[serviceberry]

For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.

[imgabe]

> For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.

[autoexec]

> This is your tax money that is being spent.

and if you aren't getting what you're owed for that money you have the ability to vote out the people responsible for that and elect people who can deliver what we're asking for. Try voting out the CEO of walmart.

Believe it or not, when a bunch of incompetents aren't dismantling them, most government agencies get their work done. There are a lot fewer "do-nothing"s than you think and a lot of hard workers who are proud to serve their fellow Americans.

[imgabe]

You don’t need to vote out the CEO of Wal-Mart. He can’t put you in jail or confiscate your income via taxes. You just go shop at target or somewhere else instead.

[autoexec]

The most universally hated companies are also among the richest. Voting with your wallet is a myth. The entire point of a private company is to confiscate your income. They must charge you as much as they possibly can while providing you with as little as they can possibly get away with. Maybe you've even noticed prices going up while enshittification and shrinkflation increases.

[imgabe]

The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.

In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.

Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.

I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.

[joquarky]

In my lifetime, I've gone from $20 copays with no deductible to $60 copays with a $7000 deductible.

[autoexec]

> If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated"

The most hated companies tend to be the ones who have been causing harm for years if not decades and impacting vast numbers of people: Purdue Pharma, Nestlé, BP, Facebook, Monsanto, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, etc. Several of the most hated companies have been directly responsible for killing millions of people. This isn't about "angry reviews online", sometimes it's about getting away with fraud or even murder.

> In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

Your calls also used to be much more private, but now the software, devices, and services you use are spying on you and your communications to varying degrees in ways that would have been illegal when you had a landline. Call quality was also vastly better ("you can hear a pin drop" vs "can you hear me now")

> TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper.

They also take multiple screenshots of every second to spy on what you're watching, they push ads on the screen even when you're playing video games or watching DVDs, and have microphones and camera collecting your personal data.

> Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer.

Cars are also spying on everything you do and reporting your driving habits to your insurance company who will jack up your rates if you drive at night or take a corner too hard.

> New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. I

You aren't counting the fact that parts of games (including parts important to the story) are often paywalled off and the cost of games can end up in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you include the DLC (for example the total cost of the Sims 4 is $1,235) or the games which require ongoing subscription costs, when in the 80s there were countless free player-made mods/maps/skins/expansions etc. Also video games are being used to build psychological profiles of you which then gets sold to data brokers and used to push ads at you (https://www.wired.com/story/video-games-data-privacy-artific...).

> The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s

The PC you had in the 90s was your computer. On your phone multiple third parties like your phone manufacturer, your carrier, and the OS maker can all access your phone remotely at any time, view/modify/add/delete files, applications, and settings without any notice to you at all. They have privileged levels of access to your device while you are left with a locked down account without full access to "your" device. Your computer in the 90s was designed to work for you, but your cell phone is designed to collect your personal data for other people.

> Food has more variety and is cheaper.

Food prices are at historic highs right now and that food is less healthy than it used to be as companies have been able to strip away regulations. The same scientists that the tobacco industry paid to lie to the public and government about the harms of smoking are now being employed by the food industry to convince the government that their additives are harmless (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...) and people are eating worse now than they did in the 1980s which shows in the amount of obesity and disease. I have to admit that we have much more variety than we did. That seems to be on the decline in recent years though and people are increasingly finding empty shelves at the stores.

Some things are better today than they used to be, but many things are actually much worse. Every new technology that does something convenient for you is also being used against you in some way.