It has yet to cost me jobs but it may come to that.

I should re-boot Camarades.

Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.

It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).

Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)

Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.

While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.

Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.

I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.

On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.

> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash. You can see this with Trump, but also with DHH claiming "everyone loves me", after his "let's kill wolves" blog entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

One of the most telling quotes of our political era is this one from 2019:

  “I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.

Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.

We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.

As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...

[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_r%C3%A9gime

I don't think it's easy to become a politician. Only a certain number of slots are available.

... Until they reach a certain size and then "customers" are just an annoying detail in the quest to maximize share holder value.