I joined a union and organized the election of a workers council at my workplace.
Union dues are 1% of my salary.In the past 5 years, we managed to enforce:
- the right to work from home
- 20% pay for the time spent on call after hours, plus 1 day paid vacation for each week you’re on call (so I now have 42 days + unlimited sick days)
- a company car for on call duty, which you’re allowed to use privately, too
- work phones for every employee (instead of having to install the company MDM on your private phone)
- convertible desks for everyone
- and a substantial pay raise
This post was about little things, no need to show your gigantic balls here.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It began with a little thing, simply writing an e-mail to the union, and kind of grew from there.All good man, I just wanted to point out how impressive what you did was. You didn’t just stick it to the man, you went Vlad the Impaler on his ass.
Don’t know if it counts as sticking it to the man, but I adblock everything. Seriously, Ive got adblockers on my adblockers. Ive been adblocking for so long I don’t know what to buy anymore.
I’m sitting here in my empty house surrounded by my bags of money I don’t know what to spend on. Send help.
Same. I also treat cookies like a virus…no, no, and no again. Though I think my days are limited with that, a lot of websites now saying accept cookies or pay. I’ll give up the interwebs before I accept trackers.
For articles which won’t let you disable cookies there’s usually an archived version somewhere. Or you use some current alternative to 12ft. Or you ask an LLM to summarize the URL.
12ft ladder has never worked for me, unfortunately. :/
Check the Firefox plug-in called Web archives. It helps you archive web pages and it helps you find access to archive web pages. It’s pretty useful.
Instead of manually denying cookies, you can deny all cookies and whitelist the sites you trust.
Edit: also note - websites that give you the ‘option’ to opt in or out may not have the same opinion on what cookies are ‘optional’ or ‘mandatory’. Several don’t even do anything and are just there to look compliant.
Absolutely agree. Site owners only get fined if someone reports them. The regulators aren’t actively scanning sites to ensure compliance.
And how do I do that?
To be blunt (but not to be mean), RTFM or google it. There are lots of ways to do it, and it all depends on the capabilities of your devices, OS, browsers and whether or not you want to use apps to manage it. And again, I’m not trying to be mean, it’s just that the question has the same effort as “how do I make food?”. I could give you the most gourmet answer and it may not help.
But to answer as simply as possible: Most browsers can do cookie whitelisting out of the box. Just be aware that it doesn’t prevent cookies outside the browser or outside the device - so if you have (for instance) a smart tv, you’ll need other solutions. And the solutions snowball from there, so I will leave it at that.
I don’t know what to buy anymore.
I have a problem where because I’m so hard to advertise to between adblock and premium subscriptions, that I am usually very out of the loop on what movies and TV shows are coming out
The biggest ones usually make their way into the news or Lemmy somehow, but there’s definitely a lot I’m clueless about until I see them pop up streaming somewhere a couple years later
I have this same problem! Friends will mention a film they’re about to see and I’ve literally never heard of it, and they very much act like I should have 😂 I do feel like I’m missing out on important information, but I’m still not turning ad blockers off.
When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I’m buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.
In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there’s no fee for cash.
That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.
amex is taken in 9 out of 10 places when I use it. it’s usually small places that don’t take it
Amex is such a douchebag rich person flex. The credit card equivalent of a Laboubou collection.
Lol what? It’s just another generic credit card.
It’s actually a charge card. You’re expected to pay it off every month.
I literally cannot think of any places that don’t take Discover.
It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.
Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.
For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).
Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.
Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.
We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.
over here, the extra cost that comes from handling cash is enough that small businesses don’t want to take it. counting till every day adds up.
Surprisingly not in the US. If you make 100 sales a day of $20 each, then over a six-day week, you’d pay roughly $360 in credit card transaction fees (assuming 2.5% + 10¢ per transaction which is average). If you instead spent half an hour a day counting cash in the till and then half an hour at the end of the week to go to the bank, that’s about $98 in labour cost (assuming a labour cost of $28 per hour, which is roughly $25 per hour in wages and $3 per hour in tax), so the savings are $262 per week, which is not insignificant.
yeah that 10¢ is 10x our transaction cost.
We buy almost nothing new except consumables. I could spend an hour, probably two, showing you around our house and pointing out all the things I made, found on the road, bought used or was given, etc. Our vehicles are 2002, 2004 and 2014.
Not sure we’ve ever bought Christmas stuff. Our house is lit up like none other on the block this year. Wife toted home a milk crate packed with lights the other day, free. The nice tree in the living room? No idea where it came from, sure didn’t buy it at Walmart.
Tried a new coat today my wife got for $1, had to cut the tags off. Damn it’s soft and warm! Had to make myself stop buying shoes and clothes at the thrift, have way too many.
Just got done making my own soap. Still not curing for some reason. :( Got some borax and will try making my own laundry soap next.
This year I grew loofa sponges. Got at least a year’s supply of scrub pads, kitchen and shower, won’t spend a dime on that shit. I’d have a 3-year supply, but made mistakes learning. I’ll grow next year and probably skip a few years after that harvest. Also, the seeds sell for $5/20 on eBay. I have hundreds, if not 1000+.
That’s super cool, respect.
I don’t remember the last time I saw an advert.
Like, genuinely, I get politely confused when people talk about them. What do you MEAN you’re not adblocking everything? What do you MEAN you still use a service if you can’t adblock it? WHAT DO YOU MEAN you paid for YouTube?
My wife is a software developer who doesn’t use Ublock or Revanced and I’m so confused.
Has she ever given a reason?
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, thats why I poop on company time.
Oh I do way more than that.
“Shit on Debra’s desk!”
When watching over-the-air television, I mute the TV and look away when ads come on.
You can show me all the ads in the world but you sure as fuck can’t force me to engage.Tap for spoiler
God help those fuckers when I finally fall down the TV Tuner + Jellyfin + TVHeadend rabbithole. I’m gonna “Live Pause” that shit or I’m gonna straight up DVR everything I wanna watch and skip the ads.
And my parents watch much more OTA TV than me so you bet your ass I’m setting up every TV in their house with a cheap trustable Android TV stick and teaching them how to Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward. Fuck ads foreverrrrrr.Perceiving advertisements is unethical. Good job!
Start saving for a small pc and some large hard drives. It’s worth it. Or pay for a VPN and use stremio and just stream torrents.
You can also buy access to other people’s Plex servers, watch anything
Fuck advertisements. I’ve got pihole setup as my local DNS, ublock origin on all computers. Being bombarded every minute of every day to buy shit is getting real old really fast.
I cook most of my own food from cheap whole ingredients. I’m almost completely vegetarian.
Support right to repair.
Edit and add to the Consumer Rights Wiki
Buy things I can actually own (not modern cars / smart fridges which can have features remotely removed at any time.)
Use solar power + house battery + V2G.
Automate everything with Home Assistant.
Provide free source code for all of my projects.
Our community library is hosting a free repair clinic to residents, where volunteers like me make ourselves available for a few hours to fix things for no cost. Bicycles, toasters, lamps, clothing, pretty much anything that doesn’t have hazardous chemicals or weighs too much to bring in. The residents are expected to stay with us as we fix things so that maybe we can teach them what we do.
It’s my first time volunteering for an event like this so I can’t wait to see how it goes.
I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.
Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.
I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.
I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.
As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.
I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.
I have sex with my husband. He’s a man. I stick it to him. Does that count?
Push Nestle and Goya products way back in the shelf / turn them around / grab non- Nestle/Goya equivalents and put them in front of the Nestle/Goya shit.
Goal is to make their products less visible to other customers.
I say anti-CCP stuff to trigger my parents lol.
They aren’t even involved in the CCP in any way, like they’re just originary people never been involed with the party in any way, but they have like some weird nationalistic glass heart that gets mad when I say anything anti-CCP.
Like… lmao what, are they afraid of the China’s secret police? Why do we have to continue pretending to love CCP? We don’t live in China anymore lol.
Like if they piss me off, I’m just gonna say anti-CCP shit to piss them off. I really wanna like make a WeChat account, add my parents, then spam their accounts and get them banned.
I remember a few years ago, my mom yelled at me so much and made me cry, so I just used a permanent marker and wrote (graffitied) “消滅中共，世界和平” on a wall inside our/their house [in the US], it’s still there, I didn’t know how to write the characters, so I just typed it in pinyinyin and used traditional characters for emphasis, they couldn’t wipe it off the wall. That is a permanent mark of our relationship. That writing on the wall represents the scars of my traumatic childhood memories.
Like wtf, CCP literally tried to kill me (long story short: One Child Policy, I was the 2nd child), and they still like defend CCP as if there’s a CCP secret police here in the US watching us. Fuck them, who cares.
(I just had an argument with parents so this comment might seem very angry and like a rant, whoops, I trauma dumped on the internet again)
On the topic of China’s secret police, what are your thoughts on the Chinese government attempting to repatriate Chinese Americans and Europeans through covert operations, such as Operation Fox Hunt? I remember hearing about operations like this a few years ago, and it always seemed really freaky to me.
I haven’t personally witnessed a “Chinese Overseas Secret Police” agent yet being in the US for like… about 15 years, so idk how serious the supposed “threat” really is. I never got any threats from PRC, yet. Then again, I don’t have much followers and I don’t really show my face and I never mentioned my real name. It would take a bit of effort to deanonymise me (not impossible, just takes effort)
I think Russia probably has a worse M.O. like… they just poison their dissidents, like Alexy Navalny
Not sure if there are any recorded instances of Chinese dissidents being poisoned like Russia does to their dissidents, so like…
if I get coerced to “go back” I’d just refuse…
what what are they gonna do, drive a van and grab me and then somehow get me across the ocean? (do they even have the logistics?)
Idk, I’m probably a bit more worried about ICE at the moment.
I mean I say anti-CCP shit and I don’t really feel fear as long as I never step foot in China again. But when it comes to… anti-trump speech, that’s when I sort of self-censor a bit to make sure it isn’t legally considered “threatening violence”.
Kinda like Snowden, you know. He can criticize his former country, but isn’t really in much of a position to criticize his current country.
I’m sort of in a Snowden-type of situation, I mean I do criticize the US, but I have to “tone-down” a lot of what I say about the US.
So, TLDR is: 没办法, I can’t do anything about it, I’m not in a position of power to help other Chinese dissidents.
It sounds terrifying if they do decide to target you, that is; but there are a lot of dissidents around the world, they can’t possible go after everyone, especially those outside the country.
I steal where I can from large corporations. I like to think of it as giving myself a discount.
rip a fart in the elevator as I walk out
