucking forehead

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without-ado · 1 year

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Ben Jennings

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is enough.” —Dr. Wess Stafford

#art #cartoon #poverty #unemployment #economic crisis #coronavirus #pandemic #covid 19 #cartoons #ben jennings

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month

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Wellness surveillance makes workers unwell

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TORONTO on Mar 22, then with LAURA POITRAS in NYC on Mar 24, then Anaheim, and more!

"National conversation" sounds like one of those meaningless buzzphrases – until you live through one. The first one I really participated in actively was the national conversation – the global conversation – about privacy following the Snowden revelations.

This all went down when my daughter was five, and as my wife and I talked about the news, our kid naturally grew curious about it. I had to literally "explain like I'm five" global mass surveillance:

https://locusmag.com/2014/05/cory-doctorow-how-to-talk-to-your-children-about-mass-surveillance/

But parenting is a two-way street, so even as I was explaining surveillance to my kid, my own experiences raising a child changed how I thought about surveillance. Obviously I knew about many of the harms that surveillance brings, but parenting helped me viscerally appreciate one of the least-discussed, most important aspects of being watched: how it compromises being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

As I wrote then:

There are times when she is working right at the limits of her abilities – drawing or dancing or writing or singing or building – and she catches me watching her and gets this look of mingled embarrassment and exasperation, and then she changes back to some task where she has more mastery. No one – not even a small child – likes to look foolish in front of other people.

Learning, growth, and fulfillment all require a zone of privacy, a time and place where we are not observed. Far from making us accountable, continuous, fine-grained surveillance by authority figures just scares us into living a cramped, inauthentic version of ourselves, where growth is all but impossible. Others have observed the role this plays in right-wing culture war bullshit: "an armed society is a polite society" is code for "people who make me feel uncomfortable just by existing should be terrorized into hiding their authentic selves from me." The point of Don't Say Gay laws and anti-trans bills isn't to eliminate gender nonconformity – it's to drive it into hiding.

Given all this, it's no surprise that workers who face workplace surveillance in the name of "wellness" feel unwell as a result:

https://www.ifow.org/publications/what-impact-does-exposure-to-workplace-technologies-have-on-workers-quality-of-life-briefing-paper

As the Future of Work Institute found in its study, some technologies – systems that make it easier to collaborate and communicate with colleagues – increase workers' sense of wellbeing. But wearables and AI tools make workers feel significantly worse:

https://assets-global.website-files.com/64d5f73a7fc5e8a240310c4d/65eef23e188fb988d1f19e58_Tech%20Exposure%20and%20Worker%20Wellbeing%20-%20Full%20WP%20-%20Final.pdf

Workers who reported these negative feelings confirmed that these tools make them feel "monitored." I mean, of course they do. Even where these tools are nominally designed to help you do your job better, they're also explicitly designed to help your boss keep track of you from moment to moment. As Brandon Vigliarolo writes for The Register, these are the same bosses who have been boasting to their investors about their plans to fire their workers and replace them with AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/advanced_workplace_tech_study/

"Bossware" is a key example of the shitty rainbow of "disciplinary technology," tools that exist to take away human agency by making it easier to surveil and control its users:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bossware

Bossware is one of the stages of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve: the process by which abusive and immiserating technologies progress up the privilege gradient as their proponents refine and normalize dystopian technologies in order to impose them on wider and wider audiences:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The kinds of metrics that bossware gathers might be useful to workers, but only if the workers get to decide when, whether and how to share that data with other people. Microsoft Office helps you catch typos by underlining words its dictionary doesn't recognize; the cloud-based, "AI-powered" Office365 tells your boss that you're the 11th-worst speller in your division and uses "sentiment analysis" to predict whether you are likely to cause trouble:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Two hundred years ago, Luddites rose up against machines. Contrary to the ahistorical libel you've heard, the Luddites weren't angry or frightened of machines – they were angry at the machines' owners. They understood – correctly – that the purpose of a machine "so easy a child could use it" was to fire skilled adult workers and replace them with kidnapped, indentured Napoleonic War orphans who could be maimed and killed on the job without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/12/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

A hundred years ago, the "Taylorites" picked up where those mill owners left off: choreographing workers' movements to the finest degree in a pseudoscientific effort to produce a kind of kabuki of boss-pleasing robotic efficiency. The new, AI-based Taylorism goes even further, allowing bosses to automatically blacklist gig workers who refuse to cross picket-lines, monitor "self-employed" call center operators in their own homes, and monitor the eyeballs of Amazon drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

AI-based monitoring technologies dock workers' wages, suspend them, and even fire them, and when workers object, they're stuck arguing with a chatbot that is the apotheosis of Computer Says No:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

There's plenty of research about AI successfully "augmenting" workers, making them more productive and I'm the last person to say that automation can't help you get more done:

https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/augmented-workforce

But without understanding how AI augments class warfare – disciplining workers with a scale, speed and granularity beyond the sadistic fantasies of even the most micromanaging asshole boss – this research is meaningless.

The irony of bosses imposing monitoring to improve "wellness" and stave off "burnout" is that nothing is more exhausting, more immiserating, more infuriating than being continuously watched and judged.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #surveillance #workplace surveillance #disciplinary technology #bossware #taylorism #ai #automation unemployment #wellness #health #labor #parenting #luddism

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incognitopolls · 2 months

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

#polls #incognito polls #anonymous #tumblr polls #tumblr users #questions #polls about jobs #submitted nov 29 #jobs #work #employment #unemployment #unemployed

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mcflymemes · 7 months

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please don't mistake silence for hatred. please don't mistake unanswered plotting messages as indifference, or a lack of enthusiasm towards you. considering the ages of most roleplayers, many of us have bills to pay, families to take care of, medical conditions to treat, appointments to make, classes to take, homes to clean, and lives to live away from the computer that are far, far more important than writing on tumblr — life has a tendency to get in the way of hobbies and fun things like this. be patient with your fellow writers. if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. of course you can set your boundaries, keep your space comfortable, and softblock whoever you wish, but do so while recognizing it's probably not hatred or apathy that keeps them from leaping into your dms with message after message. they probably love this hobby just as much as you... but sometimes life gets in the way.

#rp psa #roleplay psa #rp help #roleplay help #roleplay advice #'the rpc has changed for the worse' that's your opinion #but have that opinion while also acknowledging the ages of those you write with #and recognize they have responsibilities and worlds to take care of #people who depend on them #financial strain. hardships. unemployment. housing problems #medical bills. local weather disasters #trauma in their life deaths in their family #you cannot expect instant messages or EXTREME enthusiasm from everyone in this community #when so many of us are also dealing with irl situations #that are MORE important than talking about our fictional characters meeting for the first time #would it be nice if we could all find a comfy balance #and put passion into this hobby like we did when we were younger?#oh sure!!!! but that's just not viable anymore

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u3pxx · 1 year

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"and apollo… i need you to be there, defending me. i need your power."

happy apollo has his first trial and loses his job day! 🌻☀️🃏♠️

like this art? it's a print, here! | like what i do? support me on ko-fi!

seen lots of perceive fanart with polly looking stoic and cool so, what if i turn the anxiety up?

kept thinking about how freaky it must've been for him to focus for the first time so there he is, cutting the circulation to his arm bc the pain of focusing and his bracelet is a LOT

(im just a fan when people give his perceive ability side effects like really bad headaches and being very overstimulated and everything is just LOUD bc i go "ahaha, i do that." GDFGH)

seen lots of perceive fanart with polly lookin stoic and cool so, what if i turn the anxiety up? kept thinking about how freaky it must've been for him to focus for the first time so there he is, cutting the circulation to his arm bc the pain of focusing and his bracelet is a LOT

(im just a fan when people give his perceive ability side effects like really bad headaches bc i go "ahaha, i do that." GDFGH)

#ace attorney #apollo justice #apollo justice ace attorney #aa4 #turnabout trump #gyakuten saiban #odoroki hosuke #odoroki housuke #sunnysidedraws #happy apollo unemployment day!#im queueing this so i dont have to remember to post it at the 20th . win for my brain #aa4 spoilers #anywasy this was last year's art forgor to mention that #i still like it tho!#sunnysideattorney

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animentality · 3 months

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