“Action? Yeah…they got 4 new detectives working on the case…they got us working in shifts! Action, ha.”

Would love to see the allocation of resources in the stupid company toward crime prevention vs. developing new methods of enshittification to harvest user data

The same dude whose company is suing to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional.

Super healthy.

At this point it’s like the Onion article that they release after every school shooting about how nothing can be done to prevent it in the only country where it occurs regularly; the data raping and pillaging that goes on in the US despite other countries having passed basic common sense privacy and control laws…well too bad you can’t afford the lobbyists to pass it, Poor.

Caught me completely by obvious

Customer support tier .5

It can be hella great for finding what you need on a big website that is poorly organized, laid out, or just enormous in content. I could see it being incredible for things like irs.gov, your healthcare providers website, etc. in getting the requested content in user hands without them having to familiarize themselves with constantly changing layouts, pages, branding, etc.

To go back to the IRS example, there are websites in the last 5 years that started to have better content library search functionality, but I guess for me having AI able to contextualize the request and then get you what you want specifically would be incredible. “Tax rule for x kind of business in y situation for 2024”—that shit takes hours if you’re pretty competent sometimes, and current websites might just say “here is the 2024 tax code PLOP” or “here is an answer that doesn’t apply to your situation” etc. “tomato growing tips for zone 3a during drought” on a gardening site, etc.

I’m in HR so benefits are a big one…the absolute mountain of content, even if you understand it, even experts can’t have perfect recall and quick, easy answers through a mountain of text seems like an area AI could deliver real value.

That said, companies using AI as an excuse to them eliminate support jobs because customers “have AI” are greedy dipshits as AI and LLMs are a risk at best and outside of a narrow library and intense testing are going to always be more work for the company as you not only have to fix the wrong answer situations but also get the right answer the old fashioned way. You still need humans and hopefully AI can make their work more interesting, nuanced and fulfilling.

• My use of “biological” is as it relates to the fact women in our species are the sex that bear children, and that there is a time limit for their fertility, not a position on the biological female being better suited or predispositioned for work, or certain types of work. The significant negative career/pay effects of having or (until recently) even being perceived as potentially having a child is well covered. Labor law has focused more on reducing the latter (e.g. it’s illegal to not hire marsha because she’s pregnant, or not promote Jenny because she has 3 kids) while the former has been nearly ignored until recently, but COVID lockdown showed companies can fix this if they wish. The host, Dubner has covered that significant early & mid-career movements often come at terrible time for women who have a child(ren, which completely alters their career & pay trajectories downward.
• The rapid change discussed in the (several year-old) source was due to optimism of change due to the massive improvement women saw in the first few years of the panedmic in pay and workforce participation in jobs and industries where they have traditionally been limited access to due to social norms or pressures of child rearing, workplace physical presence, and working hours. Essentially lockdown and the rapid change to remote work leveled the playing field for many mothers who otherwise might have had to take days off to care for their sick kids, attend events, miss worksite meetings or conferences, and not be able to work on their own schedule. Despite the data being fairly quickly and easily avaialble at the time of this incredible improvement in the “pay gap”, many companies completely ignored it and launched “Return to Office” programs of different sorts–which had the predictable effect of immediately reversing this trend in companies that removed remote work. There is still much more remote work, and hybrid work available than pre-pandemic and in some cases that will remain a permanent improvement in pay data between sexes. It’s challenging to level the euphoria of productivity around remote work by 2021 that was being reported and all it’s positive effects on pay equity and poverty yet the surprising launch of return to office initiatives will mute improvements discussed. The gap will be decreasing but probably not as much as they may have suspected when they had this conversation, though I’m still hopeful companies dig into the data and continue to understand how much talent they’re leaving on the sidelines by operating like it’s 1947.
• Another reason not mentioned that gives me optimism for future improvements in general perceptions of pay equity is that with reduced birthrates (it’s own discussion!), there will be the positive effect of improving even macro, almost useless-without-nuance statistics like $0.80/$1.00. If women are having far fewer children, they may be able to be less or even unaffected by the employment and social decisions, pressures and norms that have seen their careers not develop as they would have without a child(ren).

If you get the new Air Dubai card and spend $40T within 3 quarters, you get 400,000 miles that you can redeem through their rewards portal for a Casio.

This has been definitely addressed and answered. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/bonus-nobel-laureate-claudia-goldin-on-greedy-work-and-the-wage-gap/

The root causes of the gap are social, biological and unfortunately, unlikely to quickly change. These articles will continue to be printed though as rage bait is good for PPC.

Reminds me of when Ex-Halliburtom CEO Dick Cheney was appointed as Vice President of the United States, the United States went to war, Halliburton was awarded no bid contracts totaling tens of billions of dollars…and then systematically overcharged and defrauded the government about the services they provided over the contract they were awarded.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/jun/09/arianna-huffington/halliburton-kbr-and-iraq-war-contracting-history-s/

edit: it’s also interesting to see Liz Cheney quoted in this article arguing against a “left narrative” of grift and fraud when it clearly thrived under her father yet now she’s against the pinnacle of it in Trump.

No need, just say there is and we’ve deliberately destroyed education and society to the point functional illiteracy is probably 50% of the population.

Fact checking my guess: " According to a 2020 report by Gallup based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States lack English literacy proficiency.[2]"

“Resistance Fingerprinting detected in Produce.”

But tiktok is what we should be focusing on…

It’s a bummer, but their economics were never far off from Nike…outsource manufacturing, low paid retail and a premium client base. The slide into anti-people was inevitable. They were clearly bad 3+ years ago, IIRC some of their store staff announced they were going to unionize and then suddenly they closed their headquarters store in Seattle. Same thing happened in Portland’s pearl location under the cover of “safety”–straight out of Starbucks playbook from seattle–that the NLRB found them guilty of breaking labor law and forced them to negotiate with their employees as required by law.

You can understand why these douche companies want to get rid of NLRB…government isn’t any fun when it pushes back against the powerful.

…just found this…certainly answers some questions https://www.geekwire.com/2021/longtime-amazon-retail-exec-joins-rei-as-its-first-chief-commercial-officer/

This is your reminder you should be already boycotting TJs as they joined a lawsuit with Musk and Bezos trying to claim the NLRB was unconstitutional because their employees are forming unions at such a quick rate as it’s the only power they have. REI and Starbucks joined too.

I shopped at TJs for 17 years before that story broke this summer, haven’t been in since. Money meet mouth.

This should have been settled in bankruptcy court as part of business wind down before anyone got a penny of assets divided proceeds. When it’s not then another legal battle is required to get the company to do what it should have. Such a waste of time and needless burden for society. Unfortunately, regulatory capture and representative funding capture is almost total so no laws will be passed to change it.

3rd type- sees Real wages falling each year, has college debt or car debt or credit card debt or had to buy a new furnace on an installment plan or God forbid wants to take a vacation or or or

Anyway, this person has to try keep climbing or they will lose their car/ be kicked out of their apartment, nothing in society will support them as they “failed at their job and/or must be lazy”, etc.

There truly are some doofuses at every level of organization, the closer to the top people more often are playing the cruel game to win, but middle management are hardly the game theory types–they wouldn’t have accepted their job if they were that strategic as there is no winning.

So depressing to see working class folks going after other working class folks(someone with supervisor or manager or director in their title) because they “have it better”…the latter almost exclusively are trapped in a different fucked up system.

Ideal productivity, under capitalism.

Isn’t it wild what humans are capable of? Someone can understand human nature and history to the degree to write some of the things in HP and yet completely have blinders on to their own biases that would enable the same things?

Just read “the Hearing” with my kid tonight, a chapter early in HP 5, when one of the better villains in popular literature is introduced, Delores Umbridge. First time I read HP5 was 20 years ago, reading it again today only for the second time with current context is instructive.

The Hearing is an important chapter as it, for the first time, lays out that the institution running the wizard world might not be on Harry’s side, that there may be political motives behind processes, treatment and proceedings, and overall pulls the adolescent curtain down on the assumption right and good are running everything in the world of wizarding. Umbridge becomes the embodiment of propaganda, misuse of position, and how much damage motivated actors can do when handed power.

Here’s the VP of Reddit’s community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.

She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as “autonomy”.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o

She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.