Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge ~~bats~~ parrots, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus. What are these goddamn animals?"
Fear and Loathing in the Pet Store.
I attended both a Halloween and Christmas party where the hosts had invited someone selling sex toys. Much hilarity and shenanigans ensued. They were both great parties.
It's called the "Paradox of Tolerance" if we are tolerant of all including the intolerant than intolerance will eventually win out and eliminate tolerance, therefore society should not tolerate the intolerant.
Sorry, just got dig down through the plurality of negatives you just laid down there.
"Friendly and fun" = we force you to celebrate everyone's birthdays, engagements, baby haverings, etc and so forth with cake and mandatory card signage and possibly gift/money givery.
"Learning and development" = you'll be forced to participate in mind numbingly stupid seminars, self directed online courses, and/or online presentations.
"With opportunity to grow" = grow mold as you fester in the wretched job.
I mean the Tin-Man didn't have a heart and he wasn't a total ass. The literature is inconsistent in that area. We have to work with the metaphors we have at our disposal.
"For those who don’t know, New Year’s in Russia is like Christmas in the west."
So you're saying Putin is the Grinch who stole New Years? That checks.
When tech companies say they want to "democratize" they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer "votes" with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we're somewhat failing ourselves here.
In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.
Furthermore, I don't necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.
But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.
Edit: spelling.
There was a Donner... but then there was a very unfortunate party.
There is only but so much time that can be allocated to fun, sleep only serves to rob you of that precious time.
Had to walk to school, uphill both ways in -40C everyday, all year. Things were better back then.