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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • As I see it, the biggest frustration from the left is that he makes right-wing changes.
    The right pretends to be frustrated by his policies because they need to disagree if they want to have a reason to exist - and they’ve been leaning towards the far right for years to find a place on the political spectrum because Macron took their place.

    A few examples, I hope I’ll be able to explain correctly.

    So in France we got something called the “prudhommes” which is a board that specializes in dealing with employee vs company legal matters. Usually, when you get fired and you think they didn’t do it right, you go to the prudhommes and you can sue them for money.
    The prudhommes are important for the workers because they can charge bug fines to the companies, and once one worker has won their case, it becomes easier for their colleagues to do so if they were wronged in the same way.
    It’s a powerful tool that kind of forces companies to follow the “code du travail” aka workers’ rights.
    When he changed (read: degraded) lots of stuff about workers’ rights just after his first election in 2017, Macron introduced an important change: there is now a maximum amount that the prudhommes can force a company to pay. This changes the balance of power because now companies can now how much breaking the law will cost them and decide that it’s the cost of doing business. Worst thing is, this amount can be changed by the government at any time without requiring a vote from the national assembly - this is read by many commenters as the start if the prudhommes’ dismantlement.

    In France, we’ve had (I believe since the eighties) a kind of universal basic income. It’s far from a livable income (it’s around 600€/month currently) but it’s still more than nothing. You need to be french (we wouldn’t want to share nice thingd with refugees, right?) and jump through a few hoops to claim it, but it exists. Until Macron, the only condition you had to fulfill was having no other income.
    This is used a lot by people who are unable to work but can’t apply for unemployment or sick pay mechanisms. It’s always been the last safety: when everything else fails, at least you get something.
    Since Macron, you now have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for it. Which means that if your unemployment office thinks you’re not looking hard enough, you can get excluded from this income and have absolutely nothing (which then leads to homelessness and a whole life of fun). And of course over the past 7 years of Macron, the unemployment offices are under an ever increasing pressure to find people who are not deserving enough.

    In terms of image, Macron took lessons from Trump: truth and facts don’t matter and you don’t even have to be coherent. Time and time again, he and his governement have lied, contradicted themselves… They are of course not the first to do it, but they are the first to not give a shit. Before Macron, they tried not to get caught lying, and when they got caught they tried to get out of it “that’s not what I meant”. Sometimes they even apologized. Macron and his government have had a different strategy: we don’t even care.
    When Macron visited the french carribean, he said in a public discourse “the chlordecone [a nasty pesticid wildly used by french companies in the carribean until y2k] is not cancerigen”. Right after the discourse, scientists and physicians were like “well yes it is, it’s been known for 30 years”. Macron didn’t even bother answering himself, but his services blantly told the press “he never said it was not cancerigen” even though he said it a few hours earlier in front of all tvs and radios. This is just one example of something that now happens weekly.

    These changes might seem small, not structural. But they change fundamental things in the balances of power, the way we treat people and the way we do politics. Especially since there are lots and lots of them in a lot of areas, when you take them together, french legislative and checks/balances landscapes have changed a lot in 7 years, much more so than they had since the nineties (Idk before that).

    Macron is from the bourgeoisie, is fighting the class war and has been waging and winning more battles than his predecessors by a lot. He is not interested in the status quo at all.

    I hope this makes sense and answers your question ;)




  • Maybe I didn’t get my facts straight, but iirc there are around 7.5k satellites up there, with starlink current count about 5.5k. And I think I read they got the greenlight for the 7.5k gen 2 sats launches.
    That looks like a scale change to me. Associated with the short lifespan (which contrasts with the situation 30 years ago, where launches were more expensive), it’s kind of a new situation and should have warranted a more careful approach.

    So musk isn’t the first one to launch satellites, I agree. But the way it’s done is kinda new, and mostly on the worse side. And I’m not saying the old way was good, and not absolving previous actors from responsability in the pollution.









  • This protest achieved nothing so far.

    I’m not saying the protest solved the issue, I was merely explaining why I disagreed with your arguments. Please don’t try and make me say things I didn’t.
    As for the protest achieving nothing, I’m not sure how you back up that claim. It definitely changed how google is perceived by a few people who care a lot more about the genocide than they do about online privacy and ads. It also, sadly, probably made more employees afraid to express themselves on their workplace.

    If you want to actually make a difference, leave Google, go do bioinformatics (am biased here), exact agriculture or any other shit that actually solves real problem.

    There are countless ways to try and make a difference. I could argue that your work in bioinformatics is meaningless in a capitalist world and that you should either take up arms and organize raids to execute CEOs or do nothing (I actually disagree with this point, it’s just an extreme example).
    Let’s not discourage the people who try and do things. Maybe they make mistakes, maybe they could be more efficient… but at least they try.

    All I see in those rallies a bunch of people that work at Google to maximize their earnings that are mad when Google does the same.

    Of course they’re mad. They went to work at Google, not Lockheed Martin or “insert other weapons manufacturer here”. And it’s a good thing ! Of course they still sold their time and skills to a shitty company and had an overall negative impact on the world, but they still care about human suffering when they are aware of it, and I prefer that to people who don’t care at all.



  • I don’t get the comment here, they didn’t ‘express their opinion’ about Israel. They behaved like a bunch of lunatics within Google’s offices.

    Yes, they did express their opinion on the ongoing genocide. They did that in a fashion that disturbed the workplace - which some comments seem to deem holy ground that should never be disturbed by anything - but they did express their opinion.

    If you want to protest Google’s actions send a signed letter of resignation stating the reason, send it to the press and form a union of techies that won’t work for companies that work with Israel recursively.

    Iirc they tried some regular stuff before resorting to this method. Also, it’s always funny how when people try to change things, they never seem to do it the right way.

    On a side note, I like how none of them mind building mass surveillance tools, pushing ads, Google-China relations, etc… But Israel’s genocide is trending, so they jump on that. What a bunch of shallow fucks.

    Well congrats on being less of a hyprocrite than the rest of us.
    The world is shit, nothing goes in the right direction, and some of us are more sensitive to some issues than others.
    I mean I despise alphabet and their business model, but I also understand than people are less horrified by their work being used to serve ads than it being used in a genocide. And again, I hate that ads exist.

    Protestation and strike are supposed to inconvenience the higher ups, please stop advising to use methods that don’t disturb anything.