taurath

Yeah the spread is everyone who plays contact football pretty much. Linemen are basically there to absorb and make leverage though - hands up to the head, neck strains, etc. Its a pretty brutal sport for what it does to people's bodies. Any sport has injuries, and paradoxically all the armor can make the impacts even more powerful and frequent.

It adds a sort of tragic element to the game. Growing up I used to cheer for big hits now there's a recognition you are often watching someone lose several years off of their life.

There's also these guardian caps to reduce some of the shock, but they're not very effective - they absorb like 10% of the blow, and you don't see very many players wearing them in-game.

Vehicles already have them, you don't need a lot of bandwidth just enough data to identify the members household which can be done with a wifi access point map and bluetooth MACs.

The management of the company does literally everything it can to ensure it doesn’t even have to pay drivers minimum wage and spends hundreds of millions to block minimum wage pay regulations in any municipality bold enough to try to stop them. It gets washed as “just business” but they are ruthlessly extractive.

> I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.

I can - its a collection of hundreds of PHD-level human behavior psychologists across many companies finding ways to "hack" behavior to increase revenue, vs 1 exhausted customer who just needs something basic and doesn't have the time, money or experience to be discerning in what they buy. Ad companies know more about customers and their behavior than the people are aware of themselves. They hoover up your data, run an alg to determine the patterns of your life and the lives of everyone like you, and target both online and in person various inflection points to drive you towards behavior they want.

You have both product, marketing, and sales all contributing to a mass manipulation, and for this they are rewarded with extra resources to start new companies to do more manipulation.

They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.

Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.

They could literally double the pay of every single driver and still make a profit, but they won't because the drivers "choice" of who to work for carries no market power whatsoever. Here in Seattle we passed a min wage for drivers, and Doordash promptly increased their fees to customers by 30-50%, making it the most expensive place to get delivery in the country. They didn't need to do so, except as a warning to other municipalities not to. Then they tell everyone that its the fault of the minimum wage workers that the fees are high, and not their decisions

Patrick was basically my dad - the characters he played were absolutely instrumental in developing my own values. What a sad day.

If you said "Hey, I work for an algorithm that will fire me if I don't get this done in a minute but the system didn't have the correct info, and if I don't get this done I won't be able to pay my rent" which is more accurate, then it wouldn't be right for other customers, but it would at least give a bit more insight into why doordashers are rude and look rushed and ragged all the time.

Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.

They're taking hundreds of millions in profit and doing share buybacks for the investors, they've got plenty of money, their business is to be a middleman and squeeze everyone external to them: businesses, customers, and laborers

> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job

These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.

Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.

Here's Instacart's latest quarterly report which tells you exactly where the money is going:

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.

Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.

Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)

Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)

Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)

That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.

They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.

If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.

Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.

Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.

The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.

The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.

Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.

This is happening in so many companies - executives and cult-like technical leadership are still touting lines of code as being indicative of productivity while their engineering teams lose coherence around their products.

Widespread recording and use in a cross-database is also a dragnet - its not one camera or cameras in a specific space, its cameras everywhere, accessible from anywhere, and its use constitutes a search (all IMO).

If you continue the argument that surveillance used to proactively rather than reactively find evidence is not a search, then with technology as it is today functionally there can be no expectation of privacy in public (somewhat fair) nor in private, given how widely distributed technology is - one could easily argue that technology's wide distribution is in part because of an expectation of privacy.

There must be a line for which people can expect privacy, or else privacy cannot exist. Its a fundamental value of liberty.

> "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it."

This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.

Our economy is based on "its legal for a computer to do it", so long as the ones controlling the computers are in the same class and sufficiently subservient to the power structures that selectively enforce laws.

Well yeah, it depends on what social class you live in.

I think AI gets commoditized, while also the costs and risks of just applying it to every situation become more clear with some pretty high profile failures and risks. I will not be surprised if the internet itself is effectively hobbled or goes down for days or weeks, leading to a huge wake-up call and an economic panic.

Most folks here have huge blind spots to the humanities, what brings actual value and improves peoples lives. Western society is based on empiricism and often fails to accurately describe the world. There's a broad understanding of how out of touch tech folks are, but the failure modes have not yet manifested. Do not underestimate how much our economy is based on outright fraud - this is the age of the grifter.

US and western society as a whole are currently in a feverish state, and that fever will someday break - our institutions and ability to project power are hobbled or shown to be paper tigers. The old age is over, but the next struggles to be born.

I think, and I'm a hypocrite for suggesting it, that the best thing to do is focus on yourself, your own values, your community and the people in your life who make it worth living.

We used to call those dragnets which are illegal under the 4th amendment, but the constitution only tends to apply to those with the ability to hire attorneys nowadays.

When you put a person who cares inside of a culture that doesn't and just wants to get things out to meet short term goals and figure out the cost later, you get this. Working on some projects its reasonable, but on others, especially services that customers really depend on where the cost of failure is high, it really is short term thinking. If speed is the only moat a company has, its just going to be death marches.

Almost the entire structure of software oriented companies, and why devs are expensive, are to prevent these sorts of errors. That job has gotten harder, and in some places impossible as management forces more trust on LLMs and reduces the capacity of devs to look. This is less of a problem in existing products in production and existing cultures - revenue is protected. Eventually those structures break down, as does the user perception of quality. Once the brands have taken enough knocks, it accelerates.

Yeah that's a much better lens to apply - I was mostly talking about the gap between the ownership class and the working class (which is the majority of folks working in software, but not all)

Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen

1. Social signalling

2. Aesthetic

3. Pretty colors

4. Nostalgia

I'm a 12yoe dev but don't work at FAANG/Mag7. I think the extent to which companies have pulled out all the stops and sacrificed any order in their systems by pushing devs to vibe up massive amounts of code is a tech debt bill that will come due quickly.

I think comprehension debt will keep people employed and make for many opportunities. We will be using AI to make refactors, but the reputational risk being taken on by so many companies is something that hasn't been priced in.

Homes aren't free, but many people here have parents for which one of them worked a single job out of high school and were able to provide food and shelter, buy a home, take vacations, etc for an entire family and they weren't in the top 5% of income. They weren't expected to be always online and available out of work hours either.

A little bit of historical knowledge, a little bit of reading statistics of wealth inequality currently being about the same level as France before the French revolution. A little bit of looking around and doing the math for what a schoolteacher, or someone earning the median income has to do to survive right now, and maybe you can develop a bit of empathy.

We are at a historical apex of economic exploitation in the US, where we have a trillionaire preaching about the dangers of empathy while giving billions to politicians to ensure he is never taxed or his companies regulated. We are the sons and daughters with far less security, working harder for longer and for less than our parents. We have more gadgets but far less peace or leisure or time to take care of our neighbors.