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I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF
This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.
Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.
Yes! Potatoes are magical! *jazz hands*
Reblogged from:quatschmachen
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BEFORE VOTING, reblog and tag what you think is WINNING. THEN, vote for what you think is LOSING.
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See Resultsi don’t know what i’m trying to see here but it’s certainly something
y’all know this doesn’t work if you don’t reblog it right
Reblogged from:freakoutgirl
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I had yet another amazing idea for a poll, so get ready for this super divisive question that WILL tear families and friendships apart.
What dipping sauce do you like for your chicky nuggies???
Plain ol’ ketchup, like the Lord intended.
Ketchup?? PLEASE. Clearly RANCH is where it’s at! So creamy and delectable…
All of y'all are clearly unwell. MAYO is the one true winner.
Are y'all out of your minds??? CLEARLY you have to mix multiple sauces together!
Um… y'all are eating your chicky nuggies with sauce? I just eat them plain…
Chicken Nuggets are an afront to nature and should never be eaten THANK YOU
Must we fight, my siblings? ALL sauces or lack of sauces are good with nuggies.
I just like to watch infighting. :-)
Do people really have such strong opinions…? I really don’t care…
A secret tenth option that I will reveal in the tags…
See ResultsReblogged from:softbrah
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someonesfavoriteworstnightmare:
this is a poem
i couldn’t not draw this
the rat poem is too powerful that’s why they don’t talk about it
Reblogged from:charminglyantiquated
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Lol, mine is apparently, Maximum Risk (1996)
“Welcome to the other side of safe.”https://playback.fm/birthday-movie - #1 movie on your bday
The Amityville Horror (1979) “For God’s sake, get out!”
Reblogged from:lostinhistory
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The original sin of both tech boosterism and tech criticism is to focus unduly on what a given technology does, without regard to who it does it to and who it does it for. When it comes to technology’s effect on our daily lives, the social arrangements matter much more than the feature-sets.
This is the premise behind my idea of the “shitty technology adoption curve”: if you want to do something horrible to people with technology, you must first inflict it on people without social power and then work your way slowly up the privilege gradient, smoothing the tech’s rough edges by sanding them against the human bodies of people who can’t fight back.
Thus we see the rise of all disciplinary technology, especially bossware, which started off monitoring forced prison labor, then blue-collar workers, then pink collar workers (like the largely female, largely Black work-from-home customer service reps who work for Arise):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless
The pandemic saw the spread of bossware to affluent, “high-skilled” white-collar workers, from doctors to teachers to IT workers, as the idea of being monitored continuously in your own home, from camera to keystrokes, was normalized by the lockdown:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware
And yet, what matters about bossware isn’t what it does — a keylogger that you control is just called “undo” — but who it does it to. When gig workers “seize the means of reproduction” and hack the apps that boss them around, they can turn the tables. That’s what’s happening in Indonesia, where Tuyul apps are produced by worker co-ops and small software vendors to give drivers direct control over their working conditions:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
This is true disruption, where tech isn’t just used for regulatory arbitrage (as when gig-work apps are used to avoid labor laws by misclassifying workers as contractors):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things
That’s what makes Rida Qadri’s research so exciting: the premise that if workers can hack their employers back, bossware can become laborware:
https://www.wired.com/story/disruption-mobility-platforms-politics/
In the USA, companies like Para are creating apps that sit on top of the gig work dispatch apps, monitoring all the offers from all the different apps and auto-declining offers that are too low, forcing the algorithm to bid up the labor share of the companies’ income:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
Writing for IT for Change’s outstanding inaugural “State of Big Tech” issue, the Vidhi Centre For Legal Policy’s Jai Vipra presents “Changing Dynamics of Labor and Capital,” a deep, essential look at the way that tech affects labor struggles around the world:
https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/
Vipra’s report is fascinating not just for the eye-watering new ways that capital uses tech to inflict pain on labor, but for the ingenious, effective mechanisms that workers use tech to answer power with countervailing power.
For example, when workers delivering for the Swiggy app were unable to get the company to respond to the ways that the app was driving them into unsustainable and dangerous working schedules, they staged a “log-out strike” and collectively withheld their labor from the app, triggering a crisis that management couldn’t ignore.
Likewise, drivers for Ola began mass-cancelling rides to protest the company’s policy of not showing drivers their destinations and pay until they accepted a job — the resulting chaos forced the company to let drivers see all the details of an offer of work before accepting it.
These direct actions are driven in part by the platforms’ relentless pursuit of a reduced wage-bill, which sees them laying off swathes of back-office workers who once stepped in to mediate between gig workers and their algorithmic managers. When you can’t get anyone on the phone or a livechat to complain that your app wants you to drive off a pier and into the deep blue sea, collective digital power swings into action.
The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve means that we find the tactics of gig drivers working their way up the privilege gradient to white-collar workers, and sure enough, in Mar 2021, Goldman Sachs bankers coordinated a threat of mass resignation over the bossware monitoring them in their homes 24/7, complaining of 105 hour (!!) work-weeks:
But ad-hoc coordination has its limits. Spinning up a new organizing group to counter each new bossware fuckery exacts a terrible price from already overstretched, precarious workers. That’s where unions come in. On the face of it, unionizing gig workers presents an insurmountable challenge: they are atomized, geographically dispersed and lack even a break room.
But tech taketh away and it giveth back. When Uber Eats bait-and-switched drivers into signing up in 2016 and then slashed their wages, organizers connected with other workers by placing small food orders with Uber Eats and then had organizing conversations with the drivers who delivered the orders:
https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35
Bosses push back. They’ve convinced gutless labor regulators to ban the use of work email addresses for union organizing; they send infiltrators to monitor private Facebook conversations, they plant spyware on phones and laptops to crack open Whatsapp group-chats. Location-aware ID badges let bosses follow workers around and target potential union organizers for retaliatory firings.
The same monitoring tools let bosses nickel-and-dime their workers, clocking them off while they’re “unproductive” (peeing, driving to pick up their next passenger or delivery, or only paying retail workers while a customer is in the shop).
It’s a mixed bag: in China, independent workers’ rights centers work almost exclusively through social media,
“for both direct consultations and mass dissemination of information, and this use is contributing to the organizing of labor as well.”And ironically, monopoly helps labor organizers: the rollup plays that have seen most CloudKitchens gathered into the hands of a few firms means that their workers are more likely to be physically proximate and able to organize labor resistance to their monopolist bosses.
A common labor complaint in the age of digitalization is that their bosses monitor and discipline them for their off-hours activities: think of Deutsche Welle and the AP firing journalists who used their personal social media accounts to express support for Palestinians’ struggle for justice.
Bossware vendors boast that they can monitor workers’ personal online activity “to help them stay focused” — something 72% of workers object to. It’s easy to see how this can become a focus of labor activism, especially as employers announce that they will fire any worker who refuses to supply a full list of their social media accounts for monitoring:
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/watching-the-workers.aspx
The next level of personal surveillance comes from “voluntary” health monitoring in which employees are required to wear Fitbits or other biometric tracking tools, or face increases to their health care premiums and other penalties. This is bad enough, but these biometric companies are choice acquisition targets for the biggest surveillance companies in the world, which means that you might one day wake up and find out that the data from your employer-mandated tracking cuff is now in Google’s hands:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire
Neoliberalism got us into this mess, and tech was its willing accomplice. But Vipra makes a good case that tech can “increase the negotiating power of labor over capital.” For Vipra, this starts with access to data: in India, “analog” workers have the legal right to know their employers’ profit margins, which is key for collective bargaining. But digital workers don’t have this right:
https://medium.com/tech-people/new-labour-codes-explained-48a4679d4a29
Giving gig workers the right to their own performance data would help those workers secure competitive bids for their labor — denying workers access to this data is anti-competitive:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/workplace-data-rights-regulation/
This same data can be used to make the case for regulation and unionization: when it’s your word against your boss’s, it might be hard to interest public officials in protecting your working conditions. But when the data shows that gig workers are putting in 12–18 hour days without overtime, the case is harder to ignore:
https://www.justjobsnetwork.org/wp-content/pubs/reports/transformations_in_technology_report.pdf
Modern employers collect vast amount of data about their workers, but share almost none of it. Again, the important thing isn’t what the tech is doing, but who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to.
Vipra also singles out the one-sided nature of the platforms’ use of payment technologies. Modern payment systems mean that gig work platforms collect their customers’ money in near-realtime, but despite this, gig companies are the most delay-prone employers, paying workers after totally unjustifiable delays that give bosses free cash flow and force workers into precarity.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/08/former-head-of-mint-raises-4-5m-for-lean/
After this critique, Vipra proposes “a substantive agenda for labor” in five areas: algorithmic regulation, data sharing, remote work rights, financial rights, and “emancipatory automation.”
Algorithmic regulation: Algorithms should have “a minimum level of explainability”; “minimum performance levels” (error rates, transparency, etc); and “human involvement in decision making” must be mandatory (so you can get prompt and effective redress when the algorithm misfires).
Data sharing: Don’t just “data minimize” — “reorient it towards goals that are worker- and society-friendly.” Collect and share data on labor safety, and mandate that companies “collect, analyze, and share big data to protect workers’ rights.”
Remote work rights: The right to disconnect from work; the right to be paid for work equipment, including chairs, internet access, etc (I would add here, the right to have those devices configured to block employer monitoring).
Financial rights: The state should mandate financial interoperability and use account aggregators and open banking to “minimize[] the information asymmetry in favor of people for whom information is collateral.” Force platforms to disclose the commissions, fees, incentives, etc they offer to workers. Provide source-code for these systems to regulators.
Emancipatory automation: “Automation should mean less drudgery and fewer working hours overall.” This is what I’m getting at when I call for technologists to become full-stack Luddites:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
Overall, Vipra presents a bracing, challenging view of the way that tech can serve both labor and capital, depending on how it is configured and used. I don’t agree with everything she says (the privacy section in data rights could use its own article of equal depth and critical analysis), but reading this made the hair on the back on my neck stand up (in a good way).
This is more or less what I had in mind back in 2009 when I was writing For the Win, about how multiplayer games could serve as organizing platforms for an international labor vanguard (the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, or Webblies):
https://craphound.com/category/ftw/
[Image ID: An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker’s Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst’s ‘American Weekly’ magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker’s signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining together to form a gigantic fist.]
w o a h
I think I found The Thesis
b r u h
Reblogged from:mostlysignssomeportents
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ok wait, reblog if you’ve cried at least once because of math, doesn’t matter which grade
i’m trying to prove somethingReblogged from:jennhoney
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You know the joke.
Office manager: “$75 just to kick the photocopier?”
Photocopier technician: “No, it’s $5 to kick the photocopier and $70 to know where to kick it.”
The trustbusters in the Biden administration know precisely where to kick the photocopier, and they’re kicking the shit out of it. You love to see it.
Last July, the Biden admin published an Executive Order enumerating 72 actions that administrative agencies could take without any further action from Congress - dormant powers that the administration already had, but wasn’t using:
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/biden-monopoly-executive-order/
This memo was full of deep cuts, like the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, Northern Pac. Ry Co v US (1958), the Bank Merger Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, and the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921:
The memo opened with the kind of soaring rhetoric that I absolutely dote on, a declaration of the end of Reagonomics and its embrace of monopoly:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
But the memo didn’t just offer red meat to tube-feeding activist cranks like me: it also set out 72 specific, technical activities that would make profound, material changes in the economy and improvements to the lives of every person in America, and then the administration executed every one of those actions:
They knew where to kick the photocopier and boy did they kick it - hard.
The White House action has Tim Wu’s fingerprints all over it. He’s the brilliant, driven law professor who’s gone to work as Biden’s tech antitrust czar. But Wu isn’t alone: he’s part of a trio of appointees who are all expert photocopier kickers. There’s Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ and Lina Khan at the FTC.
Khan is a model of administrative competence and ideological coherence. Her tenure has included lots of soaring rhetoric to buoy the spirits of people like me:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance
But it’s also included lots of extremely skillful ju-jitsu against the system, using long-neglected leverage points to Get Shit Done, rather than just grandstanding or demanding that Congress take action. Here’s the FTC’s latest expert kick at the photocopier: action on Right to Repair that exercises existing authority:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair
The Right to Repair fight is a glaring example of democratic dysfunction. Americans broadly and strongly support the right to fix their own stuff, or to take their stuff to the repair depot of their choice. How broadly? Well, both times that the question has been on the Massachusetts ballot, there was massive participation and the measures passed with ~80% majorities:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r
But despite this, state-level attempts to pass R2R bills have been almost entirely crushed by a coalition of monopolists, led by Apple, including John Deere, GM, Wahl Shavers, Microsoft, Google, and many other giant corporations who want the power to tell you your property is beyond repair and must be condemned to an e-waste dump:
https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13
Right to Repair is a case study for the proposition that “ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”
Enter the photocopier kickers, wearing boots. The same month that the White House dropped is massive antitrust executive order, it also published an executive order on Right to Repair, including electronics repair:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus
The EO built on the evidence compiled through the FTC’s “Nixing the Fix” report:
But it also identified that the FTC already had the power to do Right to Repair, in its existing Congressional authorization:
The Biden antitrust strategy is powerful because it recognizes that every administrative agency has powers that can be brought to bear to slow down the anticompetitive flywheel that has allowed giant corporations to extract monopoly profits and then launder them into pro-monopoly policies.
Which brings me to today’s news: the FTC has carefully reviewed the powers it has under its existing Energy Labeling Rule (you know, the rule that produces those Energystar stickers on appliances) and concluded that it can also force companies to publish repair manuals under this rule:
As USPIRG’s Nathan Proctor told Motherboard’s Matthew Gault, “When Congress passed energy conservation policies decades ago, it included the ability to require Right to Repair access. While that provision has gone unnoticed for too long, it’s not surprising it was written that way.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair
The FTC is now planning to exercise that long dormant authority in a game-changing way - to kick the photocopier really, really well. It is seeking public comment on “whether lack of access to repair instructions for covered products is an existing problem for consumers; whether providing such information would assist consumers in their purchasing decisions or product use; whether providing such information would be unduly burdensome to manufacturers; and any other relevant issues”
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/R611004EnergyLabelingANPR.pdf
The Trump years were brutal. Every time we turned around, some Trumpy archvillain was twirling his mustache and announcing an evil plot. Yet so many of these turned out to be nothingburgers - not because they were sincere in their intentions, but because they lacked administrative competence.
Trump embodied administrative incompetence. He was very good at commanding the news cycle, and very good at riling up his base, but he had no idea where to kick the photocopier, and every expert photocopier kicker that Trump hired got immediately fired, because they would insist that Getting Shit Done required patience and precision, not a deluge of chaotic governance-by-tweeting.
To the extent that Trumpland Got Shit Done - packing the courts, handing out trillions in tax gifts to the ultra-rich - it was in spite of Trump and his trumpies, and because of the administratively competent wing of the party: McConnell, Romney, et al. In the GOP, “establishment” is a slur meaning “competent.”
This isn’t to say that Trump wasn’t dangerous - he absolutely was. But it does militate for an understanding of politics that pays close attention to competence as well as virtue or wickedness.
It’s one of the things that was very exciting about the Elizabeth Warren campaign - those long-ass policy documents she dropped were eye-wateringly detailed photocopier-kicking manuals for the US government.
Biden himself isn’t much of a photocopier kicker. He’s good at gladhanding, but the photocopier kickers in his administration represent a triumph of the party’s progressive wing. And therein lies a key difference between the parties: in the GOP, the competent are the establishment; in the Democrats, the establishment are the ones who can’t or won’t act, and the progressives have got their boots on and are ready to kick.
Image:
Temple University Libraries (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tulpics/4882641645/CC BY 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/[Image ID: A photocopier in an office copy room; a silhouetted figure is dealing a flying kick to it.]
Reblogged from: -
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.BRAD AARON MODLIN
Reblogged from:lunchboxpoems
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“I’m sorry, your majesty,” Donald Duck said, looking at the elegant swirling of the throne room’s cornices, the jewel-bright tiles beneath his flippers. Anywhere but into the king’s cold eyes. “You must know the pope won’t grant you the divorce you seek.”
Finally, unwillingly, he did look up to see King Mickey’s face contorted with a terrible fury. “Then I shall found my own Church,” the king said. “And grant my own divorce.”
“What of your compassion?” Donald’s voice cracked and it was a moment before he could go on. “It is not meet that you abandon your wife when she most needs you. If she truly is insane - ”
“It is my compassion that keeps me from ordering her beheaded,” the king said bitterly. “I fear that you have misunderstood me, my old friend. I did not say she was insane.”
Rising from his throne, King Mickey paced across the throne room to stare out at the peaceful green grounds of Disney Castle. He was not seeing them, Donald was sure, but some other, darker vista, conjured by his imagination.
“I said, ‘the queen is fucking Goofy’.”
Reblogged from:dorbu
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This post is ancient and stupid but I still laugh whenever I see it
Reblogged from:
betthearm
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Reblogged from:
theabigailthorn
