Comment by mcmcmc
19 days ago
Having kids is also a bullshit excuse. Choosing comfort over conscience is your prerogative but you’re just teaching your kids the same values.
Yeah, tech monopolist that enables genocide to contemporary gestapo isn’t an equal comparison. But my point was that you can’t ignore the moral hazards of employment by handwaving “gotta eat somehow”. There are a million ways to feed your kids. Saying you have to work a high paid job to feed them non-GMO certified organic produce from Erewhon because that’s the only standard of living you can possibly survive with, that’s a choice.
I also want to reiterate that I’m not judging the people who choose to work there. I’m just saying that by signing the employment contract they accept the reasonable public perception that the products they work on are shit. And to some marginal degree, they are complicit in all their employer’s wrongdoings.
Your commentary doesn't come off as honorable or righteous in any way to me. It comes off as self centered and self righteous. As if we all owe it to you to put you before our children.
I don't know if that's your intention but that's what I'm reading.
I genuinely hope you don't agree with that reading, because I doubt you'd have a nice life with that outlook. You'd be very unlikable.
What I’d consider unlikable is implying that someone might have no choice but to work for Microsoft in order to provide for their family. It carries with it an air of privilege and condescension implying that working a lesser job or for lesser pay would be insufficient to provide for a family’s basic needs.
What lesser job? People are unemployed after six months. Meanwhile MS hired other people for less to replace those that left. Nobody won here.
It's not about "lesser" jobs being actually lesser. The point is that you don't actually have a choice. Big companies that nobody likes are in control of the economy and you can't do anything except join the unemployed until you get rehired from the pool of desperate people willing to do their bidding.
(All of this with a grain of salt. Not literally everyone is in this situation, but there are certainly many who are.)
I'm just saying, maybe don't be so quick to judge.
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