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For articles which won’t let you disable cookies there’s usually an archived version somewhere.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’m nice to others.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” - Elon Musk
That’s how you know empathy is important. It apparently affects the rich’s bottom line. Plus, you know, if you have a brain, empathy is just a given…
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?
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 pirate my media. The way I see it, I will pull one over on any company I can get away with that would absolutely swindle me given the chance.
You mean you don’t want to give the fascist David Ellison any money?!? Me either :)
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
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.
It is definitely not true that Discover interchange rates are significantly higher than Visa or Mastercard.
I’ve put below a list of the actual interchange rates for various personal Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards types.
Debit:
- Visa Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
- Discover Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
- Mastercard Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
- Visa Debit: 0.8% + 15¢
- Mastercard Debit: 1.05% + 15¢
- Discover Debit: 1.1% + 16¢
- Visa Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢
- Mastercard Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢
Base credit tiers:
- Visa CPS Retail: 1.51% + 10¢
- Discover Consumer: 1.56% +10¢
- Mastercard Consumer: 1.65% + 10¢
- Mastercard Enhanced: 1.8% + 10¢
Rewards cards:
- Visa Rewards Traditional: 1.65% + 10¢
- Visa Rewards Signature: 1.65% + 10¢
- Discover Rewards: 1.71% + 10¢
- Discover Rewards Premium: 1.71% + 10¢
- Mastercard World: 1.9% + 10¢
Premium cards:
- Visa Rewards Signature Preferred: 2.1% + 10¢
- Discover Rewards Premium Plus: 2.15% + 10¢
- Mastercard World Elite: 2.3% + 10¢
You can plainly see that Discover tends to be more expensive than Visa but is cheaper than Mastercard. The only reason I could see that someone might refuse Discover is because Discover cards are all rewards credit cards that go into the higher tiers, whereas many Visa and Mastercard cards are debit cards which go into the lowest tier.
Hmm go figure your mom gives me a hard time about it every time.
Amex is such a douchebag rich person flex. The credit card equivalent of a Laboubou collection.
Amex isn’t exclusive at all. Anyone can go apply for one and get one. It’s not special at all
I used to do that, but here (Australia) passing on surcharges has sadly been normalised, and during covid heaps of businesses went cashless.
The salt in the wound is that there’s not really any reason for businesses to push payment gateways for a better deal. They don’t give a shit any more as they just pass it into the customer.
Some American states (not mine) have banned surcharging for credit cards in response to consumer backlash. But what’s not banned is marking up everything by 3% and then offering a 3% cash discount.
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.
That is godlike, not small!
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.
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.
Oh I got a home server setup already with Jellyfin and a bunch of media already, just need to figure out the Live TV stuff (for live news, some soap operas, stuff that doesn’t get torrented much) for it to be 100% complete :)
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, thats why I poop on company time.
Oh I do way more than that.
I work in ads and I use ad blockers.
I couldn’t stomach working in marketing. Hats off to you. I took a marketing class in college, just felt icky.
I buy single purpose devices that are fully offline, durable, user serviceable, and useful… and then I go for a long time without buying anything but food. It’s almost like setting a new personal record: how many days in a row I can go without buying a single thing?
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+.
I feel like you should probably know where the tree in your living room came from? Did you steal someone’s tree?
Not everyday but every time I go shopping
Enter in cheaper fruits/vegetables at the self checkout if someone is watching and you can’t shoplift
Cosmic crisp apples at 3.50 a pound? I’ll just pretend they’re shitty 1.50 a pound apples instead (:
At my Lidl they put the cheap pink salmon cans on the same shelf intermixed with the more expensive red salmon, so if you just grab a few without looking closely you’ll accidentally get some of the expensive ones. So scan the cheap one repeatedly while putting the others in the bag.
Self checkout just confuses me so much, I’m prone to mistakes. If only there was a trained/paid employee to do it for me
As far as I’m concerned I should be paid for checking my own stuff out
I’ll just take it off the total
This is how I got my PS4 for $3.50/pound
Everything is 4011. If I’m feeling generous, it might even be 94011!
What is 4011? Like potatoes or something?
Code for bananas. Then 94011 is organic bananas
