UBI, as the OP points out, as many of us have continued to point out/scream about, is a single component of a larger agenda of reforms.
It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.
It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.
It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.
It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.
It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
This is why I love Boston: everyone here, at least in public, operates by Crocker’s Rules.
Blocking the whole escalator at rush hour? “ONE SIDE, ASSHOLE” while someone pushes them aside and moves up.
Shoving past exiting riders on the T rather than letting them off first? “LET US EXIT, ASSHOLE” as they’re shoulder-checked.
SUV or Monster Truck in the compact car spaces? “CAN’T YOU READ, ASSHOLE” as the tiny car beside them deliberately flings their door open into their bodywork.
I love it. Fastest I’ve ever adapted to a new city thanks to the glut of direct feedback. Haven’t been called an asshole in a decade.
—-
Humor aside, yeah hi I am one of those people who thrive on the sort of direct feedback Crocker’s Rules permit, because context switching sucks and the “wind up” of flowery communication ratchets my OCD into outright anxiety as it tries to pick out every possible level of nuance, tone, intent, and outcome.
If I fucked up, man, just tell me how and show me how I can do better next time. That’s all I need. I don’t need a weighted blanket and hot tea’s worth of communication coziness, I just need actionable feedback so I can apologize, fix it, and get back to work.
I really, really need folks to understand that deflecting blame away from the tool and trying to hold the human accountable feeds right into the marketing playbook of these companies in the first place.
The cops cannot be held accountable because the laws basically give them immunity. The politicians cannot be held accountable beyond being tossed out at the next election, because the laws otherwise give them immunity. The people operating the system cannot be held accountable, because the systems are marketed as authoritative despite being black boxes and lacking in transparency; they trusted the system just as they were told to, and thus cannot be held accountable.
And so when every human in the chain cannot be held accountable for these things, and the law prevents victims from receiving apologies, let alone recourse, then the tool and its maker is the only thing we can hold accountable. By deflecting blame away from the tools ("it wasn't AI, it was facial recognition"; "the human had to sign off on it"; "humans made the arrest, not machines"), you're protecting quite literally the only possible entity that could still potentially be held accountable: the dipshits making these stupid things and marketing them as superior and authoritative when compared to humans.
You want accountability? Start holding capital to account, and this shit falls away real fucking fast. Don't get lost in technical nuance over very real human issues.
I disagree. If you focus on holding the software creators to account in lieu of the humans in the loop, the we only reinforce the behavior of offloading thinking to the system.
If I am a cop in another jurisdiction and I see that in this case of error, the facial recognition company was held to account but not the police or municipality, I will be more likely to blindly trust the software assuming that they either patched it or will take responsibility.
You can blame both. The prosecutors and police that didn't do their proper due diligence, falsely imprisoning this woman, and held her for months without due process. And also the AI company that submitted a false police report and the defamation of character. There's no reason for either of them to escape the blame.
You forgot one: capital cannot be held accountable for making a tool used in a crime. It is a simple generalization of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), passed in 2005, which largely bars civil lawsuits against gun makers and sellers when their products are later used in crime.
Is there anything to suggest this sort of injustice isn't happening in low-tech all the time, constantly, all over the country, and the only reason it's getting attention here is because AI is involved?
The scale is not the same. Low-tech tools require more human input, more pre-filtering of suspects. They can't just default to starting with "everybody" and match against millions at the push of a button.
It's the fault of the tool because our society treats the tools as superior judgements than humans and to be trusted completely as a means of deflecting accountability - something any and every minority group has been warning about for fucking decades.
The reason everyone rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skills. The marketing has been the same since the 80s: the tool is superior (until it isn't), the tool shall be trusted completely (until it fails), the tool cannot make mistakes (until it does).
If folks actually listened to the victims of this shit, companies like Flock and Palantir would be gutted and their founders barred from any sort of office of responsibility, at minimum. The fact so many deflect blame from the tool like the marketing manual demands shows they don't actually give a shit about the humans wrapped up in the harms, or the misuse and misappropriation of these tools by persons wholly unaccountable under the law, but only about defending a shiny thing they personally like.
>rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skill
The magical past where people had critical thinking skills never existed. We put a lot of trust in tools is because people are unfucking reliable. Hence why in most cases actual physical evidence does a far better job than witness testimony.
This said, people are lazy. It is one of our greatest and worst traits. When we are allowed to be lazy, especially with tools bad things happen.
You’re going crazy because up until this exact moment you’ve never had to confront the reality that these tools, placed into the hands of the common man, are viewed as authoritative and lack any accountability or consequence for misuse.
For anyone who has been victimized by law enforcement or governments before, we’ve been warning about this shit for decades. About the lack of consequence for police brutality. The lack of consequence for LPR abuse. The lack of consequence for facial recognition failures and AI mismatches.
You need to understand that by using these systems correctly and holding yourself accountable, you are in the minority. Most people do not think that critically, and are all too happy to finger the computer when things go badly.
And until you accept that, and work to actually hold folks accountable instead of deflecting blame away from the tool, then this won’t actually change.
Do you mean hypothetically could society hold law enforcement personnel accountable for mistakes, bad judgement, flagrant criminal conduct, horrendous abuse of any and everyone? Certainly, a large scale and comprehensive restructuring of America’s law enforcement and prosecutorial system is legally possible.
However, I hold to the opinion that if you are discussing actual reality, based on decades (if not the entire period post civil war, for near certainty) of historical examples and the current “majority” position of the US electorate: there is a nearly unqualified NO. We cannot, or will not, hold law enforcement accountable for even intentional, planned, and malicious conduct in a vast majority of cases. There is practically no accountability at all, and that’s just for thoroughly proven intentional conduct. Bad judgement, alleged mistakes, etc are even less able to result in any action.
The reality of the legislation and precedent ensure it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
I’m one of today’s lucky 10k, because this judo-threw me with how I (didn’t) understand CI/CD. My experience with it has largely been a cumbersome add-on to existing processes that are often incredibly fragile and impossible to amend; turns out, that’s kind of the point. Understanding that it’s the equivalent of doing rocket tests on kit you expect to fail and using that to build better rockets suddenly makes its value far more recognizable, at least to my eyes.
Solid writeup. Definitely keeping in my personal notes.
Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop.
Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law.
I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts).
TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you.
Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five).
I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
The comments hit at some, but not all, of the underlying drivers. I'll add a more comprehensive view and let you draw your own conclusions:
* Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership.
* Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025.
* Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS).
* That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover.
* Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case.
The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers.
Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.
Welp. Fuck Atlassian. Their resistance towards arbitrary RTO mandates and a people-first culture had me tolerate the weirdness of JIRA and Confluence, but now?
Fuck ‘em. Rolling my own using shelfware, kthxbai.
As someone who has been alone in some deeply dark places, I'll share what's worked for me - YMMV.
* You gotta force yourself out. There's no trick, you just gotta fuckin' do it. It's hard. It sucks. You've also gotta do it if only to make sure you're varying your day and creating the opportunity for chance encounters. I spent fifteen months bottled up alone and it was only through the good graces of friends that I didn't...yeah.
* Eat out more, specifically for the human interaction. Find a local restaurant with a good deal on food (like a happy hour), and head there once a week for a meal you didn't make, and to be surrounded by strangers. Even just a "Yes Sir/Ma'am" and similar pleasantries will help, weirdly enough, because it's direct human contact. If there's a trivia night, even better - Buffalo Wild Wings was my brief go-to for that sort of thing.
* You gotta learn to love yourself, somehow. If there's an aspect you don't like, set about fixing it. For me, it was weight and my soft skills, so I worked on both in the time I could with the energy I had. Being alone means if you don't like yourself, you're never going to be in good spirits.
* You're also not really alone, depending on perspective. Setup a bird feeder and just sit and watch it. Talk to the wildlife, silly as that sounds. Your pets help, but they're "at home", while the rest of the world is decidedly not "at home". You gotta get out of the home if you don't want to be alone.
* You mentioned playing games, and I'll add that's actually what kept me sane during those fifteen months of solo unemployment. I joined a multiplayer game server community, worked my way into administration, made friends, ran events. Gaming can be a form of community if it's intentional, i.e. not just joining random lobbies to kill time.
Look, as someone still single at 39 (but blessedly living with my best friends), being alone sucks ass. There's no way around that, even for someone who generally enjoys their solitude. Lacking the warmth and intimacy of another person is debilitating in a way nothing else is, at least to me, but friends do help in their own way. We cook for each other, share our days, treat one another when we're dour, and do what we can to lift others up. So maybe I'm suggesting you reach out to other friends you may have in similar boats, see if they'd like to spend more time together.
Beyond that, some life lessons I've learned since I had more folks come into my life, that I use when I'm feeling alone or lonely again:
* Go to a city at night, downtown ideally. I look around at the empty buildings, the changing lights, the abandoned sidewalks. I remind myself I'm one of eight and a half billion people, on a single planet in a vast galaxy, itself a small part of an immense universe. Weirdly enough, the smallness of being helps me feel less alone, knowing how lucky I am to be amidst all this, right now.
* After the above, I grab a burger and a milkshake, because I deserve it.
* Pop in some earbuds, go outside for a walk, and dance. Fuck the onlookers, just exist for a moment outside your home. Prove to everyone else you're still here.
* VRChat has been damn helpful. Pop on my headset, drop into an avatar that reflects me in the moment, and world hop. Nobody judges what you do in VR, provided you're not breaking instance rules, and there's so many people there to hang out with, all while staying home. It legit got me through COVID.
* Run a game night! Gathering around Jackbox from every corner of the globe for an hour or two of weekly shitposting also got us all through COVID. Just make sure to all be in voice chat or video conferencing to rib one another.
As tired and cliche as this is, the last point I'll say is that this is exactly what the prior phase of your life was: a chapter. Chapters have endings, and this one is no different. Prepare for the long haul, but hopefully you find someone - and something - better, sooner. You're not alone in being alone, but you'll remain alone only as long as you choose to be alone.
Get out there. Force social interactions. Build those muscles.
It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.
It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.
It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.
It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.
It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
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