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sunbeam60

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sunbeam60 ,

Monitoring employees in this way is just the shittiest shit of all the shit. Surely they can assess output in a different way?

sunbeam60 ,

I’m a 47 year old man.

Whenever I hear Salute by Little Mix, I bop along. How could you not?

sunbeam60 ,

It’s a workplace monitoring tool dressed up as a workplace wellness tool.

You know that table that shows the risk of employees who might burn out, given their meeting frequency, teams interactions, email rate, work hours etc.? If you flip the sorting order, you can measure who isn’t doing enough (by whatever metrics the employer decides).

sunbeam60 ,

Your pace of walking definitely has a huge impact on people’s impression of you.

sunbeam60 ,

What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?

sunbeam60 ,

Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.

At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.

And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.

sunbeam60 ,

You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Agreed, many young people can’t save. That’s why I said “maybe not today, but at some point”. I’m not saying it’s easy for young people, I’m trying to explain why companies seek to increase profitability and that almost every investor is self-centred.

sunbeam60 ,

You’re arguing against the world that is. I’m just trying to explain the behaviour, not necessarily condone it.

A pension fund manager may not move in and out of stocks on a daily basis, but at some point they’re going to take a look at how their portfolio is doing and react.

sunbeam60 ,

Once you’ve gone public, unless some entity could do an offer to take you private, you have investors (aka owners).

To take Google private would be in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars. Even the Norwegian oil fund would struggle to do that.

sunbeam60 ,

Agreed you have to trust them. However, I suspect GDPR punishments keep them to their word.

sunbeam60 ,

Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

They definitely do. The vast majority of cars (Tesla being a notable exception) run their critical systems on CANbus with AUTOSAR and QNX or VxWorks. That’s why their entertainment system can still crash while the car drives on just fine. That doesn’t mean one can’t obscure the other; on VW group cars, for example, the reversing camera is run by QNX on CANbus but shown on the entertainment screen as an overlay. Occasionally you’ll see QNX starting to show the camera before the entertainment system has had a chance to draw the frame around it.

sunbeam60 ,

Voting.

sunbeam60 ,

100% agreed. For me it’s pretty simple; issue the same test you issue immigrants for citizenship. If people can’t pass that, why the hell are they getting involved in the governing of our country?

And I speak as someone who has passed the U.K. citizenship test to acquire U.K. citizenship. It takes 2 weeks of studying one hour/week AND some general understanding of what’s going on in the country. It’s not hard, it just requires a little effort and involvement. Seems a minimum you can expect before people make decisions that affect us all.

sunbeam60 ,

Reddit by far was a better experience; more content, better moderation, less negativity.

I’m still here on Lemmy, though, in hope of it getting better (and it definitely scratches the same itch as Reddit without the corporate arrogance).

That said, even though it annoys me, I do find myself getting exposed to a wider array of opinions on Lemmy that I just never saw on Reddit. And while I disagree with a lot of it it’s probably healthier for things to be that way. The tankies, though … so many tankies.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

Or watch the film Finding the Money: youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.

sunbeam60 ,

Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?

Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Yes more or less, that is indeed how the central bank creates money most of the time; the government creates a piece of paper that says “IOU 100k and I’ll pay you 5% interest on it for 20 years and then I’ll return your original 100k to you in 20 years” (that’s a bond), which they sell on the open market, at auction (where the variable element is the interest rate someone is willing to accept). When the central bank wishes to increase the money supply they buy government bonds on the open market (ie from other holders, rarely from the government directly) by materialising money out of thin air.

When they wish to shrink the money supply they sell their government bonds and destroys the money that they receive from the sale.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

<giggle.gif>

Not really. They’ve got a version of the euro, called kroners, which allows Danes to believe they have their own currency. They are locked into an exchange rate band (extremely tight) which means the Danish central bank has to follow every decision the ECB takes within minutes). And this makes complete sense, in that it’s a compromise that’s edible by voters (maintaining the illusion that Denmark didn’t adopt the euro) and edible by business (allowing businesses in Denmark to participate fully in the common market).

And that’s one of the reasons Denmark has such small national debt and runs a government surplus - they can’t really invent new money because it would break the bond with the euro. So the Danish budget is sort of a “household budget” in that in contrast to, say, Sweden, they cannot create money (meaningfully) and the books have to balance (which they do; lots of oil, Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and a few other big international plays who still pay a majority of their tax in Denmark obviously helps a lot).

sunbeam60 ,

Dunno about affordable but you can usually find some decently priced 1L Dell Optiplex micro systems. I’ve got one running under my desk 24/7. Great Linux support.

sunbeam60 ,

After 20 years with my wife, I still have weekly “you haven’t seen X?!?!?!” moments with her. The amount of films she hasn’t seen is staggering.

(conversely, the amount of time I’ve wasted watching films is kinda scary)

sunbeam60 ,

For me, it would be Heat. It was released before people really had the internet, so I had no idea about the movie and just wandered past an afternoon showing with a friend, thinking well why not, let’s give it a shot.

Came out wanting to immediately see it again.

sunbeam60 ,

I’m forced to use Chrome quite a bit (workplace silliness) and exclusively use Firefox at home. I seriously cannot see this edge that you claim Chrome has. Do you mean in loading speed? Scrolling speed?

sunbeam60 ,

This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.

Espionage: In seemingly the first case of its kind, the US has charged a Chinese national with using a drone to photograph a shipyard where the US Navy was assembling nuclear submarines (www.wired.com)

The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines....

sunbeam60 ,

100% cigarette reversed into a cupped hand.

sunbeam60 ,

Most of the people in those concerts are employed. They’ll have stock with Amazon, as does everyone working for Amazon on a full time, permanent contract.

You do realise Amazon is a public company, don’t you? If your country allows fractional shares, you could become an owner of Amazon for £10.

Is the “ruling class” anyone who has a report at Amazon?

sunbeam60 ,

They aren’t “solving it”, yet. They’re desperate to do something to wake up the stock and for investors to have some, any belief in the future of the business.

Whether they’re actually solving anything remains to be seen.

Can I refuse MS Authenticator?

So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose “any authenticator” and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it’s...

sunbeam60 ,

What is your concern about installing MS Authenticator.

I mean I can understand the principle of being forced to install anything on your phone.

But just stepping into the practical for a second: What do you worry will happen by installing this app to your phone?

sunbeam60 ,

Ok, but most workplaces require some form of apps installed for access, shared documents etc.

How many would install Figma, Office, Expensify, Jira, Confluence or a whole other raft of work apps if it wasn’t for work?

I mean, sure, it’s annoying but is MS Authenticator really the hill people want to die on?

sunbeam60 ,

But MS Authenticator isn’t a normal 6-digit Authenticator; it scans your Face ID (or finger print) and in many cases (like my work) it can be support password less accounts (relying only on something you have and something you are).

And in regard to your point that you don’t want to install apps you don’t need, it sounds like you do in fact need this app.

🤷‍♀️

sunbeam60 ,

Not really. It checks your location when you authenticate. It doesn’t store the location.

sunbeam60 ,

Same as asparagus wee. Man, when anyone has eaten asparagus I can smell it before I enter the door to the bathroom. When I have eaten it myself, I’m partly horrified and partly morbidly fascinated. What the fuck is up with only some people being able to smell it.

sunbeam60 ,

Are there people who can’t smell a coffee wee? You’re blowing my mind.

sunbeam60 ,

How can I take this news and turn it into a class struggle?!

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Are you referring to the US? In the country I live insulin is available for free for those who need it.

sunbeam60 ,

But it’s inheriting classics, breaking through!! What’s not to be excited about?!

<breathy> Bigme </breathy>

sunbeam60 ,

Earlier than mine, I was 7 digits, but started with a 7 IIRC.

sunbeam60 ,

I used mine in my mail signature for a while and I’ve kept all my emails since late 90s.

sunbeam60 ,

At huge inefficiency loss though. Denmark is probably further with this than anywhere else in the world and even they are sputtering on getting this going.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes but pumped storage is about 80% round trip efficiency vs power to x which is barely touching 20% out of the lab. And power to X needs an epic fuckton of very clean water, which also isn’t easy to find.

sunbeam60 ,

You are correct that when you build one new plant every 25 years it takes a long time to spool the industry, the skills, the testing and the manufacturing capability up to build new nuclear.

In countries that regularly build new nuclear it takes 5 years, comparable to any other power source. When France when through their mass-conversion to nuclear in the 70s (following the oil crisis), they put 2-3 new nuclear plants into operation every year.

All new western nuclear is in “production hell”. We don’t build them often enough to retain the skill set or for industry to dare invest. So they become massive state-run enterprises.

If we were serious on solving our climate crisis we would build nuclear power plans en masse.

sunbeam60 ,

Huh? What do you think a parking space is?

sunbeam60 ,

What you’re hearing about is lab experiments. Moving something from the lab to something in production, with the reliability and life span required to participate on the public grid is hard.

sunbeam60 ,

It must be a lot of work to see everything through this lens, all the time.

If you look at the states surrounding Germany, and the inter connectors they have, you’ll understand better why this isn’t just a simple thing to do and why it doesn’t relate to income level differences.

The only region that has managed to build a perfectly integrated spot market for electricity is Scandinavia. Every time you want to enable something like this, you’re in difficult negotiation territory; politics, unions, local government, NIMBYism, technical difficulties etc play a huge part.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes of course. Almost everything is blocked by stupid politics, not tech limitations. Unfortunately stupid politics is all we got. And that means if we want to make progress, it’s stupid politics that needs overcoming.

sunbeam60 ,

Absolutely agreed! Hear hear!!

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