2,343 karma · joined October 8, 2016
- allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app
- effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps
- disable installing apps from app store
- disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact
- none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin
- also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone.
So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it.
Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
* Employee happiness
* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office
* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge
* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)
* Able to hire from outside local metro area
None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?
* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.
Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
EDIT: Looked at a few privacy policies and the CCPA link is often hard to find. Keywords to look for: "CCPA", "California Privacy", some examples of links I found:
https://www.honda.com/privacy/your-privacy-choices
https://www.tesla.com/legal/privacy#data-sharing
https://www.ford.com/help/privacy/ccpa/
https://ksupport.kiausa.com/ConsumerAffairs/PrivacyManagemen...
Something interesting I found is also this: https://www.honda.com/privacy/CCPA-Metrics which shows how many requests Honda received. It seems not many are aware of CCPA rights and this number of requests is not enough to deter companies from gathering personal information. These metrics need to be orders of magnitude higher to make a difference in company behavior. It seems like an automated service to send these requests and more public awareness of CCPA could help here.
EDIT2: A lot of these forms ask whether you're submitting the request for yourself or you're an authorized agent doing it for someone else. I found more details on "authorized agents" on the CCPA FAQ: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa. Maybe an organization like Mozilla or EFF could setup a service where you can authorize them to do this for you? Then you could just select a checkbox of companies that you want CCPA deletion requests for and it would be sent on a regular schedule (quarterly? yearly?). If such a service became popular, it could really disrupt the personal data gathering of companies.
Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar. And pair it to use excess energy for carbon fuels synthesis. Reuse all the existing natural gas power plants to run on synthetic carbon fuel. Batteries are not the solution for this. It only fixes the day/night imbalance, but not the seasonal summer/winter imbalance for solar production.
But most importantly, we don't have time. We don't have time to wait for the beautiful, elegant solution of all cars EV, all power storage in batteries, all planes flying on electricity. Perfect is the enemy of good. Look at the arctic and ocean temps, we do not have time. The developing countries will not wait for the perfect nice solar and battery solution. We need to reuse as much of what we have now in a way that will make a difference for carbon output. Again, we do don't have time for the most efficient solution.
What is industry good at? Mass producing a lot of stuff. We can do that now with solar. Stop worrying about matching it to daily power usage. Just pump out those panels and get it installed everywhere. Get the excess into synthetic carbon fuel and we can quickly make a difference in carbon output.
EDIT: I'm not against EVs, just against dismissing the EV issues with ideas like "go rent a car" as if that's a realistic solution considering how inconvenient it is.
And I know rideshare has a bad reputation because of Uber/Lyft. But government can create rules they must follow to accept these funds. They can either accept those rules or some other company will. Or maybe a government rideshare service is a better option. This is a classic free market vs government service question and there's many options here. But the important point is allowing everyone to use rideshare as a transportation option.
You can't force a top-down solution for public transit with the road system in the US. The great strength of the US road system is point-to-point transportation. Let everyone benefit from that instead of running buses that only the poorest use. Publicly funded rideshare is the way to do this. After a while, the bus routes will naturally appear in the data. This is the bottom-up way to build a bus system.
After a while, certain high usage routes will be noticed in the rideshare data. It will become obvious which streets and destinations could be optimally served with high capacity buses. Now is the time to bring in bus routes. Setup these bus routes and offer a discount for using them.
The current system isn't working, we need to try something different.
If a lot of people start regularly sending CCPA delete requests to these companies maybe they will stop gathering this data.
But what if the natural gas plants don't have to be a stop gap? Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar). Who cares if generation greatly exceeds daily demand. Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas plants. There's already a vast infrastructure and experienced workforce to do this. Use the fuel during the evening and put any excess fuel into storage, there's so much existing ways to store fuel. Then use that during winter when solar generation decreases.
We need to stop thinking carbon fuel = fossil fuel and so carbon fuel = bad. Carbon fuel is simply a form of energy storage, a kind of "battery".
Now they are fighting a battle they can't win. HBO, Disney, etc. have huge back catalogs that immediately makes their streaming services more valuable, in addition to all the new content they make.
They shouldn't have given up so quickly on physical media. Physical media does not have the licensing issues. They could've invested heavily like the way Amazon did on lowering delivery time. Maybe they could've gotten physical media delivery down to one hour or same day. This would counter the studios back catalog because while Disney can instantly stream their back catalog, it's only Disney. Netflix would have access to back catalogs of all studios (at the tradeoff of waiting for the physical media) That's a tradeoff that many customers would make (access to more back catalog diversity in exchange for the delay of waiting for disks).
At the same time, they could produce streaming content with a different business model. How many times do customers complain about favorite shows getting canceled after a season? What if there was a way for customers to select which shows they want supported? Like pick your top five every month and your subscription money will go to that show.
Instead, they went the route of just spending a lot of money making new content as if they're a studio. But they can't beat the studios at being a studio, Disney and the others are the best at that.