very_poggers_gay [they/them]

Yes, but that does not mean AI has 0 influence. Rather, AI is a circle, a shape with no beginning or end, suggesting that AI has endless and infinite potential. Now, let’s say you want to remove AI from the equation - imagining a world without AI. What happens when you divide by zero? You can’t, because dividing by zero is undefined. Thusly, a world (future or past) without AI is now an impossibility. This is simply the laws of mathematics.

• Property Manager, AI Consultant

Mix of libgen and local bookstores, including my town’s anarchist bookstore!

I’m juggling “If We Burn” by Jason Bevins, “Postcapitalist Desire” by Mark Fisher, and “Double Shift” by Jason Read. I’m not familiar with Jason Read but the description of the book had me intrigued

In as few words as possible: U.S. academia functions as an MLM* scheme where your best career prospect after getting out will be in academia, preparing further students to leave academia only to return, ad infinitum.

Yup. Graduate students are expected to do so much unpaid work, at least here in Canada. Not just that, but we (at least in my program) still pay tuition despite not taking courses. We constantly do unpaid work for our own (or our supervisor’s) research. We pay out of pocket to present work at conferences. We pay thousands of dollars to publish our work. We have to beg and grovel for the chance to get funding, and the funding system hasn’t changed scholarship amounts in over 20 years. All the presentations, publications, funding applications, etc. are just fodder for your CV, so you can have better odds at doing more presentations, publications, and funding applications.

It’s such a rigged system.

An example comment from tankies on Zelensky: “Putin and our comrades in Ukraine are going to kill all the US financed nazi scum and hopefully hang Zelensky while they’re at it. Let’s go Brandon!”

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I don’t think that was me, but that’s really heartwarming to hear it helped you in that way

I probably feel similarly, as someone who got diagnosed last year in my mid-20’s… if it wasn’t for some memes that were concerningly relatable, I’d probably still be undiagnosed and unmedicated, and fighting way harder to function the same. I probably cried the first time I watched the wall of awful video, lmao. I’m a softie and it made me feel seen and understood in a way that is really rare.

Relevant ADHD- and EF-related post about the so-called “Wall of Awful”, which explains why it can be so hard to do things sometime, and reminds us to see the work we’re doing even if it’s not necessarily materialized

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg

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In my “First Reformed” era

Oh absolutely. It’s a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it “WEIRD” populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that “weird” terminology is a bit stinky… I’m looking at the “E” and “D”). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.

There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don’t align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely

Yup, I’ve got a paper that’s just about ready for submission, and if the journal accepts it for publication, we pay ~3k USD, so about $4k CAD.

I hope you can realize this is a false equivalency, but maybe you can’t?

If you believe so little in democracy in the workplace, why do you bother with democracy at all? Should other institutions that govern our lives also function as oligarchies, dictatorships, autocracies?

Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants.

Not really and certainly not directly. Almost all research grants (at least in Canada and the EU) are for the costs of running research, not for the PI’s salary, which their institution pays. I know those two can’t be separated, but the point is still true that most of the grant money that individual researchers apply for can only be spent on conducting research. It is not for them to live, it is for them to do their job.

If this was even a problem, which it isn’t,

What do you mean by this part?

The neoliberal logic consuming academia is bad for academia as a whole, and anyone who can stand to benefit from higher education and/or quality research (i.e., practically everyone everywhere). Almost anyone working on research in academia is severely underpaid and they’re expected to work countless hours for free. Academia is a house of cards help together by the grindset of graduate students and early- or mid-career researchers.

The ways that grunts and funding are allocated are deeply flawed, and fields that aren’t tied to profitable industries (e.g., “life sciences” like biology and chemistry) are severely underfunded. See:

NIMH funding. NSF funding

The only winners in the current system are the profit-driven capitalists who fund research for good PR and ‘passive’ income, and the few others in academia who game funding systems to cash out on shitty dead-end or naively idealist research

The company wouldn’t exist without owners, someone created it, someone started it, someone owns it. The owners are also the ones usually making the big decisions, they have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the future of the company.

The kingdom wouldn’t exist without monarchs, someone created it, someone started it, someone rules it. The monarchs are also the ones usually making the big decisions, they have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the future of the kingdom.

Americans are so pro-democracy, but they’ll bust out the most self-defeating, thoughtless, begging-the-question-ass logic to argue against having democracy in the workplace. Sad.

Employees are allowed to buy company stock and vote using it just like anyone else.

And vote with what money? Income inequality is arguably as worse as it has ever been. More and more workers are forced to live on wages that can’t even cover their basic needs, let alone buying power, while the capitalist/owning class is hoarding unbelievable wealth.

How can workers vote with their money to overturn a system designed by wealthy employers to make themselves as wealthy as possible (a system that involves keeping employee wages as low as possible, btw)? That’s the fucking problem, lmao.

Consider this: Wealth inequality in America today is worse than it was in ancient Egypt. Your “solution” is like asking asking what’s the problem with the slaves of ancient Egypt not buying their way into power.

Especially if your company has more employees and customers than even a large city?

Why do those employees get the bare minimum? Why are the working majority excluded from ownership and decision-making in the companies they run?