“I shot a note to LinkedIn and said please remove this, and they said, well, we have to contact that person and arbitrate this,” he said. “They gave the guy two weeks and he didn’t respond, so they took it down. But that doesn’t scale, and there needs to be a mechanism where an employer can contact LinkedIn and have these fake profiles taken down in less than two weeks.”
When I “went to college” at Purdue, I stayed in the dorm all 4 years. What can I say? I liked the convenience of someone else cleaning the bathrooms and doing the cooking. For freshman year — and second half of senior year, because I had such a light schedule — I worked in the kitchen, for fun and profit. I usually ran the grill and deep fryers. I have a knack for keeping track of time in my head, and I almost never (like, only once) ever burned food.
After working a supper shift, everyone had a cleaning job. If you ran the grill, of course, it was to clean it. They had these “bricks” to help with the job. (I’ve attached a screenshot of one from Amazon, but that price seems high. I’m sure you could do much better from some commercial kitchen supply place.) Anyway, the first time I had to do it, it was explained to me by a shift supervisor that this was a hard job, and it took most people 2-3 hours to do, and they gave me one of these griddle bricks to help.
The brick they gave me was worn down, and literally caked with grease. All the little pores that you can see in the picture were clogged. The front of the thing looked smooth. I started scraping with it, and noticed that, while the thing was very hard, it was also brittle. I noticed that you could “crunch” the brick if you leaned on the edge. This would expose a new “row” of pore edges to actually scrape gunk off the grill. Once I figured this out, I used a spatula to shave off all the clogged part of the brick, and figured out a technique of very slowly rotating the brick, while putting all my weight on the edge. This move kept gradually exposing a new set of “teeth” as I worked the brick, and cleaned the grill. In direct opposition of what I had just been told, it worked amazingly well.
On my first attempt, I think I finished in about 45 minutes. The supervisor was incredulous. But she looked at the grill, and admitted she had never seen it so clean, and I clocked out.
The next time I cleaned the grill, I had mastered my technique, and I was done in 15 minutes. However, I had used up a good portion of the brick. About half to three quarters was ground off during the process. I figured, hey, that’s what they were for, right? Wrong.
The supervisor was angry this time. These bricks cost a dollar apiece! I couldn’t just use one up every night! Granted, minimum wage at the time was $3.15, so this seemed like a bigger deal then. But I just asked, would they rather pay me for 3 hours of work, and spend $10 on labor, or pay me $1 for 20 minutes, and ¢75 for the brick? Well, at least she could see the math, and left me alone about it.
I had to explain this a couple more times to other managers. However, I couldn’t manage to impart my technique to anyone else, so others continued to struggle with the job.
I have no idea why I’m thinking about this today, or why I feel compelled to write about it.
Postscript: Amazon listings are really, really stupid sometimes. This copy says the bricks cleans the grill without abrasives. LOLWUT? This brick is the most abrasive thing in the world. That’s why it works. There’s also a lifetime guarantee. I have no idea how someone could ever put that on one of these, and I can’t imagine trying to collect when you figure out that these things are expendable. Truly mystifying.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
This is simply not true. It’s not true at all. Google made 85 BILLION dollars last year. They absolutely, positively, unquestionably can invest in some more machines to flag more types of content, and hire people to review the flags.
And don’t try to tell me they couldn’t programmatically de-list the kinds of accounts that are pumping out the kind of generative garbage described in the article. I could write a 100-line Perl script to catch this. It’s like the argument about how the App Store is so big that Apple couldn’t possibly catch all the fraudulent apps, but one guy looking at it in his spare time has identified scores of easily-caught problems that scam hundreds of millions of dollars out of the ecosystem.
At the end of the day, it’s a problem with misaligned incentives. Just like with Apple and the App Store, Google doesn’t want to fix the problem, because they benefit from the algorithmic/generative advertisement click-bait fraud scheme made possible by their platform being “game-able.” Corporations being the beasts they are, the only way to solve this problem is through legislation. Unfortunately, campaign finance laws being the beasts they are, that’s not going to happen.
And, as if on cue:
Zhukov’s trial established how the trade in fake clicks works. Between 2014 and 2016, the so-called King of Fraud—a name he gave himself in a text message, revealed in court—ran an advertising network called Media Methane, which received payments from other advertising networks in return for placing brand’s adverts on websites. But the company did not place those adverts on real websites. Instead it created fake ones, spoofing more than 6,000 domains. It then rented 2,000 computer servers in Texas and Amsterdam and programmed them to simulate the way a human would act on a website—using a fake mouse to scroll the fake website and falsely appearing to be signed in to Facebook.
Click fraud has been around since the rise of Google, but I guess everyone collectively agreed to ignore it as a cost of doing business, like “shrinkage” in retail. It stands to reason that these efforts have gone full-blown industrial now, and surely must be making a dent in someone’s pocketbook, but I guess everyone in the advertising economy is too entrenched now to do anything different. Advertising may be the single biggest sector in the American economy at this point. So they go after one dude, and make an example of him, meanwhile, the algorithmically-generated advertisement-bait is considered legitimate.
“Algorithms” are ruining everything that made pop culture interesting.
This video reviews an “audiophile” “tool” from back in the day to “improve” CD audio quality by cutting the edge of the CD at an angle, and marking it with a black marker, to prevent “light scattering” of the laser that degrades audio quality. This guy treats a disc, and feeds the “before” and “after” recordings into software, mathematically subtracts one file from the other, and shows that there is no difference. Literally zero. There cannot be an improvement, no matter how good your hearing, because nothing has changed.
He notes in the video that this didn’t stop many “audiophile” publications from printing reviews about the device, saying that it improved everything about the sound, from “clarity” to “noise floor” to “bass response.”
I’ll never forget the first time I read an “audiophile” catalog, and seeing a replacement knob for your receiver. According to the description, what you probably don’t know is that the plastic one that came with it is adding “harmonic distortion” to your audio. Their “tuned” replacement would fix this, and improve your system’s sound. What was it, you ask? Wood! It was a 3″ wooden hockey puck. And how much, you ask, for such an upgrade? $300, in 1991, or $650, today, for a little, wooden disc.
I’ve often thought about doing exactly what this guy has done, and proving that these kinds of “audiophile” things are snake oil. The thing that drives me the craziest are overpriced digital cables. There is no difference between the output of this cable and some Amazon Basics piece of junk. As long as it meets the spec, there CAN be no difference, and I can prove it with math.
I Need This for My Printer so my Pages Will Print Better
What has kept me from doing it is knowing that the people who believe such copy will never be persuaded. I’ve had conversations with actual people about these kinds of cables, and they don’t believe me. They will hear and see a difference, and pity me for not having the ears to hear or eyes to see what they clearly can.
I wish I could shirk all ethics and character, and invent some of my own snake oil to sell in this market.
Oligarchs, with their financial ability to influence mass media, education, and marketing, quickly proved to be the social force most able to manipulate the public will. With all three branches now functionally subject to the same democratic selection pressures it is no surprise an oligarchy came to achieve hegemonic social force in the United States.
Combine that with this (spoken of Reagan’s effect on anti-trust, via Robert Bork’s influence):
It was obvious from the start that “consumer welfare” was a scam, a ruse designed to let monopolies flourish and to install “autocrats of trade” on their thrones. Despite its ideological bankruptcy, “consumer welfare” was able to repel its critics for decades, because it had deep-pocketed backers – no different from tobacco-cancer denial or climate denial.
And we have all the elements we need to conclude that the US is now a complete corporatocracy, under the control of our oligarchs, or billionaires.
I remember reading a post on Reddit, a long time ago, by a guy who claimed he was friends with a half-dozen billionaires. The thing that stuck out at me was that Congressmen ask, “How high?” when asked to jump by a billionaire, because the checks they can write for campaign contributions can swing an entire election.
Lisa Kahn may make some headway with modern trustbusting, if given the time to get moving with a second Biden term, but with the Citizens United ruling, it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be get her out of their way through a sympathetic administration.
Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system. The Office 365 sales-pitch focuses on fine-grained employee tracking and comparison, so bosses can rank their workers’ performance against each other. But beyond this automated gladitorial keystroke combat, Offce 365’s analytics will tell you how your company performs against other companies.
That’s right – Microsoft will spy on your competitors and sell you access to their metrics. It’s wild, but purchasing managers who hear this pitch seem completely oblivious to the implication of this: that Microsoft will also spy on you and deliver your metrics to your competitors.
I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn’t even know about this. Every time I think I’m too cynical about a FAANG company — and Microsoft in particular — I find that I haven’t been nearly cynical enough.
With this new LinkedIn connection, in Outlook, it’s now possible for Microsoft to connect a particular person to a particular user in your current company’s “metrics.” I suppose they could use this to juice search results for recruiters in LinkedIn, or provide reports to potential employers. I wouldn’t put any of this past them.
Another one of Indiana’s largest companies is expressing its opposition to the abortion bill signed into law Friday by Governor Eric Holcomb. In a statement shared to employees on Saturday, Columbus-based Cummins Inc. (NYSE: CMI) said it is “deeply concerned” how the law impacts its employees and impedes its ability to attract and retain a diverse workforce in Indiana.
There’s a growing trend of corporations which threaten to take tax monies out of a state unless the state passes laws in a manner they deem acceptable. First of all, if a company will shift operations or holdings to a different state over one particular human rights law, why do they continue to do business with entire countries whose governments have long and terrible records of human rights abuses, say, like China?
Further, if they’re so concerned with social justice and making statements, why do they remain silent on such issues as China’s treatment of Uyghurs? I can’t find any reference to any statement Cummins has made to condemn this unilaterally bad policy. Even if they don’t change actual business practices, the least they could do is show some disdain for the situation.
Second of all, companies are led by a relative handful of people, which are supposed to follow the direction of the shareholders — i.e. banks — presumably to maximize profit. Why should the officers of US corporations get to leverage the enormous resources at their disposal to, in essence, blackmail our governments to pass a law, especially one that has such a dubious connection to profit? I don’t support the Indiana abortion law either, but I also don’t think corporations should be allowed to engage in this sort of strong-arming behavior toward our government. It’s not democracy. It’s corporatocracy.
Mr. Neumann, who has purchased more than 3,000 apartment units in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville, aims to rethink the rental housing market by creating a branded product with consistent service and community features. Flow will own and operate the properties Mr. Neumann had bought and also offer its services to new developments and other third parties. Exact details of the business plan could not be learned.
“In the future, you’ll own nothing, and be happy.”
The middle class was born out of the post-war boom, and the iconic thing that defined the middle class was home ownership. Those times are simply gone now, as any economic chart can show. The housing market is experiencing a huge bubble, and what’s left of affordable housing is being gobbled up by private equity and “startup” monopoly power plays like this one. If the US were run by elected representatives, there might be a change to put a stop to this. But it’s not, any more. It’s being run by the very companies who want to own everything, and rent it back to us.
In the very near future, there will no longer be a “middle” class. Not as a category. Of course, there will be people who fit the description, but it won’t be some broad strata like it has been. There will only be people who own capital, and those that labor in it and for it. I suppose it’s just Capitalism, fully-formed, with a capital “C.” It’s weird, but the US is reinventing feudalism, right under the nose of the Constitution. The oligarch billionaires are the new monarchy, the government does whatever they tell them to do.
FDA officials see themselves as an elite priesthood, pursuing excellence merely by dint of being at the FDA. From this perspective, there is zero incentive to let new players into the baby formula market when, in their view, there are already excellent quality companies serving the market, such as Abbott Labs, Mead Johnson, and Nestle. It’s true that baby formula is overpriced in the U.S., costing about twice as much as it does throughout much of Europe. But to an FDA official, price is incidental.
I mean, of course. How could it have been otherwise?
In my opinion, stock buybacks should simply be illegal at this point. They always seem to be a key part of every story about large corporations crippling our economy, and hurting the average person in favor of the executives running them.
This country was supposed to have been built on Capitalism with a capital “C,” meaning “free markets” should be providing “competition” and settling on appropriate prices. And yet every market of significance in this country is now being run by 2 or 3 large companies, who collude and “stay in their lane,” with governmental regulatory cover to preclude new entrants coming in at a lower price. And if there is a successful startup in some space, as soon as they start making enough difference to be noticed in the public filings of one of the “2 or 3” established companies in the space, they will be “aquihired,” and the FTC and SEC will stroke their chins and say, “ok.” And then whatever made the startup interesting will wither and die, ala Heroku and Salesforce.
Finally, the FDA needs wholesale reform, since this kind of crisis seems to happen a lot. I mean, the relationship between the FDA and Abbott Labs was also behind the rapid Covid testing scandal, where FDA official Tim Stenzel – who had worked at Abbott – then approved Abbott as one of two firms to make those tests, and blocked all other entrants. That’s why rapid Covid tests were both in shortage and much more expensive in the U.S. than they are in Europe. The FDA needs to be broken up so that its drugs and food divisions are separate, and it needs to take its mandate seriously for a resilient supply chain.
When Rockefeller encompassed the core of all of American business, and 25% of the government was funded by the taxes he paid alone, we got serious about not letting large companies run our country. We called it “trustbusting,” and there was a long history of it. I’m doubting that this era of American history is still being taught. We’re certainly not doing it any more.
There are a couple of takeaways from this article. He talks about it from the perspective of a fan of .NET. I see strong points in favor of Rails as well.
First and foremost, I want to talk about speed. As a fan of Rails, I hate it when critics bring up the speed of Ruby, because I have to acknowledge that there is a definite, unavoidable penalty there. And why shouldn’t there be? It’s the interpreted nature of Ruby that makes ActiveRecord in Rails so dang flexible and easy to use. But I came to using Rails after about 10 years of using PHP, and it was painful to compare page load speeds in apps I rewrote from PHP to Rails. However, the relative productivity of the Rails stack made it a no-brainer over PHP for me.
In this article, the author compares some particular benchmark amongst various languages typically used for web application development. Here, he’s pointing out how slow Javascript is compared to .NET. But what I want to point out is that Ruby’s performance is often discussed in the context of using Java, and there’s basically no difference.
Further speed point here: https://benhoyt.com/writings/count-words/
Another thing to point out is the package mess. From the top graph, above, you can see the explosion of dependencies in the Javascript stack. Comparatively, it dwarfs everything else. Combine that with this graph, below, and the situation gets even worse. Sure, by this, you can see that .NET stack wins this race, but it’s also interesting to me that Rails clearly comes in second, especially when you also consider that it has zero critical vulnerabilities.
Over and over, Ruby and Rails gets dissed, these days, as somehow being unuseful, for a variety of reasons. I find those reasons specious. Over and over, when you dig into the rationale behind those reasons, you find out the situation is better than people give it credit for being. Rails continues to be a strong contender in the web application development world. Lots of big players continue to use it, despite how critical the HN crowd is about it. Even if it weren’t suited for those big, commercial web platforms, it would still continue to dominate in writing small, focused, line-of-business CRUD apps, and I continue to find it amazingly powerful to work with.
If I were to criticize the Rails stack, my first point of contention would be the Turbolinks thing. I’ve been sort of forced into using Ag-Grid as a drop-in Javascript data table widget, and, despite a lot of effort, I can’t find a way to make it play nice with Turbolinks.
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