I'm an electronics hobbyist. This triggers a panicked sequence of shutting off every power switch and yanking every cord within reach.
I once had some lipo battery leads accidentally touch and weld themselves together, and the second I saw that glow and smoke, ripped the wires apart with full force.
Thank god for that website, I can't imagine being an aging millennial in 1980 with all the kids talking about "radical" this and "cowabunga" that and not have anything to look up.
Going from retail to trade work 20 years ago was a world of difference. If someone has a day off, it's a DAY OFF and you better not even call the motherfucker. Workers will even get yelled at by the boss for disturbing fellow employees personal time if they don't absolutely have to.
Retail is just all hell. If anyone is doing that, get out. Get out any way you can. There is no future, you will NOT be rewarded for going above and beyond, and you are just a corporate asset.
There's also another major difference. In the trades, comraderie grows organically as you work with others on a job. In retail, it's all forced, with dumbass morning meetings and songs and shit.
There are literally entire regions in the rural US where the only place to work is Walmart because they came in and deliberately operated the store at a loss to kill off all surrounding businesses. What do you suggest those people do?
Not everybody can be a white collar worker either. There are also literally not enough well paying jobs to go around. You assume everybody has the ability to just quit and move on whenever they want. And I'm saying this from a comfortable position, career wise, much like you. I just know how shitty things are.
To expand...one of the biggest goals of a capitalist is increasing profit. What better way to do this than to take over and manipulate the government of whatever state you're operating in to cut you special breaks? It's the pinnacle of capitalist achievement.
You create laws to regulate it...the capitalists will manipulate them and control your government anyways.
You loosen regulations to "promote competition" or whatever excuse they use, and then there's nothing stopping them from fucking you even harder. Capitalism and the state are always intertwined, one feeds off the other. Even the Soviet Union was sometimes said to be "state capitalist", where basically the entire country was under control of one "corporation".
I spend dozens and dozens of unpaid hours a month in my free time developing open source hardware and software and give the schematics away for free. That dedicated enough for you? You have no idea what goes on in the personal lives of each and every member of a forum, and you're painting us all with a broad brush right now.
I encourage others to reply to this comment on what it is they contribute to their cause. Because I'd be interested to hear that. On the Internet, we're just words on a screen that are easily categorized onto groups of people. But people are individuals, everybody has a story.