The kitchen sink

meets covid regulations

0 arrests were made among 748 incidents

41% of people were taken to a shelter or hospital

0 incidents were violent

6x a day, police were freed up to work on more serious criminal activity

in 2020, when everyone was isolated at home, fossil co2 emissions in the US only dropped by 11%. think about how insane it is that when almost every person living in the second largest GEG emitter was at home for months, the effect they had was a reduction of barely 11%. and yet that fucking carbon footprint calculator is shoved down our throat all day long. a whole 4 years ago when that article came out saying only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, everybody just blinked and went “no, thank you. now have you bought enough metal straws?”

this guy talks insanely fast but this is solid info on electrical outrages in the US.

If you’re looking at Texas right now and thinking, “It seems pretty bad that a state’s electrical grid can fail overnight from a snowstorm,” I have news for you. It’s so much worse than you could ever imagine. Don’t be a heartless idiot and blame ‘red state voters;’ it’s red states, blue states, purple states, green states, everywhere is in crisis.

In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our energy grid a D+, because almost all of it was built in the 1950s and 60s with a 50-year life expectancy, and we’re 10 to 20 years past that. Across the country, 640,000 miles of high voltage lines run at full capacity at almost all times, which is way more than the grid was designed to handle, and Texas in particular has one of the worst ratios between planned and real capacity.

It’s so bad that the US Government has said that if just nine of America’s 55,000 electrical substations are brought down, it could cause a coast-to-coast blackout lasting 18 months or more. And testimony from the executive director of Task Force on National and Homeland Security has said that a prolonged collapse of the electrical grid could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population. [screenshot in the video has highlighted text from this source, saying: “a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.”]

Today, the US has more power outages than any other developed country. And that’s because 68% of the electricity in the US is managed by investor-owned privatized utility companies [the source I found said it’s actually 72%], and updating their systems cuts into their profits, so they don’t do anything until something fails. And when things do fail, and, for example, start massive wildfires in California, guess who pays for it? Mostly taxpayers. 

Guys, this is really important. Until now, Google collected your data, but did not attach your name to it. Now, they can, and will. This new thing they’re doing will allow them to collect your data across searches, your email, Youtube, Maps, Google+, and all their affiliates, and build a complete profile of YOU.

If that doesn’t bother you, maybe this will: they own and can sell all that data, including anything you create and send (artists and writers, take note).

There is a way you can opt out of this ridiculousness. It’s described in the link, but if you’re still not sure about it, please ask me and I’ll guide you through how to turn all this off.

This website reads Terms of Service and ranks them so you don’t have to – because, let’s be real, you don’t.

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.

Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest places, and once it’s been normalized a little, we inflict it on students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.

Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone’s been ropted in. If your meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.

The lockdown has been a powerful accellerant for shitty technology adoption curve: the combination of an atomized polity that can’t have in-person solidarity conversations and overall precarity has kicked off a powerful shock doctrine for tech surveillance.

Pre-pandemic, work-from-home call-center workers (mostly poor Black women) lived under surveillance that transformed “work from home” to “live at work.” The tech preserved the fiction that these misclassified employees were “independent contractors.”

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

Within days of the lockdown, this technological oppression raced up the privilege gradient in the form of “invigilation” software like Proctorio, cruel surveillance tools inflicted on university students. The company is pursuing its critics in court.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

Now, every remote worker is in line to get the treatment previously reserved for misclassified employees and college kids. Microsoft has rolled out on-by-default workplace surveillance for Office 365.

https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331221942850949121

The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative “productivity” of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails.

As Wolfie Christie points out in his thread, the arbitrary metrics that Microsoft has chosen will have a hugely distorting effect on workplace behavior. Remember Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful measure.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This is the quantitative fallacy on steroids: software can’t measure qualitative factors like whether your work accomplished “soft goals” like “a better product” or “a conceptual breakthrough.”

So they blithely vaporize these qualitative elements and do math on the dubious quantitative residue left behind. It’s the data scientist’s version of looking for your keys under the lamp-post: “We can’t do math on it, so we won’t consider it.”

It’s a far cry from the early days of Microsoft, when Bill Gates mocked IBM for paying programmers by how many lines of code they produced, calling it “the race to build the world’s heaviest airplane.”

I wonder if the programmers who built this feature are subjected to it themselves? And if not, I wonder when they will be.

I mean, they won’t be in the EU. This shit is radioactively illegal under the GDPR. But Americans have FREEDOM.

Now, you may be thinking, “I bet the managers who use this tool will regret it when THEIR bosses start using it on THEM.”

You’re thinking too small. Microsoft has ambition: they’re not subjecting MANAGERS to this, they’re subjecting COMPANIES to it.

Microsoft incentivizes companies to turn on an industry-wide comparison “feature” that sends ALL YOUR EMPLOYEE DATA to Microsoft and then gives you a chart telling you how your employees fare against their counterparts elsewhere.

You get a chart. Microsoft gets fine-grained data on your company’s operations - data it can sell, or mine, or you know, just lose control over and leak all over the internet. That’s some unprecedented Shitty Tech Adoption Curve accelerationism right there.

Not since the day when Amazon convinced Borders Books (RIP) to use it for all digital ordering and fulfilment (giving Amazon 10)% access to all Borders’ customer data) has a tech company offered a shadier B2B deal.

Last year, Slate’s Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination asked me to write some fiction illustrating the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve. The result it “Affordances,” a story that grows dismally more relevant with each passing day.