Voters don't lose elections, campaigns do. Harris failed, and this kind of "turning around of the blame" thing that Dems try to do is one of the reasons why they don't win elections: they never learn.
Ever since the ICE stuff I've been desperate to find a way to not pay my taxes - even if it means donating 2, 3x, hell 4x my tax bill to somewhere else. Obviously it's basically impossible to do this (especially if your income is all self employment income) outside of just spending every penny you earn on something that could be viably considered a business expense. So I'm wondering if I should just straight up stop working until I can relinquish my USA citizenship.
Spend down my savings and assets till I have almost nothing to exit tax, exit, and then start working again.
I don't want to fund the bombing of strangers I have no quarrel with.
Imo the more ethical thing is obstructionism. Twitter's takeover showed it's pretty easy to find True Believer sycophants to hire. Better to play the part while secretly finding ways to sabotage.
I think about this a lot re: Israel. I had a conversation once with an Israeli where he was convinced "everyone is racist," but we're all too woke to admit it or something, or have some belief that racism is wrong but work to overcome this inherent thing.
His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.
It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.
People with historical trauma are far more likely to inflict further wrongs than people without historical trauma. This is the case for individual trauma too. It has always been this way.
I recently met a guy that goes to these "San Francisco Freedom Club" parties. Check their website, it's basically just a lot of Capitalism Fans and megawealthies getting drunk somewhere fancy in SF. Anyway, he's an ultra-capitalist and we spent a day at a cafe (co-working event) chatting in a conversation that started with him proposing private roads and shot into orbit when he said "Should we be valuing all humans equally?"
Throughout the conversation he speculated on some truly bizarre possible futures, including an oligarchic takeover by billionaires with private armies following the collapse of the USA under Trump. What weirded me out was how oddly specific he got about all the possible futures he was speculating about that all ended with Thiel, Musk, and friends as feudal lords. Either he thinks about it a lot, or he overhears this kind of thing at the ultracapitalist soirées he's been going to.
It seems quite a reasonable output to the current input we are having. Elon having an army of robots is... well it is what it is. Yet that is the direction we are going.
The only shareholders in a co-op are the owners/operators ("employees"), or the owners/operators + customers (for example REI I believe). There's nobody seeking to extract value at the expense of the employees or the customers.
If, as a shareholder operator, a co-op member pressured themselves to exploit user data to turn a quick buck, I guess that's possible, but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.
In my experience, co-op members and customers are more value-oriented than profit-motivated, within reason.
> but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.
Why are shareholders less likely to veto a evil person in a company vs in a co-operative? I think in most cases, the evil person is likely to get vetoed but sometimes greed takes over, specially over period of years and decades.
We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.
I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.
I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.
The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.
This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.
Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
> but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
Yes, agreed for the USA/Taiwan/Japan where we mostly operate. For us it's been understanding and leveraging the alternative resources we have. Like, we have a lot of members, but really only a couple are bringing in customers, despite plenty of members having very good networks.
Is your current a co-op? 200+ sales at 30k a pop seems to be pretty well off the ground!
> I was given a warning because said proposal was (unknowingly) opposed to a Senior Director's vision, one they'd already presented to the customer prior to seeking my input and neglected to mention when I reached out. My timing was perfect for the market, but poor for the systems of power within the organization.
I feel like there's two paths you can take in your career: corporate stooge, or productive worker. The corporate stooge will be more capitalistically rewarded, because businesses aren't optimized for productivity or quality, they're optimized for capitalistic rewards.
There was an article recently about dating apps and their inherently contradictory incentives. They're incentivized to keep you on the app, which means getting you kinda good matches, but not so good that you stop needing the app. The business world seems to be nothing but these contradictions, and it seems our choices are to learn to take this Kafkaesque fully into our internal model of the world, or give up and accept that we'll be disposed of every few years, despite keeping some part of the company's heart beating (a part some exec will one day gleefuly rip out of their own metaphorical chest so as to drive up price immediately before acquisition or something).
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