or even pseudo-incriminated for attempting to maintain our own life.
It seems so stupid that I’m like a suspect for wanting an exchange of information without dropping my pants and bending over. No, I don’t want cookies. Yes I want to read the article but no, I don’t want to “sign up.”
It makes me feel like being a f*cking hermit. But I prefer to pirate. Even though I’m not that good at it. Screw them. I got two private trackers, a VPN, and I hope that’s enough.
The ethics are complex for sure… a bit like sailing the high seas:-). I have no right to tell you or anyone else what to do, I just shared my own thought. Fuck the SOBs that started this for sure…but the WORKERS are the ones getting pinched in the middle of that clash of wills:-(.
Also I know of no better way to be generous to my fellow human - unlike some “charities”, this is no hand-out b/c there at least you can be 100% certain that they work. Also, a LOT of people do not tip (or if they do, then not much), thus necessitating a more extreme tipping from those that do if the scales were to ever to be balanced (which they ultimately never will, but still a little bit can help).
This is really a trolly problem through and through: someone puts a human on the tracks (lets say mostly innocent - possibly they were goaded rather than forced into being there but for the sake of argument let us presume they have no malice or any ill intent whatsoever, like this is no scam that they are “in” on, again just for the sake of argument), and a tiny but noticeable pile of your cash on the other, then offers to allow you to pull the lever to switch the track. Fuck the evil POS who would do that for their own amusement ofc but… given that it happened, do you play along and sacrifice your cash to help the human, or allow them to get hit? Let us also presume that you have the “right” to your cash, i.e. you would get it back rather than it being impounded for evidence or whatever.
I choose to play along, knowing full well that the system is unjust. Maybe I am contributing to the problem, but I do not know what else to do that could help in even the tiniest manner. Passing laws to enforce payment of a minimum wage that is actually a livable one seems like an entirely separate matter to me btw - b/c whether you tip or not, or whether you want to tip or not (I saw that you do the former but neither of us really do the latter, though I come closer to that in one manner of speaking), without being forced to, greedy-AF people will never (it seems) voluntarily pay the workers more on their own initiative, so simply “not tipping” in protest seems to me to be an approach doomed to failure. I do not deny that you are correct though - they will certainly take my doing so as their cue that they can continue, not that it would matter if laws were passed to literally prevent that happening - it is just that I cannot control them, I can only control me.
Thank you for this respectful conversation btw:-).
Honestly I think you should re-examine your perspective on charities. Just because they have some amount of administrative overhead doesn’t mean that they are always worse than simply giving money to a random person. That administrative overhead probably helps them operate at a scale that allows them to help far more people than a smaller organization could.
Like, if I give money to a local food bank, that would feed far more needy people than if I went to my local restaurant and bought a bunch of take-out and then went down to a homeless camp and gave random people the take-out. Because food banks have supply chain connections and economies of scale that allow them to buy a lot more food for every dollar than you can get at a restaurant.