In 2019, the total cost of every robbery in the country was $482 million.

The cost of wage theft was more than 100 times that number.

The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program recorded 267,988 robberies in 2019. Those robberies cost businesses and the public $482 million in total losses. But wage theft costs workers $50 billion every year. And most of the time, employers get away with stealing money from their employees.

What is wage theft? Wage theft means underpaying workers. It can take several forms, including paying less than the minimum wage, withholding overtime pay, or not compensating workers for all of their work hours.

Imagine you work at a minimum wage job. But your company asks you to show up 30 minutes before the store opens every morning to prep – without paying you for that time. Over the course of a year, you’ve logged more than 100 unpaid hours of work. That’s wage theft.

whistleblower

Conceptual analysis of proximity isn’t exactly what I expected to see when I joined Lemmy

But it’s… 😎 close

Gamehub Lite is pretty wild. It does take some fiddling, but it’s amazing how well (and relatively easily) you can get x86 Windows games to run on a $200 ARM Android device.

I’m 12/13 so far on getting games to work at an acceptable level.

Inexplicably, Vampire Survivors causes the entire device to crash. I guess they pull some pretty silly memory tricks to keep that game responsive with potentially hundreds of thousands of projectiles, so maybe it’s not so surprising.

That’s fucking bleak.

its*

Security guard is one. Had a friend in college that basically got paid 8hrs/night to do 2hrs of actual work and 6hrs of building his portfolio. It can definitely work well for some folks.

There is no alternative to pissing on her grave

I mean… She’s taking the ambiguity in the original statement and using it to make a valid point about how the country has never healed the wounds of slavery, and the concepts of unity and division continue to play a significant role in racial oppression.

But also… In order to do it, she had to ignore the context of how the original statement tends to be used. Which is something like: “This information ecosystem pushes everyone to express a controversial opinion about every little thing, and willingly misread others’ words in the least charitable way possible in order to use them as fodder for establishing in-group status, and that leads to a political identity so far removed from the reality of lived experience that it can only exist as hot takes, memes, and clap-backs.”

And in that sense… Her words aren’t wrong, but her words also aren’t the actual message. The actual message is: “Any time someone complains that social media creates a hostile, divisive environment of one-upsmanship over phrases, you can one-up them with this phrase”.

Also: I am aware that I’m also trying to one-up a social media post on social media! It’s status games all the way down, as Andrew Potter points out in this interview on The Authenticity Hoax. Successfully contrasting against the prevailing culture is how the prevailing culture gets built. I just… hope we start to build a culture that’s more critical of the way the tech fascists abuse that cultural pump to their own benefit.

C-suite will pay any amount for hardware to do whatever it feels like doing, as long as they don’t have to pay anything for humans who occassionally disagree with them.

We should tax the rich and spend on infrastructure.

But…

These are two separate conversations. We don’t need to tax before we can afford to spend. The deficit myth is a rhetorical sleight of hand that the powerful use to avoid authorizing spending on stuff they don’t like.

Turns out we were better off piping data to /dev/null

So what, this is the second time in two days that I’ve seen a post from this blog and I’m like “yeah, I mostly agree with your argument, but I think you’re claiming to defeat much bigger opponents than your argument actually strikes”.

What am I supposed to make of that? It seems like they’re just engagement-farming at this point. The over-reach is obnoxious.

Fuck AI

Fex

Mostly agree.

But I think their advice falls prey to the “only a Sith deals in absolutes” problem, when they start contrasting “concrete advice” vs “generic advice”. They are offering “generic advice” with this post, aren’t they?

They hedge against that hypocrisy by offering some special carve-outs where generic advice is still “allowable”, but Idk. I think this post could’ve stuck to the 60% of the topic that was a slam-dunk instead of trying to take on the entire topic of design principles.

After all, I think you could argue that when experienced designers appear to contradict design principles, it’s because they understand the underlying logic of the principles and are recontextualizing them for this specific problem. That argument prioritizes concreteness but also doesn’t paint design principles as unimportant.

As Picasso or someone once said: first you must learn the rules, and then you must break them.

Nix, but I’d only recommend it if you share my same brand of mental illness

Make computers do stuff for what purpose?

I joke to my family that I just name things for a living. When you take away all the incidental stuff like files and pointers and ports, that’s really all it is. “This sequence of events with these properties is called <this>, and when you ask our system what to do about it, it does this other sequence of events with these properties which we call <this other name>.”

It’s kinda like those ancient stone tablets that are the first example of writing, and they’re just like “Ramses owes Jeremiah 5 chickens” or whatever. It’s just how we manage abstract concepts moving around our civilization. Yeah there’s math involved, but every endpoint is a human being in one way or another.

GDP is an arbitrary metric anyway, but yeah.

Yeah…

Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.