Okay but like… the Luddites were right though.

They weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they were the ones who built the machines they would later destroy.

They were opposed to letting capital owners dictate how the technology was used. They worried that they would end up working longer hours, in worse conditions, for less pay.

They died (and killed) to prevent this — to the point where destroying a knitting frame was declared a capital offense.

While they did get disbanded eventually, they also laid the groundwork for modern labor rights.

Which is why it’s super disappointing that their name has become a derogatory term for being stuck in the past, when they were ultimately calling for a progressive technological revolution that we have still failed to achieve today.

And when you smash their nests, birds don’t lay eggs

So here’s the thing… In between the land of “shitty service jobs” and the land of “fully automated luxury” lies the vast desert of “reverse-centaurs”.

Right now, when “AI” takes over 60% of a job, that remaining 40% becomes a brutal dehumanizing gauntlet: the “human-in-the-loop” becomes a peripheral for the computer, manipulated into working at the speed that the computer prefers, like Lucy in the chocolate factory, until they’re used up and replaced. Think Amazon warehouse pickers or drivers.

Part of the problem is that this exploitation is hidden from consumers. When we see a fellow laborer suffering horrible conditions in a public-facing service job, we’re much more likely to throw a fit than when they’re hidden behind a sleek UI.

With no guarantee that we’ll ever make it through to the other side of the desert, I’d be perfectly content to stay on this side of it.

When self checkout started, it was too dumb. It would panic if you breathed on the scale wrong, frequently double-scan items or just have weird bugs.

Then for a minute, it was perfect. They smoothed out the UX, and everything Just Worked™.

Now self checkout is too smart. The camera sees me grab multiple items to scan back-to-back, or sees my kid playing with the bag carousel, and it sets off a shoplifting alarm that the employee has to come over and clear 2-3 times per trip.

So I’ve caught myself adjusting my behavior, like the Amazon drivers that get penalized for singing while they drive because the face-tracking throws an alarm.

If it were just me, I probably wouldn’t think much of it. But then I wonder: Is my daughter going to have to adjust her hands, her posture, her facial expressions… to be acceptable to an ever-present AI observer, for the rest of her life?

That seems to be where we’re headed.

What happens to the misbehavers?

It’s not all bad

I’m glad there are other people out here trying to explain how money actually works. I gave up a while ago cuz I got sick of being treated like a crazy person.

I think that, partially, people don’t like being told their folk wisdom is wrong… but more importantly, they don’t wanna believe that the people in power are either just as misinformed or deliberately lying.

Eldritch is right, but it’s kinda like Newtonian physics vs general relativity: you can think of (federal) taxes as “funding the government” and it’s not a terrible approximation. But it’s not the reality.

The reality is more like what Eldritch said: money is spent into existence, and taxed out of existence. The issuer of a currency doesn’t need to take the currency from you in order to spend it — they need to destroy it so that their newly-printed currency is actually worth chasing after.

Sounds like a distinction without a difference, right?

Except it matters when we talk about “tariffs funding the government” (cuz they don’t) or “how are we gonna pay for something like the green new deal?” (paying for it is the easy part, controlling inflation is the real constraint).

When we talk about major economic initiatives, it kinda matters for people to understand how money actually works. Musk, for example, had no clue and thought he had uncovered some massive scandal when he gained access to the federal payment system and was confused at how the funds don’t actually come from anywhere: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/elon-musk-discovers-the-magic-of

supporting

These are people who heard “trade deficit” and thought “deficit? That’s a bad word!”

We were getting a ton of stuff from other countries for cheap, meanwhile those countries either couldn’t afford our stuff or bought it at an absurd premium.

That is not supporting the other countries, it’s exploiting them.

The funny thing is, I’m like… Yeah, we should probably stop exploiting them. And in that sense, the tariffs are a good thing. Buuut the price of doing that is being paid disproportionately by working class people.

If it was more equitably implemented, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with a more tariff-based USA.

“This is probably not a Hatch Act violation, because it’s not tied to an election,” Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-partisan ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Forbes.

Not tied to an election? What? What rock are you living under?

Its supposedly open source??

NPM users: “…and?”

Hypertext Transporter Protocol

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

assault

Actually, I think it’s made with a sugar

He usually has a companion piece on his blog for anything that goes into Locus. There, he linked to the wiki page about the marshmallow test, which has a section on follow-up studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#Follow-up_studies

Reminds me of the marshmallow test:

But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal impor­tant details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier back­grounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.

The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.

So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and con­cluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.

These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

Powerful words.

Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?

To the extent that a retro handheld community exists on Lemmy, this is it.

I’ve bought a lot of these things. RG35XXSP, Miyoo Mini Plus, Retroid Pocket 3+, Retroid Pocket 5, DataFrog SF2000. Some random $5 bullshits off AliExpress for a toddler to destroy.

I’ve given out a few Miyoo Mini Plusses as gifts. They’re really the perfect balance of comfort and portability. They’re performant enough to do everything you’d want to do in that form factor, but cheap enough that I don’t mind keeping it in my backpack 24/7. The stock firmware is fine, and Onion is excellent.

Basically, because NATO and Russia are in an economic stand-off where Iran is the key, and Israel is really the only plausible excuse for the US to invade Iran

sleep just like you stand

Well, my standing posture isn’t far off from fetal position either

The closest modern thing is the Steam Deck.

Or a Retroid, or Anbernic, or Miyoo, or PowKiddy, or Ayaneo, or Ayn, or TrimUI… or slap a controller onto your phone using one of those derpy clip mounts or the fancy new Mcon once it ships.