The worst invention of late stage capitalism is the screen on the gas pump that plays video ads at you. The best invention of late stage capitalism is the coke freestyle machine.
I think I experienced a worse one a couple weeks ago. Was on a flight, had one of those screens in the back of the seat… except it wasn’t for in flight entertainment. It was for ads. And you couldn’t turn off the screen either. So I’m trying to sleep on this red eye flight with a flashing screen 1 foot from my face.
if you had hijacked the plane because of that no jury in the world would have convicted you
Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you’re in pain, but you don’t get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone’s life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn’t look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the “fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there’s been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you’re not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she’s probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I’ve heard lately but she’s far from the only person in emergency services who’s frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn’t want you filming and the cop who doesn’t want you filming.
it’s always kind of funny to me when people insist that honesty is a virtue and you should always tell the truth because being good at lying is something that’s been almost universally celebrated for thousands of years by pretty much all of humanity. like there are literally multiple folk tales and legends throughout history and across cultures that involve the hero tricking their adversary in order to win, and it’s usually considered a disadvantage to mythical creatures such as faeries that they can’t say things that aren’t true.
i want to be a conventionally attractive wealthy skinny ciswoman so i can go on the bachelor and make it all the way thru the competition, and when the guy proposes to me i just like leap towards him and close my teeth around his neck and bite as hard as i can. just absolute animal brutality like shaking his neck like a ragdoll, growling ripping tearing etc, and then before anyone can stop me immediately run into traffic and die so no one ever gets the chance to understand why that happened
you want me to give money to the people who took away the pause button on videos? who made having engaging, fun, heartwarming interactions in the tags impossible? the same people who say “you can turn it off in the settings” about every half-assed new feature they bring out and yet removed the legacy/new editor toggle?
this isn’t even everything, i’m just saying like fuck i’m rewarding them for making this site actively worse for us in the span of a month or two.
since we are talking about people who deserve a higher salary i think teachers should be making six figures a year btw. if state superintendents who have never set foot in a classroom can make that much so should the teachers. teachers are quite literally the backbone of our society and if teachers were actually properly compensated we wouldn’t have a shortage or bad teachers who are continually burnout because of a lack of proper compensation.
In before I start seeing people bitching about rainbow capitalism MY favorite rainbow capitalism story is about Subaru. Yes the Japanese car company.
In the nineties, they were struggling. They were competing with a dozen other companies targeting the main demographic at the time: white men ages 18-35, especially after a failed luxury car launch with a new ad agency. “What we need is to focus on niche demographics,” they decided, and then focused on people who enjoyed the outdoors. The Subaru was excellent at driving on dirt roads that many other vehicles couldn’t at the time, so it was perfect for all those off-road campers; they started making all-wheel drive standard in all their cars to help with that. And the people who wanted cars to go do outdoor stuff? Lesbians.
Okay. Of course it wasn’t only lesbians buying Subarus. They’re on the list with educators, health-care professionals, and IT people. But the point is, this Japanese car company interviewed this strange demographic (single, female head of household) and realized one important factor: They were lesbians. They liked to be able to use the cars to go do outdoorsy stuff, and they liked that they could use the cars to haul stuff rather than a big truck or van. Subaru had a choice to make then. They had four other demographics they could market to, after all–the educators, the health-care professionals, IT professionals, and straight outdoorsy couples. Their company didn’t hinge on this one “problematic” demographic.
And they decided “fuck it,” and marketed to lesbians anyway. This included offering benefits to American gay and lesbian employees for their domestic partners, so it didn’t look like a cash grab. (This was not a problem. They already offered those in Canada.)
Yes, there was some backlash. They got letters from a grassroots group accusing them of promoting homosexuality, and every letter said they’d no longer be buying from Subaru. “You didn’t buy from us before, either,” Subaru realized, and ignored them. It helped that the team really cared about the plan, and that they had many straight allies to back them up. There was also some initial backlash when Subaru hired women to play a lesbian couple in the commercial, but they quickly found that lesbians preferred more subtlety; “XENA LVR” on a license plate, or bumper stickers with the names of popular LGBTQ+ destinations, or taglines of “Get out. Stay out.” that could be used for the outdoors–or the closet.
Subaru said “We see you. We support you.” They sponsored Pride parades and partnered with Rainbow Card and hired
Martina Navratilova
as spokeswoman. They put their money where their mouth is and went into it whole hog. In a time where companies did not want to take our money, Subaru said, “Why not? They’re people who drive.” And that was groundbreaking.
It wasn’t blatant, it was cheeky and pretty low key, but really really effective. It played into the “if you know you know” vibe in exactly the right way.
