me? old, queer, flips logs on walks to stare at newts, sews sometimes, teaches cats to do dumb tricks. fandoms? yes, many and varied. (also PMDD: finally solved w/oophorectomy. I'm happy to chat about it!)
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Goddamit i hate this fucking post. I hate it because obviously if “twelve” followed the same pattern as the other teen numbers it wouldn’t be “twoteen” it would be “seconteen”. Think about it. It’s not “threeteen” it’s “thirteen” as in “third”. It’s not “fiveteen” it’s “fifteen” as in fifth. So with that in mind, you count “first, second, third, fourth, fifth,” and so on, so eleven would be “firsteen” and twelve would be “secondteen” or “seconteen”. “Firsteen, seconteen, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen….” It just drives me absolutely mad everytime i see this post that this obvious pattern was overlooked and i cant hold in my rage anymore.
I think this is exactly why thirteen is considered a ‘bad luck’ number.
Eleven and twelve have special names because as humans we can count to 12 on our fingers. But if we need to count to thirteen we’re outta fingers, bad news.
#this post is one hr old and has been on my dash #FIVE TIMES #from completely separate people #not mutuals reblogging each other #people I follow who all reblogged it from someone different#I’m fascinated
everyone wants to mock my suggestive birdwatching mishaps
My first job after graduation was in land management, and part of it was to monitor the nest boxes for occupancy. During breeding season, I'd go and check them every two weeks ish, take photos, and record species and numbers of chicks. Mostly, this meant blue tits.
Anyway, early on, I do my rounds one day and get back to my office to record the findings. As I'm looking at one of the photos, I think to myself "Hang on. These look different from the others. They have black heads, not blue, and I think maybe they are bigger. Perhaps these are great tits?"
But of course! As they were still moulting, I wasn't sure; and so, with the wisdom of the terminally stupid, I confidently opened up Google, went to an image search, and there on my work computer in my office in my brand new job, I typed in "great tit chicks."
The results I got were not what I expected. But. Should have been.
I had to IMMEDIATELY go and fess up to my new boss and be like HEY I don't know if you monitor our internet use at all but uuuhhhhhh I can explain. Fortunately she just about pissed a kidney laughing, so it was okay.
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TODAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.
The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.
Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.
But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.
In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":
This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.
On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.
Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).
This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.
This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.
For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.
But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.
Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:
But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.
This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):
Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.
Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:
This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:
(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)
Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).
As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.
Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.
Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."
Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":
The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":
But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.
The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.
What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:
https://vimeo.com/1203473793
This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:
The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.
This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:
The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):
In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:
The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:
Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant
I've noticed the same disconnect over terms (to a much lesser degree, although this absolutely overlaps with the food service work described earlier on) in standard job postings, too - the employers that offer "flexible hours" often counterintuitively mean that they have irregular hours that they require you to work. You may only get paid for working 25 hours a week, but you need to keep 40+ hours of that week available for possible shift scheduling.
In that sense, the blatant lie of "flexible hours" isn't news so much as a cross-industry standard weasel word - which I don't say in order to absolve Lyft/Uber so much as to indict everyone else.
This may have changed in the last few years btw - but I used to price-compare Lyft and Uber, since most drivers I got used both platforms anyway. Lyft would always be cheaper but would tack on a bunch of non negotiable fees at the end, so the prices turned out to at least seem comparable. If they still do that, then that would be another reason consumers aren't comparison-shopping.
Thank you so much for posting this in full here with embedded source links.
Baby Horseshoe Crabs: these eggs contain tiny horseshoe crab embryos, and the hatchlings typically emerge after 2-4 weeks, but it takes another ten years for them to reach adulthood
These photos show the embryonic form of Limulus polyphemus, commonly known as the Atlantic horseshoe crab. The eggs of this species are initially opaque, with a grayish-blue, green, or pink coloration, but they become increasingly translucent as the embryos mature, providing a glimpse of the tiny horseshoe crabs developing within.
Above: several embryos twirling around in their eggs
The legs become visible roughly five days after fertilization, and the embryos begin to move shortly thereafter, eventually flexing their legs and twirling their bodies. They molt for the very first time just a few days later. Each embryo will shed its skin and grow a new one four times in total before it even hatches from the egg.
The color variations are likely related to the growth rate of each individual embryo, which can differ slightly based on the temperature, salinity, moisture, and oxygen levels around each egg. Certain colors can also arise from bacterial or fungal growth in the egg membrane.
Above: Limulus polyphemus embryos
The hatchlings finally emerge after 2-4 weeks. The freshly-hatched larvae measure less than 1cm long, and they look just like miniature versions of their adult form, except that they do not yet have tails (which are actually known as telsons) and their exoskeletons are still soft and translucent. These young horseshoe crabs are often described as "trilobite larvae."
Above: a young horseshoe crab discarding its egg
Atlantic horseshoe crabs generally spawn in May and June, with hundreds of thousands of individuals gathering along the coast on the night of the full moon and new moon. Each female lays up to 100,000 eggs per season, but very few of those offspring actually survive to adulthood. Most of the eggs are eaten or destroyed before they can even hatch, and many of the remaining larvae perish at some point during the 10 years that it takes for them to reach full maturity (i.e. the age at which they begin to reproduce).
Above: the freshly-hatched larvae
Wild horseshoe crabs can live to be more than 20 years old, and they can measure up to 60 centimeters (2 feet) long. They have 10 eyes in total, including two compound eyes that are specifically adapted for the purpose of finding a mate:
The most obvious eyes are the two lateral compound eyes. These are used for finding mates during the spawning season. Each compound eye has about 1,000 receptors or ommatidia. The cones and rods of the lateral eyes have a similar structure to those found in human eyes, but are around 100 times larger in size. At night, the lateral eyes are chemically stimulated to greatly increase the sensitivity of each receptor to light. This allows the horseshoe crab to identify other horseshoe crabs in the darkness.
Above: a close-up of a horseshoe crab's compound eye, which is covered in tiny hatchlings for some reason
Horseshoe crabs have been around for at least 445 million years, which means that these creatures are about 200 million years older than the dinosaurs and at least 50 million years older than trees, and yet their morphology has changed very little in that time. In fact, modern horseshoe crabs are frequently described as "living fossils," because they still look strikingly similar to their fossilized ancestors.
Above: the juvenile form of Tachypleus tridentatus, commonly known as the Chinese horseshoe crab
It's important to note that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact, they're not even crustaceans -- they belong to a completely different group of arthropods known as chelicerates, and they are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to crabs.
Above: Tachypleus tridentatus and Limulus polyphemus
This is a revised/updated version of a post that I published about two years ago, with much more information, photos, and sources.
Sources & More Info:
iNaturalist: Horseshoe Crab Eggs
Maryland Department of Natural Resources: Horseshoe Crab Life History
Current Zoology: Developmental Ecology of the American Horseshoe Crab
PBS: Once a Spawn a Time: Horseshoe Crabs Mob the Beach
Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute: Limulus polyphemus
National Wildlife Federation: Horseshoe Crabs
Maryland Department of Natural Resources: Horseshoe Crab Anatomy
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obsessed with star trek repeatedly writing themselves into a corner by creating alien races that are supposed to be The Bad Guys when that explicitly conflicts with their previously established notion that no group of people is inherently good or evil.
first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.
hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.
this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.
hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.
this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.
hey these are the romulans. hey these are the founders. the list goes on. i just find it really interesting
thing I am proud of: when the doctor started going on a weird rant about long covid not being real I paused and listened to his nonsense for a bit and then very calmly said, in a polite and curious tone, "you don't believe in post-viral illness?" and he like. stammered a bunch and was like OH WELL I'M NOT SAYING -- I DON'T...I just think ..! and backpedaled awkwardly while I just sat there like :3c interesting :3c thank you so much for clarifying your stance on this :3c
an important skill for chronically ill people to develop is the ability to treat the doctor as though they are simply a person you are interviewing to find out how much they know about your condition.
Holy shit op this is LITERALLY in the book 'Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depends On It'. Written by a guy who did hostage negotiation and then tried doing business negotiation, and mopped the floor with industry experts.
I'm fortunate enough to have a primary care doctor who knows about hEDS, but it's occurring to me that the skills in this book could be medically life changing for chronically ill folks of all kinds. Like. Literally a matter of life and death, especially for BIPOC and/or fat and/or young people who are having their issues dismissed.
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