A corporation having to ability to bribe people who need money to pay their rent and healthcare in order to save their own image is indeed "too much power".

> We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?

Not when they have full time people dedicated to lobbying the legislation. That's the issue on why things move so slow or halt when it comes to really voting on such policy.

"we" is a strong word here. More like some people 50-80 years ago decided to at worst rule against the worker's best interest, and at best chose to ignore it and pretend things would work out with a "gentlemans' agreement".

> I don’t really want some arbitrary govt limit restricting what private parties can do with each other.

Given that this runs tangential with whistleblowing and free speech, this is exactly where I want a government to draw a line.

But it was a severance agreement. She accepted a sum of money for agreeing to not disparage. You don't see anything wrong with someone knowingly accepting these funds, and then turning around and immediately violating the agreement by writing a book (making even more money in the process)?

If it's about whistleblowing and doing the right thing, why not just refuse the money?

There should be a statute of limitations on this stuff. Otherwise we’ll see things like chemical plant employees who signed such an agreement keeping stories of dumping to their deathbeds.

In a better world, disparagement would not legally refer to the dissemination of factual accounts.

In such a world it would only add to penalties for proven libel.

It’s a pretty simple concept: if the truth hurts, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.

NDAs theoretically should never be able to paper over illegal actions. In a similar vein, non disparagement clauses should not be able to paper over the publication of legitimate insider experience of terrible — even if legal — behavior.

Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

It still strikes me that some places consider someone fully able to freely consent to enrol in the army, to the risk of getting permanently maimed or mentally scarred, and consider them fit to make life or death split-second decisions for both themselves and everyone around them under terror In highly stressful situations.

But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.

I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.

Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.

We seem perfectly fine splitting up some aspects of adulthood, like 21 for drinking.

The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.

I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.

That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.

Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.

Nothing is really stopping us the consumer. But given that YouTube seems to be the only one in its "medium" (compared to Twitch and TikTok being different formats) that pays creators, it's hard to ask all of them to impact their potential livelihoods.

Nebula as a premium service seems to be the best in terms of paying creators and keeping non-perverse incentives. But Nebula is for very specific kinds of content.

It's a 15 now.

And yes, thars the issue. I pretty much unsubscribed from Disney+, HBO, and Netflix becsuse I can't just have multiple 15 dollar subscriptions add up.

As of now, YouTube, Rider, and Google One are my only subs. And I should really shuffle around space so I can unsub from One.

You do need to take care in pruning videos you don't normally watch. Either remove from watch history, mark as not interested, or just thumbs downing the video.

But at least you still have that ability compared to most platforms.

Isn't the thumbs down only from a third party extension? Does YouTube recommendations pay attention to it?

You can still thumbs down a video. You don't get any feedback nor metrics from it, but you can still do it.

I haven't paid close attention to the effects, because I don't thumbs down too many videos. But it did feel like I generally don't get that channel as much after thumbing down a video from my recommended feed.

I don't expect them to move the world for me. But I don't equate "powerless managers" with "useless managers". If they feel like they do what they can within their means, I'd say that's a good manager.

>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”

That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.