Remember kids, climate change is your fault specifically, and only you can make things better by making your own life harder!

Agreed. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t have a union, and sometimes unionizing just isn’t possible.

HR can protect the company by reigning this guy in. I really feel it was a lone wolf thing, not policy.

Very true! Like I said, I’m not trying to convince you to not bring it up, just that it’s something to be careful about, and to make sure you have evidence or documentation.

I completely believe all of that, and I’m sorry she’s had to deal with so much crap. Lately a lot of employers seem to be showing their asses by being overtly racist, ableist, and transphobic. Everyone I know who isn’t a white straight cis man has had employment troubles in the last six months.

I hope this is just a strange interaction with one HR person and you have a better time with everyone else!

Exactly what I was referencing! I’ve known a few people who were recently fired from remote jobs under very strange circumstances. I can’t prove anything of course, but I distinctly got the feeling that they were fired because the intersection of their marginalizations made them look like “evil North Korean spies” to management.

Definitely! However if your first experience with HR is being discriminated against, raising concerns about discrimination can be dangerous. Who do you go to when HR is causing the issues? HR is there to protect the company, not you. If the easiest way to protect the company is to fire someone, HR will probably do that.

I’m not trying to talk OP or anyone else out of going to HR, they aren’t always sharks waiting to fire someone. It’s just good to be careful here and OP and their wife should be aware of the risks before taking any action. Definitely document this incident. If this becomes a repeat issue, documentation can be the difference between getting fired and winning a wrongful termination lawsuit.

It sure sounds like racism and poorphobia to me. HR trying to make sure her surroundings don’t look like what a “typical poor person” would have (clutter, children, signs of disability, “drugs”, etc.) It’s not super common, but it’s common enough that I hear about it every so often.

I can’t offer any kind of legal advice, but it sounds like this job will be potentially problematic and HR will definitely be one to watch out for.

ETA: There’s a lot of paranoia in the US right now about “laptop farms”. Remote jobs are paranoid about people getting remote work to send money back to North Korea. It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s causing issues for a lot of people, mostly marginalized people. I think it’s useful context to know why this kind of thing is happening more lately.

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IA is not a sustainable project, and is built as a single point of failure. It has no transparency and no recovery plan if things go bad. Compare that to Anna’s Archive, a project that open sources all of their code and data so that things will continue running even if everyone involved disappears.

Ask yourself: if IA’s data was silently modified, would anyone be able to tell?

Hang on, I’ve read this book before

I told you bro. I fuckin’ warned you.

People have called me “paranoid” for years for pointing out that this kind of thing was going to happen, and it’s so much worse than I thought it would be but at least I’m vindicated.

Tech companies will literally murder or enslave you if they think it would be good for their bottom line. We know that’s true because tech companies are murdering and enslaving people in the global south because it’s good for their bottom line. Stop giving them money. Stop buying wifi-enabled garbage that spies on you for the police state.

Maybe it’s a good thing that people with entirely too much money are being forced to rock their own crying child instead of having a machine do it. Using robots to soothe your child is a Phillip K. Dick-esque dystopia. Obviously a crying child take a huge mental and physical health toll on everyone in a house, but in a country where poor people are being forced to give birth, maybe the rich people should have to suffer a little bit too.

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You literally compared a man who was tortured for being gay to a man being racist.

Haha yeah those faggots deserve hate because they’re so whiny about human rights and dignity.

I mean come on. You’re literally saying I’m exactly just as bad as queermisics because I’m uppity.

It’s ironic how the queer community

You don’t get to use that word. We’ve been called queer by people bashing us, we’ve been called queer by people killing us, for decades. We’re the only ones who get to reclaim our slurs, not you. And when you use that word while victim blaming a man who was tortured for being gay, while telling queer people we’re responsible for our own marginalization, it’s just a slur. You don’t get to say queer any more than you get to say faggot.

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okay cishet

Please tell me more about how the person comparing a man tortured for being gay to racism is not victim blaming.

“Uppity faggots are just trolls!” wow I feel like I’m back in 2018. It’s not working, nobody’s falling for your bullshit.

I love how you just compared a gay man who was tortured for being gay to a racist man with a racist sign. You would be less offensive if you just called us faggots.