partial_accumen

These were horrible cameras that sold like crazy back then. Because a diskette only held 1.44MB and the write speed of floppies was so slow, Sony compresses the hell out of the images to that you can fit a higher number of images on a diskette and so that they write to the diskette quick enough to take the next picture.

The result was really poor quality images out of these on the settings that everyone used.

I’m not sure I’d call it a “bug”. It can be exploited to obtain tax breaks, which benefits the “make money” primary goal.

It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.

Yes exactly, policy making at the government level, not at the corporate level as the author was suggesting.

To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”.

Under capitalism, yes they are.

One of their primary functions is to employ people.

I’d argue under capitalism, that isn’t even a secondary function. Employing people may be tertiary at best.

If Intel had trotted out Chip and then announced it would be creating a universal basic income scheme based on the savings the company was amassing by using Chip, then I’d be clapping along with the audience. As it stands, it just seems like bad taste during a difficult time.

I’m not sure the author of the article has a realistic understanding of Intel’s role or ability to affect change public policy.

The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts.

Fashies also have vastly different perverted definitions for all kinds of things like “freedom” and “peace”, but I’m not adopting their definitions of those either. I’m not sure where you’re going with this unless you’re saying @tfm@europe.pub is a fascist, but I don’t think you are saying that.

Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.

You’re using a different definition of “echo chamber” than I’ve ever heard of. What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion. If differing views are being introduced its, by definition, not an echo chamber.

An echo chamber is when only one set of opinions are voiced, and all responses are in support of that opinion, hence the “echo” portion of the term.

Well, he’d finally have to pay taxes on that then.

the brand would continue to be tainted for years.

Every GOP accusation is an admission. Where is the money going? Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.

The hell is an implicit security arrangement??

Faith based security

I don’t think the “Harlem Shake” had commercial interests. Who was making money off of that?

I don’t get it. You’re going to have to explain that one to me.

Well without VC cash injection many tech startups would simply die early. No one forces a company to take VC money. All recipients do it willingly to themselves.

I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

You’re proving my original point. Staying at a single employer for years, and you’ll get minuscule raises irrespective of the level of your efforts. Further, you get a sham of job security. When tough times come (as I’ve seen three cycles in IT), layoffs can come and take your job anyway. Without having built up a war chest of savings to live on, your living situation and that of your family is at risk.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

You’re trying to fix employers. You’re welcome to go that route. In the original article Doctorow posited that “vocational awe” was the reason IT people put up with such conditions. Apparently that’s true for some. However, I also know it was not true of others who preferred to make the money they needed to eventually stop working for someone else.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization).

If an org, under union influence, would do 15% to 400% salary increases year over year for their entire company/department, they’d likely go bankrupt. Yet that was possible on an individual level without a union in place. I didn’t really mention it before but employers that treated their workers poorly were many times an asset to this method. That bad behavior drove away workers, meaning the bad employers would have to increase their salary offerings much higher to attract a worker to join even with the bad behaving employer. It also meant that the IT worker, who may not have been entirely qualified, would would have a shot at getting the position (and become qualified on the job). Once that that worker is qualified (after the year or two), they can take that knowledge and experience and jump ship to a good quality employer, gaining yet another with a big raise. The worker also just collapsed 5 to 10 years of slow career growth into 1 or 2 years.

I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

I’m guessing those quotes are about salary gains across a the entire company/department. This was nearly mercenary-mindset IT work. As in:

• Get in with the raise
• Learn the next thing you need
• Work the thing for a bit until you know it and have the experience and expertise at that employer
• Get out

Rinse repeat.

None of that is assisted with a collectivist union mindset or union implemented rules. Please correct me if I get any of the following union benefit bullet points wrong. As I understand it, the union would do everything to undo that situation. They’d:

• work to normalize pay across workers fairly.
• emphasize a proper work/life balance
• enforce conflict resolution with strong worker advocacy
• encourage/provide training across the company/department for continued competency among everyone
• establish rigid rules for promotion

IT has been a raging river, but if you were able to navigate it, you’d get to the end very quickly. You’d certainly come out with some cuts and bruises though. If getting to the end (comfortable money in our case) is what you were looking for, then it was the fastest way to it.

Yeah, right now end of life EV batteries are great for making your own power storage but that’s a level of diy beyond what 95% of people are willing or able to do

End of life EV batteries are great for grid-scale operators doing power storage, but I highly recommend against homeowners use them this way. Not just because they are complex DIY projects as you point out, but because the EV batteries that are aging out of car use are NMC chemistry. These are great for high density power storage, which you want in a car, but they are susceptible to thermal runaway if they get too hot. The original Tesla Powerwall and Powerwall 2 also used these same chemistry batteries. I wouldn’t want these in my house. However, in a utility grid scale? Sure, they won’t be anywhere near people so in the unlikely event they do catch fire its a property problem, not a lost human life problem.

Shhh! We’re releasing that accuracy update in the next version of the product. We need to sell through our existing inventory of the less accurate ones.

If you are in the HR department call your legal department. If you are not in the HR department, call HR.

I have a competing technology that is nearly as accurate. For only $50 I’ll send you this device that you will have unlimited license usage rights to. While not 53% accurate like my competitor, its proven by scientific studies to be 50% accurate. I also offer volume discounts if you buy 10 the price drops to only $45 per device. Sign up now!

Assuming that the windmill is twice as efficient as every other windmill and can extract 70% of that wind energy, we can estimate that your windmill will output roughly 35 watts of energy on average, enough to slow-charge a laptop, for a total of about 25 kWh per month.

And while this hypothetical example gives the best case scenario for home wind provided in our discussion, I can give you the real world data from a residential solar array. I’m one step away from Seattle’s solar radiance. I just looked at my home solar data. Last month (March), I generated 36.3kWh from a single 405W rated panel for the month. This is calculated by the total monthly solar power generated divided by the number of panels I have on my roof. I can also tell you March is not a good month for solar in my northern state. During my best month (June) last year I generated 59kWh from the same single 405w rated panel.