For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.

I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

How? Asynchronous communication is better for a lot of people. And now that we have really good choices for that, it’s hard to ignore.

A phone call demands that you drop everything in that moment and pay close attention to the person on the other end. If they ramble, deviate, breathe heavily, have a lot of background noise, etc, you’re stuck with that experience for the duration. Also, recording without consent is illegal in a lot of places, so you have to be able to write things down in order to refer back to the conversation if it contains any important information.

In contrast, everything else is self-documenting, can be read through multiple times, and can be handled when there is time to focus on that task. As a bonus: most people can read and understand text faster than they can listen. So it’s just more efficient.

I’m gonna be “that guy” and say they’re pulses.

Oh, are we posting beans now? Again?

Here’s my contribution:

Trump might as well sign an executive order that declares himself Emperor of the Moon and Supreme Chancellor of Outer Space, it’ll have about the same amount of impact as this first round of executive orders will.

Look, not to call you out or anything, but the impact of these edicts (however nonsensical) is radically different now that he’s in office.

The problem isn’t the legitimacy or legality of any such order, it’s the veracity and scope to which they are carried out regardless of those facts. He just pardoned the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Now, people that are handed off-the-wall, yet much more clear, orders from the White House can now go on thinking that illegal activity pursued in the name of said order will be washed away. So, stuff like this will cause damage to be done well before any courts can intervene, constitutionality be damned.

As a bonus, this adds culpability to the actions of his subordinates. Step in line or lose your job. Fail me after committing a crime and you go straight to prison. This is an organized crime tactic to keep shady people in line.

This is the part about harm reduction that I wish more people understood. Either you do it the right way - set up a clinic - or pay for it later in terms of security systems/service, insurance rates, theft, property damage, and the occasional violent encounter (e.g. during theft). This guy did the math and realized that a $20 bill is WAY cheaper than the alternative(s).

Before we had stuff like Google Maps, or any digital navigation service really, nobody could then, either.

Even when asking someone for directions to get to where they live you get the wrong number of stoplights, turns, and so on. Street-names are also a gamble because maybe they (mis)remember that the street they commute on changed four years ago. I would wager that most folks are just not “wired” for this sort of task, and is why (shipping) pilots, trackers, and trail-guides are a thing.

Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s any worse than the oft-abused FARM USE tags.

I’ve also seen a few people just say fuck it, and have any tags at all.

The downside is that the lack of sovcit “plate” might make you more likely to get pulled over. Word is those guys are a huge PITA for cops.

They can also refuse to register the car,

Virginia has a model for this that can be a tad regressive; not sure about CA. On the one hand, there’s regular safety and emissions tests that must be passed or you cannot (re)register your car for the coming year or two. This more or less keeps deathtraps and oil-burning-smog-machines off the road. On the other hand, it has absolutely crippled plenty of households just scraping by where that old car is needed to just break even every month. Depending on where one stands on car-dependent culture and if owning/operating a vehicle is a necessity, it can be quite the contentious issue.

Point being, I can easily see how a higher bar for registration, and re-registration, can change the makeup of what’s on the road. I can also see how that can suddenly prevent a whole chunk of the population from participating.

I’m inclined to agree. The idea that a cabinet-to-be is able to make headlines during a lame duck session is… well, I don’t think it’s normal, but I may be misremembering.

Nothing earth shattering today (Dec 13) but a few noteworthy things on AP: https://apnews.com/hub/congress

Okay, the penciled-in numbers (but only for non-military time because who uses that?) just sent me. Easily one of the best “job’s done boss” images I have ever seen.

Sorry to hear about your dog.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this, partly because I haven’t been following Korean politics as of late. From Reuters on an earlier article :

SEOUL, Dec 3 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday for the first time in the country since 1980. Below is a Reuters translation of the military decree: "In order to protect liberal democracy from the threat of overthrowing the regime of the Republic of Korea by anti-state forces active within the Republic of Korea and to protect the safety of the people, the following is hereby declared throughout the Republic of Korea as of 23:00 on December 3, 2024

Maybe it’s too early to know, but does anyone have the faintest idea what is meant by “anti-state forces”? Is this just a ham-fisted power grab that failed, or is there any legitimacy to that claim? I’m missing ALL the context here.

Did… did he actually say this? I knew this guy was full of it, but that’s a whole other level.

Good grief. It’s like he asked ChatGPT “how do I hire people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”

Dear meme-lords: I need something with much more facepalm than the Picard one. A “super facepalm” if you will. Thank you.

At the same time, this kind of confusion is essential to TST tactics. If everyone knew and understood that they are a morally upstanding institution, they’d lose a lot of their scare-tactic leverage when asking to join in on bringing “religion” into public institutions. Bad optics are the whole game here.

I agree with your professor. It’s one of these things that people have a hard time understanding. A lot of folks can easily imagine the end-state, but have no clue what has to be solved to arrive there. A lot of folks think that projects in electronics, software engineering, computing, etc. are just a linear march from beginning to end; failure is a human or resource problem. In reality, there are problems out there that get exponentially harder to pull off with linear inputs, which is much harder to imagine let alone a great way to scare off investors.

In this case, the framing of the problem is all wrong. We’re not trying to solve “a car that drives itself” (e.g. autopilot). Instead we are “simulating human sensory organs and cognition in order to pilot a vehicle without catastrophe or injury.” The latter is much harder to solve, but IMO, is a much more realistic portrayal of the job.