Tag: How We Live Now

Minor Earthquake on the East Coast – Twitter Reaction

Apple Vision on the Subway

Working in the NYC subway on the go with Apple Vision Pro?! 🤯🤯 pic.twitter.com/iVWiYlxjxP

— Alexxxx (@haig98) February 3, 2024

Temporality is Part of the Truth

The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It’s certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein. And while half of my brain worries that writing about Saved by the Bell and Memento will immediately seem as outdated as a 1983 book about Fantasy Island and Gerry Cooney, my mind’s better half knows that temporality is part of the truth. The subjects in this book are not the only ones that prove my point; they’re just the ones I happened to pick before I fell asleep.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever “in and of itself.”

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Chuck Klosterman
First Scribner trade paperback edition 2004

Part Time Labor in the U.S.

The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15 movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that “Walmart’s probably a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a lot of the jobs in higher ed.”

The problem is that most Walmart employees don’t make $36,400, the annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year, the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 — equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that’s the median; many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl’s employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week. At $15 an hour — the rate Starbucks said it was raising barista pay to in 2022 — 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year, which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

It’s Not Just Wages. Retailers Are Mistreating Workers in a More Insidious Way.
By Adelle Waldman

Chicago Rat Hole

The Chicago rat hole is a petrosomatoglyph, a hole shaped like a rat in the sidewalk of West Roscoe Street in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. After existing for decades, it became a viral phenomenon on social media (mainly Twitter) in January 2024, attracting tourists to the site.

The New York Times described the hole as “Chicago’s Stonehenge“, as its origins are unknown.

History
The hole gained worldwide attention on January 6, 2024, via a tweet by Chicago-based comedian and writer Winslow Dumaine. The post quickly became viral, compelling many Chicago residents to visit the hole—in what has been described as a “pilgrimage“—and to make offerings to it, such as coins, flowers, candles, cheese, cigarettes, alcohol, children’s toys, foodstuffs, and estradiol pills. One group of visitors took shots of Chicago specialty Malört beside the hole, before leaving the bottle as an oblation.

Despite its newfound attention in 2024, the hole had existed for at least 20 to 30 years, according to locals. A local softball team has been using the rat as its unofficial mascot since around 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_rat_hole

Martin Luther King Day

Office Space – 3 Quotes

Dom Portwood: Hi, Peter. What’s happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.
Dom Portwood: Yeah. Did you get that memo?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is just that I forgot the one time. And I’ve already taken care of it so it’s not even really a problem anymore.
Dom Portwood: Ah! Yeah. It’s just we’re putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that’d be great. All right!

Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: We need to talk about your flair.
Joanna: Really? I… I have fifteen pieces on. I, also…
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Well, okay. Fifteen is the minimum, okay?
Joanna: Okay.
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Now, you know it’s up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Or… well, like Brian, for example, has thirty seven pieces of flair, okay. And a terrific smile.
Joanna: Okay. So you… you want me to wear more?
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Look. Joanna.
Joanna: Yeah.
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, okay? They come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude. Okay? That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.
Joanna: Yeah. Okay. So more then, yeah?
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don’t you?
Joanna: Yeah, yeah.
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Okay. Great. Great. That’s all I ask.

Peter Gibbons: Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday and you’re not feeling real well, does anyone ever say to you, “Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays?”
Lawrence: No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked sayin’ something like that, man.

IMDB

RE: Taylor Swift at Football Games

Texas Woman Leaves State for Abortion

Dec 11 (Reuters) – A woman who had asked a court for an order allowing her to get an abortion under the medical emergency exception to Texas’ near-total ban will leave the state to receive care while the state’s highest court considers her case, her lawyers said in a court filing on Monday.

Lawyers for Kate Cox said in a filing with the Texas Supreme Court that she nonetheless wished to continue her lawsuit. A lower court last week issued a restraining order allowing her to obtain an abortion, but the state Supreme Court put it on hold while it considers an appeal by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican.
…
Cox’s fetus was diagnosed on Nov. 27 with trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality that usually results in miscarriage, stillbirth or death soon after birth.

Texas woman who asked court to allow emergency abortion will leave state for care
REUTERS

Random Pics – November 2023

Opera in the Subway – New York Anecdote

In Sync
Dear Diary:

I was in the Times Square subway station, walking from the 7 train to the A, C and E lines. It was the evening rush hour, and hordes of people were racing to escape Midtown and get uptown, downtown or to New Jersey.

I was in full commuting stride when I heard the notes of the Habanera from Bizet’s “Carmen” in the distance. A woman soon began to sing along to the music, and I began to mouth the words.

By the time I got to where she was, we were fully in sync, singing “l’amour est enfant de bohème … ”

As I passed her, she caught my eye and smiled. I hopped onto the A with a toreador’s spring in my step.

— Nicolas Gerard

METROPOLITAN DIARY
NYTIMES
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html

Some Americans Talking About Their Jobs

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
It is hard to talk about this work. It is hard to do it, too. The best time to work is when it’s quiet, from ten at night till two in the morning. Because sometimes, well, [laughs] almost always, it’s a frustrating job. You know, it’s easy to use finished product, like computer games or Microsoft products, but the process to completing software is very frustrating. It is sometimes even pretty easy to write a program, but to make it so the users who will use the program cannot do anything stupid or cause some problems you have to imagine every single thing the user could do on keyboard. That part takes almost all of time. And it is a very boring time.

GAS STATION ATTENDANT
Out where this place is, it’s just all desert, and there’s a lot of weird people that live out around here. They’re kind of scary. They actually scare me more than the freeway people do because the main reason anybody’d live all the way out here is because of drug problems and problems with the government. Most of them are like that. Not all of them—there’s nice ones, but there’s a lot of weirdos that do weird things, they drive really awful-looking cars. White trucks with blue doors. No teeth. I try not to get involved with them. I’m polite. I smile, take their money, bag what they’re buying, but that’s it. I’m scared so I try not to get personal. That’s probably the worst part about the job. The drive is no fun, but the scary people, they’re the worst.

PERSONAL INJURY TRIAL LAWYER
And by the way, I have never, and I mean this, never met an honest man. I have had rabbis lie. I have had priests lie. I have had witnesses of every color and denomination and persuasion lie. Clients come to me and tell me that they were caused to have an accident and they were injured in a certain way. But the truth is that it usually didn’t happen exactly the way they say it happened. The client may be fundamentally and inherently a good and honest person, but when it comes to their case their theory is, well, it’s a goddamn insurance company, and they’ve got more money than God, and it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. And so it’s okay if, on the margins, on the fringes, they improve or enhance their story a little bit.

So we have to begin with a premise that it’s not a question of whether someone’s honest, it’s a question of the degree. And lawyers are the most dishonest people of all. A lawyer will prepare his witness in such a way that he, the lawyer, thinks he’s being honest, but in truth and in all candor, he’s really not. Because he’s kind of steering or directing the witness in a certain direction—the direction that says the other party is at fault. And that’s part of our business. A good lawyer has to approach every accident, every case, with the mindset that his client is not at fault. The other party is at fault. And so a good lawyer is often dishonest and so is everyone else.

TEMP
I’m not an actor. I’m not into that. I’m a temp, a forty-year-old temp. Let’s leave it at that, okay? I mean, I know there’s stigma attached to being a forty-year-old temp. At forty, people assume you should have achieved something. And they don’t see this as an achievement. But I don’t care. I’m happy doing this. I’ve never fit in. The more I see what fitting in is, the less I want to. It’s plots that you already know the ending to. Why do you want to live out a story and know that you’re gonna do this or do that, you know? A steady job is a plot. I will stay here and I will do this, then I’ll retire, then I’ll move to Florida. Then I’ll die, you know? You spend your days at work dreaming of the future, you spend your days at work getting ready to get off of work. Me, I don’t know if I’ll make it to my job tomorrow. So it’s the moment, living in the moment.

Like last year, I took a vacation. I’d been at this place a couple of months and it was getting old. I called up and said, “I’m going on a vacation.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t know if we’ll have a job for you when you get back.” I said, “I know you don’t know if you’ll have a job for me when I get back ’cause I’m not even sure when I’m coming back.” So I went on this bike trip; I took a bunch of time. I love to travel and see things. Two-week vacations just don’t do it for me.

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
NOTE – Highly recommended book

Evolving and Accumulating Requirements, Example of

For example, consider the most basic issue of coverage: whether a given worker is eligible to claim unemployment benefits. According to the DOL, to answer that question you must figure out, among other things, whether the worker’s “employing unit” qualifies as an “employer.” Under the Federal Unemployment Tax Act, that term originally applied to “employing units” that, “during any calendar quarter in the current or immediately preceding calendar year, paid wages of $1,500 or more” and to “employing units of eight or more workers on at least one day in each of 20 different weeks in a calendar year.” In 1956, that threshold was changed to four or more workers; in 1972, it dropped to just one worker. Today, about half the states use this federal definition, but the others strike out on their own. In Montana, the minimum payroll to qualify as an employer is $1,000 in the current or preceding year; in New York, it’s $300 in a single quarter; in Iowa, any wages at all paid in the current or preceding quarter will qualify. In Massachusetts, thirteen weeks of payroll is enough to be an employer; in Arkansas, it’s having a single employee for ten or more days.

The unemployment department in any given state would have had to update its systems as the federal definition changed, as their own state definition changed, or as their labor agency switched back and forth between the federal and state definitions. Few updates succeed in catching all past references to the former rule, so you will find artifacts of previous regulations strewn throughout documentation and code. That’s probably how the EDD came to have work items for “Stop Payment Alert” and for “Stop Payment Alert—Claim Review” that mean two totally different things. Perhaps some law changed and programmers coded a new work item to fit the new rules, but the original one persisted, most likely because it was still attached to active claims. Everything accumulates.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
Jennifer Pahlka

AI Revolution – 20 Year Prediction Window

And it’s about time. Machine thinking is another area where early expectations were not fulfilled. Attempts to invent artificial intelligence are generally dated to 1956, and a summer workshop at Dartmouth College for scientists with a pioneering interest in “machines that use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” At the time, machines with humanlike intelligence were often predicted to be about twenty years away. Now, they’re often predicted to be … well, about twenty years away.

The futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom has a cynical take on this. Twenty years is “a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change,” he writes: nearer, and you’d expect to be seeing prototypes by now; further away, and it’s not so attention-grabbing. Besides, says Bostrom, “twenty years may also be close to the typical duration remaining of a forecaster’s career, bounding the reputational risk of a bold prediction.”