plushpuffin

My experience with the NHS is that it's a way for a community to get free labor out of already overworked students in exchange for an extra line item on their college application. I don't think most of the students involved were genuinely interested in volunteering; we understood that it was a transactional relationship. You would still have to offer something to get students to participate.

It reminds me of the ISIS puzzle orb, an expensive 3D puzzle that seemed to exist just to collect the personal information of people willing to spend lots of money on luxury goods.

http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/12/worst-puzzle-ever.html

If you've got old people who want to talk, can't you connect them with each other and not have to pay people to talk to them? Then you can charge a lower price since it's merely a matchmaking service.

Or is the payment an incentive for someone to be a willing audience to be talked at? I think that paying people is an implicit admission that the benefit of the conversation is pretty one-sided.

Others have noted that the pay/hour is actually pretty reasonable, but unless it's a video call I can see the "volunteers" just going "mm hmm, wow, that's interesting" at every break in the conversation and not actually engaging in the conversation. The more sophisticated volunteers might even set up a soundboard to do this. I have a hard time believing that you'll get a lot of quality conversationalists to sign up.

I found a way to stop the ads on Roku without having to use a PiHole or other DNS filtering. Not sure if I should share it in case Roku engineers are browsing and fix my method.

It's hard to overstate just how bad the Windows 10 UI is compared to 7. Just look at this example of how Windows 7 visually shows you the differences between the various desktop stretching/fitting options, and Windows 10 leaves you guessing:

http://www.wwddfd.com/plushpuffin/personalize-desktop-7vs10....

Block the account whose tweet is being promoted, and/or the account promoting it (sometimes there will be tiny text saying "promoted by"). You'll never see tweets from that brand again, whether promoted or unpromoted.

After a few weeks of this you'll get some pretty strange tweets from really obscure brands. You will however still regularly see promoted tweets from financial services companies, because there are apparently an infinite number of them.

In the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan, people deal with this by editing their memory every once in a while so that every experience feels fresh. One guy even edits his personality so he becomes obsessed with something for a random amount of time and then abruptly loses interest.

This is the setting for a sci-fi novel by Frederik Pool called The World at the End of Time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

You can get a much better deal than that. Sign up for Curiosity Stream using a promoted bundle link and you get Nebula free with it. It's only $12/year this way.

Here's one from the LegalEagle guy: https://curiositystream.com/legaleagle/

Oh, apparently this was also on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26466435

I read an article recently arguing that his reputation is overblown:

The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking - Prospect Magazine - https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/stephen-hawking-...

Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?

A few years ago, they wouldn't have. Now they would, and should. The GOP has escalated and the Democrats need to respond in kind by expanding the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, to undo the damage caused by years of Republican obstruction which prevented Obama from appointing hundreds of judges.

Please stop pretending that this game of escalating stakes and norm-breaking is somehow on the Democrats. We've been watching Mitch McConnell and we remember what he's done.

The Senate has traditionally accepted the president's nominee assuming s/he was qualified. Garland had previously been out forward by the GOP as an example of a qualified and respected judge. And let's not forget that had Clinton won, the GOP was determined to keep that seat on the court empty for 4 years. They said as much. And when they refused to even consider Garland they also said that their newly made-up rule would apply if the shoe was on the other foot. They clearly didn't mean that, and the rationale for confirming Barrett that you are parroting above is just that, a rationale. An excuse. Don't pretend the rest of us are stupid. We know exactly why your position on this has changed and it has everything to do with the fact that your side has the temporary power to do what it wants.

It's funny that you lament the suppression of class-action lawsuits without considering why they are in decline. They are in decline because corporations want them to go away.

The scenario you advocate is:

1. Unions are outlawed.

2. Class-action lawsuits are fully restored.

3. Employees seek redress from their employer by filing a class-action lawsuit for every instance of abuse.

This is not a stable scenario. You can't just set it up and expect it to stay that way. Laws change. Corporations delight in changing laws for their own benefit. The inevitable and near-immediate result of this:

1. Corporations lobby the government to make class-action lawsuits (in general, or just specifically workers vs their employer) illegal, or to allow employment contracts to require forced arbitration.

2. Corporations rewrite their employment contracts to require forced arbitration, which always favors the corporation because it has more resources than a single person and is the one paying the arbitrator. I can guarantee you they will include a clause like this even if it's illegal, because who's going to stop them?

3. Corporations can now deal with workers one-on-one, which is a recipe for abuse.

4. Any worker who agitates to start a new class-action lawsuit is summarily dismissed for violating their employment contract.

5. In the interim period before class-action lawsuits by workers are neutered and made impossible, corporations will simply drag the cases through the court system slowly, accepting the ongoing lawsuits as a cost of doing business. They will always by definition have more resources and more ability to absorb this cost than the workers.

The only way workers can exert any power over their employer is by organizing and striking, because that's the only way to comprehensively disrupt the corporation's capital flow and bring them to the bargaining table before the workers run out their savings. The end result of this strike must always be the formation of a union, or the strike is ultimately pointless. A union must be formed so that the employer knows any attempt to abuse its workers will result in an immediate response which hurts their bottom line. A class-action lawsuit takes years to play out, and workers don't have that long!

The formation of a union requires the following:

1. The corporation recognizes the union and agrees to deal with it by signing a contract.

2. The corporation agrees not to retaliate against union members for union activities.

3. The union is allowed to conduct its activities and collect fees to pay administrative costs, legal fees, and for political activism (to defend its right to exist against corporate lobbying).

3. The contract must always stipulate that the corporation will not hire non-union workers. Allowing this would be a death knell for the union because the lack of such a clause means the corporation will just hire non-union workers in the future until the union has been starved of funds and collapses.

These are just basic facts and inference supported by the history of the labor movement. Your assertion that workers hate the fees and hate the politicians supported by the unions is in dire need of citations and references. Your entire post seems less like a logical, well-thought-out argument and more like blatant anti-union propaganda.

I'm sorry but that is just insane. What about the company employing the workers? What about the owner/CEO/board members of that company? Will they be similarly restricted?

The whole point of the union is collective bargaining and providing a united front, and they need to be able to defend their right to exist in the political arena. If they can't make political contributions, it won't be long before they are outlawed. It's not like they wield disproportionate influence, anyway. They are far outspent by the capital class, as evidenced by the gradual erosion of union power and the passage of anti-union laws such as "right to work" in recent decades.

You should read the Beggars trilogy by Nancy Kress. It's about a world that gradually devolves into just that.

I think one of the big problems with trying to predict and constrain corporations is that they all basically have OCD. They are obsessed with whatever it is they do and they task all their agents with figuring out how to optimize and achieve that one thing (or multiple related things if they're organized into divisions).

While the corporation might not possess superintelligence, trying to thwart it it when its actions are harmful to society is like having a crazy neighbor. You just want to relax when you're home from work; you can't dedicate all your free time and attention to constantly monitoring and pushing back against someone who is on a crusade to achieve a petty, limited goal and seemingly has no other interests to occupy their time.

I read that the T2 chip really messed with some audio hardware by saturating the USB 2.0 hub. That might be one thing?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/19/pro-audio-glitch-...

OK, let's nail this down. Who are the insurgents, and what is their goal?

A great example involves marsupials. I read once that marsupial evolution is restricted by their need to be able to crawl/climb into their mother's pouch. So, it's highly unlikely that there will ever be a hoofed marsupial.

You just write REFUSED on the unopened letter. It's best to scribble out your address to prevent their automated system from simply re-delivering it to you. I do this on postcards as well (which cannot be opened by definition) and they will take those. If it's first class mail they'll return it to the sender, otherwise they will take it back and discard/recycle it.

I spent 5 years trying to get AT&T Time Warner to stop sending monthly ads for their cable internet. I finally got someone to admit that they don't maintain a "do not mail" list and that every other CSR I spoke to had lied to me. What finally worked was threatening a lawsuit and restraining order. The ads stopped immediately.

You are incorrect, but only technically. You can opt out of EDDM at the DMA website, but the whole chain of custody for handling the opt-out is so convoluted that it's effectively pointless.

What happens is that the DMA maintains an opt-out list which the mailers are supposed to check. Then they add your address to a cover sheet called a facing slip which they pass to the local USPS when they hand off the ads. The USPS is then supposed to give those addresses to the mail carrier and the mail carrier is supposed to check it when delivering the ads.

In reality, since EDDM is intended for blanket coverage of local ads, practically no local advertisers bother or are even aware of the opt-out list, and even if they did the mail carrier will probably ignore the list, so signing up has little effect.

The best way to "opt out" is to be a dick to your mail carrier. Put a sign on your mailbox that says "NO EDDM: unaddressed mail will be refused" and then follow through on your threat by forcing your carrier to take back all EDDM ads the next day. My mail carrier quickly realized that there was no point delivering EDDM ads to my house.

That was in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American: Evolution Encoded.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047680?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/12330/12626747/my...

Also, Best Buy used to have an internal website at their stores with higher prices so they could claim their in-store prices were the same as their website prices

https://consumerist.com/2007/02/best-buys-secret-employee-on...

It absolutely does mention this, in language almost identical to yours. From the article:

> In theory, e-commerce is good for the environment... Instead of a neighborhood worth of people driving to stores in their personal cars to shop, one truck can deliver everything. But that calculus is changing.

They allow your workplace to remotely administer your work account without giving them full control over your whole device.

Personally, I think even without Internet Explorer ruining Do-Not-Track (which I also think Microsoft torpedoed on purpose by making it the default), the tracking companies wouldn't have respected it. They were looking for an excuse not to comply with DNT after promising Congress they would self-regulate, and IE gave them a fig-leaf to go back on their word.

You can install a different home app. I use Nova Launcher, which lets you customize the search bar or remove it entirely.