• mech@feddit.org
    6·
    1 hour ago

    I joined a union and organized the election of a workers council at my workplace.
    Union dues are 1% of my salary.

    In the past 5 years, we managed to enforce:

    • the right to work from home
    • 20% pay for the time spent on call after hours, plus 1 day paid vacation for each week you’re on call (so I now have 42 days + unlimited sick days)
    • a company car for on call duty, which you’re allowed to use privately, too
    • work phones for every employee (instead of having to install the company MDM on your private phone)
    • convertible desks for everyone
    • and a substantial pay raise
  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    3 hours ago

    I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

    Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

    I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

    I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

    As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.

    I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

  • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
    7·
    4 hours ago

    Support right to repair.

    Edit and add to the Consumer Rights Wiki

    Buy things I can actually own (not modern cars / smart fridges which can have features remotely removed at any time.)

    Use solar power + house battery + V2G.

    Automate everything with Home Assistant.

    Provide free source code for all of my projects.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    5 hours ago

    We buy almost nothing new except consumables. I could spend an hour, probably two, showing you around our house and pointing out all the things I made, found on the road, bought used or was given, etc. Our vehicles are 2002, 2004 and 2014.

    Not sure we’ve ever bought Christmas stuff. Our house is lit up like none other on the block this year. Wife toted home a milk crate packed with lights the other day, free. The nice tree in the living room? No idea where it came from, sure didn’t buy it at Walmart.

    Tried a new coat today my wife got for $1, had to cut the tags off. Damn it’s soft and warm! Had to make myself stop buying shoes and clothes at the thrift, have way too many.

    Just got done making my own soap. Still not curing for some reason. :( Got some borax and will try making my own laundry soap next.

    This year I grew loofa sponges. Got at least a year’s supply of scrub pads, kitchen and shower, won’t spend a dime on that shit. I’d have a 3-year supply, but made mistakes learning. I’ll grow next year and probably skip a few years after that harvest. Also, the seeds sell for $5/20 on eBay. I have hundreds, if not 1000+.

    • Aneb@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Hey got any ideas for vinegar? I haven’t searched it online but thought I would ask because its my ultimate cleaning solution

    • cornshark@lemmy.world
      11·
      4 hours ago

      I feel like you should probably know where the tree in your living room came from? Did you steal someone’s tree?

  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
    6·
    4 hours ago

    I’m actively working towards a passive income, and I am very low consumerist. I decided I don’t need anymore devices (asides from solar panels/other forms of power generation).

    Once I have mycrop, passive income, and elrctricity, “the man” is fucked without lube, because my plan is to rabidly “jailbreak” anyone who will listen by getting them to the same state.

    Minimum bills, minimum subscriptions, own food, own power, anti-consumerism, mutual trade.

    Do you see how this would affect an exploitative system once you have the option to just not participate in it?

    The government would be forced to treat their people better, and so would the companies trading with them, because they are no longer as important.

      • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I literally hate ads. I have a adguad at my house that blocks everything and I use a VPN. Because I’m in the industry, I know what they do. Its awful what they are capable of.

    • nul9o9@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      4 hours ago

      I couldn’t stomach working in marketing. Hats off to you. I took a marketing class in college, just felt icky.

      • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I do my best to only promote to keywords with high intent. So people who search for words with the sole purpose to purchase. I avoid doing ads to people who wasn’t looking for someone.

        This help me sleep at night.

  • Cricket@lemmy.zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    I’m not sure if this qualifies, but I have a friend who way back when, like decades ago, probably before the extensive surveillance we have now, would do something rather ingenious and devious to get major discounts on whatever expensive things he wanted at stores: he would print out a sheet of barcode stickers for a product that was similar but much cheaper than the one he wanted and plaster it on a bunch of the items like the one he wanted. Take it to the cashier and get a super discount.

    For example, if he wanted some fancy model of an electronics gadget, he would print barcodes of a much cheaper but similar model from the same manufacturer. According to him, he had even done this for fancy cuts of meat. The reason for applying it to a bunch of them and not just the single one he planned to buy was for plausible deniability. If someone questioned him, he could say, I don’t know, I just picked one off the shelf - they could go check and see that there were many labeled as the cheaper item.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    7 hours ago

    Push Nestle and Goya products way back in the shelf / turn them around / grab non- Nestle/Goya equivalents and put them in front of the Nestle/Goya shit.

    Goal is to make their products less visible to other customers.

  • MutantTailThing@lemmy.world
    128·
    11 hours ago

    Don’t know if it counts as sticking it to the man, but I adblock everything. Seriously, Ive got adblockers on my adblockers. Ive been adblocking for so long I don’t know what to buy anymore.

    I’m sitting here in my empty house surrounded by my bags of money I don’t know what to spend on. Send help.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
      11·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t know what to buy anymore.

      I have a problem where because I’m so hard to advertise to between adblock and premium subscriptions, that I am usually very out of the loop on what movies and TV shows are coming out

      The biggest ones usually make their way into the news or Lemmy somehow, but there’s definitely a lot I’m clueless about until I see them pop up streaming somewhere a couple years later

    • Clanket@lemmy.world
      32·
      11 hours ago

      Same. I also treat cookies like a virus…no, no, and no again. Though I think my days are limited with that, a lot of websites now saying accept cookies or pay. I’ll give up the interwebs before I accept trackers.

      • asmoranomar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        9 hours ago

        Instead of manually denying cookies, you can deny all cookies and whitelist the sites you trust.

        Edit: also note - websites that give you the ‘option’ to opt in or out may not have the same opinion on what cookies are ‘optional’ or ‘mandatory’. Several don’t even do anything and are just there to look compliant.

        • 200ok@lemmy.world
          4·
          6 hours ago

          Absolutely agree. Site owners only get fined if someone reports them. The regulators aren’t actively scanning sites to ensure compliance.

      • daed@sh.itjust.works
        10·
        10 hours ago

        For articles which won’t let you disable cookies there’s usually an archived version somewhere. Or you use some current alternative to 12ft. Or you ask an LLM to summarize the URL.

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      After pushback, I switched over to ad nauseam (which still blocks via UBO). Not sure how effective it actually is for the click part (considering it also catches related things, some YT recommends, share buttons, definite non-ad things in search etc) but it says $1.8K (I have it set between ‘sometimes’ and ‘always’).

  • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
    8·
    7 hours ago

    Linux and buy tech second hand only when the wheels fall off. I don’t buy branded clothes. Sail the seas. I boycott a lot of places/brands too.

  • NateNate60@lemmy.world
    57·
    11 hours ago

    When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I’m buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.

    In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there’s no fee for cash.

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
          2·
          7 hours ago

          It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.

          Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.

          For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).

          Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.

          Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.

          We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.

          • NateNate60@lemmy.world
            5·
            7 hours ago

            It is definitely not true that Discover interchange rates are significantly higher than Visa or Mastercard.

            I’ve put below a list of the actual interchange rates for various personal Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards types.

            Debit:

            • Visa Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
            • Discover Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
            • Mastercard Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
            • Visa Debit: 0.8% + 15¢
            • Mastercard Debit: 1.05% + 15¢
            • Discover Debit: 1.1% + 16¢
            • Visa Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢
            • Mastercard Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢

            Base credit tiers:

            • Visa CPS Retail: 1.51% + 10¢
            • Discover Consumer: 1.56% +10¢
            • Mastercard Consumer: 1.65% + 10¢
            • Mastercard Enhanced: 1.8% + 10¢

            Rewards cards:

            • Visa Rewards Traditional: 1.65% + 10¢
            • Visa Rewards Signature: 1.65% + 10¢
            • Discover Rewards: 1.71% + 10¢
            • Discover Rewards Premium: 1.71% + 10¢
            • Mastercard World: 1.9% + 10¢

            Premium cards:

            • Visa Rewards Signature Preferred: 2.1% + 10¢
            • Discover Rewards Premium Plus: 2.15% + 10¢
            • Mastercard World Elite: 2.3% + 10¢

            You can plainly see that Discover tends to be more expensive than Visa but is cheaper than Mastercard. The only reason I could see that someone might refuse Discover is because Discover cards are all rewards credit cards that go into the higher tiers, whereas many Visa and Mastercard cards are debit cards which go into the lowest tier.

              • NateNate60@lemmy.world
                1·
                2 hours ago

                A card which is subject to central bank regulations regarding the interchange fees which they are allowed to charge. According to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act 2011, the Federal Reserve has the power to limit debit card interchange fees for debit cards issued by large banks with over $10 billion in assets. A “regulated debit card” issued by a bank subject to the regulation is therefore tariffed at the maximum rate allowed by the regulation, which is 0.05% plus 22 cents.

        • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          4 hours ago

          The small retailer I worked for didn’t take Discover. We took Amex though, because it was high-end and wealthy people love their Amex.

          Editing to clarify, had to dash off before: wealthy people love their extra-thick Amex Black Card made of titanium or whatever, that we used to have to type in by hand because it would damage the old slide readers. So as long as we were taking those we took regular Amex cards too.

        • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
          6·
          9 hours ago

          anyone can get an amex. unless you’re talking about a platinum or black card? those have minimum spending requirements per year to keep them.

          • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            4 hours ago

            The Amex Black Card is the one I was starting to refer to, I got interrupted and decided to hit the button rather than elucidate further. Sorry. You can look up the requirements and benefits, it wouldn’t be good for me but for someone who travels a lot and throws big expensive parties it might. Or if they’re basically a corporation

          • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            It costs more for the merchant and cardholder. That’s why rich people flex with it. Because they can afford to pay more and cost others more for no reason.

            • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
              3·
              8 hours ago

              Maybe more for the seller, I don’t know but the cost to me is… Nothing. Well the benefit to me is about 3% back on anything I buy. No fees. Just another cheap card.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
      10·
      10 hours ago

      over here, the extra cost that comes from handling cash is enough that small businesses don’t want to take it. counting till every day adds up.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
        11·
        10 hours ago

        Surprisingly not in the US. If you make 100 sales a day of $20 each, then over a six-day week, you’d pay roughly $360 in credit card transaction fees (assuming 2.5% + 10¢ per transaction which is average). If you instead spent half an hour a day counting cash in the till and then half an hour at the end of the week to go to the bank, that’s about $98 in labour cost (assuming a labour cost of $28 per hour, which is roughly $25 per hour in wages and $3 per hour in tax), so the savings are $262 per week, which is not insignificant.

    • postnataldrip@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 hours ago

      I used to do that, but here (Australia) passing on surcharges has sadly been normalised, and during covid heaps of businesses went cashless.

      The salt in the wound is that there’s not really any reason for businesses to push payment gateways for a better deal. They don’t give a shit any more as they just pass it into the customer.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 hours ago

        Some American states (not mine) have banned surcharging for credit cards in response to consumer backlash. But what’s not banned is marking up everything by 3% and then offering a 3% cash discount.