#generous benefit package

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States

The vast majority of America's debt collection targets $500-2,000 credit card debts. It is a filthy business, operated by lawless firms who hire unskilled workers drawn from the same economic background as their targets, who routinely and grotesquely flout the law, but only when it comes to the people with the least ability to pay.

America has fairly robust laws to protect debtors from sleazy debt-collection practices, notably the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which has been on the books since 1978. The FDCPA puts strict limits on the conduct of debt collectors, and offers real remedies to debtors when they are abused.

But for FDPCA provisions to be honored, they must be understood. The people who collect these debts are almost entirely untrained. The people they collected the debts from are likewise in the dark. The only specialized expertise debt-collection firms concern themselves with are a series of gotcha tricks and semi-automated legal shenanigans that let them take money they don't deserve from people who can't afford to pay it.

There's no better person to explain this dynamic than Patrick McKenzie, a finance and technology expert whose Bits About Money newsletter is absolutely essential reading. No one breaks down the internal operations of the finance sector like McKenzie. His latest edition, "Credit card debt collection," is a fantastic read:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/

McKenzie describes how a debt collector who mistook him for a different PJ McKenzie and tried to shake him down for a couple hundred bucks, and how this launched him into a life as a volunteer advocate for debtors who were less equipped to defend themselves from collectors than he was.

McKenzie's conclusion is that "paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States." If you stand on your rights (which requires that you know your rights), then you will quickly discover that debt collectors don't have – and can't get – the documentation needed to collect on whatever debts they think you owe (even if you really owe them).

The credit card companies are fully aware of this, and bank (literally) on the fact that "the vast majority of consumers, including those with the socioeconomic wherewithal to walk away from their debts, feel themselves morally bound and pay as agreed."

If you find yourself on the business end of a debt collector's harassment campaign, you can generally make it end simply by "carefully sending a series of letters invoking [your] rights under the FDCPA." The debt collector who receives these letters will have bought your debt at five cents on the dollar, and will simply write it off.

By contrast, the mere act of paying anything marks you out as substantially more likely to pay than nearly everyone else on their hit-list. Paying anything doesn't trigger forbearance, it invites a flood of harassing calls and letters, because you've demonstrated that you can be coerced into paying.

But while learning FDCPA rules isn't overly difficult, it's also beyond the wherewithal of the most distressed debtors (and people falsely accused of being debtors). McKenzie recounts that many of the people he helped were living under chaotic circumstances that put seemingly simple things "like writing letters and counting to 30 days" beyond their needs.

This means that the people best able to defend themselves against illegal shakedowns are less likely to be targeted. Instead, debt collectors husband their resources so they can use them "to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit."

Here's how this debt market works. If you become delinquent in meeting your credit card payments ("delinquent" has a flexible meaning that varies with each issuer), then your debt will be sold to a collector. It is packaged in part of a large spreadsheet – a CSV file – and likely sold to one of 10 large firms that control 75% of the industry.

The "mom and pops" who have the other quarter of the industry might also get your debt, but it's more likely that they'll buy it as a kind of tailings from one of the big guys, who package up the debts they couldn't collect on and sell them at even deeper discounts.

The people who make the calls are often barely better off than the people they're calling. They're minimally trained and required to work at a breakneck pace. Employee turnover is 75-100% annually: imagine the worst call center job in the world, and then make it worse, and make "success" into a moral injury, and you've got the debt-collector rank-and-file.

To improve the yield on this awful process, debt collection companies start by purging these spreadsheets of likely duds: dead people, people with very low credit-scores, and people who appear on a list of debtors who know their rights and are likely to stand on them (that's right, merely insisting on your rights can ensure that the entire debt-collection industry leaves you alone, forever).

The FDPCA gives you rights: for example, you have the right to verify the debt and see the contract you signed when you took it on. The debt collector who calls you almost certainly does not have that contract and can't get it. Your original lender might, but they stopped caring about your debt the minute they sold it to a debt-collector. Their own IT systems are baling-wire-and-spit Rube Goldberg machines that glue together the wheezing computers of all the companies they've bought over the last 25 years. Retrieving your paperwork is a nontrivial task, and the lender doesn't have any reason to perform it.

Debt collectors are bottom feeders. They are buying delinquent debts at 5 cents on the dollar and hoping to recover 8 percent of them; at 7 percent, they're losing money. They aren't "large, nationally scaled, hypercompetent operators" – they're shoestring operations that can only be viable if they hire unskilled workers and fail to train them.

They are subject to automatic damages for illegal behavior, but they still break the law all the time. As McKenzie writes, a debt collector will "commit three federal torts in a few minutes of talking to a debtor then follow up with a confirmation of the same in writing." A statement like "if you don’t pay me I will sue you and then Immigration will take notice of that and yank your green card" makes the requisite three violations: a false threat of legal action, a false statement of affiliation with a federal agency, and "a false alleged consequence for debt nonpayment not provided for in law."

If you know this, you can likely end the process right there. If you don't, buckle in. The one area that debt collectors invest heavily in is the automation that allows them to engage in high-intensity harassment. They use "predictive dialers" to make multiple calls at once, only connecting the collector to the calls that pick up. They will call you repeatedly. They'll call your family, something they're legally prohibited from doing except to get your contact info, but they'll do it anyway, betting that you'll scrape up $250 to keep them from harassing your mother.

These dialing systems are far better organized than any of the company's record keeping about what you owe. A company may sell your debt on and fail to keep track of it, with the effect that multiple collectors will call you about the same debt, and even paying off one of them will not stop the other.

Talking to these people is a bad idea, because the one area where collectors get sophisticated training is in emptying your bank account. If you consent to a "payment plan," they will use your account and routing info to start whacking your bank account, and your bank will let them do it, because the one part of your conversation they reliably record is this payment plan rigamarole. Sending a check won't help – they'll use the account info on the front of your check to undertake "demand debits" from your account, and backstop it with that recorded call.

Any agreement on your part to get on a payment plan transforms the old, low-value debt you incurred with your credit card into a brand new, high value debt that you owe to the bill collector. There's a good chance they'll sell this debt to another collector and take the lump sum – and then the new collector will commence a fresh round of harassment.

McKenzie says you should never talk to a debt collector. Make them put everything in writing. They are almost certain to lie to you and violate your rights, and a written record will help you prove it later. What's more, debt collection agencies just don't have the capacity or competence to engage in written correspondence. Tell them to put it in writing and there's a good chance they'll just give up and move on, hunting softer targets.

One other thing debt collectors due is robo-sue their targets, bulk-filing boilerplate suits against debtors, real and imaginary. If you don't show up for court (which is what usually happens), they'll get a default judgment, and with it, the legal right to raid your bank account and your paycheck. That, in turn, is an asset that, once again, the debt collector can sell to an even scummier bottom-feeder, pocketing a lump sum.

McKenzie doesn't know what will fix this. But Michael Hudson, a renowned scholar of the debt practices of antiquity, has some ideas. Hudson has written eloquently and persuasively about the longstanding practice of jubilee, in which all debts were periodically wiped clean (say, whenever a new king took the throne, or once per generation):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Hudson's core maxim is that "debt's that can't be paid won't be paid." The productive economy will have need for credit to secure the inputs to their processes. Farmers need to borrow every year for labor, seed and fertilizer. If all goes according to plan, the producer pays off the lender after the production is done and the goods are sold.

But even the most competent producer will eventually find themselves unable to pay. The best-prepared farmer can't save every harvest from blight, hailstorms or fire. When the producer can't pay the creditor, they go a little deeper into debt. That debt accumulates, getting worse with interest and with each bad beat.

Run this process long enough and the entire productive economy will be captive to lenders, who will be able to direct production for follies and fripperies. Farmers stop producing the food the people need so they can devote their land to ornamental flowers for creditors' tables. Left to themselves, credit markets produce hereditary castes of lenders and debtors, with lenders exercising ever-more power over debtors.

This is socially destabilizing; you can feel it in McKenzie's eloquent, barely controlled rage at the hopeless structural knot that produces the abusive and predatory debt industry. Hudson's claim is that the rulers of antiquity knew this – and that we forgot it. Jubilee was key to producing long term political stability. Take away Jubilee and civilizations collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Debts that can't be paid won't be paid. Debt collectors know this. It's irrefutable. The point of debt markets isn't to ensure that debts are discharged – it's to ensure that every penny the hereditary debtor class has is transferred to the creditor class, at the hands of their fellow debtors.

In her 2021 Paris Review article "America's Dead Souls," Molly McGhee gives a haunting, wrenching account of the debts her parents incurred and the harassment they endured:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

After I published on it, many readers wrote in disbelief, insisting that the debt collection practices McGhee described were illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

And they are illegal. But debt collection is a trade founded on lawlessness, and its core competence is to identify and target people who can't invoke the law in their own defense.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” today (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

#pluralistic #jubilee #debts that cant be paid wont be paid #Patrick McKenzie #patio11 #bits about money #debt #debt collection #do not pay #bottom feeders #Fair Debt Collection Practices Act #fdcpa #finance #armbreakers

[korsgaardmacias]

How To Produce Music At Home

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[corbetthansen]

How Prefer Restaurant Accounting Software And Stay In Business

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[kincaidbroch]

6 Benefits Of Starting A Business Online

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[pollardgill]

Smart Homes - Home Automation And Lighting Control Systems

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[moralesoffersen]

Automated Forex - Pros And Cons Of Forex Robot Software Systems

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[wrengreenwood]

The 5 Top Social Media Best Practices For Generating Business Leads

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[catboybiologist]

Okay i dont talk about HRT with people a lot and i started E when i was a teen so i actually didnt know estradiol injections were a thing until i saw your posts. I thought injections where a T thing and that we all got E through titty skittles.

I want to ask what the difference actually is because its piqued my interest. It sounds pretty annoying compared to a pill. Is it cheaper or more often covered?

also ps i know youre not my doctor but is 44pgml too low?

So first off, yes, 44pg/mL is way too low by any standard. The usual standard you'll see is 100-200pg/mL, but this is starting to be considered very, very low. More modern standards of care try for 200pg/mL at trough (the lowest you should be- on sublingual this doesn't vary much though). Generally 200-400 pg/mL is the more typical modern guidance. Your T is also very important here. It's very difficult to get your E high without your T going at least a bit down first.

With that said, self injecting E seems very intimidating at first, but has a lot of benefits, including but not limited to:

The main benefit is medical. Injecting E bypasses the liver. This means that you're stressing out the liver less.

This has an added benefit: you can safely get a much higher effective dose with little to no health concerns. Eg, Oral and sublingual generally have a limit of 8mg sublingual per day, and most of that gets completely destroyed by the body via the liver before it acts on estrogen receptors. Sublingual injections come in different forms, and the dose numbers aren't directly translatable, but no matter what you do, the effective amount of estrogen you're delivering is much, much higher.

Additionally, this means that your estrogen can safely get high enough to suppress T on its own. Once your T is down, and E stops being suppressed by T, the reverse will start happening- E will down regulate T production (up to a limit but that's an additional detail). That means something awesome- no blockers. No Spiro, no cypro, no bica- all of which have some concerns of their own beyond just E.

Yes, it is easier to access. Generic, sterile, injection supplies are easily available online in large quantities from reputable medical supply sources, and the injectable medication itself is generally cheaper and more likely covered by insurance.

This also means it's uh. Easier to access when access to HRT is... Non-conventional.

Whiiiiich also means another thing. Injectable medication is always limited by expiration time and the sterility of the vial, not the quantity it's packaged in. Which means that IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOURE DOING, you have flexibility in your dosage if you so choose. Eg, I have personally talked with my provider about how to do this safely, but I've recently tried dosages of estradiol valerate ranging from 6mg to 8mg a week. Again, remember that this isn't translatable to 8mg sublingual a day- 8mg EV injected a week is SO much higher than 8mg estradiol pills per day.

It seems intimidating, but honestly, I find a ~20 min routine on a Friday morning much easier to keep track of than taking multiple pills multiple times a day.

In general, it's considered the best HRT option, although most people ease into it with a period of time on sublingual first. If you can, get trained by a nurse to self inject the first couple of times.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

#pluralistic #moral injury #enshittification #worker power #google #dont be evil #monopoly #sam altman #openai #vocational awe #making a dent in the universe

[deadlynavigation]

Hello, I really enjoyed your m! Wednesday x reader stories. Can you write about how his s/o gets shocked by the amount of gifts his gives and the expensive family vacations he takes them? Forgetting that he and his family are loaded lol.

Money Well Spent

Fandom: The Addams Family

Pairing: Male!Wednesday Addams x Reader

Warnings: Mild swearing, mentions of seduction, rich people being rich

Author's Note: Wednesday is aged up in this- same as previous fics

Navigation

Your boyfriend had money. Was money. And it was getting ridiculous.

There were a couple of times he had crossed the line, a couple of times when he put a bit too much pressure on the already thin ice.

After a while, you kept a mental list of these moments.

-1-

It’s been almost a week since you last saw your boyfriend. Wednesday had accepted an offer for his work, but there was a catch- a weeklong business trip in New York.

Not that you blame him. From what he told you about the offer, it’s an amazing opportunity for both his position and his company, one that would benefit him for years to come. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t miss his gloomy presence and warm embraces from time to time.

So imagine your despair when he calls your cell, on the day he’s supposed to arrive back, informing you of a last-minute change of plans.

“So you’re staying another day.”

“With a heavy heart, cara mia.”

You sigh quietly, and it carries to the other end of the line. “I do apologize, Y/n. I didn’t account for further negotiations regarding the business deal.”

“It’s fine, Wednesday. It’s not that big of a deal- I’ve survived this long without you, haven’t I?”

“If only I could say the same, darling.”

And so here you were on a Friday night, watching some generic TV program and mulling over your to-do list for next week. If Wednesday were here, he’d kiss you until you forgot about it, claiming that the weekend is for you and him, not work.

After a bit of sulking, you hear movement near your apartment’s entrance. Probably the building settling. But as the mysterious sounds grow louder, you rise from the sofa, mind on high alert. You creep near the entranceway, eyes scanning for a weapon of some sorts.

“Y/n, are you home?” Wednesday’s voice echoes throughout the apartment as you pick up a particularly heavy shoe. Dropping it quickly, you make your way to the door, where Wednesday is leaning against the frame.

“Babes?”

“Darling.” He breathes in relief.

“You’re- back. I thought you had until tomorrow morning?”

“I was reminded once more of a man’s desire for money.”

You rub your forehead. “You bribed an agent.”

“I satisfied his materialistic desires.”

You stare at him for a minute before giving up trying to understand your boyfriend. Sensing your disapproval, Wednesday drops his luggage and pulls a small package from his coat pocket. It almost looks like a ring box, all black and ready to be opened.

“I understand your anger with me, Y/n. It is completely justified. However, this may make up for my tardiness.” He offers the box to you, face dead serious with a hint of anticipation. You take the box from him, opening it with steady hands. Wednesday has given you gifts before- expensive gifts. This better not be a repeat.

As the lid pulls back, a watch is revealed- a Jaquet Droz, from the look of it. You’re in love with it the second you see the sleek design. And though you’re tempted, you pull back into reality, facing your lover once more. He’s adopted the stance of a sheepish partner, knowing you would never allow yourself to buy this (but would want it all the same).

“You’re not buying me out with this.” You insist.

“Of course not, darling. I’d be disappointed if this was all it took.”

“And I’m expecting an apology.”

“In the morning. I was gone for a week, cara mia. Let me enjoy you right now, instead of the reminder of your absence.”

And so you sigh and grumble, but in the end, Wednesday has won your heart over with his loving words and actions and watch.

-2-

“Mr. and Mrs. Addams, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” You say, muting the excitement in your voice for fear of them despising your expressive voice.

“The pleasure is ours. We’ve been waiting for Wednesday to introduce us to you, Y/n.” Gomez Addams replies happily.

“We’ve heard all about you from our son. All good things, of course. Tell us, is it true you’ve lit a spider’s heart on fire?”

“Mother, Father.” Wednesday cuts in. “Please don’t overwhelm them. We’ve only just arrived, and you’re picking them apart like they’re a deceased relative.”

“No, it’s fine.” You say, then lean over to your boyfriend. “You’re telling me that story later.”

“Of course.” Wednesday whispers, then turns back to his parents. “Shall we?” He gestures to the sitting room.

“Ah, yes. But before we do, your father has something for Y/n.”

Your eyebrows furrow. You turn to Wednesday, who is avoiding your glare in favor of picking a conversation with his mother, catching up quickly as Gomez goes to grab whatever it is he has up his sleeve.

“Here we are!” You all startle at Gomez’s loud exclamation in the room over. Clattering noises are heard before the father rushes back to you, Wednesday, and Morticia, holding a long object draped in velvety red fabric.

“This has been passed down to Addams’ lovers for generations. I gifted it to Morticia, my mother bestowed it upon my father, and her father… It’s been in the family for decades, and now it’s your turn to hold it.” And with that, he pulls what is possibly the most expensive-looking sword you have ever seen from the fabric, holding it out to you. Your eyes go wide as you look from the sword to Wednesday and back to the sword.

“Wow- thank you,” you marvel. Words cannot describe how beautiful the weapon is- and as you think of that, you almost snort at the irony. But it’s true. The sword really is amazing, jewels trapped in its metal as it glints in the moonlight.

“I would have told you, beloved, but that would ruin the surprise,” Wednesday murmurs into your ears as you accept the sword with a delicate touch. “You are holding thousands of dollars worth of beauty in your hand, yet it pales in comparison to you.”

You almost drop the sword as Wednesday takes on a seductive tone. You want to yell at him, that he is in front of his parents and this sword is worth more than all your organs combined, but damn, his voice-

“It’s an honor, Mr. Addams, Mrs. Addams.” You turn back to your hosts.

“Please, call me Morticia, dear.” Morticia smiles.

“And feel free to call me Gomez. You are part of the family now- and family uses first names.”

With that, they stride into the sitting room, expecting their son and his lover to follow. And you do- after you glare at Wednesday, drag him down by his coat lapels to kiss him heatedly, and hiss at him that you will be getting gloves to handle this sword.

-3-

“Pack your bags, cara mia.” Wednesday strides into your shared room, dark sunglasses hiding his eyes.

Your head rises from your book, eyebrows raised. “...Why?” You ask hesitantly.

“We’re going on a trip.”

You place your book down, not mentally prepared for Wednesday’s antics. “Kay, I’m gonna need a little bit more than that. You’re not just whisking me away to god knows where without any explanation whatsoever.”

Wednesday sighs dramatically as you wait, not moving to pack as he hoped you would. It’s a tense couple seconds, breeze fluttering in from the open windows as your gazes lock and a silent argument occurs.

Wednesday, surprisingly, breaks first. “To Spain,” he starts. “My father has friends there, and he thought it was high time he visited them again. With the whole family this time.”

Only the Addams Family could schedule an impromptu trip to another country with a snap of their fingers.

“See? That wasn’t that hard.” You coo sarcastically. “Now- what? I’m not technically family…”

Wednesday stops for a moment, taking your words in before walking over to where you’re perched on the sofa.

“Cara mia.” He murmurs, dropping to his knees in front of you. His fingers draw a path from your cheek to chin, settling there as he talks. “Look at me. You are family. My parents, however bothersome they may be, consider you the daughter they never had- and Pugsley hasn’t tried to put an arrow through your heart yet. You are family, as far as any of us are concerned.”

You breathe deeply for a moment, bathing in the romantic words of your lover. “All right, then.” The words tumble out of your mouth.

“Excellent. Now go pack.” Wednesday stands back up and goes to grab your suitcase.

That man would be the death of you.

#male wednesday addams x reader #male!wednesday addams x reader #male wednesday addams #addams family x reader #oneshot #fluff #requests #x reader #Wednesday x reader #addams are loaded fr

[play-now-my-lord]

good signs at your new job

- coyotes keep attacking you on the road - deer scream at you and charge when you approach - your boss, whose face you can never seem to commit to memory, keeps praising your team for "loyalty to the bitter end" even though you've all been there a week - get served with divorce papers despite not being married - I love my job - your "new maintenance guy" (obvious government employee but nothing like any cop or fed you've ever met) keeps installing bugs in your house, but they're not good at hiding it and seem afraid of you - false memories implanted by job about working the job when you were a child, before it was even a thing people did - pleasant grinding sound barely perceptible when there's no other sound. Seems to follow you around - payment includes "generous exposure package" but what you're being exposed to isn't specified - I love my job - the news announces that hell is real, they discovered how to make a portal to Hell using something called "slow photons". It's definitely hell but it's full of long-dessicated skeletons, not even geologically active. Everyone's always talking about it, like, what are the implications, what does it mean for us, does that mean Heaven is real or is it just Hell. The next day they lead with how the Dow Jones is doing and don't mention Hell and then they never mention it again, and at first people are upset but they increasingly go along with it, and you start feeling like you're nuts for remembering about Hell being a physical, real place that humans have visited and found empty and barren - first listed benefit for 1 year seniority is "Undeniable Proof"; proof of what? no one will say - your boss, whose voice is at once familiar and novel, calls you on your weekend and he's crying and saying shit like "it's all over" and "what the fuck have we done" and then on Monday you come in and everything's normal - I love my job - I love my job

#frog writing

[pollardgill]

Top 10 Things You'll Love About Having An Online Business

How do these lifts work? Usually, Benefits of Industrial Automation is operated by remote control, allowing that it is maneuvered from anywhere in area. Once the lift is raised, see your medical doctor has swivels to allowed the screen to show to different angles, allowing others to possess a view for the movie or TV program as amazingly well. Tip: You can automatically keep the advertising to a maximum of date by allocating 80 percent of your budget to proven promotions and 20 percent to testing new important things. When something new works compared to your proven promotions, move it on the 80 percent group and also testing something else in the 20 percent category. The next basic issue centers on focus. Most cameras possess a good auto focus feature. Characteristic probably does a better job definitely than you can perform manually products and solutions lack experience or don't use anything but the camcorder from time to time. Some situations confuse the automation, however, and to get decent footage you must jump in and take control. The least expensive systems kind Industrial Automation that attach directly to a kitchen sink. I would suggest that you forget all-around pitchers. They may be very inexpensive, it's true, but they aren't results-oriented. An other sample for one smart lighting control process is adjusting the power of light adjusted towards the time of day. For example should wake up midnight and go to kitchen the clever control should have the ability to turn within the lights by using a weak lightening thinking that you could be not Food and beverages automation here is a high power of light. The SVI tell us how good or bad the settling ability within the mixed liquor is. This settling is initiated only after the mixed liquor has been aerobically managed. Technically it is the volume among the settled activated sludge in a period of 30 min. during the settling stage of the activated sludge treatment course. This volume is expressed in milliliters. If the quantity of settled mass is low after 30 minutes. then it is considered good. Might be a SVI is of a top-notch value, for example about 100 then is actually usually believed that there is a high content of suspended and volatile solids. This can be believed to cause problems a later stages of treatment method. For most part, the activated sludge Wastewater treatment plant is operated at a SVI value between 50 and 5. The average industrial sales is made on the 6th and 7th hint. Some take less, some additional information. At first, your own time will be used up with 1st contact calls. Will certainly be doing 20 to 30 calls per hour (2-3 minutes per ask for call backs and 4-5 minutes for appointments. Including longer calls in-between for example follow-ups, at 20 calls per hour for 6 hours, that's 120 calls per day. These will decrease as your follow-ups heighten.

#Industrial Automation #Food and beverages automation #Packaging and material handling industry automation #Wastewater treatment #SCADA Programming #PLC and HMI #PIPE system in refinery #Power Generation and Refinery #Automation in New Jersey #Benefits of Industrial Automation #Automation saves time and money #Uptime Automation helping business grow

[neonthewrite]

The Office Fae

The next prompt was Tangled, and I ended up with a brand new character for this one. He's fun so far. I'm enjoying his very gremlin energy. I hope you all like him too!

~~~

Life in an office building generally worked well for Simon, despite technically being a house fae. The rules could be fuzzy on that front, with so many humans coming and going every day. Sure, there wasn’t a singular family loving the place and cherishing their lives there, but a lot of humans from many families liked the building and their jobs there well enough to make the energy inviting. Something about flexible hours, good wages, and a solid benefits package made for a harmonious office with plenty of memories–some friendly, some dramatic, even some spicy memories.

Plus there was a vending machine. Simon came for the vibes originally, but he absolutely stayed for the vending machine. At a modest five and three quarter inches tall, he had easy access to a good variety of things in portions that lasted him days.

Another house fae rule he bent–it wasn’t precisely a bowl of cream left out for him specifically, but nobody could expect that these days. Keeping the vending machine stocked was close enough, and if the light bulbs and printer cartridges in the building all lasted longer than they should, well, Simon earned his keep. He probably saved them hundreds on the annual operations budget.

Work always slowed down around the end of winter, aside from some buzzing over in the accounting office. All the holiday parties were done and the potluck food all taken home from the break room fridges. Simon planned for it and handled it well, though things could get cold with the shorter hours and heat on less to make up for the emptier office.

To that end, Simon wintered in the ceiling of the server room. The servers, bulkier and taller than a human, stood clustered in a side room and were never turned off. Blinking lights of green and red and blue twinkled on each machine, colors filtering into the ceiling along with the ample warmth those hulking obelisks gave off.

With so much downtime, he found himself perched near an opening in the ceiling, a spot where the tile had broken off long ago, and watched the server lights flicker on the tangled mess of multicolored cables that ran between them. It was a game of his to trace each cable from end to end with his eyes, idly kicking his bare, grey-skinned feet (his skin had shifted to a tasteful, cool grey a few years ago after an office refresh had updated all the paint). Long, slender fingers absently braided silky hair the color of faded ballpoint ink while he scanned the cables with eyes reminiscent of the shocking, dreaded blue of a computer on its way out.

Most house fae took on colors in equal parts camouflage and defense. Simon would be tough to spot if he happened to be out in the open near a human, but if someone did see him, humans never liked seeing that blue. So his eyes would probably protect him.

Not that he ever intended to test that. As much as he liked his many many humans and their water cooler chatter, Simon was realistic. They wouldn’t like him much even if he shared their scale. All his features were a bit elongated, just enough to seem strange and other. He only wore flowing pants made of scrap fabric and he ate bugs sometimes. Humans would call him scary or freaky or any number of words they had for things they didn’t like, and if his eyes couldn’t scare them off he’d be in danger of a rolled up magazine or a dusty phone book.

He’d stayed hidden for a long time, and he anticipated many games of look-at-cables in his future, all without humans being a bother.

Of course, until they were a slight bother anyway. Simon paused his movements and tensed when the door opened abruptly. Light flooded in and he lost track of the cable he was tracing when he looked over, grateful for his higher vantage point and the human tendency to ignore background details.

Two figures stood there, one familiar and one not. One was Tom, a human whose limbs gangled a bit but whose middle had padded out after so many years in a desk job. His bald spot glowed with light from the hallway, and his rumpled t-shirt sported a band name Simon thought he recognized. From what Simon knew, Tom was every bit an IT master and a vital cog in keeping the office running smoothly. He didn’t have to dress any higher than casual.

The other human was a new face. A woman, probably younger than Tom by a couple decades. Her dark skin contrasted with his pale complexion. Her hair, coily and thick, grew longer atop her head though it was tapered close at the sides. She wore a smart blouse and slacks, which Simon immediately recognized as the sort of thing one wore to a job interview, or one’s first day at work.

Tom waved a hand at the servers whirring away in the room. “Servers in here. Probably not gonna need to be in here a ton, but y’know. If something needs a reset…”

The woman nodded and smiled faintly as she scanned the room. “What are the chances I can fix up some of those cables?”

She said it as a joke. Simon didn’t find it funny at all. Tom did. He laughed. “Now that I get someone to pass tasks like that along to, I imagine I can convince the bossman to let me schedule a maintenance day. Now, let’s get you some of your equipment…”

The door closed and the humans walked away, and Simon cared not at all for their conversation or the rest of the onboarding for this new IT interloper. She wanted to organize the cables, which simply would not do. Simon stalked back to his makeshift camp to get his pack.

This new hire was simply not a good fit, and he’d do what he could to stop her horrible plan.

#gtjuly #gtjuly2023 #mywriting #simon the office fae #gt #g/t #giant tiny