If your wages are hourly or salary then they might be raised dependent on either a “performance” bonus which works as an incentive or by a fixed yearly raise but neither is tied to profit. It’s technically just engineering the workforce to give more output by dangling a carrot. The size of the carrot distribution is factored into the labor cost - it is distinctly not profit, it is operating budget which deducts from profit because it is counted as an expense.

Here is the thing about profit - it comes from saving money on labor, resource or overhead. Sometimes it’s a neutral or good thing when the profit comes from a source like a clever innovation that solves a problem or by fulfilling a highly desireable market demand… But a lot of the time that isn’t the case. Those profits can come from collaboration with competitors to pay labor less, finding cheaper materials that shunt the costs onto other people outside the business by means of pollution or utilizing exploitable workforces with less health or legal protections, outsourcing.

Yes people are motivated by money but why do people want money? In the case of your average worker the demands are quite small. Money equals security - a non toxic and comfortable place to sleep, food on the table, assured care for health when sick or old and creature comforts to create fulfilling free time. Profit oftentimes incentivizes removing these things from other people in service to an investor class. Creating protections against this is often the prerogative of government because government depends on the wealth of it’s people to perpetuate itself so it’s incentive is to protect the majority of people whom hold them accountable on the whole from becoming exploited into poverty, sickness and death because those things can be profitable. One can say “that’s just the way it is” only so long as once a large enough group of people see no value or security in living life they generally start banding together to become violent.

Technically workers do not care about profits, they care about wages. The average worker doesn’t benefit from profit because they represent a fixed expense. The work they produce is worth more than their salary which is how a company produces profit. As long as a company breaks even and the salary is enough to meet one’s needs a worker does just fine. However a worker’s job could easily be axed in the name of profit because they are what is being profited off of, not the entitled beneficiary of the business as a whole.

Profit it just the take home winnings of the investors or owners of the business and the few jobs at the top where compensation is based off of profit percentage or lavish bonuses for making the targets.

How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

Yes it does suck on your end but on the other side of the phone your perspective date is probably having a whole mental breakdown about it. For a lot of trans folk disclosure is absolutely nessisary as early as possible and preferably for safety reasons not when you are face to face…

Buuuut they also are very likely to get really vile transphobic backlash from a perspective date as much as they are honest rejections based on genital preference which sucks to be rejected for but is nobody’s fault. There’s a lot of trans people out there who feel like they are never going to be given a chance. Either way steeling themselves for one form of rejection or a vile reminder of the awful people out there who think you are subhuman and are offered up a nice juicy target on which to let loose their bigotry does tend to make for disordered social niceties. Once someone has been burned enough they get pretty damn shy and the procrastination is more of a case of battling personal traumas until the last possible second where one absolutely must do the right thing.

I would advise not taking it too personally.

Yeah… If anyone starts talking too much about the shape of the human skull as if that means anything whatever they are selling ain’t worth the pitch

The current ID system for accessing government services is sort of like that as I understand it… But the Conservatives haven’t really been very forthcoming about how they actually intend to enforce a digital id legislation on a bunch of privately owned digital vendors from multiple countries that are already slippery. They haven’t really outlined what active enduring measures would be required to keep up this sort of digital regulation for it to be maintained in perpetuity. It all feels like trying to stop a river by installing a net…perhaps maybe closer to Trump’s “building a wall” move politically.

Passing something without outlining any specs or plan on how they actually achieve their ends is very much the regular Conservative MO. I don’t even nessisarily think they want it to pass it to be honest. I think they just want something that sounds easy to your regular joe but is fraught with practical and logistical issues so they can make the incumbent government look like it is obstructionist or morally bankrupt. If they actually passed this it would be a dog who caught the car senario but as is they know the incumbent government absolutely does not want to be on the hook for making a big messy new department that would take time off the floor for other issues while it’s hashed out, require a massive expense to explore options and then further budget to create a government service in perpetuity all while their opposition gets to whine about how the incumbent government are too far over budget and too slow to get things done. The Conservatives know their constituents have the memories of goldfish and won’t seriously ask why the things the Conservative party seemed to care about so much when they were opposition will be completely dropped when they are elected.

There’s technically a warrant process required so you have to be operating on a reasonable proof of misconduct from an individual.

Realistically there are issues with Digital IDs. Like the ones that currently exist are for Service Canada websites and services so stuff like disability benefits, healthcare interfacing stuff, tax ans employment insurance related stuff. It’s basically just supposed to be an extra encryption key that makes it easier for users and cuts out password issues… So it’s basically just government encryption operating on government sites.

An authentication system requires both halves of an equation to have the program and so backwards engineering the whole thing is very possible by anyone working for the vendors. It opens vectors for nasty blackmail material if someone uses a digital ID to feign access to things. Even without the blackmail angle it can be dangerous…Like if someone posts illegal child porn before a moderation influence flags it someone who knows the system could clone your Digital ID to watch it and you could end up with the legal charges.

This is likely to just push people to go further underground to illicit sources for their porn. The ones that aren’t legal businesses or platforms. Essentially it could end up meaning more audience and financial support for the illegal platforms and infrastructure who produce the stuff we desperately want to stop.

It debuted when I was living in Japan and when I got back everyone was using it and I had just finished blogging my travels and was like… Nah, doing this for my regular everyday life is way too much to bother with. Facebook continued to became a major thorn in my side for years as every social event under the sun was scheduled through the fucking thing so I missed a bunch of invites because I basically refused to play ball.

It is odd after so long to be the envy of people after a solid decade and a half of being cursed by them for not being on Facebook.

Law is a funny beast. Lots of people do things which are illegal all the time and get away with it because you basically have to assert your right to be protected by law to sort of activate it. Like someone yelling at me that they are going to kill me while I am out in public is technically a form of assult. , I can call the authorities and get them to assist me to make sure they don’t follow through and to get them to stay the hell away from me but chances are I am not going to seek restitution in court for something that small because I would have to press charges, seek and pay for legal council, everything would need to be processed to make sure the law is being properly handled at all points of the arrest and the punishment would likely be fairly trifling for all my troubles.

Private entities already basically have the imperitive to determine what is permissible on their platforms. Freedom of speech is not practiced under the auspices of substack. They are allowed to kick you out for whatever the heck they want (some exceptions applying) because they own that space. To remove posts as threats a judge would have to go through each individual one, source it, bring the original commenter into court and go through due process with every single user to check it against their local jurisdiction’s laws for threats and the likely outcome would just be small fines and community service… Quite frankly the juice would not be worth the squeeze.

On the other hand we are absolutely allowed to have an opinion that substack letting Nazis spread hate speech on their platform under their watch is a moral failure on their part.

A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren’t a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.

Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can’t opt out of… And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It’s simply not supposed to be other people’s problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies “tolerance” for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone’s unrestricted discourse.

Then there’s the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?

We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name. There is no moderation policy, even an unrestricted one, that is truly ethically neutral. Your choices about what is or isn’t allowed on your watch always effects people and the mental cost is borne by someone.

Technically there are different dialects and a lot of unique slang, idioms and specific descriptive words.

In the trans and non-binary community for instance there’s a lot of terms regarding how people identify and express themselves that unless you know the actual function of how they work aren’t easily indistinguishable from slurs to outsiders. Take “Femboy” and (please forgive me mods) “Shemale”. The former is a perfectly socially acceptable description of a guy (cis or otherwise) whose gender expression is very feminine…the latter is a slur that places emphasis on the birth sex characteristics of a trans woman and implies heavily they are guys just pretending to be women and the term originates from the porn industry that fetishizes trans women.

You also have the usage of neo-pronouns. In languages with more gendered components than English sometimes what words are chosen either reflects the gender of the speaker or the person being addressed or objects can be given a gendered connotation. Some languages are actually very gendered and the usage non-binary folk using those languages make whole new conventions. English speakers whine a remarkable amount over they/them singular pronouns are confusing but ain’t seen nothing. A lot of places your job title and status has no neutral gendered term or culturally there are sentence structures that differ down entirely binary gender lines. Are you latino or latina? Guess we need a new word… Latinx!

So prefacing this with specifying I am Trans masc, former tech support person. Now in another male dominated career. I was read unambiguously as a woman during my time in the field and the number of times I picked up a phone and had someone ask me to put them through to a male tech was astounding. It doesn’t really matter if your employer is willing to hire you if you are treated like a second class citizen by the average person in the job. I lasted about three years before I left and trashed all hopes of ever applying for anything in the field ever again. The number of women folk who dip their toes into the entry-level and then decide that they can’t deal with the added mental health issues of being treated like a child or an idiot by default for the rest of their working life keeps a lot of women out of a lot of fields. Even if you are passionate about the thing the additional wear on your psyche will burn you out faster.

My new field has a different issue. It’s very nepotistic so people tend to hire their friends first. Being incredibly competent only earns you the fourth or fifth spot on a crew of about six or seven people. If you are a male crew boss and your friend base is overwhelmingly male and you hire the people you feel most comfortable around then unthinkingly about 50 percent of the most secure jobs go to your male friends. Women, incredibly competent ones, tend to bounce around our industry, a lot get stuck as temp labor. Female leads are rare as are those who get the secure crew spots despite the total numbers at the hall telling us 40 percent of the hall roll is female. It doesn’t matter if the bosses aren’t actively trying to discriminate against women because they are just hiring people they like to work with, in the end none of that matters if you are a woman because regardless of the intent in the hearts of the crew bosses you are still stuck having to be incredibly competent just to fight for the leftover scraps.

Oftentimes what these events actually are for is more about solidarity than recruitment. One of the issues with male dominated fields is that oftentimes they are exhausting to participate in when you are treated as an outsider. Having a community space where people can get together and talk shop, ask frank questions about culture from recruiters and gather strength from visibly seeing other people doing the same thing you do can give a sense of not being so alone.

That and a lot of women require a lot more data on how they compare before they feel like they are actually a viable candidate. They are sort of trained into an almost crippling idea of modesty and more social anxiety in general so a lot of them will only apply if they solidly fit the listed requirements. When they utilize a dialogue based recruitment space they can gain confidence that small missing bits of listed experience desired on their resume don’t fully discount them from being a candidate for a job and gets more of them to apply. Women lean on pack tactics more than men do so these sort of events actually fufill a lot of secondary objectives than just on the day hiring.

There are a fair number of Democrats who think abandoning trans issues is the right path to take to make themselves more acceptable to “centrists” reasoning that the democrats will make things better in the long term when they have the safety to do so…

But they have no idea how much damage can be done. How many people in that time will give up hope that things will be better or who will be driven to that point by feeling alone and weird because they don’t see themselves reflected anywhere and there’s no one out there to tell them that people like themselves exist and that their lives are not always defined by pain, loneliness and want.

When people act like it’s something that should just be put off so some bigots feel like maybe they might halfway consider voting democrat (which they usually don’t. Even some of my trans accepting friends who agree with all the leftist talking points still self identity as conservative in their heart of hearts in part because they’ve been brainwashed to equate the word “conservative” with “reasonable” ) they forget that so many of us are down to clinging to the very bricks by our fingernails. It’s quite in character for the Democrats to shelve trans issues to try and appease Republicans by trying to wheedle and play nice to encourage them not to be horrible by trying to become some sort of model of respectable comprise instead of finding new ways to defend against and fight the systemic prejudices and correct the disinformation surrounding trans health care… News flash to Democrats. Republicans will never wake up and see you as the model Paladin of democratic dignity and process. They will never be courted to be better if you compromise now so they might owe you one later. They don’t ever pay back those favors for the compromises you make. They will just take every concession and compromise and turn around and call you obstructionists. You just will lose more ground until eventually there’s none left to hold.

Info dumping is a love language.

My move is to go to the library and borrow stuff on DVD. I dunno where you are but up here in Canada you would be surprised what you can find legally for free if you got a library card.