Just a guy, doin’ stuff.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

    In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

    Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

    But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

    Edit: spelling.



  • I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.

    In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.



  • Sorry, it was the 7th last year. I forgot it falls on the first Monday of August each year.

    It’s a civic holiday that celebrates the founding of Halifax and Dartmouth, but all of Nova Scotia now celebrates it as a civic holiday. Most provinces have their own version falling on the same day, but as a Nova Scotian, I’m biased. The Nova Scotia flag or our tartan patterned onto the Lemmy symbol would be a way to go. The bluenose, and Peggy’s Cove lighthouse are also well known icons, but probably harder to incorporate. You could also go with a blue nose, as we’re known as Blue Nosers (named after a potato), but that might be confusing.