Ah yes, this is a great way to turn “Can I see your driver’s license?” into “Can you hand me your unlocked phone so I can rifle through it?” at a traffic stop.
Yes, it’s more convenient than having a separate card, and it may serve as a great backup in case your physical card is lost or damaged. But please don’t use this as your only driver’s license, especially if you are an often-targeted demographic.
“Californians can now carry driver’s licenses on their phone as part of pilot program”
This means you must completely unlock an iPhone to reveal the ID. If they used Apple Wallet, it would require authentication to open Apple Wallet to reveal the ID, then authentication AGAIN to unlock to phone beyond the wallet.
A study on #UniversalBasicIncome#UBI from 2020 is now peer-reviewed and published. The study gave $7500 cash to homeless people in Vancouver and compared their outcome versus a control group. The result was clear:
“The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up.”
Further, each person who moved into stable housing one year faster saves the city over $8000 per year, which makes this program cheaper than existing housing programs.
Universal Basic Income works. It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, but: giving people cash lifts them out of poverty. We need to do that more.
“A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it.”
This idea of a society where people are provided with a fair and just basic income is a very bad one for #capitalism. It would just deplete the "work market" from people forced to work for survival.
Once everyone has their basic needs of food, housing, healthcare and education fullfileed, the only way we can get people to work will be by raising their wages to levels where we won't be able to support #shareholders and #billionaires. That would be the end of western #colonialist civlization as we know it.
@drahardja even the tiny stimulus checks we received in the US over the past couple years changed my life. I was able to pay off all my credit cards with the first one, bumping up my credit score enough that I could replace my old car before it died, I got a fantastic interest rate so I was able to pay that off in two years.
It was amazing how it worked out, my old car had 190,000 miles, I knew it wouldn’t last much longer, it died a week after I sold it. We don’t have public transportation here, I would die without a vehicle. Literally die.
$600 (or was the 1st one $1200?) literally saved my life.
I am once again encouraging #Fediverse#admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.
@drahardja@seb Meant to respond to your earlier post (a couple weeks ago IIRC) to strongly endorse this suggestion and to encourage developers, especially those of us who offer open APIs, to do the same. (We already have thanks to your suggestion)
@drahardja@seb Hi Dave! This is something the admin team is already working on, along with some other policy updates.
I'll push this to the top of the queue.
We have a lawyer on the team (that's me), so no need to collect money for the updates; I do SFBA work on a pro bono basis.
Here’s a thought experiment: If you had a small group of skilled mobile, desktop, server, and web front-end engineers who have access to time and money, and are eager to MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE USING THEIR SKILLS (and not just spin up yet another exploitive startup) what would YOU have them do?
Be specific.
Assume cost is no object.
It’s time to stop bellyaching about how bad tech is, and start brainstorming about what good it can do.
Please repost for exposure.
EDIT: Let’s add hardware, industrial design, and UX engineers in the mix as well, to round things out.
@drahardja ... Theoretically a health insurance company's customer is supposed to be able to call up their health insurance company, or go to their website, and query just which therapists take the insurance they have. After all, the insurance company knows with whom they are contracted. It's their approval list, it's their "network".
So the insurers sabotage their databases so they're full of garbage hits, have unintelligible UIs, and are otherwise unusable.
They do things - with plausible deniability, of course - to pump up their catalogue of therapists who "take" their insurance products so it looks like there's an abundance of choices, but without increasing the actual number of in-network therapists. Because they WANT a too-small network of therapists, so they can claim they provide MH coverage, without all the customers they have who want therapists being able to find them.
And they want their customers to get discouraged looking for therapists with openings.
WebMD’s parent company, Internet Brands, released a cringey and abusive internal video threatening their employees to #returnToOffice. “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point”, the CEO says. “Don’t mess with us”, the video reads at the end. The video features employees dancing and celebrating RTO (at gunpoint? or at least under threat of firing by HR?).
I know corporate videos are all kinda crappy, but this one is…spouse-beating levels of terrible.
Remote work isn't the issue; it's outdated managers. It offers benefits like no commute and more time with family. It also allows young people to enter the job market without needing to live in expensive areas. I've personally witnessed this, and it's great to see new careers starting without the high cost of living in DC.
Workers: DO NOT OVERWORK YOURSELF to avoid getting laid off.
You’re damaging your life and health.
Your employer doesn’t actually notice (no, really, they don’t.)
Your behavior enables future mismanagement of resources.
When layoffs come, you’re gonna get laid off anyway.
Remember that a company’s job is to extract maximum work from you for minimum pay, so your job is to extract maximum pay for minimum work. Somewhere in the middle, both parties find an equilibrium that they agree on. Do not voluntarily modify your side of the bargain to your detriment.
@drahardja yes.
I learnt this lesson straight out of uni, working my 'dream job' at Lotus & got laid off within a year. It hurt.
Since then I only work if I'm being paid. I don't do free overtime or let a job get to me. That's nearly 25 years ago(!) and if it's hurt my career then I haven't noticed.
Now I'm working for myself it's harder to be so strict but it's a different deal!
First they require in-person #returnToOffice, then they relocate business units from one location to another, and force those who can’t uproot their lives to leave.
The Apple location in #SanDiego isn’t going away. But they intentionally forced 121 people to choose between moving to #Austin, or lose their jobs. Make no mistake, this is a layoff.
Never mind the fact that #Texas is hostile to anyone with a uterus, or is not cishet—why the hell anyone would move to that state? If anything, Apple should be shutting down their Austin office, and paying for people to relocate to a state that better ensures their safety.
“Apple to Shutter 121-Person San Diego AI Team in Reorganization”
Oh and for folks wondering why #Apple is insisting that people work in #Austin#Texas: I can’t speak for their actual motivation, of course, but this much is true:
In 2018, Apple received $25M in grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund, as well as a $16M property tax abatement from Williamson County for building their new campus, contingent on Apple bringing in 4,000 new workers to Williamson County over 12 years.
I’m sure those financial considerations come into play.
This is so cool! The engineers at MIT discovered that cement and carbon black (paracrystalline carbon) can be mixed to create a supercapacitor that still behaves like cement. That means you can build cement structures that store energy. They estimate that 45 m³ of this material is enough to store 10 kWh (about a day’s worth of energy for a home).
“New Breakthrough in Energy Storage – MIT Engineers Create Supercapacitor out of Ancient Materials”
@fbartho 45 cubic meters, not 45 meters cube. 45 m³ is a cube 3.5 m on each side, which is probably the same volume of concrete used to make e.g. a slab foundation plus a driveway.
@drahardja INCREDIBLE! So we just did the math, and an average sized American house (1500 ft²) with basement and slab is about 66 yd³ and slab about 24 yd³. A meter and yard are roughly equivalent for back of napkin exercises, so an average sized home would be able to capture (solar) -and- store the power without the use of expensive and potentially explosive batteries.
So #Grindr staff chose to #unionize, and company leaders enforced #ReturnToOffice as retaliation. Company leaders know #RTO sucks, and they are using it punitively.
They started enforcing #RTO of two days a week, and HALF THEIR STAFF RESIGNED.
The response of the CEO is hilarious. “The team will be smaller than where we were before and where we want to be…So that’ll obviously impact margin in a positive way in the near term.”
That’s like saying “The bad news is I lost my entire left leg. The good news is that I finally got my weight under 160 pounds.”
@sj@inferis Software engineers in Silicon Valley have a thing in their brains where admitting that they need a union is basically admitting that they aren’t mommy’s smartest child any more, and we can’t have that.
@constantine@gsnedders@sj@inferis Most software engineers in Silicon Valley are not rich. The cutoff for “low income” for a single person here is $92k, which means most software engineers place somewhere in the middle of the pack near the $118k median. Entry level engineers earn less and they can’t afford to rent an entire apartment or house to themselves, much less build investments.
The problem is there are maybe a thousand or two extremely successful software engineers in the area who continually boast about their negotiation skills or whatever and sneer at unions, and they become the default perception for software work; but the bulk of coders are barely making a living in the area, and they really do need collective bargaining power. Inequality of wealth and income is quite huge even within the software world, and unions help to counterbalance that.
Tomorrow, Apple will shut down My Photo Stream, after 12 years of service.
I wrote the code that ran the service on iOS devices back in 2010, and it has been faithfully syncing hundreds of millions of photos between iPhones and iPads and their respective macOS Photo libraries for more than a decade. It survived the introduction to iCloud’s Shared Photo Streams (I also wrote its client software), the shutdown of Aperture, and the introduction of iCloud Photo Library. And today, we finally bid it goodbye.
It’s been a good 12 years. 1000 photos, hosted for 30 days, for free, so you can save them on your Mac—those were the days, eh?
@drahardja "1000 photos, hosted for 30 days, for free, so you can save them on your Mac." One day to go, and I FINALLY understand what this service was and how I could have been using it all these years
“The entire case for “AI” as a disruptive tool worth trillions of dollars is grounded in the idea that chatbots and image-generators will let bosses fire hundred of thousands or even millions of workers.
That’s it.”
Yep. Spot on. This is the fundamental reason that #AI is getting so many billions poured into it. It’s the lure of replacing expensive labor with automation. Corporations have endlessly squeezed blood from lower-cost labor and they are salivating at the prospect of getting rid of high-cost labor.
This is unfortunate, because AI has actual uses. As models get more specialized and smaller, I can see AI automating a lot of rote work away at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, the corporate hype is so strong right now it’s muddying all the conversations.
@drahardja@pluralistic they chase after "AI" because it's the perfect worker in the sense that it can be endlessly abused with zero repercussions to public image. It explains why companies are willing to chase the elimination of jobs like long haul trucking that would be a net negative in terms of equipment cost, but self-driving trucks can't unionize, can't go to the news to complain or blow whistles, and someone else gets the blame if people die on the road due to a software error.
Had a conversation with my friends today about why #Austin is failing to be the next #SiliconValley, despite the “progressive” nature of the city, the lower cost of living, the zero state income tax, and all the incentives they’re pushing to tech companies, and I’m wondering if it’s because it’s LITERALLY SURROUNDED BY #TEXAS.
If you’re not a conservative cis-het white able Christian man (or his cis-het child-bearing wife), Texas literally wants to exterminate you. If you have a uterus, they want to control it. If you want to teach your kid about black history, they want to prevent you. Austin may be an oasis, but it’s very much part of the state.
Maybe that’s why tech people don’t want to move to Austin. Have you seen who does tech every day? The same people they want to kill and control. Maybe that’s why they’re not attracted there. Just spitballin’ here.
“'Where ambition goes to die': These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they're desperate to get out.”
@drahardja Austin can’t even reliably be an oasis, because the state of Texas will override any progressive local laws it doesn’t like. It’s not safe for many people to be themselves there.
A high school friend works for a globally known tech company in TX. Last year, he said he was leaving the company because he couldn't stand Texas anymore. The company offered him 100% remote work and even paid his moving costs.
Oh hey, the Attorney General of Indiana has published a snitch line for schools that teach LGBTQ+ issues, or make Woke materials available to their students!
Here’s the URL. Use it responsibly. Don’t use it to report Godzilla flying the Trans flag or anything like that, ok?
I mean, I know paper cups have polymers to keep them waterproof, but I hate the fact that I can’t actually get away from plastics or toxic trash, ever, anywhere.
I prefer paper cups and cardboard takeout boxes to plastic clamshells, but I bet those paper products are still coated with plastic to keep them waterproof. Short of bringing tiffin carriers into US culture (can we? please?) I don’t really know how we can do better.
“Sorry, Your Paper Coffee Cup Is a Toxic Nightmare”
When I was a kid in #Indonesia, we did take-out by bringing empty, clean stainless-steel tiffin carriers to the restaurant. They would scoop the meals into our carriers, and we would take them home. Some vendors had a system where you took home their carriers, cleaned them out, and returned them for reuse.
I don’t think a similar system can exist in the litigious culture of the US (whose fault would it be if you got food poisoning?), but I dream of having washable, reusable containers made of something that will degrade into harmless rust when discarded, instead of toxic chemicals.
@drahardja When I was growing up in Wisconsin, in the 1970s and 80s, soda ( Pepsi and Coke and good-ol RC Cola ) came in glass bottles that you bought from the grocery store and then you returned the empty bottles for a deposit ( 10¢/bottle, I think? ) and got your 80¢ back and they washed and refilled them. We still had them when I moved to California in 1989; but they disappeared there within a few years.
Glass bottles always seemed better because they stayed cool longer.