The title makes it sound like the storm drain is some sort of organ harvesting machine and he was purposefully placed in there so his organs could be donated.
Deepfake fake news story aside, at the crux of this story is a girl or parent jealous of Madi’s position on the team and was trying to tattle to get her kicked off the team. This story getting ignored was the best result. The girl was 16 and she was caught vaping. Kids are going to do shit they shouldn’t and any hard and fast rule on vices like this is only going to be abused and cause more damage in the long term.
Considering the woman: A) is legally barred from discussing the other families, and B) denies having sent anything to anyone, I think you might be making some pretty broad assumptions. What we do know is that the videos and photos weren’t faked, and they were evidence of misconduct by the other girls, who as of yet have experienced zero consequences and in at least one case may have benefited from the case going viral.
Oh no, a teenager faces zero consequences for vaping. We are doomed! /s
That being said, you are right that the allegations should not be taken as facts, especially considering they came from the same source as those deepfake lies.
Are you kidding me? You didn’t read the article did you? You just picked side & started downvoting.
Those kids lied the whole way through, saying the videos were fake. They doubled down it. They got the cops involved & were somehow stupid enough to let a pedophile cop take it the point that a woman, likely a family’s, life has been ruined.
No the other mom shouldn’t have narc’d, but if you fuck up and get caught, you don’t get to lie your way out of it at the expense of someone else.
Stop seeing shit so black and white. Everyone involved here is stupid as shit.
No asshole. The first mom went to the other kids’ parents. She tried to at least keep it between the families. Yes, she fucked up with anonymous messages, but that’s pretty fucking minor compared to doubling down a lie to the point the fucking cops get involved.
There are no winners here. The fact that you view any of this to be fair is really fucking sad and I feel bad for your neighbors.
The first mom went to the other kids’ parents. She tried to at least keep it between the families.
That’s not what she was convicted of. She sent them to the cheerleading organization as well.
In March 2022, Spone was found guilty of three counts of misdemeanour harassment for repeatedly sending anonymous messages about the three teenagers. A jury found that she had used secret phone numbers to send incriminating photos and videos. The messages – sent to the Victory Vipers and to the teenagers’ families – accused the cheerleaders of drinking, smoking and posting revealing photos on social media. The anonymous numbers used to send the messages had been sent from an IP address belonging to Spone. She appealed against her conviction, but the superior court of Pennsylvania upheld it on 14 November 2023.___
She sent REAL videos of the teens acting badly, including her own. One of the other teens LIED claiming the videos were fake.
This was parent contacting other parents about kids fucking up & the other parents opted to trust their lying children over the other adult.
The first mom got charged with harassment because the cops were not able to charge her with deepfaking child porn. The cops tried to charge her as a pedo & opted to slap her wrists for anonymous text messages rather than admit they fucked up too.
Again, no one is right here, but if you think those kids don’t deserve some righteous holy hell for their bullshit then I don’t know what to tell you.
Except, maybe… don’t procreate. Not sure we need your kids running around this planet.
They were vaping and drinking, normal shit 16 year olds do and not hurting anyone. It’s hardly the end of the world. She didn’t just keep it between the families. If she hadn’t tried to fuck them over and get them kicked off the cheerleading team it would have been a non-issue. Doesn’t really matter what the cops initial motivations were. She went through a trial and a jury reviewed the evidence and found her guilty.
Normal 16 year olds don’t hold onto a lie long enough that it destroys the life of friend’s parent. Those fucking kids lied about their behavior in the face of video fucking evidence & kept lying until police were involved. If you ever let your child lie to the point you involve the police because you refuse to believe your teenager is teenager, you shouldn’t have teenagers.
The mom you’re convinced deserved to have her life ruined, did nothing more than contact parents of her kid’s friends because she was worried about her daughter & her daughter’s friends.
Did she do it the right way? No. But… I can at least follow of the logic of “send anonymous messages so I don’t wreck my kid’s social life”.
She did not the call cops & it never would’ve escalated to this point if one, just fucking one of the other parents had acknowledged their teenager is liar, as most teenagers are liars in the face of getting caught.
I cannot follow the logic of “no way my kids are liars, better call the cops, cause that technologically gifted mother just has to be creating deepfakes on her phone”. That’s ridiculous & it never should have escalated to this point.
And for the record, once again, It is the other parents & their kids that escalated this.
One of those fucking adults should have stood up & said, “look, these are teenagers. What’s the likelihood they’re lying? Maybe we sort that out first before we ruin our kids lives by inviting the cops.”
If you think any of the adults in this situation acted correctly, aside from the reporter, I really hope no one ever finds themselves relying on your ability to judge character.
I already read that one, where do you think I got the quote I provided you? Did you read it?
Anyway. I went ahead and read two more to try and get a more concise explanation of what was proven in court here are some notes:
In an alleged deepfake video — altered through software to make one person appear as another — the same girl was depicted to be vaping. That video was sent to the coaches of the Doylestown-based cheerleading squad in an attempt to get the girl kicked off the team.
We know this was not fake but it was sent to the coaches, not the parents. Doesn’t seem like someone who is concerned about the girl in the video. Seems like someone who wants to fuck up their cheerleading career.
In one of the calls the girl received, she was told, “You should kill yourself.”
Two other parents came forward to police in December 2020 to report that their daughters were targeted with similar calls and texts, including salacious images that placed them in situations that never occurred. Some images included cruel captions.
A search of Spone’s phone by police found the images that were sent in the messages stored on her mobile device.
So we’ve confirmed she had images with cruel captions on her phone. That IS harassment and again, not the behavior of a concerned parent.
Prosecutors said that Spone used several anonymous phone numbers to contact the girls’ mothers and the cheerleading team coaches. Spone hid her phone numbers using an app called Pinger, prosecutors said.
Magisterial District Judge Regina Armitage allowed the trial to move forward in Bucks County Common Pleas Court. Spone remained accused of making inappropriate calls and sending hostile text messages about the three girls from incognito phone numbers.
The three girls and their mothers testified during the trial that they were scared after receiving the messages because they didn’t know who was sending them. Spone never identified herself when asked who the texts were from, prosecutors said.
Spone was not behaving like a concerned mother, prosecutors said, because she initially went to the cheerleading team’s coaches instead of the parents. Spone knew the mothers of all three girls and could have contacted them individually through her own number, investigators said.
She fucked around and ended up having her name drug through the mud. Same as she was trying to do to the girls. I have no sympathy. Is the deepfake thing stupid? Yes, but that’s on the cops for not investigating properly before making statements. As usual.
The information you’re presenting is presented as having come from Weintraub over the course of the investigation into Spone. What do we learn later about Weintraub?
“Matt Weintraub became a judge in January; his office said that, given his new position, “the ethical rules require him to decline” my interview offer – but he has been declining to comment on the case since May 2021.”
Moderately suspicious until you weigh in this. That investigation that crucified Spone, the one you’re so dead set on being fact? Well, it didn’t result in much did it?
“But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything…
Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.”
Now the article goes on to talk about the other families involved. If they were on the righteous side of all this, certainly they’d share a thought?
“I have tried to contact Madi and Jennifer Hime for two years, over email and social media, and also Kayla Ratel and her parents, Sherri and George; none of them have responded. Of the three families, only the Neros have got back to me, to politely decline my request. Those who made the loudest noise when the cheerleader deepfake story broke have now gone quiet.”
The reporter then goes onto to acknowledge that the only perspective that can be shared on the WHY any of this happened, is that of Spone.
However the reporter goes on to tell us,
“The way Spone describes it, there was no rivalry between the Vipers. But it’s clear that in 2020 she had been checking the social media feeds of her daughter’s cheerleading friends and had become concerned by what she saw. What happened next caused things in that cheerleading family unit to break down, irretrievably. “They were my friends. They were people I cared about,” Spone says, quietly. “It broke every part of me.””
So… maybe Spone did send the videos to the coaches… another X for her… but, here’s a reminder that you’ve pulled that information from a police investigation headed up by a would be pedophile, who claimed to be able to visually decode deepfakes, using “metadata”.
An investigation done FOR Weintraub, who’s still a starry eyed DA with an election to win at this point. An investigation that would be drummed up nationally, getting as many eyes on “Karen the Pedo Mom” as possible…
Only to drop the charges, slap Spone on the wrist, & then STFU his way to a judgeship.
Spone saw her kid doing dumb kid shit, alongside other dumb kids doing more dumb kid shit on Social Media… that’s where she got those images you want to crucify her for.
She didn’t make them. The kids did. She raised the flag internally, trying to KEEP KIDS from getting in worse trouble.
Again, I’ll grant that maybe Spone contacted the coach. But do you know when that happened?
Did it possibly happen after the other girls started lying about deep fakes?
Cause if Spone already knew those girls were lying, then she’s got nothing to lose by going to the coach. That is a mother protecting her daughter.
From who?
From a bunch of dumb fuckin kids who are just dumb enough to put their dumb fuckin kid shit on social media, just dumb enough to get caught, & just fuckin dumb enough to lie this charade onto a national platform.
For real, that’s a story in itself. And then Madi’s old man knows some guys on the force so they say it’s fake, that’s story two. I’m honestly more interested in story one, because some loser is out here stalking this 16-year-old girl so they can screw her shit up, presumably out of jealousy.
My kids will play sports and dance and do whatever. I have no interest in pushing them towards very serious leagues, because time and again the people involved in them have shown they are all losers. My kids will not be professional athletes, we are not particularly tall or strong or fast, but they can do well, be healthy, and make friends, that’s about all I want from it.
No no clearly the best thing to do is to ruin her life over vaping just like kids who lose all the scholarships they earned because they got caught smoking weed. How else are they going to find out how dangerous these things are if we don’t absolutely destroy them in spite of their accomplishments?
Either a woman with no background in digital technology had made a sophisticated deepfake on her iPhone 8, or a 16-year-old had panicked and lied to her mother about vaping, or mother and daughter had decided together to explain away behaviour they knew would get Madi in trouble, with an elaborate story about digital manipulation. The police chose to believe the first explanation.
“They never understood deepfakes, and the implications of giving a press conference scaring people into thinking someone could take an image and turn it into something else so easily,” Birch says. “I don’t think they ever thought this thing would spread like wildfire and become a worldwide phenomenon.”
A small police force made a mistake that became too big to fix. “Once it blew up, the police couldn’t extricate themselves without losing face.”
As always, ACAB.
edit to add
And then there was this …
These would be the last public comments (Officer Matthew) Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation.
Only 1-2 years for possessing literally hundreds of CP images and videos? What the fuck? I mean I guess he didn’t harm anyone directly (as far as we know) but still, come on.
He was charged with obstructing a government organization. Obstruction of Government Administration under NY Penal Law § 195.05 is a class A misdemeanor. A class A misdemeanor is punishable by up to one year in jail or up to three years of probation. Additionally, the court may impose a fine of up to $1,000.
Presumably that’s the strategy: arrest everyone to break up the protests and scare off future protests , then drop charges since you really don’t have any. Bonus that most students don’t have the resources to sue for wrongful arrest. It would be a shame if they arrested someone who did
Bonus bonus points, even if charges are dropped, the fact that you were arrested still shows up on your criminal record, and may affect your employment opportunities.
Amateur radio operator here, I see some things in this thread that are kinda correct in this case but not technically accurate, and I’d like to provide the actual details:
I see folks asserting that “AM goes farther than FM.” This is only accidentally true in this case. The stations that your car radio’s AM setting can pick up are transmitting in the Medium Frequency (MF) spectrum, around 500 to 1600 kHz. The wavelengths here are around 200 meters. Radio waves with these wavelengths can refract around the Earth’s surface, or at night bounce off the higher layers of the ionosphere, to be heard hundreds or thousands of miles away (respectively).
By contrast, commercial FM broadcasts are done right in the middle of the VHF band, from 88 to 107 MHz in the US. These waves don’t refract off the ground or sky, and only travel in straight lines, so you have to be fairly close (within 75 miles depending on the height of the antenna) to hear them.
The terms “AM” and “FM” refer to how the audio signal is encoded on the radio wave; the short answer is Amplitude Modulation gets brighter/dimmer, FM gets redder/bluer. This is very little to do with how far the signal will travel, though it can have ramifications for how easy it is to hear near the edge of range and rising above the noise floor, etc. Both modes are relatively inefficient with power and bandwidth for different reasons; AM is primitive and FM is fancy.
AM radio is kept deliberately simple. Like, pre WWII simple. You can improvise an AM radio receiver with stuff you have lying around your house. I’ve seen a diode made out of a rusty razor blade and a pencil. It doesn’t have the best audio quality, it’s a bit of a waste of bandwidth compared to something like Single Sideband (which is cool but beyond the scope of this comment. Ask me about SSB if you want to hear about some cool radio shit) but it’s easy to find or make a working AM radio. There’s nothing that says you have to use AM on lower frequencies; aviation communication radios are AM (because we started using radios in planes before FM was invented) and they’re in the VHF spectrum just above the FM broadcast band and just below the amateur 2 meter band.
FM is fancier, it chews up even more bandwidth depending on the exact implementation and is less power efficient, but it offers the potential for less natural interference, better audio quality, and they even broadcast it in stereo. There’s just so narrow in terms of bandwidth you can make FM, which is why you don’t find it in use below 10 meters (about 28 MHz); there’s just no room for it. FM radios are more complicated, compared to a smart phone or PC they’re pretty basic but you’re not as likely to successfully improvise one out of shit you find in a tool shed.
In terms of sources for emergency information? I want both and more. AM broadcasting is the very definition of “good old” and relatively few stations can reach a national audience fairly easily, though FM stations typically take a LOT less power to run so I think they’d plausibly be up and running in a partial grid failure, and they’re more localized. So for a national emergency I might tune into AM, for a local emergency I’m going to tune into my town’s FM station that is 6 miles from my house.
I would also want a WX band radio. For those who aren’t familiar, the National Weather Service operates a network of transmitters that broadcast continuous weather information on one of a dozen channels in the 160 MHz range, narrow band FM. If you’ve had a “weather radio” that’s what that is. I know of very few car stereos that are equipped to receive WX band broadcasts and now that I think about it I can’t imagine why it hasn’t been mandatory for decades.
A crystal radio receiver, also called a crystal set, is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It uses only the power of the received radio signal to produce sound, needing no external power. It is named for its most important component, a crystal detector, originally made from a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena.[1] This component is now called a diode.
Crystal radios are the simplest type of radio receiver[2] and can be made with a few inexpensive parts, such as a wire for an antenna, a coil of wire, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones (because a crystal set has insufficient power for a loudspeaker).[3] However they are passive receivers, while other radios use an amplifier powered by current from a battery or wall outlet to make the radio signal louder. Thus, crystal sets produce rather weak sound and must be listened to with sensitive earphones, and can receive stations only within a limited range of the transmitter.[4]
The graphic above is from Wikipedia. The top graph, the “baseband” signal, is the audio, aka the signal coming out of the microphone. It’s vaguely what a human voice would look like on a specrograph.
The second graph is what AM looks like. The spike in the middle is called the “carrier.” Let’s say you’re transmitting on 5 MHz with a 10 watt radio. When you push the talk button and then say nothing into the mic, you start broadcasting a 5 MHz wave with a power of 10 watts. A receiver tuned to 5 MHz will hear the background static go away, because you are transmitting a carrier wave that does not modulate much louder than the background noise, you are effectively holding the receiver’s speaker still. A signal coming in strong enough to do that we call “full quieting.”
The carrier carries no information. Another way to look at these graphs is, picture the sine wave. You may have seen something like this before:
That middle waveform represents AM, notice how there’s always some squiggles going through the middle, and it varies toward the top and bottom edges? That’s what the upper graphic is representing, that big center spike is always there for that reason.
You may notice that the two lobes to either side are the same shape as the base band signal; or one of them is, the other is a mirror image. We call these sidebands. That’s actually where the audio is. In the second graphic, you can see how the top and bottom edges of the AM waveform resemble the baseband signal. Turns out, AM radio uses twice as much bandwidth and more than twice as much power to transmit the usable signal.
So what if we built the transmitter to only transmit one of the two sidebands and suppress the carrier and the other sideband? The same audio information goes over the air, and we take up less room on the radio spectrum to do it. What’s more, since we’re transmitting less overall “stuff,” the radio’s power is more focused on the part we do transmit, so a single sideband transmission comes across as “louder” than an equivalent AM transmission.
There are some cool upshots to how SSB works: the first is that the radio uses less power and overall stays cooler. AM (and FM) transmit with their full power all of the time, doesn’t matter if you whisper or scream into the microphone you’re putting whatever power your amplifier is set to out to the feed line. You might be transmitting silence, but it is very loud silence. SSB doesn’t do that; the louder you talk into the mic, the more power goes out the antenna. You aren’t constantly transmitting that carrier, so if your mic goes quiet, so does your antenna. Thus, your transmitter gear takes less power, runs cooler, and if you are on some consumable power source like batteries, you can transmit more effective power for longer.
Even cooler than that is the lack of collisions. If you’ve played with radios much, even listening to music radio stations near the edge of their ranges where you can kind of hear both, you know they interfere with each other. Happens all the time with aviation radios, pilots will transmit on the same frequency at the same time and anyone else listening gets to listen to the psychedelic sounds of two carrier waves interfering with each other. On FM radios usually the louder signal “wins” and the other one just sounds like static or interference under it. SSB doesn’t do this.
If two people transmit at the same time on the same frequency on SSB, a third person listening just hears two voices, just like if two people talked at the same time in a room. Hams hold contests to see who can make contact with the most people from the most places, and folks from somewhere rare will end up asking for contacts, everyone else says their callsigns at once like it’s the floor of the stock exchange, the one station will pick someone he heard to exchange details with, rinse and repeat. It’s 1950’s Discord.
Hams also use this technique to send text back and forth extremely efficiently. If you tune your software defined radio to 14.070 MHz (or use one of several people make available online) you might hear what sounds like several strange warbling whistles that come and go. That is PSK31, a digital text mode designed to use an ordinary PC sound card as a modem, and an ordinary SSB transceiver to send the signals across the air. Using software like FLDigi, you can receive and transmit text over the air, and each text transmission is very narrow in bandwidth. Over a dozen can take place in the same space as a normal voice channel, you leave the radio tuned to 14.070 and choose which transmission to listen to by clicking on them in the waterfall, ie choosing what audio frequency to listen to, which only works using SSB because no carrier collisions.
For all its advantages, there are some disadvantages. You cannot transmit “quiet” with SSB the way you can with AM or FM; so the background static, the “noise floor” is always there. Makes it not so nice for listening to music, which is why you basically only ever see it on communication radios. And it also requires a much more complicated transmitter and receiver while achieving the same or slightly worse audio quality than AM. You don’t see SSB used much in VHF and above because there’s so much room for activities/line of sight limits how far your signal goes so the efficiency advantages of SSB are less important, which is why we tend to use FM (or AM for old shit like airplanes) at wavelengths shorter than 6 meters or so.
100% accurate, thanks for the clear write up. Please stick it up on Wikipedia if you can :)
And I’ll add a bit about Clear Channel AM (unrelated to the billboard advertising company) - there were originally a handful of said stations that broadcast on a few AM band frequencies that are reserved just for them, so their broadcast range is impressive.
One for example is WOR radio in Chicago.
Fun factoid - you can see on very old AM radios those clear channel frequencies marked by a diamond or similar symbol on the dial.
Very nice write up. I am curious, is the long wavelength Responsible for the rise and fall in audio quality depending on where you are. I have had this happen as I was driving, the sound quality seemed to pulse.
Also I used to live right at the base of a tall mountain range there was a AM transmitter on the other side less than 100 miles away. During the daytime I could never receive it, at night it would bounce over the mountain and it was pretty clear.
I doubt the wavelength is a factor there; depending on the circumstances it could be anything from atmospheric waves to something in your car causing intermittent interference.
The Earth’s ionosphere exists in several layers. During the day, solar radiation ionizes gas deeper into the ionosphere causing a layer that doesn’t usefully refract most radio waves; you can reach beyond the horizon on some of the higher HF bands, but down in the MF, you’ve basically got ground wave. At night, without the sun around to cook the atmosphere, that lower level dissipates, revealing a higher ever-present layer, and the geometry is right to refract signals for hundreds or even thousands of miles.
Skywave propagation can be really fun to play with.
There likely was no “shielding” in a truck of that era, just simply the truck was made of metal as was the chassis of the radio, bolt 'em together and you’ve got a reasonable ground.
But, I do know from experience that there are items on a pickup truck that can produce radio interference especially when worn. A worn distributor is a spark gap transmitter, as I learned when I installed a mobile radio in my S10. The audio on my radio got a lot better after a good service of the ignition system.
This is just making me think that there should be a fundamentals of modern technology class in high school somewhere between a shop and physics class. It’d be a nerd elective but by fuck am I that nerd
Yeah as an engineer I think it would’ve been far more useful than the engineering class I took that was basically how to do autocad and measure things. And it would’ve been useful for everyone.
There are two things at play here. 1) one of the primary purposes of the United States’s education policy is to produce engineers. This is an economic and military strategy. And 2) we live in a world where technology abounds and yet so few people understand it. A robot isn’t a magic person made of metal, it’s the manifestation of the laws of physics as applied for our own desires.
Making a radio receiver and a telegraph and a record and telephone and a basic battery etc makes for more grounded adults. Show the teenagers the way the real world works, clever applications of natural phenomena
Considering the growing importance of digital radio communication, Computer-Assisted Design, electronic repair, etc. I’d love to see this kind of thing.
Trump refused to send people to crack down on the January 6th insurrectionists.
Also, pretty hard to say that when one didn’t last a day and resulted in criminal accusations, the other has been going on for over a week and, as far as I know, has seen no one being criminally accused.
Trump was in charge on J6. The failure to crack down then, is in part due to Trump intentionally not cracking down. I would compare this to the heavy handed crackdown on the DC Black Lives Matter protesters. You know, the one where he heals a Bible upside down. That was a violent crackdown on mostly peaceful protestors.
Side note just in case it saves you from a gotcha in arguing with a Maga nutjob, but Trump didn’t hold the Bible upside down that day, per NYT, Politifact, and other fact checkers. He’s still a useless piece of shit.
It took them five years to whip up a measly 20 pages of dipshittery? Magic space daddy is free to come down here himself and choke on my girl dick if they take such offense to me. Show up quick though I’ve got The Surgery™️ in two months. My unique dignity is I do whatever the fuck I want to with my body, and if god didn’t want that for me shouldn’t have given me the damn thing in the first place
Also I love that they’re like “don’t modify your precious god given body!” and in the same breath say intersex people should be “corrected”. Fuck these ghouls and fuck anyone who supports them
It’s much easier, if God wanted us to do something instead of any other things then why the fuck will give us free will, instead of making a bunch of robots.
From another viewpoint, though, we are all flesh robots. Our bodies are built on genetic programming, our personalities and behavior based on environmental stimuli. How much independent thought or agency can an individual claim to have when so much is predetermined the moment we draw first breath?
Might even be able to predict it all if you have a powerful enough computer.
That’s my argument against the religious. If God created you, then he chose to make you trans or gay. He chose to make people skeptical. He chose to make people who need hard evidence to believe things.
If there is a creator who purposely made each of us, then It would see no moral difference between gay and straight, cis and trans. It would also not judge people for disbelief, because It made people who were predisposed to disbelief without extraordinary evidence.
All in all, fuck the religious. They don’t understand their own religion.
He is some sort of sadist, the free will is so you don’t want to do whatever it is that you are forced to do. Either be miserable in life or suffer for eternity after death. He loves you a lot btw.
“No doctor, you must not remove that child’s appendix! All parts of the body are made in god’s image, and if god wanted this child’s appendix to develop appendicitis, it is surely part of god’s plan!”
Elections have consequences. This is just the latest step in the FAFO process for Idaho.
First, it was the clinics in the North Idaho, and now the rot is moving southward. More and more women and children will be affected by this attitude of anti humanism that focuses on declaring women property of the state.
Women in Idaho should be looking to move somewhere that doesn’t consider them owned by the legislature. Good luck to you if you’re stuck in Idaho. The scenery is beautiful, but the rights are contracting.
It’s not their sole responsibility to bare. Men should feel ashamed to live in the state and every father should be working OT to protect their daughters.
The pandemic showed that a huge percentage of our work is literately bullshit used to keep us grinding away and not actually living life. And to keep us from dealing with the huge and glaring problems in our society.
The Puritan idea that we must slave away in order to be worthy is a lie.
One of the greatest economists, Keynes, expected us to be working 15-20 hours a week at this point because of productivity increases.
But instead of sharing in the blessing of productivity, we were forced to do an increasing amount of meaningless work and spend less time actually living, all while being shackled with debt rather than even increasing our pay.
I work 9 hours a day either sitting at my desk doing nothing or sitting in meetings doing nothing. My only reprieve is that it pays decently well for the area I live in.
My time at my job could be cut in half and I’d still get just as much work done as before. So much of my life and and everyone else’s lives are being wasted doing such meaningless work.
This is why I don’t trust people who claim the jobs AI takes will be replaced, because that’s how it was in the past. It wasn’t, we never replaced those jobs, only created meaningless work. David Graeber is right.
It’s just incredibly apparent now that not all of us need to work anymore, by a longshot, but how can they keep the working class in its place without scarcity?
We didn’t replace jobs with productivity gains. We absorbed them into our jobs. Consider expense reports. Used to be that you would send all your receipts to an administrative assistant and they would send you a report to approve. Now that work gets pushed down to an individual responsibility. Company thinks if we let each worker do a little more, we can get rid of this position.
People finally realized what is important and got a taste of life without constantly being overworked. Good for them. Most of modern work is totally ridiculous bullshit in the big scheme of things.
I feel like it would be pretty easy to untraceably send a single letter. False return address, address written slowly with your alternate hand (or printed), dropped in an unmonitored street mailbox a few hours away from your home…how would USPIS find such a person?
Letter boxes don’t stamp the specific location in most places. And even if they did, you could just use an outgoing box at a large community, or someone’s house mailbox.
The ones I mentioned pepper almost every London junction. In metro areas, there’s also loads of private installations that can be looked at to help identify and track individuals.
Well, maybe in the police-state UK. But we don’t have that over here. And even if we did, as I said, they couldn’t narrow down the exact box in the postal code and if it was in a heavy traffic are there could be thousands of people dropping mail off daily.
Mail drop boxes are not in nooks or crannies. In a city you can bet every intersection and retail space has you on video. Even if you found the truman show magic spot where the cameras don’t see, you still need to pass by them to travel there. Further, All corporate retail and most of the rest are using geofencing to track and advertise. If you enter their fence and are not identifiable you are now part of less than 1% of people who maintain minimal privacy. Which makes you stand out for anyone looking for someone nefarious. we are to the point that it is in the courts now to decide if a burner phone itself substantiates intent to commit a crime even. Some idiocracy unscannable kinda shit.
Do you live in a major US city? Police 1000% frequently sepenia businesses for CCTV footage, and are increasingly getting standing access to existing cameras. And to a lesser degree I believe they are installing their own cameras, but I have hit my limit of finding sources for someone else’s comment while taking a shit.
This just says the police access cameras. It doesn’t say that there are cameras on every male receptacle from apartment complexes to individual houses. There are plenty of places without cameras to put an outgoing letter. I’m not really sure what you’re arguing about. I’m right
People underestimate how prevalent camera doorbells are now thanks to ring. At my girlfriends place about 75 percent of her neighbors on the block have em. Just installed a eufy for my mom a little while ago and she’s super untech savvy. Her apt building also has about 60 percent door cams.
Super helpful tool with tracking bad guys…but also it’s just so creepy and dystopian.
I was trying to see who a stray dog belonged to in my own neighborhood, and pushing the button and talking into these little lenses on every door was so weird.
Neighborhoods are now enclaves full of suspicious hermits…
I just like the idea that somebody might be stupid enough to put their real return address on the envelope, and your suggestion is the first time that it’s occurred to them that they might not need to do that.
He is talking out of his ass. They made the mail more reliable, by removing stupid routes and some unnecessary air mail. It now takes an extra day to send stuff cross country, according to the mailing guidelines… but the previous service guidelines were off by a half or full day anyway for that distance.
“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m,’” Foster said of her younger colleagues in an interview with The Guardian.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
In this case, I think the whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that giving sincere effort at work is so clearly a mug's game. It used to be that being disciplined about showing up and doing your job was difficult, but at least there was a reason to do it and develop the skill over time. Now? Unless you have some sort of unusual job where the management gives a shit about you, why would you?
I'm in the highest paying workplace for my field in the country and it's still not worth putting in any extra effort.
Capital just fundamentally doesn't understand that monetary incentive has an inverse relationship with performance and that you can't hire 9 Women to have a baby in 1 month.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
I think you’re right. My guess is that as companies get greedier and work offers fewer and fewer benefits, people are less and less willing to work as hard as their parents did. Employers that don’t understand this are either genuinely ignorant or just pretending to be ignorant.
Strategic ignorance. You can exert more pressure on someone if you genuinely believe the crazy self-serving things you're telling them with a straight face.
I sincerely doubt the idea that people are working less. I worked at a college with a lot of boomers. Great people, but I was radically more efficient than any one of them. The woman who had my job before (college print shop), would complain about the work load. I only really worked until lunch and caught up on every single thing I needed to do. Watched YouTube and coded the rest of the day. Helps that I had a boss that didn’t care as long as I was caught up.
I was late to work last Friday, intentionally, because my cat fell asleep in my lap while I was eating breakfast. That moment meant more to me than making sure I was there in time, no matter what it may have impacted. Working to live, not living to work, is the rallying cry upper management needs to come to terms with.
I spent a over a year trying to get a promotion while an ex boss who’s team I left was secretly sandbagging me.
I got an offer elsewhere and suddenly leadership asked “what number would keep you”. That was exciting until they followed up that raises and promos were frozen so I’d have to wait indefinitely.
“Hey so I’ve been here a few years and I’ve learned a lot more and I’m much more productive in my role. I’ve also learned the business enough that I’ve applied the skills I brought with me to the point that that’s now less than 10% of my workload, having become so efficient with it that you haven’t had to fill the other opening you had for my role because I’m handling it all. What do you think my prospects would be for a raise or promotion?”
“Sorry, no budget for a raise this year beyond your 1.3% annual raise (in a year with 4% inflation). And sorry but we can’t promote you either. You don’t have the skills for the position above yours, and besides, if we promote you out of your role we’ll be too under staffed in it.”
“So hire someone, let me train them for my role while you train me for the role I could promote to?”
“Nah that’s too expensive and we wouldn’t likely get the performance from them that we get out of you. Great job by the way. But no, no promotion, no raise.”
“Do you think that might change next year? Or like…where do you see my role here in the future?”
“We’re really happy with the roles you’re in and feel you’re well suited to it. And we feel that your pay is in line with the work you’re doing, so just keep up the good work.”
…so they basically told me that they’d keep overworking me and that I could expect to never get a significant raise or promotion ever again.
Two months later I got a job offer doing less work, work that was much more in line with my skills and preferred work…and a 38% raise. When I gave my notice, immediately they wanted to make a counter offer. I said I’d hear them out but based on our last conversation I doubted they were going to be willing to retain me…but sure I’ll listen.
Their offer:
No raise.
I could work a shift of mandatory 9 hour days to make more money (OT was always unlimited and freely available so this was literally just taking away my choice to work OT and forcing me into it).
No promotion.
But they would also start training me to assist another guy in the office with his work. Basically I could work longer hours and have more responsibilities for the same pay.
…and they were surprised when I refused.
They even had the gall to tell me how they felt betrayed that I only gave them 2 weeks notice, rather than agreeing to stay on until they could find my replacement and I could train them. When I pointed out that they literally told me they weren’t hiring my replacement as long as I stayed their only response was that they would have if they knew I was going to leave.
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