It’s actually far worse than that. Trailer park Millionaires is a report from 9 years ago following wealthy investors who were buying up trailer parks so they could Jack up rent. Investors specifically targeted sex offenders, convicted felons, and other desparate tennants, so they could mercilessly exploit them since they truly had no place else to go.

The investors were also trained to exploit families, since more members in the household means more potential workers, and that means they’ll be more likely to tolerate a rent hike.

Communication Workers of America is probably the closest to what you’re looking for. You’re definitely better off working with an established union instead of trying to build one from scratch, they have a lot of valuable experience and resources that you’ll need to pull off a unionization attempt. If you reach out directly to CWA, or any other union, they’ll work with you to help organize your workplace.

If you are serious about unionizing: first, see if you can get a few of your coworkers on-board by talking to them outside of work. Do this in-person or on voice calls that aren’t recorded, it’s crucial to keep the company unaware as long as possible so they have less time and ability to oppose you.

Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn’t clearly express what I was thinking, and didn’t address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.

If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.

I definitely don’t believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.

Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don’t think it’s a pipe dream, I think it’s a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.

I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors. If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation’s technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain.

Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.

Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.

Absolutely, and I’m glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! “Public money == public code”.

Unfortunately, generics can vary wildly in efficacy & quality. As @Aradina pointed out, sometimes the encapsulation is different (e.g. extended release coating vs. standard release), but also the form of the drug can differ (e.g. capsule, tablet, softgel, chewable, etc), chemical by-products from different manufacturing techniques may be present in different amounts, and different manufacturing processes can also yield different chiral enantiomer ratios in the end product.

The “same” drug from different manufacturers may vary in effectiveness / side-effects, and brand-name drugs aren’t always the best formulations for most patients.

It is misleading to attribute too much credit to a single individual, even a president. There was a significant clash of social/political forces when Obama was in office. Off the top of my head I can think of the following major forces: War in Iraq & Afghanistan, Great Recession & Occupy, DREAMers, ACA, Gay marriage, Environmentalism / Inconvenient Truth, Global outsourcing & job loss, Tea Party & the rise of militant christian nationalism. That’s the landscape in which progressive policy ambitions were compromised to death to avoid total gridlock.

It’s also worth giving credit where it is due: those auto safety and emissions regulations achieved their goal… for regular cars. Unfortunately, Republicans insisted on exceptions for body-on-frame vehicles (trucks, vans, SUVs). In the years since, those types of vehicles have steadily become the most common in the US, because they are the most profitable for the auto industry.

I highly recommend Framework laptops for Linux. I have not used the Framework 16, but I can attest that Linux support for the Framework 13 (intel 11th & 12th gen) is excellent. I have used Fedora on the Intel 11th gen and Intel 12th gen, everything worked immediately on a fresh install without any workarounds or issues. Other distros might require a few package installs, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu derivatives should work out-of-the-box without any additional configuration. The Arch Wiki article for the Framework covers pretty much everything you might need to know to have an optimized Linux experience with any distro.

Aside from Framework’s excellent Linux support, I really have to stress how cool and unique it is as a laptop for developers and tinkerers. This thing is literally designed to be opened up, repaired, and modded. All of the internal components are clearly labeled and easily accessible, there’s even a little spot inside the laptop chassis just for spare screws in case a screw ever gets lost! Another awesome obscure feature of this laptop is the ability to use a Storage Expansion Card for dual booting. I just plug in the expansion card to boot into Windows, then unplug it and I’m back in Linux. It is absolute bliss compared to Windows and Linux sharing a bootloader.

I know I’m rambling, but I really could keep going on and on about Frameworks. They truly are unlike any other laptop, in all the right ways.

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.