The RR workers get NO sick leave and NO regular schedules! They are always under their bosses’ thumb. COVID shows how important sick leave is. Inhumane schedules, and denying sick leave, especially during a pandemic, increases illness, deaths, and disparities, especially among people already vulnerable to Covid.
Sick leave and humane scheduling will not ruin the companies financially. Paid sick leave only amounts to 3.5% of the industry’s soaring profits; in fact, over 50% of their revenue is profit.
Speaking as a former comedian, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Because … have you ever had 10,000 people hate you TO YOUR FACE before? Because I have. And humans aren’t wired for that.
I’d note that the 10,000 people hating me to my face were actually just stonily silent while I ate it on stage while opening for a musical act. And while I laughed it off after .. it was rough. And I’d been working for years at that point. But BOOING?!
And for a *narcissist*? Just saying – expect some serious whiplash crazy coming over the next week.
If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!
Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.
Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”
The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.
Cory:
Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.
It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.
It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable
A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.
I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.
“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.
I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”
He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.
Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.
— Ava Kofman, with Doris Burke, at ProPublica and The New Yorker.
I’ve been sleeping better for the past month or so. I attribute to more consistent bedtimes and wake times, reduced life stress and cooler bedroom temperatures. Even though summer nights here in San Diego are cool, our bedroom stays warm, and I think next summer I may return to my energy-wasting summer habit from the early 90s of sleeping with the a/c on, under a heavy blanket.
Common wisdom says you should avoid screen time before bed, but I have not found a correlation between screen time and insomnia.
[Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, an on-demand freight marketplace] says the body is programmed to sleep twice a day, at night and again eight hours after you wake. The second sleep should be a 30-minute or a 90-minute nap to take advantage of the sleep cycles and avoid waking during deep sleep.
Having a bedtime is important. Croke recommends to trucking companies that they have drivers start work at the same time every day.
Starting work the same time every day encourages a fixed bedtime.
If you have a week that wears you down, Croke says you can make up for it on the weekend.
“The brain is incredibly resilient,” he says. “You’ll bounce back quickly if you’ve got two periods of good sleep at the end of the week. I call it the ‘two and seven rule.’ Get two periods of consecutive sleep each week to get rid of the sleep debt from the previous week.”
After two periods of good sleep, the brain washes away that sleep debt, and you can start Monday morning fresh.
Sleeping in on weekends runs contrary to a lot of other sleep advice I’ve read, but I believe it. With regard to sleep advice, a lot of folklore gets passed as science.
The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse… Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.
What if failure is the plan?. danah boyd has been studying social media for decades, with a particular focus on young people and other marginalized groups. She applies her insights to the current state of Twitter, with asides on the global war on terror and the real cause of the collapse of local journalism (it wasn’t the internet, Google, Facebook, or Craigslist that killed journalism. It was financiers hungry for the physical real estate—land—that newspaper offices occupied).
I’ve been viewing events at Twitter as an entertaining shitshow with little real world consequence. It’s fun to watch an arrogant billionaire fail spectacularly and publicly. boyd provides sobering perspective.
It is a cold and blustery day here in San Diego. We had brunch with friends. I walked the dog before the rain started. I am spending the afternoon on my keister, reading and blogging, with Julie and the dog. Then I will have dinner and watch some tv. An altogether splendid day.
Also, Julie bought a bag of googly eyes. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ We professional writers call this “burying the lead.”
Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.
Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative.
Yes to this. Also, blogging and posting to social media are different forms of expression. Twitter is obviously different, with its character limitations.
Interestingly, US newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries read like blogs. This was before newspapers standardized on the neutral voice from nowhere. They were livelier and had more personality.