Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that’s designed to keep people watching – stuff that’s sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn’t happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.

In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don’t pay directly for healthcare, but they don’t really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That’s why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.

I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it’s an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.

The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it’s virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn’t matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.

Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there’s only 1 other option. It’s so much easier to retain power when there’s only one other option.

So, you can’t get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don’t know that things could be different, and because they know that it’s hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn’t benefit the wealthy donors.

Yeah, that’s too bad they can’t get job as firefighters, but it’s still something too to have on a resume. Firefighting is such a competitive job that it would have been hard to get in even with firefighting experience. But, that just underscores how positively firefighters are viewed.

Yep.

I don’t know the full legal situation here, but AFAIK the prisoners working firefighting jobs are allowed to say no.

Now, for the moment put aside that merely being able to say “no” means that it’s not slave labor. The ethics of the situation are complicated.

In an ideal world there wouldn’t be prison, there wouldn’t be prisoners, there wouldn’t be crime. This isn’t an ideal world. In this less than ideal world, is firefighting a good job for prisoners? I would argue that in many ways it seems ideal. Firefighting is one of the most respected jobs in the world. It’s a job where someone puts themselves in danger to save other people. If a goal of prison is to reform prisoners, having them do a job that people are very thankful for and which gives them a great amount of respect can hardly be better. Once a prisoner is released, having spent time fighting fires is probably an amazing thing to have on a resume, and will probably open doors for them that were otherwise closed.

On the other hand, it’s a dangerous job, and prisoners are probably much less well trained than career firefighters. Even if a prisoner technically has the right to say no, prison may be such a dangerous and unpleasant place that it’s not really a free choice. Especially in a world of privatized prisons, prisoners might feel like taking on a potentially life-threatening job is the only way they can have enough money to do basic things like talk to a family member occasionally. Add to that that the justice system in the US means that a wealthier, white person is very unlikely to end up in prison compared to a poor non-white person, which means that prisoner firefighters are not going to be very representative of the communities they’re saving.

Overall, IMO, it’s a good program as long as it’s 100% voluntary, and the training is done by the same people who train professional firefighters, it’s probably overall a good thing. But, to really make it fair, the prison system would have to be reformed so that prison is safe and healthy but boring, similar to prisons in northern Europe. If you have a choice between a safe and boring time in jail vs. having the opportunity to help the community by doing some firefighting, then it really is a free choice.

The sad thing is that at the beginning he had a little tiny bit of justification for not liking what WP Engine was doing.

What WP Engine was doing was completely legal. They were completely following the requirements of the WordPress license. But, it was true that they could have done more to benefit the WordPress community. Instead, they were building a huge, quarter-billion dollar business based on WordPress without either helping pay for its development or contributing meaningful code themselves.

A competent project leader could have used the goodwill they’d amassed over decades to mount a subtle pressure campaign to get WP Engine to do more. But, instead, his approach has somehow made a private equity backed for-profit company to almost appear to be the “good guy” in this fight.

affecting

horse

If you work for Facebook, you almost certainly have options. Choosing to continue to work there means you value your stock options more than you value being a good person.

To me, this is just another story of the music industry’s technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your “archival solution” had issues.