Employers are monitoring computers, toilet breaks, even emotions
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is. Putting the screws on the workers is always the easiest way to compensate for bad decisions in the leadership change.
I worked in an old shop once that did an oil and air service for $59.99. We got a ton of business from a local rental car place because their service pool was under provisioned after their managers expanded the fleet. Now typically when working on simple stuff like a packaged deal, I inspect other stuff. Your brakes/brake lines and any leaks i might spot that seem dangerous. Those get logged in your invoice with a $0.00 fee. Typically the rental place would send the vehicle back for the additional service and a nice thank you box of donuts for the crew.
Management started seeing these 0.00 fees and assumed we were giving away free service because they didnt take the time to train on the computer system we all have to use. So they dismantled the service deal and started charging individually for everything, driving the cost up to close to $100. they also eliminated the inspection line items. We lost the rental place, and we had to spend 20 minutes hand writing issues we noticed on greasy post-its, which makes the shop look cheap.
I eventually quit the place when they started putting cameras in the garage bays "for safety" and changed our normal punch clock system to a fingerprint system...not because i dont like biometrics, but because they dont work when your hands are coated in 30 cars worth of grease and fluid. When the timeclocks broke down, we were always accused of sabotage.
"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.
There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs - enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.
2. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create - your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.
Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my life has never been better since I began working under the second.
I've been a dev for 20 years now, and I've definitely had coworkers that fall into both those categories you mention.
I'm new-ish to management now, but I'm working under the (hopeful/optimistic) assumption that most people fall in the latter category. But I need to find a style that can handle both types of employees.
Some people are self-motivated when crunching numbers on spreadsheets because they find it satisfying but would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to provide phone support -- and vice-versa.
And there are probably some jobs that it's more common to be self-motivated for than others. Garbage collection? Data entry?
And that 2) is the view that arises when that cultural pressure is mitigated
It’s follow daddy’s orders/daddy knows best wrapped in economics and math and history that tries to say see look all this work by humans in a closed room proves this is how an economy should work
It’s religious in that no one knows how it works but we’re convinced it’s right
Having not been raised in a church and growing up in a remote place studying physics and electronics since I was 8 with my grandpa who grew up similarly in the 30s... the blind allegiance to such nonsense has struck me as utterly bizarre
“I’ve never looked. I just keep believing what they say.”
Nocebo effect in action
Google Varoufakis’s talk about the meetings during Greeks debt crisis. They had no theory or clue; they just wrote math that worked for the context in question— “Greek must lose and investors must win.”
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about basic human needs being met. I’m talking about caring about Steve Jobs as if he’s was a child and enabling his childlike tantrums to hold so much sway over our reality.
Negotiating working conditions with a union-enforced contract gets rid of mickey mouse management, and establishes a process for workers to review working condition changes. I honestly believe that's the best feature of unions.
(The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees -- the "interently lazy" types. As long as "protecting the worst employees" is a key concept, unions won't make it back.)
What's needed is a situation more akin to what hollywood has. A union sets the floor on treatment and wages and individual agents advocate for their clients. Also, I think the situation with large German corporations is better too, since it gives the union a literal seat at the board which puts the people running the corporation onto the same team as the people running the union.
0. Yes I know there are the odd exceptions, but these are so rare they almost prove the point.
There are a lot of confounding factors in why different types of companies are founded. Saying that less employee owned companies are started is evidence of failure is at best a very shaky understanding of how to look at the business landscape.
Meanwhile, in some European countries (maybe Germany?) the unions were responding to the recession by cutting back on hours for everybody, to maintain broader employment. I remember thinking about 4 day work weeks.
The impression I formed was that the American unions were serving their narrow purpose of protecting members, especially senior members, but failing to serve as a "labor movement" with broader social goals, while taking credit for social gains of the past. It created a situation where many members of the working class believed that they were competing with the unions.
"Tendency to protect the worst employees" as opposed to a tendency to protect the best, or as a logical consequence of protecting the set of all current employees?
It would be a better use of my time to find a 1.5 place and make it into a strong 2. Or a place that's already a 2 and make it even better. Let the market sort out the rest.
If you can get them to care about you or the thing you are trying to do, the worker bees will have to be stopped from burning out and the lazy guys will find ways to get the job done without spending too much effort.
How to so that is difficultut, but there's one thing that doesn't work: putting the screws
I tend to be critical during interviews and demanding during work... but I'm always ready to forward some trust towards the guys on my team. More often than not, I end up assuming "There's probably a good reason for that decision".
And so far, it has paid off. If I trust people to make good decisions, people make even better decisions than I could ask for. Many, many people want to do a good job I've found.
Over 20 - 30 people I've had on teams, there has been 1 guy who stretched that trust and he was a known troublemaker people put on my team as a test. As a result, I gave them a clean and solid case to fire that guy.
I think a lot of people grow up being told to "never quit", so they don't prepare for the day when they should quit. Thus, they don't sock away f-u money and they take on too many responsibilities too early in life.
One of the common themes is the unintended consequences. For example, UPS drivers who get scolded because the truck records that it was sometimes in motion without them wearing their seat belt. Regardless of the circumstances before the scolding (there are lots of situations where it would be reasonable to make such a judgment call, esp on private property like a parking lot), afterward they would simply clip the seatbelt empty and sit on top of it. Then the truck registers 100% seatbelt compliance and they are far less safe since they're never wearing it.
What we know about human behavior definitively indicates that having a sense of autonomy and control is essential to motivation/performance. It's also obvious that stress increases under the knowledge that someone is monitoring you. Hell even the ancient Greeks probably understood the perils of micromanagement...
In the case of readily measurable output in blue-collar work, it seems obvious that a component of compensation should scale proportionate to productivity, so that you're rewarding high performers instead of implicitly penalizing everyone uniformly. And then you just fire (obvious) chronic underperformers, so that you still gain the advantages from there being a fear of repercussions.
It's the same as measuring a programmers output by Lines of Code, you're just going to get a heaping mass of code that could be done in 1/10th of the lines.
Result: You would see huge bloobs of autogenerated code getting shipped that could have been done with about 5% of that code, and then later get discarded by security as a security risk.
Even after my consulting(I was hired to fine our how mouch of there code is rly a security risk like there industry partners claim) they did not change there practice for 3 Years.
Im surprised the Company even survived, but it did and after 3 Years a big restructering basicly fired all of IT management.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I'm also reminded of a similar Chinese saying: 上有政策下有对策。 Loosely translated as "the higher-ups have policies, the lower-downs have antipolicies." The other analogy is squeezing a bag of water: if you push one place, another place pops out to compensate, and if you squeeze everywhere and too hard, it pops.
One of my closest friends has been an automotive tech in the dealership world for the past 12 or so years and has mastertech certifications for 2 manufacturers.
I never cease to be amazed at how fucked that industry/line of work can be, even for someone who is firmly at the top of their game. The incentive structure seems totally out of whack to me, such that it's no wonder that people assume the worst when they are faced with having to take their vehicle in for service.
Then an article and a comment like this come along.
Honestly, there are a lot of businesses out there that are just plain run by idiots and/or crazy people. It feels like the majority are, to me.
So, next time you feel like the only sane person in the room/interview/review, you really should consider the possibility that you are correct, and not dismiss that thought out of hand.
I've been amazed by how often this is true, especially in the world of "startup CULTure". When I was naive and fresh out of college, I assumed that people who made it into management or into executive leadership did so because they knew what they were doing. That couldn't be farther from the case. There are so many companies run by people who are borderline insane, and so many people who will just blindly follow them through their nightmare.
In contrast, there are great people and companies to work for if you put in the effort to find them. I will say that the whole tech recruitment industry has made that harder though as you have people who are financially incentivized to get you hired and tell you whatever bullshit you want to hear even if they know you will be miserable in that position and that 90% of that information is false.
Is that true, though? That is, is merely putting the effort in enough? I'd expect there's an element of luck/timing, especially with startups, since funding is so limited.
I think washing your hands thoroughly before clocking out might have forced that issue, but it sounds more like the last straw for you.
Clearly they killed the goose when they unbundled that service contract. It's too bad some of you didn't walk and find a different shop to offer the same deal.
This has been ask throughout the history. And we have come a long way since we were duped that Kings, Queens and Popes have "Divine Authority".
However, today, we have been duped again. And just like in the past, people didn't readily realize it. It will take effort and probably blood.
Here's one good relatively recent example when people were finally fed up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
That is literally exactly what happens, and how too many people in management think. David Noble's Forces of Production is about machine tool shops in the 1960s and 1970s, and is full of accounts just like yours (with details right down to management accusing workers of sabotage), with sources from both the worker and management sides.
I suppose you could apply the value of the diagnostic to the eventual repair, but I'd feel trapped with that kind of arrangement and prefer not to enter it.
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand.
Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
A key theme in cyberpunk is control and means of escaping or disrupting it. Both of which might be physical violence, chemical (qv Case, or the salaryman), informational, or psychological.
At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.
When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked, almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and control over things people were doing away from the office.
This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an instruction manual.
The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it. Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.
For example, I wrote the performance monitoring web application. Each employees manager would rate them 1 (good) to 4 (bad) on 10 criteria (e.g. punctuality, quality of work etc). The scores would be averaged and you'd end up with a 1 to 4 rating. I was asked to change it so that an average score greater than 2.2 would automatically become a 4 and also a manager could arbitrarily lower the overall score if they wished. So someone getting a 1 average could be moved to a 4 if their manager felt like it. This formula was baked in to everyone's employment contract, so legally the company would have had to notify all staff and get their approval to make the change. I raised ethical concerns but was told to implement it and not tell anyone, or risk getting fired. I told people anyway, I knew I wasn't going to be working there much longer.
Employees tend to use work computers for personal communication, browsing and shopping. They can do some fairly personal things on those computers because they don't realize the amount of monitoring, and who looks.
Some countries have laws against looking into personal usage of work computers, like Austria. Most don't.
I work in Infosec, and I believe filtering of web access are absolutely critical to any tech company, so much so I that I consider the lack of basic cyber security as [users can't go to malware.ru or run executables with their normal account] to be incompetent and certainly against industry regulations.
Your work computer is not yours to browse reddit on, unless the company assumes the risk of doing so.
Now, some things like behavioral analytics, emotion detection, micromanaging time and whatnot, that's spooky, costs outweigh benefits, and so on.
The SOC at some company will use monitoring to combat threats, and will not have interest in any sort of micromanaging or other business-related monitoring.
This topic is about use of monitoring for the purpose of micromanaging, not security.
Often times, the person who complains about web filtering at work would be the person who complains about for any reason.
Given that the company in question is a bank, and teams must often be physically separated from each other for compliance and liability reasons, I am highly dubious of that explanation. Only a handful of people outside my immediate team can even access the floor where we’re located, and they certainly couldn’t just plop down at an empty desk and start working. And yet we have the sensors anyway.
And even if that were the reason, the fact that they thought anyone would believe it is concerning in itself.
I think it backfired because the amount of people coming in late/leaving early hasnt gotten better. Tbh, fridays seem worse.
Now that we know we are tracked, people dont even hide it. Sub 40 hour weeks are becoming norm.(assuming you dont have a major issue)
Maybe the "forcing" was employee paranoia?
My partner used to work for a business that had a swipe-in resolution of 15 minutes, so if you were just 30 seconds late, you would be docked 15 minutes of pay. You had to work the unpaid 14.5 minutes or you got your butt kicked out the door. That was a factory job.
Nobody who worked there seemed to have a problem with it. I ended the interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company. Threats were made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.
You can say no to making bad things. Even if you work at Google, you can say no.
Wow. Most would be thrilled that an uninterested candidate is moving on quickly rather than getting the job then immediately quitting or being terminated (both of which are things I have seen).
Trying to threaten a candidate into continuing an interview is just psychotic.
But this... this is the thing that gets me questioning if human nature is just so broken that creating newer and better tech really is a net negative for the world. This kind of story is the one thing that makes me want to wash my hands of the whole lot of it, embrace anarcho-primitivism and go live in a shack in the woods in Montana or something.
Depressing doesn't even start to describe this stuff.
In any case, my prediction is that once these things go mainstream, companies with values that rely on trust as a core element of collaboration instead of surveillance will gain an advantage in the job market. I hope I’m right
i doubt it. surveillance means less stability as there are more reasons to fire people.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...
Of course, Shoshana Zuboff beat me, and very nearly everyone else, to this in the 1970s:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-smart-machine-t...
(Her work began in the 1970s, though the book was published in 1984.)
Zuboff's laws:
1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.
2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.
3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.
Also, this company would repeatedly under-scope projects, go over budget and over the deadline in the design process, and then blame it all on developers when the project was behind schedule and over budget.
Background:
There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.
What really happened:
While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8 hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1 hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00. When a colleague back lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.
The work culture was never worse.
It was great when the goal was "solve the customer's problems and get them online".
When they hired an official "Customer Support Manager", it started being all about metrics and went downhill. "How many calls are you taking an hour" vs "how many problems did you solve".
I hear that one of the large hosting providers here in town even does screenshots of everyone's desktops every 30 seconds to a minute. That's insane. My employer, on the other hand, doesn't care what you're doing in another window as long as it's not illegal and you get your job done.
If that's true to any appreciable degree, that really makes my generation the biggest sellouts there ever were.
If anything it's the people around me in their 40s and 50s who are most cavalier about constantly sharing their location and activities with the world ala Facebook checkins.
These chips are just passive RFID. This actually has been shown to be incredibly insecure; these chips have so little compute (necessarily), that all they can really do is broadcast a number. Walk by someone with a reader, and now you have everything you need to compromise security.
Given that you have to keep the implant super small to be easily injectable, how the hell could you put a GPS on that? You'd need not only the hardware for the GPS, but also a power supply of some kind. GPS is one of the most draining features on your phone. RFID and bluetooth are still the main technologies for consumer asset tracking because they're such a lower power drain.
This article is FUD. I would have a problem having an implant put in too, but it contains no more functionality than an employer issued badge. It's basically just a badge you can't put down. Now, that inserts all sorts of issues, yes, but it's not same as having a GPS or something that I can't put down. My phone is far, far more alarming from a privacy perspective than these are.
>The company has just launched a mobile phone app that pairs the chip with the phone’s GPS, enabling the implantee’s location to be tracked.
The phone app reads the RFID to ensure that the person is at the same location as the phone.
"The company has just launched a mobile phone app that pairs the chip with the phone’s GPS, enabling the implantee’s location to be tracked (...) Could he ever see the company using GPS to track its chipped employees? “No,” he says. “There’s no reason to.”
Maybe the CEO just meant -he- wouldn't ever use that, but to my mind the question makes more sense as asking "Hey, do you plan on putting a GPS on the chip" rather than "Hey, do you plan on actually using this functionality you just built out". But I may just be misunderstanding. That said, the level of technical knowledge of mainstream reporting has...generally not been the best.
Depending on how invasive it is, I wouldn't mind it just for the novelty of the whole thing.
I was vehemently opposed to this on simple grounds -- we already measured everything about the workers' performance that mattered to the organization's bottom line (customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.) -- what did we care _how_ they achieved their results? Measuring the wrong things is a total waste of time and effort. It's a distraction.
Oh yeah, and it's hideous and creepy.
Setting aside the privacy violations of the rest of the article, this part is really depressing for me. I'm reminded of an episode of Mind Field [1] where they steer live cockroaches through a mobile app by connecting a chip to its antennae - the potential application being scouting of buildings, since it's cheaper to use a live cockroach than build a tiny robot.
This to me feels like Amazon are working towards a fully robotic factory worker - they have all the smarts done in software, but for now they need to use a human for the body. Could you imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to be the body of a robot?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXNGvDdkXZE (YouTube Red subscription required, unfortunately)
there's a lot of unwarranted FUD surrounding implantable RFID.
I wouldn't say that. They enable tracking much like a credit/debit card; they provide an unique ID that can be logged by the reading device when you use it.
if i set up a system at home, my implant would be useless in the context of any other system. i am not at risk of being tracked by unknown parties simply by virtue of having an implanted RFID chip.
[1] (the video is loud) https://twitter.com/The_Sass_Hole/status/982519966225305600
It might even be intentionally rejecting weak signals.
Later: "My phone got his RFID. Let's clean him out."
Nope, not anymore. Current UHF RFID tags are able to store enough charge from the RF signal from the reader to have a half-duplex conversation with the reader and do small amounts of computation. See https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:18000:-63:ed-2:v...
Until that happens, I just don't see it being secure.
A few minutes of Googling would have told you that, yes, such things already exist and have for a while. Slap one into a implantable tag and you're done.
And just because the reader in a door lock only responds to a nearby tag doesn’t mean they aren’t detectable from further away if the antennas are bigger.
i apologize for the sarcastic example, but the point i was originally trying to make is just that media doesn't understand implantable RFID and constantly implies that if you get a chip you'll end up in a government database with constantly refreshing latitude and longitude.
But if everyone gets an RFID tag you can be sure their locations end up in a big database the government can track, either because companies roll over each other in their efforts of covering the world with readers or the government placing them itself. Just like the database that records the tower your cell phone is connected to, all the time and basically forever. And you can be sure governments aren’t keeping their hands off that kind of data, they’ll find a reason why they need it.
To me, adding the capability to a watch, fitbit or other such wrist wearable is the far more practical option. Easy to change out if it gets compromised, plus you can build in a switch so that it is only capable of broadcasting when you press a button.
The power of collective bargaining it seems is understood with clarity everywhere in business. Except when it comes to labour suddenly the waters become muddied.
Propaganda against organizing and unions remain at the level of one bad restaurant or bank discrediting the entire idea of restaurants and banks and people with IQ see this as credible. Yet without collective action it is impossible to stop this kind of creep.
Capitalism and free markets is all about choice but working and a job is not a choice for most people. Surviving is a compulsion not a choice. True choice includes the choice not to do something which is where the economic power of choice comes from.
If all companies in a race to the bottom adopt these practices what choice does labour have and them being forced to accepting these conditions is anything but meaningful 'choice'. It's coercion.
Seriously any company doing this is not competent enough to do any kind of meaningful analysis on data of that scale.
How should we compare this kind of upstream oppression--heading off free expression, movement, association before they happen--with more localized forms of assault? More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?
In short, history repeats itself, and "experience is recognising a mistake the second time you've made it."
Sometimes they make new good things, sometimes they repeat bad old things. I call it social mutation.
Just go to you local city council planning meeting and see how gray haired and crazy the NIMBYs are, and they dictate local housing policy.
I don't see the problem here with age. The problem you're describing seems to stem from other social issues, namely nepotism, classism, etc. People living longer isn't going to change that much I suspect; people have had these issues for thousands of years, and if anything, it's much better now than it was centuries ago. There's far more social mobility now than there was in Medieval times.
>Just go to you local city council planning meeting and see how gray haired and crazy the NIMBYs are
I think I already addressed that: age has an effect on the brain, so if we figure out biological immortality, we should also figure out along with that how to eliminate these aging-related problems/diseases.
The other problem you describe there is basically classism, and the ability of locals who gain power to shut others out of power. Again, this was much worse in the past when people didn't live nearly as long. The way to fix it isn't to have people die off early, it's to come up with laws and policies that counteract it.
The way to fix the NIMBYism problem is simple, and they've done something like this in Japan: you remove power from local government to set zoning policy. Obviously, local governments get people like this in power who don't look out for the overall good of society, and instead look to maximize their real estate value through manipulation of zoning, so you strip them of that power and move it to the state or national level. In the Bay Area, this means the state government needs to grow a pair and pass some strict laws about zoning, and severely curtail the ability of local governments to reject development.
You've always had a right to free speech, you sure as hell have never had a right not to be criticized for what you say.
But it's pretty misplaced. Social media companies and the state have more power than ever to control the spread of ideas, and antifa has a street fight now and then.
I am from Europe, and born/lived under communism, poor as hell, with food rations and all, people going to jail, etc and yes,
these dipshits (the Antifa) are nothing but a "my way of the highway" totalitarian movement, which resembles more to a loosely organized fascist gang, than anything else. Silencing and beating up opponents was a favorite tool of both fascists and nazis.
I think that this is insufficiently emphasized.
Personally, I think what's even more importantly forgotten and has led to the rather ridiculous situation on college campuses[1] is that there is no right not to be offended. I would even go so far as to say that such a right would be the opposite of freedom of speech.
[1] e.g. trigger warnings
Free speech is very much about allowing someone to act like a jackass (or worse!) to people with words and ideas.
It doesn't protect those speakers from the repercussions.
Trigger warnings aren't repercussions, however. They're prior restraint, and that's a no-no.
There's a reason why free speech does not apply to fascist movements in most countries and it's illegal to use its symbols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Also, equating authoritarian systems with an anti-authoritarian movement literally named "anti-fascist action" is a bit ridicolous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/05...
That's too simple. Good systems have potential (good and bad). For example, "It went from looking for bad guys to monitoring underground pipes." -https://www.npr.org/2018/05/08/609493403/these-smart-sewers-...
Were you going to suggest we surveil people who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?
We might lose our grip on the world if we slow down - and there's not enough to go around.
"So what if we pollute? We're the cops of the world!"
There is way more to life than this.
This myopic view is the religion of capitalism.
There are plenty of capitalists who don't support this kind of degrading, dehumanizing shit. And for that matter, capitalism doesn't even require corporations at all. It would be more fair to say:
"This myopic view is a disease that infects some organizations in a capitalist economy".
The question is, how do we eradicate the disease without killing the host(s)?
The only way to solve this is regulation. If you don't impose non-negotiable standards on everybody, the ones most willing to bend laws and morals succeed.
I'm sure that happens sometimes, but I don't think it's been demonstrated - not do I think it's true - that companies prosper because they do this kind of stuff. In fact, I'd argue that it's actually self-defeating over a sufficiently long time-scale.
And this is where we, as a community of hackers, need to put energy into doing the "stuff" that makes that sort of behavior self-defeating. We need to be the ones figuring out more clever ways to decentralize things and use all this cool tech we've created to allow individuals greater autonomy, and more ability to proper without requiring the trappings of the big enterprise.
If Coase[1] was right[2], then the main reason "firms" exist is to reduce transaction costs. So the question becomes - how can we use tech to make reduce those same transaction costs, allowing smaller firms (down to the level of the individual, ideally) to proper just as well, without needing to build some byzantine, bureaucratic, behemoth?
The only way to solve this is regulation.
Regulation is just another disease, which is arguably a more dangerous variation of the first. Regulation leads to regulatory capture, franchise agreements, taxpayer subsidized firms that can out compete the unsubsidized ones, ginormous military/industrial contracts, the F-35 debacle, Navy destroyers running Windows, all manners of corruption and artificial monopolies, etc.
> I don't think it's been demonstrated - not do I think it's true - that companies prosper because they do this kind of stuff
I don't think it's because of this always, but it's certainly an advantage for companies that do.
> I'd argue that it's actually self-defeating over a sufficiently long time-scale
How long though, and how many people will have suffered by then? I mean, polluting the environment is self-defeating over a sufficiently long term, but we don't want to let this self-regulation happen because it will come with extinction. We should strive for things being fixed sooner rather than later.
> We need to be the ones figuring out more clever ways to decentralize things and use all this cool tech we've created to allow individuals greater autonomy, and more ability to proper without requiring the trappings of the big enterprise.
I agree 100%.
> If Coase[1] was right[2], then the main reason "firms" exist is to reduce transaction costs.
Oh, thanks for the link. I don't know enough about this to comment.
> Regulation is just another disease, which is arguably a more dangerous variation of the first.
Regulation refers to a setting rules. It's dangerous because the state is powerful, but it can also exist devoid of private interests for this reason. Like the FDA ensuring food is safe, or urban planning ensuring all buildings get water, electricity and other basic services.
> Regulation leads to regulatory capture,
Like running leads to injuries; I mean, if done wrong things will fail.
> franchise agreements,
These sound like regulatory capture.
> taxpayer subsidized firms that can out compete the unsubsidized ones,
Is this necessarily wrong? Subsidized fire departments and public libraries certainly out-perform unsubsidized ones. On certain industries subsidies might not make sense, but if it's an industry where a business model is hard to maintain (like a fire department) then why oppose it? Part of the reason regulation exists is to avoid market failure; sometimes private actors don't suffice.
> ginormous military/industrial contracts, the F-35 debacle, Navy destroyers running Windows
This sounds like government doing business poorly, not like government setting rules for better management and avoiding market failure.
> all manners of corruption and artificial monopolies, etc.
Well, if you have a corrupt government then yeah. There's instances of regulation done well too, though.
That may be true, but they're not the ones in charge at Amazon.
Unfortunately not the ones that matter on a meaningful scale. I can't imagine worker intel (even just the minimum: browsing on work machines, swipe in/out times, etc) is not being gathered at all Fortune 200 companies. These companies have the walk to the trash can calculated down to a quantitative loss in productive output. The solution? Tiny trash and recycling bins directly by your desk. Human asset management has it's tried and true methodologies, just as any other asset class.
Disclaimer: My view is U.S. centric, it is the mecca of global Capitalism.
I look forward to having an employer whom I can help to outperform their overly-sentimental competitors.
Read http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations for more info.
The US has no interest in efficiency, you're mistaking us for Germans. The US has always had an economy based in a combination of slavery, the exploitation of immigrants, the exploitation of the badly educated, and the exploitation of impoverished foreigners through cruel middlemen. As a country that started with slavery, and rolled into the industrial revolution right when slavery was dissolving, it has always expected an input for lightly-skilled physical labor of humans who have no civil rights and can be paid then minimum that it takes to keep them alive.
America doesn't consider a person fully human who isn't at least in management, or doesn't hold a position that requires a university education. The degree of humanity is directly related to the number of people managed, or the cost of the education.
Also by the by your dating life will improve by 500% if you do nothing else than start monitoring your date's emotions better than however you're doing it now. It's the single best thing you can do to start managing literally anyone and anything, including yourself. Do you know how you feel now? I bet until I asked you, you didn't, and now that I did, I bet you realize you're procrastinating doing something. (Not necessarily true, you could be taking a break for a few minutes.)
This is totally true. How do you think Mark Zuckerberg managed to marry Priscilla Chan? He got improved emotional monitoring algorithms in one of his 2011 firmware updates.
/Acknowledging/ emotions may be much more useful, in case that's more along the lines of what you meant...
Great start
> Do you know how you feel now? I bet until I asked you, you didn't
So emotions only exist when they're put into words? Or only emotions that can be described have value?
Emotions are complicated, influenced by many factors, and exist as a composite of conscious and unconscious factors. To think that you can easily monitor emotions in a meaningful way, chart that to be useful data, and alter processes to "improve" emotional scores (whatever that means exactly) is foolhardy indeed.
Emotions exist when they aren't measured. Measuring emotions is hard, even if we directly ask a truthful person, we only get part of the story. Your manager isn't a therapist, nor should they be.