I got an estimate to fix my car and the guy doing it kept talking and talking. He was mostly pleasant, but I have a hard time with long interactions with people who don't know me.
I'm fairly certain I'm neurodivergent because "being normal" is exhausting for me. When I'm with people who know me, I'm fine, I could conversate for hours. But with strangers I feel like I'm an actor in a play I really don't want to be in.
Beanis died for my sins
My impression is it's less about pushing Trump and more about causing conflict within the US. There were Internet Research Agency(commonly called a troll farm) linked accounts pushing both sides of the COVID stuff, both sides during the BLM protests, etc.
Dems blaming things on Russian disinformation plays right into that goal, too. If you want to rile up the US populace, make people feel like everyone they disagree with is brainwashed by evil outside forces. Republicans did the same shit with TikTok, blaming China for young leftists, trans people, etc.
I am so ready for local apples. Supermarket apples have been garbage lately. Even fujis, which are usually consistently mid, have been mealy trash.
I went to a tourist thing where you can ride a train up a mountain. They offered us the option to ride on one pulled by an old steam locomotive that they only run on special occasions.
It was really cool looking, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of smoke involved. The train cars were open and I felt like I smoked the equivalent of 500 cigarettes on that short ride.
This pdf has his manifesto with footnotes that explain everything and a lot of good research into the stuff that led up to it.
It's a good read, it changed my opinion of Dorner. I still fully approve of his later actions, but his motivations were basically all personal.
There wasn't much in the way of innovation in Uber/Lyft. Private Taxi companies and the regulated cab commissions were able to get competing apps going pretty quick. They just couldn't compete because they had to charge some kind of fee to the Taxi operators, while Uber was giving users a huge discount.
The venture capital firms knew from the beginning that Uber wasn't about technology or innovation, it was about being the next tech monopolist.
Get in between businesses and customers in an industry that's going through a technological change. Subsidize to the benefit of the businesses and the customers to prevent competition. Grow until you have monopoly power. Increase the costs to the users, then increase the costs to the businesses. Next step is usually offering to sell the customers to the businesses(usually by selling ads), but I could see it being some kind of Uber driver gold subscription or something that gives you priority in the app.
Yeah, I don't think the algorithms are the valuable part of social media sites. It's the active users that make up the network effects. Meta has likely already figured out the algorithms already, Instagram reels is struggling because creators go where the viewers are and viewers spend the most time on the platform that has their favorite creators.
I'm bouncing back and forth between tears and rage
There's an Xposed module for this. Make sure you have the latest version of lsposed installed before trying it.
https://modules.lsposed.org/module/com.android1500.gpssetter
In New Hampshire a new law has started allowing parents to put their kids in private schools and keep the public funding. In my tiny town we have a private Christian school newly created for the purpose of taking this money. Each kid that leaves our public school costs the community money because you can't fire 1/20th of a teacher or close 1/400th of a school.
Our schools were already poorly funded because of New Hampshires stupid fucking tax system. There is no income tax and no statewide funding of education, all of the funding is local. The poorest towns pay the most to educate each student for the obvious reason that poverty causes a lot of problems for kids. We also have the lowest property values. This means our town, the poorest in the state pays 10 times the tax rate that the richest community pays, and ends up with the worst schools.
I had an idea to trick a gig app into paying more.
One of the variables Walmart Spark uses to determine pay is how long a trip is estimated to take, using Google Maps data to estimate driving time.
I've noticed that on Saturdays Google maps wants to reroute me around a particular section of street in my town, even though it's by far the fastest route. On Saturdays various groups are allowed to collect donations on the town common, which is on that road.
I realized that is making Google maps think there is heavy traffic, because drivers end up pulling over briefly to give the donations, but they never pick up their phones or leave the car.
My idea is to do that, but along the one road that leads from Walmart into town. I could buy 20 cheap phones and have someone slowly creep back and forth along that road, causing Maps to think it takes 30 minutes each way, thus driving up the pay.
I won't actually do it because the increased pay wouldn't offset the cost of 20 phones and service, but it's a fun idea.