Privacy fundamentally is about keeping things private ... from someone.
If that someone is everyone, then nothing is private. Any sufficiently powerful entity can just overpower you, torture you into submission, guarantee a backdoor into a system you thought was cryptographically private, etc.
I for one do pay for a VPN service, because it keeps my home traffic stream private from some people - namely my ISP - with high probability.
It also obfuscates various types of traffic I generate and makes it harder, though I agree not impossible, to collate my traffic into a usable form for spying agencies.
For me that’s easily worth paying ~$100/year for someone else to manage, and if they base their business reputation on not collecting logs, etc., there’s enough incentive to trust that while also staying vigilant to verify what I can and switch providers if they are shown to be lying.
Self-hosting a vpn is utterly not an alternative for my use case, not even for technical reasons as I am an engineer who works on production web services all day. Just from a cost effectiveness / value POV, third party vpn vendors are a good solution for me.
It feels like you are making sweeping generalizations. “Software engineer” applies to a massive variety of people, all across gender & sexual identity spectrums, socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ancestries, religious beliefs, favorite sports teams, food preferences, political opinions, etc.
What you’ve written up sounds like a sanctimonious appeal to make yourself sound more “blue collar” especially by choosing to describe diversity in your apartment building based essentially solely on occupation status and implicitly contrasting engineers with “needing to use kindness to relate to each other” (something all my engineer coworkers seem to be exceptionally good at, for instance).
I’d be willing to wager highly that if you are having trouble socializing with engineering peers, you are probably the reason for the trouble. If you can’t find exceptionally wide diversity in a very generic field like software engineering, it suggests you’re not trying very hard.
Uber and similar ride-hailing services have not led to more efficient space or energy use. On the contrary, these services have led to serious and alarming increases in congestion and pollution and diverted funds away from public transit.
The real economics of taxi services, for example round trip costs for servicing lower density out-lying regions, implies much higher prices and lower ride inventory.
Uber and others providing an inflated amount of inventory at unsustainably low prices is not some sort of shift in transit patterns. It’s nothing but temporarily selling a dollar for fifty cents in order to compel all competitors out of the market, at which point it instantly goes right back to being just as hard to get an Uber in the suburbs as it was to get a taxi there in the 90s, because that’s precisely how the price equilibrium of that supply and demand always worked.
> “If Uber didn't produce any value for the user people wouldn't be taking them”
At current prices, which are unsustainbly low due to VC subsidy, people find value in the trade of money for the service. At a price that fairly reflects the cost of delivering the service unsubsidized and maintaining driver quality of life at a socially acceptable level, nobody would pay for it.
So the game was to lever perceived market value up very high with VC subsidy and hype, all the while knowing that they are selling a dollar for fifty cents, just long enough to be acquired or go public at prices that pay back the original VC subsidizers at a multiple allowing them to profit, while whomever bought in is left holding the bag when the company is left in an unsustainable operating position and there’s no more hype-profit carrot to attract new subsidy investors.
I see a lot of businesses that don’t create value, like Uber, or even destroy value in multiple senses, like Uber, that go relatively unpunished by markets and create huge financial windfalls for executives, investors and some employees. Similar things have happened with some cryptocurrencies.
Often a business is run solely to generate enough hype to externalize losses onto an acquirer or public retail traders or unwitting retirement plan holders, while creating space for personal profit for a small set of people.
I’d argue that working on weekends is not reasonable in either case, except for extremely infrequent work emergencies handled with some predefined on-call sort of scheduling.
If it is employee laziness or incompetence, the employees should be retrained, demoted or fired. Grinding them on weekends is only likely to make the productivity drain worse and if they are creating bad work outputs, you’re accelerating the compounding growth of their mistakes.
I like what was said in Peopleware about this, “You can kick someone to make him sit up in his chair, but you can’t kick someone to make him work.”
Despite all of the above, 99% of the time this sort of issue stems from toxic & incompetent management. Is your CEO using Twitter to bark workload policy at you? Well, then you know who the problem is.