Hence the new job. My current colleagues swear like sailors, bitch moan and complain about every aspect of the job, and a few of them just refuse to do things the right way out of sheer bloody mindedness. And the morale on the worst day here is at least 3x better than the aspirations of the call center. Plus I am getting a wage that I still don’t feel I have actually earnt compared to the big company. In this one particular aspect of my existence, life is very good.

Depends how persistent they are. I was at the end of my rope after a day of pressure, bloody corporate culture mentality. Current job I said “No thanks” and they went “Cool”.

I have gambled $10 in my life. Less than half of that being my own money. Had an uncle who tried to convince me to give it a go and after 3 $2 bets he gave up. Every workplace I have ever worked I have had to go through the same explanations that I find gambling distasteful and don’t want to participate, got a lot of flack from a manager once for pointing out that statistically buying a lottery ticket doesn’t significantly alter your odds of winning. Hell buying a ticket once a week for your entire life doesn’t do much to change the odds.

Why would tech bros target a constrained market like the disability industry when they could target the much wider market of perverts? Honestly of there was any hope of these sorts of HMI devices being designed, manufactured or used ethically I would love them, tech enthusiast type I am. I literally bought in the first batch of the HTC Dream that reached my state, and bought the first Samsung Galaxy S (the first generation) that was sold in my state, I was the quintessential early adopter, really wanted to buy Google Glass back in the day. Now I am not and cannot be that person anymore, I see the privacy violations, the damage that unconstrained techo-capitalist manipulation is wreaking on our society and I have to be slow and measured.

These pervert glasses are bad news, and the pervert isn’t necessarily the person wearing them. If I was blind I would still get the ick from the idea of strapping a device to my face that allowed a techbro to filter and interpret reality, there’s at least a few cautionary tales worth of material in that, see episode 5 season 3 of Black Mirror for one example.

Here’s the thing though, all that data they are generating is being processed and some portion of it retained. It’s cool that they have chosen accessibility over privacy, if they lived a life that kept them isolated that would be entirely their choice. But they are taking this invasive spy tech into society, people who don’t want to be closely surveilled are not getting a choice.

I have not been into a Coles store since the Palantir stuff was revealed, because I get to make a choice. There’s an IGA I don’t go to because they are pretty sneaky about their AI surveillance disclosure (you can only find the notice in the back corner of the store). I started shopping for hardware at Mitre 10 not Bunnings when they were doing their AI thing. I opt out when and where I can, but what do I do when some brings that surveillance tech into my workplace, when they take it to my kids sports games, when I walk past them on the street. I have endless sympathy for the situation they find themselves in but there is no divorcing the technology from the invasion of personal privacy.

Until we get those rights hammered out, fines in the millions of dollars for these shitful companies that are constantly spying on us would be a good start, I see this becoming a more and more polarising matter as time goes by.

Hell even if we had a company backing these glasses that didn’t want to use the incidental data generated by their operation, how long would it be before they had a competitor who would offer a more featureful set at a lower price and drive them out of business simply by offering a better deal by turning people with a disability into ambulatory Flock cameras?

It can be fucking scary how short-sighted the average person can be. I had a discussion with someone recently who lambasted me because I told him that Tasmania shouldn’t be spending multiple billion dollars on a stupid sports stadium when we are struggling to afford critical improvements to our education and health systems.

His response, "My kids grown up and I don’t get sick. I’d rather watch the Footy than waste money improving our hospital. "

So we will get a white elephant stadium that he will likely outlive, before he winds up in a shitty underfunded aged care facility, with a skeleton crew for staffing because Tasmania is suffering a critical shortage of young people have left for a more prosperous state, bitching about how he deserves better while actively voting against anyone that might give that to him.

On the one hand I get where the firefighters are coming from… On the other hand if they think one nation would piss on them if they were on fire…

This is the problem with having a duopoly and a bunch of racist fascist who people think are the third choice. The Liberals don’t give a fuck, PHONeys will give a fuck right up until Gina tells them not to then they will turn tail and bolt, if Labor aren’t going to do the right thing then no one with any clout will.

They should probably endorse the Greens, but they won’t cause all the true blue Stralyans would rather die than vote for a bunch of filthy hippies, regardless of how much they agree with them. Greens are usually to dysfunctional to do much damage, at least if the Tasmanian ones are any indication of nationwide calibre.

Uh yeah, it’s humans doing it using addictive design features. The design features are just a force multiplier for the intent to harm that flows from Zuckerberg through the rest of the organisation.

I’m in Tasmania we have already had Firmus ignoring planning conditions, we need regulation so tight that the slightest breach results in people (or CEOs I’d accept either) spend a lot of time in prison. We need to make the current round of monorail salesmen sweat blood at every opportunity.

Was this infographic not meant to be read in the context of forecasting? The article states that this story is based upon Sydney’s water authority planning, I didn’t read it as current figures? Seems more pressing to me to be planning for the future, not waiting till it arrives then trying to mitigate the world of problems we are in.

I think they prefer Physically Conservative.

So is it unwanted for me to point out its about safety? Flocks tend to confuse predators and so by being part of a group they decrease their odds of being lunch when an attack happens. Same reason fish tend to school although smarter predators use that against them.

Democratic Anarchy, it is a system that would rely on a couple of generational leaps in computers and mind machine interfaces before we could even aspire to it. Nowhere near as appealing as the Culture would be, but also only dependent on moderately Clarke tech computers not massively Clarke tech.

Anyway I’m not defeatist, more just realistic. This guy would fall pretty squarely into the capitalist bootlicking Libertarian camp. He only really responds to violence (or the threat thereof) as motivation, in other words your typical boomer small business owner. He is never going to comply without some form of threat to back things up.

Its great to be idealistic, but I sincerely doubt we will see change in my life time, or that of my kids. We as a species are wired to listen to the ape that shrieks the loudest too much.

My example? That there are people who refuse to act rationally or reasonably? This was someone who needed an intervention from an authority to motivate him to act in a way that cost him nothing but that he was ideologically opposed to.

Governments are always going to have a strong advantage against other frameworks that seek to decentralise power, trying to overthrow a centralised power structure is likely to be extremely violent and bloody. We aren’t there yet.

I have read Alastair Reynolds and I would love to be a Demarchist, but I don’t see that being feasible in the forseeable future.

But we kinda do. Because you can’t expect people to act reasonably or rationally.

I know a guy, let’s call him Bob, who got a warning from the police for aggressively looming over a man at the supermarket who was wearing a mask and trying to maintain healthy social distance.

Because Bob didn’t believe in masks or social distancing he percieved that behaviour as the other person being judgemental of him. When the other guy, rather reasonably, pointed out that he has cancer and didn’t want Bob, who was wearing his mask over his chin at the time, to be so close to him, the confrontation was on.

Bob still maintains to this day that he was just standing up for his rights as an Australian…

He is also firmly of the belief that Anthony Albanese is a traitor to the country and that John Howard is the best Prime Minister we have ever had…

I sometimes look at the ideological splits in regional areas and wonder if these people are being led to irrational hatred of renewables to make sure that the early movers reap the most benefit. Surely that last stick in the mud core group of farmers are going to see far less yield off their solar projects than the ones who have siezed the initiative. I wonder how many anti-solar pollies have family that have already pounced and don’t want to see their profits take a hit once every man and his dog is feeding power into the grid.

I always want to ask, “If these are the talented go getters you imply… Why is their passive income potential being capped a bad thing? Couldn’t they just shift away from buying heaps of property and shifting their holdings into trusts to reduce their tax bill and move towards starting more businesses and new enterprise?”

I literally know people who have shut down successful businesses because they could make more money for less work as professional land lords, so how is the current (or former) structure incentivising business ventures?

I have it on good authority that cost of living pressures and inflation are entirely attributable to the Labor government and Anthony Albanese in particular.

According to all the business owners I know he inherited an economy that was running like clockwork and drove it in to the ground with his unfair and unAustralian spending on things that business neither wants nor needs.

Also he is punishing landlords for their success.

Additionally if he goes after trusts they are convinced that every successful entrepreneur in the country will leave and take their money with them.

They must be telling the truth right? They get all their talking points from a select handful of investment bankers who are fearless truth tellers after all…

In an ideal world Epic would be doing so badly that Tim Sweeney was reduced to promising to personally provide blowjobs if people would just open an account. Unfortunately Fortnite means they can afford to just buy their way into a market position no matter how shitty they are.

Yeah I commented on the post without even delving in to the article. Turns out my knee jerk reaction was absolutely pin point accurate huh? I’ll be honest though, I haven’t created an Epic Games account despite years of them offering bribe free games, I wasn’t going to magically become a convert now they have given up on human developers.