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curryst commented on The return of the 10-minute eviction   washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/BayAreaEscapee
southerntofu · 4 years ago
> The tenants he ushered outside each day into their first moments of homelessness were often inconsolable, or defiant, or suicidal, or mentally ill, or violent and aggressive, but Lennie was calm. “You have to take your own emotions out of it,” he’d told colleagues during one national training. “It’s our job to carry out the court order.”

> Lennie had done more than 300 evictions since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal moratorium expired in early August

It's super convenient for our corporate overlords that they can count on such psychopaths to execute orders nazi-style without even a glipse of empathy. The question is how can we as a society find any such situation acceptable? The empty dwellings outnumber homeless people at least two to one (probably more) and yet a State religion/delirium called private property forces people to be homeless.

Think you're squashing bugs hard to make a living when you review your git log? This person squashes about 15 "bugs" (that's us) a day for the profit of housing speculators/mafia. Such efficiency taken in the wrong direction: only police abolition can lead to better justice on this planet.

curryst · 4 years ago
I'd get behind that, but it won't happen at this point.

I would like to see abolishment of speculative property ownership. You either use it, or it gets given to someone else.

You can't hold it and wait for the price to go up. You get a year, maybe two, and then it becomes public domain to anyone that will use it.

I find it absurd that people are born and indoctrinated to believe that because someone else says they own this bit of land that they've never used, no one else can use it.

People are literally born homeless. Their parents may have a home, and they may let their children use it, but they are born without anywhere they can legally be without someone else's permission.

curryst commented on France latest to slap Clearview AI with order to delete data   techcrunch.com/2021/12/16... · Posted by u/arkadiyt
tempnow987 · 4 years ago
Wishing something is true doesn't make it true.

How many more times do these bodies need to pass "orders" that don't result in any action before they come up with a new approach?

The US does not have GDPR. Period. Flat out. Full stop. Once you understand that, things will make a lot more sense.

And no, extraterritoriality means absolute zero here. That french citizen traveling in America? Heads up, US Customs does not have to respect to GDPR. Neither does the walmart he shops at. Neither does Amazon if he orders something online.

Claiming they do is weird, that's not how it works.

Before we are snarking about clearview having to come up with new arguments, let's evaluate how well their current arguments are working?

Pretty darn well.

And my guess is the US government, rather than shutting them down, will PAY them to do their stuff, ESPECIALLY on overseas nationals. This is exactly the type of big government "anti terrorism" surveillance style databases govts love.

curryst · 4 years ago
> Heads up, US Customs does not have to respect to GDPR.

Customs is part of a sovereign nation. What customs can and can't do has precious little bearing on what companies can and can't do. It's basically irrelevant.

> Neither does the walmart he shops at. Neither does Amazon if he orders something online.

Sure, if both are OK with not being able to operate in the EU _and_ believe the US government will take the political heat for refusing to enforce the EUs laws.

We also don't strictly _have_ to extradite criminals to other countries. But we usually do.

International law functions nothing like domestic law, because there is no higher power to say "no, you can't do that". If the EU can get the US to punish US companies through diplomacy, force or trades, then that's how things work. If they can't, then it's not how things work.

My guess is that the US won't shield them. It's not critical for US defense, largely redundant with data available from Facebook, and we're already fighting to keep our existing tech giants abroad. Clearview is more useful as a sacrificial pawn than trying to get it crowned a queen.

curryst commented on Where Are the Workers? Millions Are Sick with ‘Long Covid.’   barrons.com/articles/labo... · Posted by u/throwaway81523
egberts1 · 4 years ago
Still no uptick in Social Security Disability application.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html

I’m calling “bullshit”.

curryst · 4 years ago
Yeah, I can't read it, but "millions" sound rather high to me. In 2019 there were 157 million American workers. That's expected to increase by 2 million in 2022, to 159 million workers. The number of workers is higher than it was, although perhaps that growth is lower than it would normally be, I don't know.

"Millions" does imply full percentage points of the workforce have long COVID. That sounds high to me, because it either means long COVID is pretty common or that a lot of people have gotten COVID.

It's entirely possible we're over-diagnosing it. The symptoms of long COVID overlap with practically every common condition out there, not to mention a lot of them can be stress induced. There's been a lot of stress going around, too.

I don't know if we'd expect to see an uptick in Social Security just yet. Unemployment was covering people up until fairly recently, and I believe is much easier to get.

More generally, I doubt the government will make it eligible for disability, or they'll limit it to extremely severe cases. I don't know that we can fiscally afford to not only lose whole digit percentages of the workforce, but to pay out benefits as well. I won't even pretend to be an economist, so I could be wrong, but it's not intuitive we can run the money printer like this in the face of declining productivity due to people dropping out of the workforce.

We're still not done yet, Omicron looks likely to infect a lot of people, including those who are vaccinated (and especially those who aren't boosted). If long COVID is as prevalent as the WSJ believes, letting people not work will be a big problem, and paying benefits will be unthinkable. If we're at millions of people now, we'll easily be at tens of millions by the time Omicron makes the rounds.

curryst commented on SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers   thenationaldesk.com/news/... · Posted by u/NoRagrets
dumbfoundded · 4 years ago
A lot wrong with your statement. Weed isn't imported. It's grown domestically. Here was a billion dollar field in California that got caught (1). There are many more.

The next part of slave labor is just false. Trimmers I met were earning $500 to $1,000 a day. $100 per lb trimmed was pretty common. If anything, creating an import model will guarantee we use slaves. Columbia exports cannabis legally to Europe already with a lot less worker protections than in the US.

(1) https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-county-sheriff-m...

curryst · 4 years ago
> Trimmers I met were earning $500 to $1,000 a day. $100 per lb trimmed was pretty common.

I don't believe this, the numbers don't line up. If it's wet, doing 5 pounds in a day is reasonable, but nobody's going to pay you $100/pound for it. 5 pounds of wet is a little over a pound dried, so $500 is around a quarter of the total sale price. I just don't believe anyone is paying that much for something a child with safety scissors could do (albeit much worse). I also don't believe that growers wouldn't simply buy automatic bud trimmers. They're not as good, but I would be willing to bet that consumers would be happy to not pay the apparent 25% trimmer markup in exchange for slightly less pretty buds.

If that's dry bud, the price is reasonable, but there's no way in hell anyone is trimming 5-10 pounds of dry bud a day. That's like a rolling curbside garbage bin full of weed.

I don't think they're using slave labor, but given the number of people I've heard wanting to do it so they can work with weed, I'd be surprised if they're paying significantly more than minimum wage. I'd wager it's very close to $15/hour + perks, where "perks" mostly means "all the free weed you can smoke".

curryst commented on An engineer fighting Texas’s ban on Israel boycotts   theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/sofixa
codingdave · 4 years ago
This is exactly why public schools have accessibility requirements for any of their communications. Take it to the school board, and if they do not help, take it to a lawyer.

The only way corporations will take control of our society is if we let them. I am continually amazed by how much people let corporations and attorneys bully them. There is this pervasive attitude that they control everything and it is dangerous to fight back. If that attitude continues to prevail, then yes - that is when we will have serious problems.

curryst · 4 years ago
The other poster is right, I can't see any way this is an accessibility issue.

You could try pushing back with a First Amendment complaint. Say you have a sincere and deeply held belief that using Facebook is wrong, and that forcing you to use it violates your First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court has held that beliefs do not need to be strictly religious in order to be protected. It's the same route anti-vaxxers take.

I still wouldn't hold my breath. You might win, but your children will already be in college by the time it's all sorted.

curryst commented on SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers   thenationaldesk.com/news/... · Posted by u/NoRagrets
kortilla · 4 years ago
People make alcohol in prison toilets. That’s not really far from “throw seeds in the ground”.
curryst · 4 years ago
It's also not really safe to drink. Probably unlikely to kill you, but you're not going to get any assurances E. coli isn't in there.

It's pretty hard to mess up growing weed bad enough to hurt someone, unless you poison yourself with pesticides on accident (which aren't really necessary at least at the personal scale). If something bad happens, it's almost always to the plant.

curryst commented on Supersonic Trebuchet   hackaday.com/2021/12/01/s... · Posted by u/wyrm
SV_BubbleTime · 4 years ago
So with that in mind, his standing behind the loaded device, was akin to him muzzling himself.

I would think the four rules of firearm safety would apply to supersonic trebuchets.

curryst · 4 years ago
I would think a prototype supersonic trebuchet would come with a lot more rules than a standard firearm.

They would be much closer to the safety precautions for a prototype firearm, which includes things like being behind a blast shield because there is no safe zone if it fails catastrophically.

I don't even trust that the sides of that thing are safe from shrapnel or the rubber bands whipping parts around. If one side of the machine gave way for some reason, it could absolutely swing sideways. That tiny string at the end is probably going fast enough to slice through skin and veins, and it's concerningly close to neck height.

He should have parked his car off to the side and used the engine block for cover. The paneling of the car will stop minor wood shrapnel, and the engine block should be able to stop any metal pieces that come off. Ballistic barriers would be better, but at least you're not standing there tempting fate with your squishy and easily separable limbs.

curryst commented on Supersonic Trebuchet   hackaday.com/2021/12/01/s... · Posted by u/wyrm
technobabbler · 4 years ago
At a certain point, wouldn't the tiny fast pebble just drill through the fort and leave a small, hot hole in its wake? Like a big neutrino?
curryst · 4 years ago
I'm a little doubtful. I think your standard pebble would vaporize from the friction with the air. A pebble certainly wouldn't survive re-entry into the atmosphere, so there's an upper bound on the speed before it disintegrates. If you made a vacuum between you and the wall, it might work?

One reason to use larger projectiles is to deliver similar amounts of energy without having to fight things like that.

curryst commented on Anthem Blue Cross breach notification [pdf]   oag.ca.gov/system/files/C... · Posted by u/arkadiyt
JshWright · 4 years ago
Most doctors offices are effectively overworked and understaffed small businesses. Shifting all that support to the phone would not be reasonable, from a workload perspective.
curryst · 4 years ago
Just to expand on that, patients aren't the only ones with a legitimate reason to access that data. Insurance companies need copies as well, so they would still want some kind of mass-data portal even if customers don't use it. If you change doctors, they want copies of your old medical records. If you see a specialist, if you go to the hospital, etc, etc. Pharmacies might call and ask if they think there's something weird about a prescription.

Direct patient contacts are a vanishingly small percentage of records requests for a doctor. Doctors could likely handle those via phone, but it doesn't solve the issue of needing an EMR.

curryst commented on Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix flight search app   flyertalk.com/forum/33719... · Posted by u/hnburnsy
deanCommie · 4 years ago
Something I never understood about Google's 20% time concept...do people at Google not have deadlnes?

Like it's just assumed that every project estimate will be added 20% to account for 20% time?

Like it's great when you're a market gorilla dominating the competition in search, but how does it work when you're #3 in the cloud and trying desperately to compete with Azure and AWS from behind. Do those people get 20% time too? Seems like a recipe for always staying #3...

curryst · 4 years ago
Google owns the stuff you make during 20% time, iirc, so they use it as a feeder for new products.

Allegedly (I can't verify, but can't see why they'd lie) GMail, Google Maps and AdSense were all born out of people's 20% time and Google just swooped in and turned them into full on products.

It might be worth staying #3 in cloud if they could pull off products like that again. I can't help but notice that those products are all old, though.

u/curryst

KarmaCake day1270September 12, 2014View Original