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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 10th, 2024

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  • If you want people to act, focus on giving them a way to act that feels meaningful and worth the sacrifice. There’s not much for safety nets in the US, so if people are going to risk hunger and homelessness, they need to feel like they have a meaningful choice, one where their sacrifice makes an appreciable difference.

    What option do they really have as individuals? You can say general strike as a concept, but people need concrete plans, and they need to be widely known so people can act in unison. Just telling people to get off their ass and act is trying to set people in motion without any idea how to keep all the headless chickens moving in the same direction. If there’s not a fully coordinated attempt at massive unity, there’s just no way it accomplishes something. People will act here and there, they’ll get fired, they’ll get replaced because tons of people need work, and the mess will continue. It must happen coherently, or it’s just a bunch of martyring. We need to figure out how to coordinate on a large enough scale when so many people are so heavily reliant on corporate media and social media, who will most certainly be weaponized against any such movement.


  • Look, man, I get it, I really do, but I don’t think you quite grasp the responsibilities some other people have. Maybe, just maybe, if we could actually coordinate something big enough to have an impact, but there’s nothing like that to join. We had some of the biggest protests in national history multiple times, and nothing really happened. When we lay it all down and sacrifice everything not only for ourselves but on behalf of our whole families, under the current circumstances, what exactly do you expect to happen? A handful of us try a general strike, get fired, and immediately get replaced because the job market is absolute trash? Because that’s what’s going to happen if we just act on our own.

    You want people to do something, and that’s really understandable, but you’re ultimately asking people to give a lot when the current circumstances mean we’re unlikely to get much in return. If you want people to act, we need to figure out how to change circumstances or at least reframe things so people can see the value in their own personal sacrifice.





  • But what were talking about isn’t implemented a flawed system, it’s improving one that’s already flawed, and the result still wouldn’t be perfect but it’s better than what currently exists

    Except this is something we disagree on. I do not agree that the massive extensions to copyright are anything other than deeply flawed.

    And it doesn’t prevent passing even better laws further down the line, but I think you know that creating new more comprehensive survivor benefits that would cover everyone is a much harder sell than a comparatively small tweak to copyright laws.

    “But it’d be hard to do it right, let’s just bandaid it with more flaws.”

    And if we remove those copyright benefits before those new systems are ready, you’re leaving people in the lurch without any safety net until those new systems can be created (if in fact they ever are)

    I could maybe, maaaaybe, agree to a big shift with a grandfather clause. Anything already published would then get the old rules, and anything new would get the new, much less restrictive rules. I’d still rather just fix it properly, though.


  • Just because the system is flawed doesn’t mean we should implement even more flaws in the system to cover some of the old ones. If providing for retirement and a family that survives the early death of their provider are your priorities, let’s work out systems to ensure everyone gets the support we can both agree should be provided. Depending on inherited IP rights and depending on an employer to contribute to retirement are both deeply flawed plans, and we’d be better off doing something like eliminating the cap on social security taxes so we can make sure everyone’s retirement is covered and that survivor benefits are sufficient.