This was kind of how I felt when COVID was taking over the world. There was literally a pandemic where people were dying and our bosses were all scrambling to keep productivity up.
It’s like dude, brad, our metrics aren’t the most important thing right now.
I work for government, in a software development area, and I had to be at work during COVID.
At first in person, with free parking which was nice, but no coffee shops. Then we got the 200 remote work licences that were originally for field workers and worked on VMs, then the organisation got a remote work system for the whole workforce and could work on our own work desktops from home and everyone was virtually back
We worked so hard during that first year (2020 good riddance) and delivered so much emergency support software so quickly
Then things get back to normal and are told that we can’t deliver while working from home so have to be in the office 3/5ths of the time
Until some businesses found out the hard way that if a few critical people are sick for weeks, maybe months or even die, a department stops running and without that department the entire company shuts down. That’s when companies changed their minds with remote work and measures.
Restaurants around here are mostly closed during the holidays because they can’t find enough people. Lots of their workers were laid off and found work with better pay and/or hours and didn’t come back. The whole sector is now permanently understaffed.
During the pandemic, I was in management at an office supply retail store. It was insane that we were open, and even more insane the people who wanted to shop. Boomer people who felt that we were keeping them from the damn printer ink and paper. People were dying and they were worried about being able to print the silly email Aunt Helen sent them.
Coincidentally, “Four Horsemen Deep” was also the title of my sexually explicit D&D campaign exploring the origin of centaurs.
Something, something, easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism and all that
The capitalist AI companies are unintentionally trying to end capitalism. It’s a snake eating its own tail, it’s ridiculous and inevitable.
I’m all for it.
“That is completely accurate, when I encountered a freeway swallowing lake of fire, I did not consider weather or not it would impact my and my work teams performance. At that point in time my mind was occupied with some rather more immediate problems”
Collectively, we make all the parasite class’ money. The workers who show up and do actual work create all the value. The second the workers don’t show up collectively, the entire machine grinds to a halt.
A general strike is the only way to fix things. Logistics workers, tech workers, all the “essential” employees who had to work through the pandemic, and everyone else who busts their ass so some rich asshole gets richer without paying you your value. Their need for your work is the critical weakness in the system. A general strike fixes things rapidly, because it all collapses without us.