I was reading the comments in the front page article about some dumbass venture capitalist comparing the 1% to the Jews (a truly mind-boggling comparison...), when I ran across some comments that implied we techies don't know anything about the real world.
Hi. I know what the real world is. I grew up in it and busted my ass to get where I am today. Mommy and Daddy didn't pay for college. I worked my way up without it. Besides, Mommy died while I was a teenager (and the medical bills emptied what meager savings my family had) and Daddy's on disability in Arkansas after the small house in rural CA (you know you grew up in a shithole when you piled into a friend's beater and went an hour to fucking BAKERSFIELD for fun...) got foreclosed on.
The real world is awesome growing up! Especially when you get tossed, as a geek, into a classroom full of kids that don't want to fucking be there with curriculum tailored to them, and where if, $DEITY forbid, you actually pipe up and answer the teacher, you get bullied to the point of suicide attempts because you don't conform to the shitkicker jock slacker lifestyle (or in the case of Seth Walsh, actual suicide...this happened in the town I grew up in).
It's awesome in your 20s, too! I just recently had an eviction fall off my record. My credit's just now recovering from hospital bills. I've had to make the choice between rent and dinner before.
I spent a stint of time unemployed last year after getting laid off. I've worked fast food and retail gigs. My start in tech was a $10/hr graveyard gig doing dial-up tech support for grown Texan adults who literally did not know what a phone line was -- I shit you not, I had to say this line to a customer: "Please push in the doopy bit on the flat silver cord thingy to remove the cord from the back of your Windows and plug it into the back of your other phone to see if there's a dial tone or not. No, you have to pick up the handset once it's plugged in to see if there's a dial tone or not." I'm still about $10k away from getting out of the debt I had to run up in my 20s.
I ain't bitching, either. I know that I've got it good now, and that once the debt's paid off I'm a 10%er. I also know that the majority of what my hard word did for me was nothing more than put me in the position to take advantage of luck/opportunity when it fell in my lap, so trust me, I ain't claiming the bullshit line of "Work hard and you'll succeed." I also relied on some goverment programs getting here, and that's one of the reasons why I'm a liberal -- because people who grew up in the "real world" (and even some of those that didn't) need help in some form or another at some point in their lives.
So it's really, really awesome to work hard, get damn good at your chosen craft in life by learning on the job and spending a lot of evenings nose-deep in books to learn what the next job needs as well for a decade and a half after high school, find some place that'll pay you an upper-middle class living with some nice perks because you're damn good at your craft, manage to not call it "good game" and check out like a few of your classmates did via suicide thanks to bullying because you grew up in one of the toxic towns the "real world" has to offer, and then you have to put up with even more ignorant-as-shit remarks once you're grown like some in the Bus Taxes front page article who think that because now tech workers like me have it good now, that we've always had it good and have no idea how to the real world works.
Fuck off.
You know why those buses are there? Because the vast majority of employees there are lefties or left-libertarians -- while the right-libertarian techies tend to get the press, they're a minority. Google and Apple employees got those companies to give in to a form mass transportation that actually gets people from the city to the Valley in less than 2 hours, and gets a shitload of cars off of the road, because we give a shit about the environment.
Should the companies we work for actually have invested in public transit? Yeah, that definitely would have been a better option. Except that there's no unifying authority between the counties, the aging boomer crowd doesn't want construction noise interrupting their yoga and colon cleanses, and even here on this site (check my first diary on DKos), people say it's absolutely moral for companies to not pay their fair share in public taxation -- so why the fuck do you expect them to do any different? Shit, Kos is paying the majority of his payroll from Adwords revenue...a Google service. This site uses Google Analytics to track statistics. But you guys use this service that Google pays for, so it won't get picketed like wifi-enabled buses.
I was working at Apple when the news about the Chinese factory hit. You know what the conversations I had with my coworkers were? The overwhelming sentiment was that none of us were happy or comfortable with the idea of making our living off of the backs of those people, and some of us with shares were developing a plan for the next shareholder meeting to get the company to address it, at what would be to the detriment of our share prices, so we were plenty willing to put our money where out mouths were -- and then the company addressed it.
But yeah. We techies totally have no idea how the real world works. Hell, we're all the same kind of people completely (which is hilarious to anyone who has tried to organize a group of us -- herding cats is far, far easier).
You want to go after the companies that aren't being good corporate citizens of this country? Go for it. Want to go after the management who turned Google evil, decided that Apple, which had zero debt and made it a point of pride to not have debt take out debt to buy back shares rather than repatriate foreign cash, because their customers don't give a shit that they're paying 1% to 1.5% interest to a few financial institutions to avoid paying 35% in corporate taxes? Go for it.
Making a target out of people who aren't the 1%, most of whom aren't even the 10%, when they're actually trying to be environmentally concious and reduce the hellacious traffic on the 101 by taking a bus service that has no public equivalent because the local governments would rather give these firms tax breaks rather than enforce the tax code?
It's fucking stupid. Try targeting the actual companies and their management rather than their worker drones. Try targeting your local governments who can't put away 50+ years of bickering over use fees to put together a truly functional mass transit system that runs 24/7 throughout a metropolitan and economic zone. Try speaking up when the tax code allows them to nearly completely avoid taxes on their foreign income, rather than mewling about how since it's legal for them to do it, it's moral for them to do it. Try updating extremely outdated rent control and Section 8 laws to keep housing affordable in the face of rising income, which gives everyone a chance at city housing rather than to the highest bidder.
Try doing something productive rather than lashing out at the workers of companies you disapprove of. It tends to work better than insulting an entire sectors worth of workers and making their lives hell, when they don't make the decisions.
Just a thought.