Agreed. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t have a union, and sometimes unionizing just isn’t possible.

HR can protect the company by reigning this guy in. I really feel it was a lone wolf thing, not policy.

Very true! Like I said, I’m not trying to convince you to not bring it up, just that it’s something to be careful about, and to make sure you have evidence or documentation.

I completely believe all of that, and I’m sorry she’s had to deal with so much crap. Lately a lot of employers seem to be showing their asses by being overtly racist, ableist, and transphobic. Everyone I know who isn’t a white straight cis man has had employment troubles in the last six months.

I hope this is just a strange interaction with one HR person and you have a better time with everyone else!

Exactly what I was referencing! I’ve known a few people who were recently fired from remote jobs under very strange circumstances. I can’t prove anything of course, but I distinctly got the feeling that they were fired because the intersection of their marginalizations made them look like “evil North Korean spies” to management.

Definitely! However if your first experience with HR is being discriminated against, raising concerns about discrimination can be dangerous. Who do you go to when HR is causing the issues? HR is there to protect the company, not you. If the easiest way to protect the company is to fire someone, HR will probably do that.

I’m not trying to talk OP or anyone else out of going to HR, they aren’t always sharks waiting to fire someone. It’s just good to be careful here and OP and their wife should be aware of the risks before taking any action. Definitely document this incident. If this becomes a repeat issue, documentation can be the difference between getting fired and winning a wrongful termination lawsuit.

It sure sounds like racism and poorphobia to me. HR trying to make sure her surroundings don’t look like what a “typical poor person” would have (clutter, children, signs of disability, “drugs”, etc.) It’s not super common, but it’s common enough that I hear about it every so often.

I can’t offer any kind of legal advice, but it sounds like this job will be potentially problematic and HR will definitely be one to watch out for.

ETA: There’s a lot of paranoia in the US right now about “laptop farms”. Remote jobs are paranoid about people getting remote work to send money back to North Korea. It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s causing issues for a lot of people, mostly marginalized people. I think it’s useful context to know why this kind of thing is happening more lately.

I don’t have links because they get banned pretty quickly, but over the last week I’ve seen maybe 4 or 5 examples of lemmy users referencing “the race card” (derogatory) in response to others talking about systemic racist violence.

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If you’d rather have any amount of bad journalism over trying to fix things, then we hold such fundamentally different values that I don’t actually know how to talk to you. You’re also moving the goalposts a lot, you seem like you have your mind made up that somehow ads promote good journalism, which is just not true.

And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues

This issue already exists and has for as long as modern sensationalist news has existed - decades.

IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century.

You don’t actually think that, you just weren’t actually around for the media of that era so you don’t know what it was like. You’re blinded by rose-colored glasses. I’ll remind you that Rupert Murdoch built his media empire in the 1980s, and Murdoch’s one of the empires currently destroying media. There’s also the bit where Reagan couped multiple countries and the USAmerican public still thinks it never happened because it wasn’t covered.

Browsers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our ads!

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

Ad companies have lists of banned topics, effectively leading to news organizations being unable to talk about those topics without losing ad revenue. It’s called keyword blocking, so you’re actually getting biased news because of ads. It’s a well-known advertising strategy to just avoid controversial topics entirely.

Every youtuber I’ve watched recently has opened a patreon and asked people to donate there because youtube ad revenue is worth almost nothing. Every small journalism site I’ve seen asks for donations, and even the big ones admit their ad income doesn’t pay the bills.

Sometimes it sucks knowing that you’re indirectly removing revenue from someone. But personally, I prefer my time, attention-span, privacy, and security over giving one ten thousandth of a USA cent to someone. I started using an ad blocker because flashing advertisements were giving me headaches. I kept using them because autoplaying video ads were sucking up all the bandwidth that I was paying for. I continue to use ad blockers today because every single ad is either a scam, malware, or some weirdo far-right political pundit telling me gays are bad. Sorry to the independent journalists relying on ad revenue, but you gotta diversify and get revenue from a source more stable than the adware industry.

The corporate internet you are talking is more about sites like Facebook, insta, reddit etc who doesn’t view the content posters are creators and they definitely doesn’t share profits. I am not talking about this type.

Youtube is owned by google, and is definitely part of the corporate web. Most news sites are part of the corporate web, being owned by just a handful of companies or politicians. The vast majority of sites you would consider small content creators are most likely part of the corporate web. In fact, I haven’t seen a single non-corporate website that serves ads.

When I say I want the corporate web to die, I’m talking about seeing places like the fediverse, tilde sites, and neocities sites thriving. If facebook and google die and all that’s left is a few sites written by weird mentally ill queers who whost blogs on gemini and gopher, I’d be very okay with that.

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But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.

The corporate web wouldn’t be what it is today, the internet would be fine. This is an important distinction to make. The internet is run by a bunch of nerds going to “internet peering conventions” and paying for BGP cross-connects in data centers. They would be fine, because ad-blockers don’t hurt them.

The corporate web, on the other hand, would die. I’m very okay with that. In fact, I see that as a feature, not a bug. I hate the corporate web, and I think the world would be better without facebook and google creating monopolies on communication. But either way, if the only way technology can survive is ads (and it’s not the only way), then let it die.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It’s not like they know what they’re missing.

lolno. We should be doing everything we can to protect ourselves and those around us from malware, surveillance capitalism, and predatory advertising. Even if you don’t care about other people, herd immunity to malware and surveillance capitalism are very real things. It’s a lot harder to get infected by malware on an immunized network, and it’s a lot harder for facebook to surveil you (remember shadow profiles?) when nobody around you is having their every step tracked.

Consider why those people don’t even know about extensions or ad-blocking. The web was built to be extensible, but ad companies (google) have done everything they can to keep people from realizing they can just change websites however they want, including blocking ads. People aren’t ignorant about privacy because they want to be, they’re ignorant because a lot of money and manipulation has gone into keeping them unaware and unempowered.

Solidarity and support are the only real weapons we have in the war against surveillance and malvertising. If not for those around you, then at least do it for the sake of your own privacy.

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Ironically every single trans person I know is the lo tek on the right.