> I've noticed in an industrial setting, that managers are often looking for closed solutions that can't be modified by the user, either for regulatory reasons or adversarial labor-management attitudes. The industry wants your boss to think that letting you make your own tools is either dangerous, or a waste of your time.
It's interesting to consider in this context that workers owning the means of production is what links the GPL with Marxism.
It took me way too many years to discover FOSS, but after getting hooked on it, I find that I'm actually more motivated and creative when I'm using tools that nobody owns.
Both the ruling class and the public of the 21st Century United States have a great deal of emotional investment in pretending that we are some sort of hyper-equitable nation, governed wisely by the public in the interests of freedom and the general good, instead of our government being a plutocratic shit-show.
The name for this in the helping professions is "compassion fatigue", basically the only way out is to stop trying to help so many people for so many hours per week.
My father in law was a psychiatrist. The "types" described in the article are all too real.
He got attached to some of his patients, tried to help them outside his practice. A handful of these people became part of his (and now mine) family's social circle. A woman on SDI became a nanny, a former factory worker is now our handy-man, another guy he put up in an apartment he was rehabbing and still lives there. At some point, some dude lived in my in-laws basement (my wife just shrugged that off, it apparently happened every few years).
I cringe when I look back on how I thought about psychiatry earlier. I thought it was rich people just going to complain about how sad they felt instead of just sucking it up.
Life is a struggle, for everybody. We have no idea how bad it is indeed. And now, psychiatry to me seems like a terribly lonely profession.
