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 also want journalists to ask what would be the result of asking executives to take a pay cut instead of raising prices. would they leave? would they not be able to find qualified people to take those top jobs? hard to believe imo. how much would it lessen price increases and lead to taking business from restaurants that did increase prices? how much of inflation is a choice not to share the burden with those most able to handle it?
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.
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!
Edit: OK this is making numbers, and I now think it’s more than likely that this is a clever edit of the original. Welp. It’s hilarious anyway. Enjoy it for what it’s worth!
Edit: The numbers seem to have come from this article:
“People who had more than one COVID-19 infection were three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die than those who only had one infection. Those with multiple infections were also more vulnerable to other dangerous conditions; they were 3.5 times more likely to develop lung problems, 3 times more likely to have heart conditions, and 1.6 times more likely to have brain changes requiring care than people who had only had COVID-19 once.”
@camille@drahardja Apparently Drongo was a race horse 100 years ago who never won a single race, and became enshrined in Australian slang to refer to "a no-hoper, a hapless soul who, try as he might just can’t do anything right"
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.
The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.
I started working at Honeywell Aerospace (AlliedSignal back then) in 1998, and by that time people were already working on Y2K issues. We were in the GPS navigation business, and there were real issues that would have caused aircraft navigation to go awry unless they were fixed.
People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing. https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/111670219441506220
@ajsadauskas@drahardja The idea that it wasn't a real problem is infuriating to those who worked on it.
It's also a myth that nothing went wrong. Some bugs slipped through, and (mostly minor) issues did occur in 2000.
This article has some examples - and I know I received a bill that said payment was due on 3rd March 1900. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/585013.stm
This is excellent reporting. Reuters somehow got their hands on seven years of internal #Tesla service records, as well as internal communications from service technicians and engineers.
What they found is pretty shocking to me. Repeated catastrophic failure of suspension parts. Power steering suddenly disabling itself. Evidence of denying warranty coverage. Failures that forced a recall in China that continued to be shipped in the US.
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.
Here’s a clear example of how aggressive the image processing has become on newer iPhones. This is a comparison between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, taking photos of distant text at equal magnification. Note how the 15 Pro Max’s image pipeline has made up all the details.
EDIT: I’m going to drop mentions of “AI” and “hallucinating” here because I think it’s conjuring up the wrong mental models in readers’ heads. What’s likely happening is over-eager noise reduction and sharpening (which may or may not have pattern matching) creating details where none exist. Every phone does some amount of NR and sharpening, but later iPhones are super aggressive in this regard, so much so that the results often depart from what we accept as “reality”.
@drahardja
For a long time I would say to people (who were not into photography) "why are you bothering with a camera? Your phone takes better pictures than that!"
I guess I may need to stop saying that. 😬
I'm assuming these AI filters can be turned off though?
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.
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.
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.
VW is raising workers’ wages 11% because of competition from unionized manufacturers, even though their workers aren’t unionized. Hyundai announced a 25% wage increase over the next four years, even though their workers aren’t unionized.
#Unions raise wages for everyone, not just unionized employees. Imagine how much greater workers’ bargaining power would be if more would #unionize.
@drahardja Friend who works for FedEx said they got a raise after the UPS strike was settled and UPS workers got a big raise. Too bad FedEx isn’t a union shop. Joining with UPS workers, they could have gotten even bigger raises.