tilde

mhoye, 7 days ago to random

Tired: This meeting could have been an email.

Wired: This startup could have been a spreadsheet.

BasicAppleGuy, 8 days ago to random

Personalized Pencil Pro

tilde, 13 days ago to random

You can tell that Deep Space Nine is dark & gritty Star Trek out on the boundaries of the Federation's control where imperfect people have to make imperfect choices in imperfect situations. It's because they don't have a conference room. The conference room is the beating heart of a Starfleet crew. It's where everyone goes to respectfully share different perspectives and talk through challenging problems before agreeing on a mutually-acceptable solution which makes use of all their diverse skills. And DS9 doesn't have one! Because it was made by the Cardassians who don't do things that way!

annaleen, 14 days ago to DnD

AGAB = All Gnolls Are Bastards #dnd

tilde, 17 days ago to random

You are in a maze of twisty turny Google Admin Console pages, all alike. Exits are in the sidebar, the top bar, the banner, and the support overlay.

grimalkina, 17 days ago to random

Pointed to this paper from a column on it: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4464593

Folks in dev psych and elsewhere often talk about girls being underconfident. But how rarely we frame in terms of boys' overconfidence.

"Across a range of countries, contexts, and domains, men have been found to exhibit higher degrees of confidence in their ability than women (Kay and Shipman, 2014). This phenomenon has been particularly salient in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)."

tilde, 19 days ago to random

Public services are better, fairer, and cheaper than privatization.

Public services are notionally paid for by taxes (though sovereign states have considerable leeway to invent debt). Taxes can be progressive: a billionaire should pay more in tax than someone who works for a living. Privatized services have inequitable pricing. The power bill or the groceries or your prescriptions might have the same price in principle, but a fixed price represents a lot more of some people's earnings than others. Public services are fairly priced, and reduce barriers & friction by reducing the need to charge at the point of service.

The ostensible argument for privatization is that private enterprise is more efficient: that it can offer services at a lower sticker price. Even if that's true (and it often is not), where does that price improvement come from? Does it come from cutting wages and benefits by outsourcing labor? It just moves the cost around by creating externalities like underpaid workers who now need food and healthcare assistance, and who burn out. When PG&E defers maintenance and equipment upgrades (while paying executives handsomely) are they actually saving money? I bet anyone would rather pay electric rates or taxes which cover the cost of maintenance rather than letting the utility start forest fires and killing hundreds.

The truth is that private enterprise isn't more efficient. It's just motivated by profit rather than public good. Privatized services are regressive priced, making them inequitable. They have to deal with the considerable overhead of charging money, which makes them less efficient and harder to use. The costs they cut are often heart of what the service used to offer. Or they just externalize those costs and society pays them either way, but now with capitalists taking a cut of what they destroy.

tilde, 23 days ago to random

What the heck is "default opt-in"? Is this corporate consent-subversion talk for "opt-out"? Just say "opt-out". mastodon.social/

RE: mastodon.social/users/arstechnica/statuses/112457773374003138

tilde, 25 days ago to random

For being a pet story, this story is weirdly relatable? mas.to/

RE: mas.to/users/kissane/statuses/112442637073844205

tilde, 28 days ago to random

Reading Scatter, Adapt, and Remember back to back with Four Lost Cities, @annaleen comes off as something of a luxury travel writer whose destinations just happen not to exist any more. It's as if they started with an obsessive need to understand how cities and societies fall apart… and so naturally went on a wold tour of climate scientists, historians, and archeological sites. The books are just kinda an inevitable side effect which occur naturally when a science (fact & fiction) writer and journalist tracks down a thought which they simply cannot get out of their head any other way.