algorithmicsaviors

[algorithmicsaviors]

I now am around more automation

Machines still break. Guaranteed work.

Turns out the "machine learning" parts are difficult.

Still uses lots of humans to create the profits.

Capitalism is suspiciously bad at optimizing for human thriving?

[algorithmicsaviors]

7 ways living in Switzerland ruined America for me

The Swiss have a culture of professional part-time work, and as a result, part-time jobs include every benefit of a full-time job, including vacation time and payment into two Swiss pension systems. Salaries for part-time work are set as a percentage of a professional full-time salary­ because unlike in the United States, part-time jobs are not viewed as necessarily unskilled jobs with their attendant lower pay.

During my Swiss career, I was employed by various companies from 25 percent to 100 percent. When I worked 60 percent, for example, I worked three days a week. A job that is 50 percent could mean the employee works five mornings a week or, as I once did, two and a half days a week. The freedom to choose the amount of work that was right for me at varying points of my life was wonderful and kept me engaged and happy.

There is of course the ban on minarets, but the Swiss work culture does have many appealing attributes.

[algorithmicsaviors]

Fortunately, priorities are beginning to shift in some cultures. Germans used to be famous for hard work; these days they’re notorious for long vacations on Majorca. Western Europeans in general have discovered the joys of slowing down, especially when compared to Americans — hence the witticism that Brits rhyme leisure with pleasure, Yanks with seizure.

[algorithmicsaviors]

Me, handing over CSVs straight from the timekeeping system to the DoL.

Friend: I need receipts Me: On who 

[algorithmicsaviors]

Run commodity firewalls and AV all day.

Go home and watch Darlene and Eliot destroy the techno-security complex you perpetuate for an hour.

Wow, so cool!

Rinse hands of responsibility.

Repeat step one.

[Image: Computer wallpaper with a photo of Elliot from Mr. Robot, wearing a black hoodie and backpack with his arms crossed. He is looking to the camera with contemptuous but cheesy, face and body language. Below him is “Mr. Robot” in a retro style, and behind him is a purple digital grid stretching to to the horizon over a space nebula background.]

[algorithmicsaviors]

One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. As long as the dominant affect is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge. Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes. And it portrays a fundamental part of its functional logic as a contingent and localised problem.

We Are All Very Anxious | We are Plan C

Such crucial reading.

In addition to broad public secrets like anxiety or boredom, other secrets contribute to alienation1 among smaller subsets of people, though still powerful over a given individual.

Eg. many people quietly working at the same jobs they had as a college student, or claiming to be busy with grad school applications to affirm their own worth to themselves and others. Maintaining the lie.

In the sense of "I feel like a screwed-up (and possibly screwed-over) mess" and I can't tell anyone or else they'll find out what a mess I am, and how much I am personally failing. Not trying to make any heady early-Marx references here. ↩︎

[algorithmicsaviors]

tbt foodservice

Going to work most days, with grim resignation, too little sleep and having imposter syndrome in front of a goddamn chip fryer as you work without a sense of urgency, and wonder if today is the day that you'll be fired (or quit) until that day finally comes and you say goodbye and wish your bosses good luck with their flailing chipotle at a university (!?) and take your $1.10 in tips and go home to eat the cherry garcia ice cream you had gotten from a bus stop garbage can and have been saving for just this occasion.

[algorithmicsaviors]

Our results show a strong relationship between a commuting zone’s exposure to robots and employment. In the areas most exposed to robots, between 1990 and 2007 both employment and wages declined in a robust and significant way. During this period, we estimate that, relative to other areas, the introduction of a new robot per 1,000 workers in a commuting zone reduced the local employment-to-population ratio by 0.37 percentage points and local wages by 0.73%. This is equivalent to 6.2 workers losing their jobs for every robot.

Although these numbers suggest that exposed commuting zones are doing worse than the rest in terms of employment and wages, they do not necessarily reflect the US-wide effects of robots. The adoption of robots in one commuting zone could lower production costs, and via trade, enable other industries to create employment in the rest of the economy. Such indirect benefits would be missed in our cross-sectional comparisons. To account for these gains, we use our model to recompute the impact of robots allowing for trade between commuting zones, and found that the employment and wage effects were smaller - but not by much. The exact impact depends on how easy it was to substitute between goods produced in different places, the cost savings from robots and the elasticity of the local labour supply. Using reasonable estimates for these elasticities and our estimates to discipline the calibration of the remaining parameters in our model, we found that allowing for trade still implies each new robot per thousand workers reduced employment to population ratio by 0.34 percentage points and cut wages by about 0.5% (as opposed to 0.73%). If we further take account of the potential spillovers from reduced employment and wages in industries adopting the robots onto other local non-tradable industries, these numbers might be even smaller: about 0.18 percentage points lower employment to population ratio and 0.25% slower wage growth for every one robot per thousand workers (corresponding to about three workers losing their jobs because of one more robot).

[algorithmicsaviors]

So far as division of labour re-appears in the factory, it is primarily a distribution of the workmen among the specialised machines; and of masses of workmen, not however organised into groups, among the various departments of the factory, in each of which they work at a number of similar machines placed together; their co-operation, therefore, is only simple. The organised group, peculiar to manufacture, is replaced by the connexion between the head workman and his few assistants. The essential division is, into workmen who are actually employed on the machines (among whom are included a few who look after the engine), and into mere attendants (almost exclusively children) of these workmen. Among the attendants are reckoned more or less all “Feeders” who supply the machines with the material to be worked. In addition to these two principal classes, there is a numerically unimportant class of persons, whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time; such as engineers, mechanics, joiners, &c. This is a superior class of workmen, some of them scientifically educated, others brought up to a trade; it is distinct from the factory operative class, and merely aggregated to it. [99] This division of labour is purely technical. To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton. When the machinery, as a whole, forms a system of manifold machines, working simultaneously and in concert, the co-operation based upon it, requires the distribution of various groups of workmen among the different kinds of machines. But the employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallising this distribution after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. [100] Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work. The most striking proof of this is afforded by the relays system, put into operation by the manufacturers during their revolt from 1848-1850. Lastly, the quickness with which machine work is learnt by young people, does away with the necessity of bringing up for exclusive employment by machinery, a special class of operatives. [101] With regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be replaced in the mill by machines, [102] and owing to its extreme simplicity, it allows of a rapid and constant change of the individuals burdened with this drudgery.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I — Chapter Fifteen

Learn to code! Adapt your movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton!

[algorithmicsaviors]

They didn't ever implement any of those technologies, but they did leverage labor law violation by misclassifying workers as exempt from overtime pay!

Just call it “regulatory arbitrage” and then it's basically Lyft.

Menial Helpdesk Job Interview

Blob of four nondescript pale men in synthetic polos embroidered with the company logo: What are some technology trends you are excited about?

Person trying to get hired but also anxiously awaiting the end of wage labor: Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, as a force multiplier in resolving issues.

Internal thoughts: How can I make a system for canned replies to knowledge base articles and automated follow up and also make money. Also, I wish I was in Switzerland because full time with only ten days in vacation/sick leave is nonsense.

[algorithmicsaviors]

Late capitalism is full of opportunities

for disappointingly dull workplace injuries and RSI.

Can't feel my finger, while gently chopping herbs for minimal bruising.

Burned hand on grill a couple days ago, here for manager meeting this afternoon.

Bad cramp in back of my knee from leaning over a counter bagging chips and scooping beans. Back of my scooping shoulder is screwed up.

Oil burns? Lol.

Imposter syndrome in front of a chip fryer. The bags celebrate variation. Not that kind though.

Managers recall a burn here, a scar there. Make sure not to rest your thumb on the top of the knife, don't hurt that tendon.

[algorithmicsaviors]

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this– in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

Karl Marx – The Grundrisse, pp. 705

I'm still looking for the quote I think I remember from Capital, or a companion to it, on how the machines consume all supporting jobs until the remaining roles are simply building and fixing the machinery.

[algorithmicsaviors]

It's hard to find time to evangelize about our centrist VC-approved algorithmic saviors when you're working unpaid overtime to make the computers go.

[algorithmicsaviors]

To Walmart executives, the Auto-C self-driving floor scrubber is the future of retail automation – a multimillion-dollar bet that advanced robots will optimize operations, cut costs and revolutionize the American superstore.

But to the workers of Walmart Supercenter No. 937 in Marietta, Georgia, the machine has a different label: “Freddy,” named for a janitor the store let go shortly before the Auto-C rolled to life.

[algorithmicsaviors]

User deactivation.

Just follow the checklist, make sure someone gets their mail for a while.

a little autobiographical piece about the internet

[algorithmicsaviors]

Disability is a labor issue!

[Transcript of Twitter thread by nor @alljustletters:

being chronically ill with a full time job actually means having two full time jobs.

# Not Your Inspiration: i’m 25, multiply disabled with a 40hr job. this means sacrificing my social life, hobbies, interests. using the weekends to recuperate and sleep. being stressed and in pain and overwhelmed constantly. that’s not inspiring, that’s fucking sad. i haven’t “overcome my disability” or am “succeeding despite my disability”, i’m continuously forcing myself to endure further damage to my health in a desperate attempt to survive under capitalism & be allowed to contribute to/partake in society. i actually wanna work cause it gives me structure and purpose, and i enjoy my job. what i want is for my job to not require me to hurt myself day after day & to pay me a living wage regardless. it shouldn’t be either back-breaking work or poverty. # cripple punk

End of thread]

Source: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1020402513420447745

[algorithmicsaviors]

https://cvdazzle.com but with an entire community and a preferred drink!