https://twitter.com/roshanpateI/status/1773028865297825963
I've seen this a lot in my life. People who are never going to be hungry or will never end up homeless treat the prospect of giving anyone else any amount of money as if it would bankrupt them. People in your life who are poor or have been poor, will just help you
I've seen obvious blue collar workers hand people their own groceries they just bought on public transit without the other person even asking
I've never seen any of my dozens of tech friends other than the one that's a communist ever give a homeless person any money or buy them any food when asked
I'm glad I don't see any of the techie guys I knew from college because they all behave this way, and also have the very obnoxious belief that anyone less successful than them has earned their lot in life. I have one friend who still sees them and I laugh whenever I hear about them racking up insane bills at a restaurant, completely oblivious to how it feels for the normal people they then demand to bill split with. They even charged my friend his share of a hotel stay for a trip he had to back out of, just insane shit
I used to wait tables and we had a regular who was a prominent local retail estate agent (like, multiple billboards with her face on them prominent). Everyone hated getting sat with her because she would insist on being sat in the party room by herself or with one person she was with (I guess she was too good for a table next to another customer's table) and you'd basically have to split your attention between two sections, neglecting your actual section that your other tables were in, inevitably leading to reduced tips from that section.
Then after like an hour and a half when she finally left she'd consistently tip one dollar. On top of being a ton of extra work, you'd generally net lose income for waiting on her.
Yeah we just need to get back to saying "no" to those types of people.
The anything to appease the rich customer who doesn't even actually earn the company more than a regular customer mentality is so a thing of the past.
It's even bad for business, you can do 3 normal tables in the time it takes to deal with one shitty table and appeasing that person means they'll keep coming back and possibly be more demanding. Staff needing to deal with rude people isn't even good for the capitalist.
As a former poor person, I have no issue with buying my coworkers and friends the next round or paying for the uber. But you can bet your grandmothers ass that I will file an expense claim to my employer for that 2$ patch cable I needed.
this is the way. ive got some friends ive known for like 15 years. we pay for each others shit all the time. where's the debt stand? idk man probably $1000 one way or the other but none of us could tell you which
“It all comes out in the wash” is a common saying in my family. But our family also has a mooch/thief that everyone knows not to lend money too so that saying clearly has a boundary somewhere.
Yea I've made a couple comments about my high-school friend group so not to belabor the point but we had the same thing. Everybody just covered for everybody else except one asshole who one time when they weren't around we all went around in a circle and realized the one asshole owed the group thousands of dollars collectively.
And no, it wasn't that he was poor in fact he was one of the better off ones and of course the one that went far right and the last convo I had with him is how he has no sympathy for homeless people. This conversation happened in a city in winter where it regularly got to 10 degrees below zero before windhill.
Same with my friends. It doesn't help that we like to make it as complicated as possible between the three of us by always swapping who's buying for who and "trading" debt (all in good fun, none of this penny counting venmo bullshit)
had a friend of a friend offer me and my two friends a slice of pizza. before we could even finish bro pulled out the calculator app on his iphone 15 to determine we all needed to add him on venmo to send 94 cents each. next time i saw him he talked about taking cruise ships every summer
that's how the sigma affords the iPhone 15 and the cruise ships
How do you think he paid for the cruises? That's right, pizza money
"friend"
I'd have just cracked up at the obvious absurdity of it
If he insisted, I'd have laughed harder and then left
i would have told him to suck it and let that be the last time i ever saw him
this is absolutely an overreaction, but my first thought was "wall"
I am really really really really really really really bad with money and wish I had more just so I could buy things for people to make them happy
I"ve only ever wanted to make other people happy and feel bad that I don't have the power to do so for more people
One time when I actually did work as a barista, I purchased a regular's order for them. She got a really big smile on her face and blew me a kiss as she drove off. I really just appreciated her as a customer (and might've also been a simp, but I just love how joyful she seemed overall either way).
I try not to be that guy, but I have a lot of friends like this (will literally venmo charge you in the moment). It just makes the relationship feel transactional.
Those people wear me out
I always try to be the one that initiates a good faith system so people can get a feel for what I'm about. Worst case is someone tries to take advantage of me, but by then their (lack of) character shows up in other ways
I’ve never had a friend like this, and I never will. I don’t mean to say I haven’t met people like this, but they have no chance of becoming my friends.
Just think of that $2.82 venmo request as the cost of finding out they arent worth spending time with.
I think there’s a difference between asking for exact change and just rounding up to quickly pay someone back. It’s not immoral or anything to use venmo to square up obligations, but it does feel petty once you bust out a calculator or use exact change.
I was trying to get rid of an old nes a year or so ago and offered it to a coworker, he asked how much I wanted for it and I just told him to buy me lunch some time.
Months go by and I've totally forgotten and we're getting lunch and he's like "nah this one is on me for the NES".
I hate venmo culture so much, just have vague favors and stop counting the pennies for the love of god.
"whatever you think is fair" sometimes helps for bigger things, but yeah it's an emotionally drained way to interact with people. Invoices is for companies and groups, not friends.
I like that one too for when someone actually wants to buy something off me and I'm not really looking to make money off a friend.
The poorest people I know have always been the most generous.
It's a damn near universal constant that rich people are greedy assholes.
Sometimes you get some that are cool people who inherited a bunch of money but in general they're the scum of the earth.
Talk to any server and they'll tell you the people who roll up in fancy cars with watches worth more than a mortgage are the ones doing the math to leave exactly 12% while it's the guys on lunch break from a job site that'll leave a $10 on a $25 ticket.
It's a damn near universal constant that rich people are greedy assholes.
People don't always get what they want, but to get rich you have to reaaaallly want to be rich
The less certain maintaining your own personal material conditions are, the more cooperative and community-focused you become.
that's just because he respects the GRIND you PEASANT
NOW FINISH SHOVELING THE DUNG
i've seen a couple posts about this phenomena before and every time i check the comments there's people going "that's how they stay rich!" as if pocket change gave them their lake house 😭
Show
the fact all these mfs PAY MONTHLY FOR TWITTER while emphasizing penny pinching is fucking hilarious (2nd/3rd just have the checkmark hidden, you gotta scroll past every blue to get the normal users)
Who in the hell is making $450k per year as a software developer
Probably only if you are a principle engineer at FAANG and not even these days since the tech crash. But mrah someone who is ultimately also just a laborer made more money than me so they’re the problem.
But mrah someone who is ultimately also just a laborer made more money than me so they’re the problem
If we're friends that regularly hang out and they ask me to cover half of the 10 dollar Uber ride that they called or my 1 beer at the bar then yes, they're the problem
No surprise, the best tech friends I've had we never send money to each other unless it's in the order of hundreds. Anything else we just go back and forth on
All my tech friends who were dead set on going even for everything, even the ones that have offered to pay me 2 dollars for the movie popcorn that I bought, have all turned out to be neoliberals that don't care about anybody outside of their friend groups or tech/finance social circles
Find better friends? I don’t understand what them being tech people has anything to do with them being assholes. To be clear, what you’re describing is for sure asshole behavior. I have worked in relatively high paying and low paying jobs and have seen all types in all positions. Some people just suck
I don’t understand what them being tech people has anything to do with them being assholes
The tweet is just poking fun at the fact that the average tech bro is way more likely to be douchey
Can you stop doing the "akschually not ALL tech people" thing?
Not interested in a flame war but I would describe that as an inaccurate characterization of what I was saying. all I said is you’re mad at the wrong people
How am I mad at the wrong people? "Wealthy" people who do this suck and are assholes
You can actually be mad at the ruling class AND people who are working class if they're shitty. You don't get a pass on being an unreasonably selfish and greedy person just because you're a laborer lmao
This silicon valley techbro would be a class traitor during the revolution, and on some level, they know it, but are too cowardly to admit it. That's why they're pushing this #notalltechbros thing so hard.
Class traitors are good. I can't think of a successful revolution that wasn't full of them.
Why would they be "too cowardly to admit" being a good thing? Why are we so hostile to the same good thing that's featured prominently in every successful revolution? This is leaning towards ultraleftism.
Because they're a working class person who will side with the bourgeoisie. They aren't petit bourgeoisie, they use their own labour. Class traitors can go in either direction. Working class people can be convinced to work against their own best interests.
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Everything is ultra-leftism to you, either that, or "stuff that won't build a mass-movement" when it's against the crackers. I don't think you have any ground to label what's good and bad to revolution anymore. I for one, am not putting my faith in fairweather fence-sitters when the last time we saw one of any prominence was a hundred years ago.
24-hours after edit: 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵
7-days after edit: 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵, 🦗🎵
https://www.shanley.com/blog/stop-feeling-bad-for-tech-workers-these-people-are-the-enemy
There are over 1.5 million software engineering jobs in the US and less than a third of them are in Silicon Valley. Neoliberal horizontal hostility trap. average software engineer makes around $150k. Yes that’s a fantastic salary beyond what many people could imagine but that’s not a quit your job at 40 kind of salary. Y’all are mad at the wrong people. Did you quit your job when the frito lay strike happened? Why not? No class solidarity smh
It's bourgeoisification theory - wealthy workers in the West have been bourgeoisified by the superexploitation of the third world proletariat and thus do not actually have the same class interests as the rest of the working class. Sure, they might not have "quit your job at 40" kind of salary, but they do not ever actually experience economic hardship alongside the rest of us.
Those people will never support socialism. You have to realize this.
I can say for a fact that some of them do, but it's definitely a lower percentage of the total when compared to average working class folk that support socialism.
Fair, there will always be class traitors.
They can't be relied on as a base of support though. They're atomized and cut off from struggle.
I want to not believe this. But my experience has been witnessing PMC, and tech workers especially, acting as defacto wreckers more than once.
What’s the cut off do you suppose? 100k? 150k? 70k? 40k? How poor do you have to be to count as a real socialist in your mind? Anyone who is having a portion of their labor being extracted by a capitalist owner can be radicalized. At worst you could classify middle class Americans as the petit bourgeois. Many have been fooled by being successful in a system where not everyone can be a winner but even Marx thought in the end the petit bourgeois would side with the proletariat. Look it’s not a great place to occupy for sure but the effort is to find coalitions not subdivide further
And anecdotally I find what you said to be untrue but maybe that’s just me
It's not a "cut off" it's a material relationship. Anyone who gets to have a portion of the superprofits from imperialism distributed back to them can be deradicalized by this material relationship. They materially benefit from cheap commodities produced in the global South, cheap imported fossil fuels (and cheap externalized costs of climate change), cheap food grown on the backs of undocumented workers, etc.
This isn't to subdivide the workers further, it's to explain why someone in a cushy software engineering job isn't going to want to sacrifice their comfort and security for the sake of strangers. They have no class solidarity because their class interests are not working class interests.
I think that this arrangement is decaying as the empire goes into decline - that's actually what "inflation" is! People who were once bought off by cheap commodities and energy and food are now finding their budgets squeezed tighter and tighter. We are all being de-bourgeoisified by the decline of the empire and will once again find our material interests realigned with the rest of the working class.
This was a historical anomaly produced by US hegemony and it's coming to an end.
Software engineers will be on the picket line with the rest of us soon enough.
I don’t disagree with any of that; I think we’re basically saying the same thing. I think ultimately what you described applies to all first world inhabitants, particularly Americans, regardless of their job. The cheap comforts of capitalism via third world exploitation even for low paid workers is a significant barrier to class consciousness but the magic sauce is quickly evaporating. We’ve all been brainwashed at some point in our lives and eventually we woke up. Everyone is on their journey, and we’re all going to be on the same side in the end. my goal is to reduce exclusionary rhetoric to accelerate that goal but ig that just comes across as “um ackshully” to some folks.
Also I like your username lol
I think, in the first world, the cheap comforts of imperialism (and they are comforts of imperialism specifically, not just capitalism) don't actually get evenly distributed among all first world workers. It's all tied back to race, language, gender, religion, immigration status, etc. These internally colonized people within the imperial core are not beneficiaries of imperialism, they are only exploited by it.
The brainwashing is basically irrelevant imo - it's the material relationships that matter, people can't wake up from the reality that their own lives are materially better because they live on the backs of the superexploited global south and internal colonies within the imperial core. It's not a wake-up moment we need, it's organization of de-bourgeoisified workers and internal colonies within the imperial core.
Remember the BLM uprisings? That was a rebellion of internally colonized people against their imperial oppressors and was joined by debourgeoisified masses, which is why it also became the largest protest movement in American history. We weren't organized so the revolutionary energy burned itself out, but for me it serves as a stark reminder that America's chickens are coming home to roost.
As inflation continues and wages stagnate, those "cheap" commodities and energy and food won't be so cheap anymore.
And if we aren't organized we'll let yet another revolutionary moment pass us by - and we don't have a lot of those left!
You know what it's definitely a neoliberal thing though. Everyone responsible for only their piece of the pie, no more no less. In fact weigh the pie and they will just pay for price by weight at wholesale of the ingredients. See they have found the cheat to keeping their wealth and what all people should do.
Sure to make money you should be hiring cheap import labor from wherever you can get it and stealing as much of the money upwards to yourself as you can.
But we are all in this together, pay your share, it's only fair, unless I have more than you.
I have a hard time convincing people not to pay me back to the point where I actually get really annoyed. Constant unending "oooh i can't accept blah for free blah blah blah must pay you back blah blah" SHUT UP SHUT UP
also works with joints/blunts
or like chicken nuggets? idk thats what some of my friends did in high school
I don't like owing debts to anybody. I've known people to try and hold me over a barrel over things they've given, all the way up to people I've dated; as well as had my own generosity taken for a ride to the tune of ten grand poured down a lying cheat's gullet. I don't like letting the scale go in either direction anymore.
I live with somebody like this, i have just stopped accepting their offers because I know they'll pull some shit like this.
Had a friend in our friend group who was an asshole in this way among many others.
We'd all take turns driving places and he was consistently the only one who asked everybody else for gas money everytime he was the one that drove, also he was the one that easily drove the least, also by his math we usually owed him like $10 each for a 30 minute drive. Basically drive the car down with the gas light on, fill the tank then tell us we all had to split the gas with him.
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&country=254
Go get 'em tiger
Netflix pays crazy rates, but treat their employees as bad if not worse than Amazon. Last I heard the average tenure there is 12-18 months (granted, that's still a fuckload of money).
Last I heard the average tenure there is 12-18
lmao 6 months of that is settling in and not achieving much no wonder netflix is going down the tube
Companies like those expect you to fully ramp up and deliver positive value within 2-4 months (no matter how much they like to tell you otherwise during orientation)
It's fucking brutal and on purpose to filter out people who can't learn fast/grind hard
Yeah but does anyone really in that time? Lol lmao no.
Some might try to but they don't really, not creatively. It really fucking shows in the output of netflix too.
Yeah but does anyone really in that time? Lol lmao no.
They do, I've had quite a few new teammates who've done that
They're all people who've been coding at a young age or are completely obsessed with coding and working. Like spend lots of free time reading published papers or just working more types lmao
They usually also job hop once every year or two so they're used to it
Just the most hardcore careerists you've ever seen
Working there for 2 years and moving up the ladder and gaining influence, eventually convincing the executives that limiting customers to 5 movies a day is a great idea. Then by the time the company has tanked, you would’ve made a million bucks and dipped to another state
I'm the failure in my friend group, they're all highly paid software engineers and I'm a POS factory schmuck. But I have both experiences between a few of them. One of them is cheap as shit, made his wife deal with a broken graphics card where the screen kept going black in the middle of playing for years, while my other friend keeps buying me games he wants me to play with him so I reciprocate when there's one I want him to play lol
I'm the failure in my friend group, they're all highly paid software engineers and I'm a POS factory schmuck
How did that even happen lol
They're smart and I'm not. People can have different capabilities. I happen to be pretty limited as I'm just stupid.
Oh no, like how did you end up making friends with all these people? In my experience highly paid tech people are only friends with and only date other highly paid tech peopel
Probably school or childhood friends.
I still hang with my childhood friend who is a CFO of a small real estate development firm despite being below the poverty line myself.
And to be fair to him he hates his job and his boss and peers and is looking for another position
Ohhhh lol yeah as the other person mentioned, these are long time friends. Ive known them for decades.
You can see this along countries and cultures too; westerners are usually way more stingy than people in the global south. Middle Easterners, North Africans, South Asians, Latin Americans, etc. will constantly try to do favors for family, friends, acquaintances. Muslims will randomly offer and insist on giving people free gifts or food. I've heard Swedish people tell guests to wait in the other room while their family eats dinner.
i used to bring donuts to work every friday or every other friday at one point.. no one else ever bothered to but they were sure as hell happy to eat them all.. then it got to the point where one of the guys who was definitely making $500k+/yr bitched at me for not getting any apple fritters and that's the only kind of donut he liked
then i stopped bringing donuts in
This made me really sad. I don't even know you, but I wish I could buy you donuts in return.
Same here in Georgia. A good 90% of the people I know from Europe and NA are stingy, whereas here, I haven't met one person who hasn't insisted on paying.
Small rant/story: there was this one guy I knew who migrated here from Europe, and I paid for his lunches for the past year, refusing to let him pay for it himself. I'd use the fact that he doesn't know the language to speak up to the cashier, and tell them in the native language that I'd be paying (worked without fail, lol). The second that I asked him to buy me some KFC and a Coffee because I didn't have enough money that day, his friends from home insisted that he start a debt list. They also tell him to refuse the gifts I give because he would then "have to make it up to me by buying gifts in return". I guess it's just more transactional culture in the west, dunno.
there's a linguistic link between the words "author", person who writes for a living, and "authority", an entrenched structure of power.
I think, in the beginning, the difference is knowing when to stop writing. Keeping friendly acts on a ledger is very much far far past that point.
Oops! All defense firms!
