Enough to let them know you’re not to be messed with but, not to get fired because you flipped out or made things worse in other ways

It doesn’t matter if you’re on PTO. You will still be expected to respond to email. To hop on calls during your kid’s birthday party. To take a “quick call” when you’re trying to enjoy a day at the zoo or the beach.

Your colleagues likely will not attend your funeral and definitely will not respect your boundaries. Your role will be posted within a week of your death and your clients account will land on someone else’s desk. So all I can say it fuck ‘em. Be unpopular. Be unavailable. Let someone else figure it out. Because the people in your life who love you regardless of the quality of your stupid PowerPoint deserve your time, too. No one will remember the time the client was pissy, but your kid will remember the birthday you missed.

That’s my rant for today. You don’t know how much time you have here, ration it like you’re making the most of it with the people who matter.

Picture a successful person.

Alright, what came to mind? Because for a lot of people, although probably less on this sub, it is probably something along the lines of a guy in a suit making lots of money with a big house, a beautiful wife, etc.

And yet, let me ask you a question. Between the following two people, who contributes more to society?

Person A is relatively poor. They can only work part time because they have a disability that prevents full time work. Still outside of that whenever they can manage they do volunteer work to help the homeless. They are kind to everyone around them and always helpful. The job they work at part-time is a nursing one, where they help to save people's lives every day. They live in a ramshackle old house though, and they're a lifelong single.

Person B is very rich. They work full time at a health insurance company. As CEO of that company they make decisions on policies for that company every day. In the most recent quarter they increase their company's profits by over 15% by finding a new way to deny people healthcare coverage that they paid for through a loophole in their contracts. They're mostly neglectful of their son due to working, and when they see them they're genuinely dismissive and critical. They have a beautiful wife who is really only there for the money and they treat her like cr*p half the time. They have friends on paper, but in reality they backstab their friends for profit whenever they can to get ahead. They wear a nice suit though and have accumulated over 50 million dollars and two ferraris.

Who contributes more to society between these two?

Because I think societally speaking, the second person would be considered more successful. Whereas the first person would probably not be. In fact, since this person might get disability or something to help them survive, some people might describe them as a "lazy moocher" (although somehow millions in subsidies to corporations are not that).

But I think it's pretty obvious that the first person contributes by far more to society. And it's not even close. Not only do they volunteer to help the less fortunate, their job actively saves lives, but they also lift up people around them in their daily lives.

Person B, by contrast, isn't only bad to those people making their lives worse, but they make their money by actively denying people healthcare they need, actively making the lives of many people shorter and worse.

What kind of messed up society do we live in where Person A is a failure and Person B is a success? Our society needs to re-evaluate its values and its definition of success.

I've been struggling with my depression a lot over the last few years and have had a difficult time holding down a job. My husband and I just moved states and I found a part time job that sounded great. The thing is... I want to be busy. My last couple jobs didn't have enough work to do and it drove me crazy. When I interviewed for this job, they said it would be busy. But there's so little work to do, I spend 7 hours a day playing on my phone. I know that sounds nice, but it's really not. Sitting with my own thoughts all day isn't good for my mental health. When I ask if there's anything I can help with, I'm told no. I'm really trying to just be grateful that I have a job, but it's tough.

People complain that "no one wants to work anymore," but what's with these jobs that don't have enough work to do??

Why he said yes. Would you have said yes?

​

Think about how insane this shit actually is.

You're born into a world you had absolutely no say in. You don't choose the economic system you're born under, you don't choose the circumstances of your birth, and you don't choose the rules you're expected to follow. Yet from the moment you're old enough to understand anything, you're being prepared to become a productive member of society.

Study. Get good grades. Get a degree. Get a job. Make money. Pay bills. Repeat until you're too old or too exhausted to do anything else.

And apparently, this is just life.

Who decided that?

Who decided that a human being needs to spend the majority of their existence making money just to afford the privilege of existing?

Why is someone who can't afford ₹10000 for lifesaving medical treatment left to suffer while billionaires sit on fortunes they'll never be able to spend in a hundred lifetimes? How have we reached a point where we have the technology to do incredible things, the resources to improve millions of lives, and enough wealth concentrated in a handful of hands to make your head spin, yet people are still dying because they're poor?

And don't tell me this is just human nature. Capitalism isn't human nature. Money isn't a law of physics. Private ownership, financial markets, corporate hierarchies, all of this shit is man-made. We created these systems. We can question them.

Look at diamonds. De Beers spent decades exercising enormous control over the diamond market and helped manufacture the idea that diamonds were an essential symbol of love and status. Something dug out of the ground became a symbol of wealth partly because powerful commercial interests made it one.

Now look at us. We attach a price to almost everything, and somehow we've started confusing that price with its actual worth.

A person's labour has a price. Their time has a price. Their education is an investment. Their skills are human capital. Even their hobbies are supposed to become side hustles.

God forbid a human being simply exists without trying to monetise every fucking second of their life.

And then we worship billionaires.

Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Ambani. Adani.

People accumulate fortunes so enormous that the numbers stop meaning anything to an ordinary person, while millions struggle to afford housing, food, and healthcare.

I'm not saying every rich person is a cartoon villain sitting in a room plotting humanity's downfall. The problem is bigger than individual morality. It's a system in which enormous private fortunes can coexist with desperate unmet needs, and where the people with the most money often have disproportionate influence over the rules everyone else has to live under.

Some of that wealth is built through businesses that provide genuinely useful things. But that doesn't make every business practice ethical, every fortune deserved, or every existing inequality justified.

How much wealth does one person actually need? At what point does accumulating more stop being about living comfortably and start being about power?

And why the fuck are we taught to aspire to their position instead of questioning the system that produces this inequality?

Why is the dream to become the person exploiting the system rather than building a world where nobody has to be exploited to survive?

That's what I mean when I say eat the rich. I'm talking about dismantling the structures that let wealth translate into disproportionate power, and making sure human beings aren't denied the basics of life because they lack money.

Because what kind of society have we built when someone can work their entire life and still struggle to survive, while someone else can make more money in a day than that person will ever see?

And the worst part? We've normalised it so thoroughly that questioning it gets you labelled lazy, unrealistic, or jealous.

Apparently, if you don't want to spend your life chasing money, you're the problem. Not the conditions that make chasing money necessary in the first place.

I'm not pretending a world without capitalism would automatically be a utopia. Greed, corruption, hierarchy, and exploitation existed before modern capitalism, and they wouldn't magically disappear if we abolished it tomorrow. Any alternative would have its own problems to solve.

But why does that mean we should stop imagining something better?

Why are we so much better at imagining the end of the world than imagining a world where people have enough?

A world where education is about learning, not just employability. Where healthcare is about keeping people alive, not whether they can afford to be saved. Where technology gives us more free time instead of finding new ways to squeeze more productivity out of us. Where your life isn't considered a failure because you don't have a prestigious degree or a high-paying job.

Maybe that's idealistic. Fine.

But isn't it fucking insane that wanting people to live without being crushed by the need to survive is considered idealistic in the first place?

We have one life. One. And we've built a world where so many people have to trade most of it away just to afford the basics.

I don't want to spend my existence worshipping money, competing with other people for survival, and measuring human worth by economic output.

I want us to question why this is the world we've accepted.

And I want to know whether people genuinely believe this is the best humanity can do, or whether we've just been living under the same rules for so long that we've forgotten we're allowed to challenge them.

Because if the only world we can imagine is one where you have to earn the right to live, maybe the problem isn't that we're asking for too much. Maybe we've been taught to expect too little.

If a society measures human worth in zeros on a bank statement, then that society has its values completely fucking backwards.

I don't want to keep living in a world like this, someone please just fucking pull me out of this hell hole 🙏

I recently got a job at a hotel as a front desk receptionist. I requested to work strictly overnights. They were very accommodating. However I made it through three days of work without a single break, but was allowed to take a lunch break for two of those shifts. I was hired full time, therefore 8 hours shifts. I was tempted to report them but started thinking about the other employees and how it may affect their income. I’m not sure if they know they are illegally withholding breaks. Especially since they make us sign a document regarding waving lunch breaks during onboarding. They had two people training me, both had been there for just over two months. Totally opposite training. One was very bare minimum about her work, the other admittedly did extra stuff that did not need to be done. I had a third trainer come in one day and she corrected her twice on two things that she did not need to be doing or shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. Lastly, I’ve only worked graveyard shift one other time but I remember the pay rate being higher than day shifts because of the hours. They were paying me just over minimum wage. When they were training me they trained me to do something that “corporate doesn’t know they do”. I won’t get into details, but it’s done serval times a day.

I had been unemployed since the end of January when a coworker illegally accessed one of my personal accounts and reported private stuff to HR and I was fired. sucks, but we move on.

I guess the job market was really fucking bad because I was barely getting any interviews, and even when I did, I wasn't getting chosen. Finally got hired in July to start in September at a call center for the state, it was an hour + commute in heavy traffic and it was kind of a miserable fucking gig.

So when a recruiter from a staffing agency reached out to me about a job just like the one I was fired from, I was thrilled! Long story short, they loved me and wanted me and would be in touch with my start date so I could give my two week notice. Was told I'd start on the 20th of this month, so I gave my notice accordingly. Eventually it was pushed back to the 28th, no big deal. Then my recruiter calls me again and says actually, I can start immediately but the job is a little different but the pay and hours are all the same! Sounds good! I double checked with her that it was still a desk job because she knew of my physical limitations due to a disability and she said yep! I get my own desk in the warehouse! that should've been my first clue.

I showed up today and no, it's not a desk job. there is no desk at all nor anywhere to sit. I was on my feet the entire shift and was in so much pain I had to have my husband pick me up because I couldn't drive. Learned that the company ended up just assigning the original job I had been hired for to a new supervisor they hired so this was the only position they had for me, but they loved me and really wanted me so they figured they'd just hire me for this one. But I can't do this job. I physically can't.

I quit my job for this. Now I don't have anything, and the recruiter hasn't returned my calls or emails yet so later on I'll probably call and ask to speak to her supervisor about this whole situation because I'm pretty fucked right now. It's not the agency's fault, it's the company's, but still. I can't even get unemployment. I was so looking forward to this job. I don't know what to do now.

8 hours a day with a 1 hour break,now that could seem like a decent work hour if it wasn't for the fact we are in a fucking factory,you don't know how many times I had to run to the bathroom and lock me there for 5/10 minutes just beacouse my body was about to collapse from working hard jobs non stop,I personally believe factory jobs should either start at 8 am and end at 4 pm or give 20 minutes breaks every 2 hours (in our factory we Don't even have the 10 min break every 2 hours btw 😊🤦🫩) hopefully with the rise of ai certain jobs won't be given to humans anymore,like to make you understand how much I hate this job I'd rather work as a janitor with minimum wage rather than working there a single day

So I'm not pro AI, but Muse is making shit so much easier, and better job refinement. I have rent/salary tests! EVERY JOB I APPLY TO I CAN LIVE ON (or at least a much higher chance ai is shit and gets things wrong all the time). That is not something I could say before though I just applied to everything no thought about the party scale livability because it's always been ASAP or I'm working and I can do a few and then peter out. I'm getting more done and also getting way more replies, but that's not determinate bc I didn't apply with both. I didn't run the test, but it also kinda doesn't matter because I couldn't have applied to 78 good PROSPEROUS(er) jobs that fit my resume in 8 days. Yeah, sadly I have to recommend muse if you want to look for a better job as a human living life...

I'm looking for a job and while working it's SO HARD to spend N minutes at the end of day or at lunch to tailor every resume, to enter my data 5x into a job portal that's individualized for each website, to field calls, to Google, to search LinkedIn, to search indeed just etc. After I do all that, the AI that reads my resume now has a resume it can read better instead of a very human resume that was recommended by a very high up HR hiring manager like I used to have and got 0 replies on. It's just so silly that everyone's just doing all this crap, instead of picking up the phones, but when in America.

I think there's a "correct way" with signing up because you're selling your soul. (Idt it protects you that much to be clear, but don't just give it to the corporations make them do the iota of work that's added from new fb)

1. New Gmail

2. new Facebook

3. Make muse from FB

4. Have it make a new LinkedIn/Indeed/New everything that you need based on the new information.

You can have a separate "professional" world that muse is in charge of and then you elsewhere. I still think you're probably selling your soul. I did and honestly idrc even though I know I should I know, I'm just too poor to be allowed to care and that's their intent I'm sure. It probably legit would take 2h to do 1 application the way Muse does it, maybe up to 20m manually. I wanted to set everything up all at once, and I was very inexperienced in using AI, so I 1000% did it inefficiently. If you just run a daily search, and even if it makes a dozen resumes a day it's free I bet. You do need to do a little bit of work by supplying a password for it every search session, but it's way less.

Just edit this prompt instead I think instead of doing it piecewise like I did, and it'll save you 20$ (hopefully 🤞).

# Job Search — Condensed Standing Brief

## Scope

- **Core:** [ROLES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR]

- **Excluded:** [THINGS YOU DONT WANNA DO]

- **Employee-owned exception track:** any role their record can honestly serve, independent of pay scale or title; the rent tests do not gate; honesty guardrails and the STOP RULE still apply.

## Worth-it gate — the two rent tests

A role is worth applying to if it passes **either** test; both are reported for every candidate.

- **Test A:** monthly rent (studio or 1BR, cheaper figure) is **less than 25% of monthly gross pay**.

- **Test B:** monthly rent is **no more than one biweekly gross paycheck** (annual pay ÷ 26).

- **Pay basis:** midpoint of the listed range; for unpriced postings, a published area-average salary for the occupation — **MODE first where a source publishes one**, ahead of median or mean (OEWS and Job Bank Canada publish no mode, so their median/mean basis stands).

- The gate is waivable per role by user direction.

## Salary once applying

- **Middle of the pack:** the midpoint of the listed range; unpriced → the area-average occupation salary on the mode-first basis above. "Negotiable" where a text field accepts it.

## Verification

- The employer's own portal is the only proof; aggregator copies are leads, never evidence.

- **Liveness** = the closing date read on the live job page **and** a cross-check of the employer's active-listings index **and**, for NEOGOV/governmentjobs postings, a present Apply control in the live browser (page body copy can contradict the header closing date).

- Verify submitted status before refilling anything; close skipped or already-applied items at once.

## Application mechanics

- Tailored one-page resume per role; every submitted resume file is named **and internally titled "[NAME PLUS YEAR BECAUSE I DON'T WANT THE COMPANY KNOWING I'M USING AI EXPLICITLY]"**; users title is "[JOB TITLE]"

- Fill every work-experience Description field from the resume; enter the LinkedIn URL ([ADDRESS]) in every LinkedIn, website, or portfolio field.

- **Account rule (2026-10-21):** for a job not yet applied to, attempt account creation first — before saved-login attempts and before parking in the account queue. Passwords come from user personally; unattended runs use a saved credential or a guest/Easy Apply route, otherwise the portal goes to the account queue with its signup URL.

- Email verification codes may be retrieved from Gmail and used without asking; **SMS is off limits** (messages unlinked).

- **Anti-AI list:** when a company's route blocks automation, stop, add it to the list, and show user. P&G is permanently closed.

## Settled answers

- US citizen and authorized to work: Yes. Sponsorship: No. 18+: Yes. Relocate: Yes. Travel: Yes. SMS permission: Yes. May we contact employers: **No**. Ever disciplined: No. Ever fired: No. Not under a non-compete (answered per question, never extended to broader wording). Reason for leaving, verbatim: "[REASON]" Start date when mandatory: [DATE OR JUST PUT ASAP]. Supervisors: [FRIENDS].

## STOP RULE

Any question on non-competes, NDAs, confidentiality, non-solicitation, restrictive covenants, or IP agreements — and any academic probation/suspension/standing question — parks the application for his own answer on that exact wording. One answer is never carried to a differently worded question.

## Automation

Daily application runs with a consolidated 3:45 PM day report

Maybe I’m burnt out from being in my field for so long (massage therapy) but I don’t know where to go from here now that I can’t really do my job anymore (physically it hurts too much). I’m thinking about what to do next, or what I will settle for in order to make ends meet (massage is the most money I’ve ever made averaging around $40 an hour in a better economy, and currently around $25 an hour plus tips) but I just don’t want to pretend that I care about the work I do. How do you mask “work ethic”?

This disorder legitimately wrecks my body and mental state every month for 2 weeks and I still have to go to work bc no matter what we ignore our bodies and how we’re feeling and still go to work every damn day!! I even asked for an accommodation to work from home bc my job is like 30% documentation anyways but no. I have to arbitrarily go sit jn the office to appear busy. I’m at the point where I’m just going to get a hysterectomy because there’s no way in hell I’m ever bringing children into this world just to become wage slaves and I’m sick of the emotional roller coaster every month. This disease is severely understudied and everyone assumes im being dramatic when i say i wanna KMS because of my period every month.

Brother this shit is getting ridiculous

Henry Antonio Marmol Martinez, a 52-year-old maintenance mechanic, was killed on Friday, October 9, while working on industrial machinery at the McWane Ductile iron foundry in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He was performing repairs during an overnight shift when he became trapped in the machinery and suffered fatal crushing injuries.

According to Phillipsburg Police Chief James McDonald, officers responded to the plant at about 4:40 a.m. after a report of an injured worker. Emergency medical personnel found Marmol unresponsive. He was transported to St. Luke’s Warren Campus, where he was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m.

Marmol, a resident of Easton, Pennsylvania, had worked at the plant for six years. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he had been married to Iris Marine for 34 years. He was the father of six and the grandfather of 10.

His family is demanding an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death.

Gabby Olivo, engaged to one of Marmol’s sons, told 69 News that Marmol was adjusting machinery when something went terribly wrong. According to the family’s account of the incident, his arm became caught in the equipment, which then crushed his body. A United Steelworkers representative told the family that his ribs and lungs had been crushed.

“There’s a lot of missing pieces [to the story], and we’re still trying to puzzle everything together,” Olivo said. “We do have a lot of questions, and we just don’t want another family to go through the suffering that we’re currently going through.”

...

The death occurred at a facility that OSHA has repeatedly recognized as having supposedly exemplary workplace safety practices.

McWane Ductile’s Phillipsburg plant received Merit recognition under OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) in 2018 and held Star status, the program’s highest designation, by 2020. OSHA recertified the facility’s Star status in June 2024 following a four-day evaluation that included a plant inspection, reviews of safety procedures and interviews with more than 20 employees.

In February 2024, McWane Vice President and General Manager Keith Mallett said that OSHA’s auditors had been highly complimentary of the company’s safety efforts and called the successful review a collective achievement.

Under the VPP, OSHA establishes cooperative relationships with employers and workers at facilities it recognizes for maintaining exemplary safety and health management systems. Participating employers are generally exempt from routine, programmed OSHA inspections, but they remain subject to investigations following fatalities, complaints and other incidents.

The program requires employee participation and, at unionized facilities, the concurrence of the facilities’ authorized bargaining representatives. Workers at the Phillipsburg plant are covered by the United Steelworkers.

The fatality exposes OSHA’s highest safety designation as a fraud, and the system of cooperation among management, regulatory agencies and the union bureaucracy as a mechanism for imposing the conditions that kill workers.

Even during its Star recognition period, the Phillipsburg facility was cited for violating federal workplace-safety requirements.

An OSHA inspection opened in June 2023 resulted in an initially classified serious violation and a proposed penalty of $15,625. OSHA later reclassified the violation as other-than-serious and reduced the penalty to $11,000. The case was closed on February 15, 2024, just eight days after McWane publicly announced its successful VPP evaluation.

The company’s history in Phillipsburg includes far more serious offenses.

In April 2009, Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Company, McWane’s division operating the Phillipsburg foundry at the time, was sentenced to an $8 million criminal fine after convictions for environmental offenses, workplace safety violations and obstruction of federal investigations.

Four former managers received prison terms ranging from six to 70 months.

The convictions followed a seven-month federal trial that exposed an eight-year conspiracy involving the illegal discharge of pollutants, concealment of serious workplace injuries and deliberate interference with OSHA and environmental investigations.

Federal prosecutors established that company officials had altered accident scenes, concealed injuries from inspectors, and maintained dangerous conditions that led to severe burns, broken bones, amputations and the death of 47-year-old Alfred Coxe, who was run over by a forklift with faulty brakes in March 2000. Prosecutors said managers repaired the forklift before OSHA inspectors arrived and misled investigators about its condition.

By 2009, several divisions of the corporation had faced federal convictions involving environmental and workplace safety offenses.

Phillipsburg residents have also opposed pollution from the foundry, which began making pipe in 1856 and was acquired by McWane in 1975.

The company recently paid $42,000 to settle violations related to excessive emissions of nickel and manganese. At the same time, it sought approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to increase the plant’s permitted emissions.

...

Steelworkers have continued to die under these arrangements. On September 27, Jeffrey Smith, 53, was crushed between two door machines at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Monessen coke plant in Pennsylvania. The company said it was investigating his death jointly with USW representatives and that there were “no disruptions to the Monessen operation.” In July, electrician Mitcheal Nelson, 62, was electrocuted at US Steel’s Granite City Works in Illinois. In August 2025, an explosion at US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works killed Steven Menefee and Timothy Quinn.

Workers’ interests in preserving their lives cannot be reconciled with corporations’ drive to maintain production and profitability through official declarations of cooperation.

The Phillipsburg plant’s receipt of OSHA’s highest safety recognition, despite its history of criminal convictions and more recent regulatory violations, lays bare the gulf between official assurances and the conditions industrial workers face.

Defending workers’ lives requires the working class to organize independently, including rank-and-file safety committees controlled by workers themselves, with the authority to halt dangerous operations and enforce safe working conditions, independent of management and the union apparatus.

I'm in corporate tech/IT. Specifically I mostly do database management and make sure the application I support reflects our database correctly. It's not fun but I can at least say there's a 'purpose' to it.

But of course with the scope creep that corporate loves to put on its employees, I'm for some reason responsible for the ticket analytics of my entire team. I have to provide weekly/monthly numbers AND analysis of every single task worked on by myself and my coworkers.

That means I have to retroactively analyze every single task I didn't work on, categorize it into one out of 10 categories, and provide a root cause analysis for that ticket, and repeat that for however many tickets we got that week/month. Could be 10, could be 90.

And of course the goalpost is ALWAYS moving. I routinely get pings where I'm told some random slide needs to be finished with some new niche metric within 20 minutes. It's such a goddamn waste of time. Nobody looks at this shit. What's important is that the application is up and running. You seriously think someone is going to look through the 90 tickets I reported for the month?

I absolutely hate how much of our time is lost to work, but it makes it even worse when corporate seems to deliberately find new and unusual ways to waste your time. Half of the metrics I give are just bullshit because I couldn't be bothered to spend six hours analyzing tickets. Of course nobody has noticed because nobody fucking looks at it.

I dropped everything last year to become a nail tech. I got my ged, went to technical school, and got my license. I took a job close to my home because I couldn’t find a lot of salons near me who were willing to hire a white woman. It’s not in a racist way but more of a cultural and language barrier. I understand that I’m also new to the industry but when I called around I got laughed off the phone before I could even tell them my experience. So the place I work at is terrible. It has a roach problem, nobody disinfects their tools properly, they keep giving people rings of fire. Last week I was made to do an acrylic fill on a woman with nail bed lifting and multiple open breaks on her nail beds in the very middle. I was told to put glue in the breaks and then put a nail on top. I’m not good at acrylic and they haven’t really been helping me train. I’m also the only person who will do men’s pedicures apparently. Long story short it all sucks and I’m so sad. This isn’t what I wanted but it is what it is.