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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

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/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[uswanth123]

SAP SF MODULE

Title: SAP SuccessFactors: A Modular Guide to Transforming Your HR

Introduction:

Human Resources (HR) departments are pivotal in driving organizational success in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. SAP SuccessFactors (SF) is a powerful ally, transforming traditional HR into a strategic force with its cloud-based suite of HR modules. In this blog, we’ll explore these modules and how they can revolutionize your HR processes.

What is SAP SuccessFactors?

SAP SuccessFactors is a cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solution that streamlines and optimizes HR functions. It offers a comprehensive array of modules, each addressing specific HR needs. Whether you want to enhance employee engagement, optimize talent management, or gain actionable HR insights, SuccessFactors delivers the tools for success.

Key SAP SuccessFactors Modules

Let’s break down some of the most potent SAP SF modules:

Employee Central: The core of SuccessFactors. It serves as a centralized HR system of record, housing employee data, payroll, time and attendance, organizational structures, and more.

Recruiting: Streamlines your hiring processes with powerful tools for job postings, applicant tracking, candidate management, and seamless onboarding of new hires.

Onboarding: This provides a welcoming and structured experience for new employees. It automates tasks, provides essential information, and fosters early engagement.

Performance & Goals: Aligns employee goals with organizational objectives, fosters regular feedback, and drives continuous performance improvement.

Compensation: Helps you design and manage competitive compensation plans, ensuring fair and performance-based rewards.

Succession & Development: This department identifies future leaders, develops development plans, and creates a pipeline of talent for critical roles.

Learning: Offers a robust employee training and development platform, supporting diverse learning styles and tracking progress.

Benefits of Using SAP SuccessFactors

Improved Efficiency and Automation: Replaces manual, error-prone processes, saving valuable time and resources for HR teams.

Enhanced Employee Experience: Delivers personalized, self-service HR portals, fostering employee engagement and satisfaction.

Data-Driven Decision Making: Provides powerful analytics and reporting to uncover HR insights, drive informed decisions, and improve strategic workforce planning.

Global Scalability: Supports multinational organizations with a cloud-based system accommodating multi-country regulations and compliance.

Continuous Innovation: Benefits from regular updates and new feature releases, ensuring your HR technology stays at the cutting edge.

Getting Started with SAP SuccessFactors

Implementing SAP SuccessFactors takes careful planning. Here’s how to begin:

Assess Your Needs: Identify your HR pain points and areas for improvement.

Choose the Right Modules: Map those needs to specific SuccessFactors modules.

Partner with an Expert: Consider a certified SAP SuccessFactors consultant to ensure a smooth implementation.

Conclusion

SAP SuccessFactors is a game-changer, empowering HR to catalyze business growth. Its modular approach lets you tailor a solution to your organization’s unique needs. If you’re ready to modernize your HR, exploring SAP SuccessFactors is an investment you won’t regret.

You can find more information about  SAP HR in this  SAP HR Link

Conclusion:

Unogeeks is the No.1 IT Training Institute for SAP HR Training. Anyone Disagree? Please drop in a comment

You can check out our other latest blogs on  SAP  HR here – SAP HR Blogs

You can check out our Best In Class SAP HR Details here – SAP HR Training

———————————-

For Training inquiries:

Call/Whatsapp: +91 73960 33555

Mail us at: info@unogeeks.com

Our Website ➜ https://unogeeks.com

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[sage-hendricks]

I have been doing this for years! If you want a quick bit of pointers to get started and you're young enough to have not ripped CDs, here's the world's easiest version (and much cheaper than you think!)

Get a USB external CD drive for your computer; it's only $20 on Amazon, at a quick glance.

Download iTunes. There are fancier programs to use but iTunes is by far the easiest to use for a newbie to rip CDs, even if you don't use it for your library.

For the music itself, there are still record stores everywhere, especially used ones. I'm in the SF Bay area so I'm lucky to have access to two of the biggest and best, Amoeba and Rasputin, but I know if like 6 indie shops within a half hour or so drive of my apartment. CDs these days cost like $15 *at most*, and anything older than 5 or so years is likely going for straight up $3-5, particularly used.

Once you pop the CD in your computer you can just hit import in iTunes and it's done!

NOW, here's the part where you replace Spotify (on Android at least, though they keep promising an iOS version)

Upload all of your music onto the cloud provider of your choice (namely Dropbox and Google drive I know work excellently) and then on your phone download the app CloudPlayer. Link your cloud provider and it will build you your own streaming service! No space taken up on your phone (unless you save songs to be available offline), and it streams whatever you put into your cloud to your phone the same way Spotify would from their own servers.

I feel like Spotify's most notable trait is how they barely pay their artists at all, so start a music library. Buy and/or download the songs you like, stick them in and app like iTunes or MusicBee and boom! They're right there on your hard drive and they'll never get region-locked or delisted and you'll never have to hear an ad when listening to it ever.

What are you paying monthly for Spotify? Make that your monthly music budget to buy from Bandcamp or what have you. Then the songs are yours to keep and the artists actually get a substantial cut (at least by comparison).

Maybe you can't afford a bunch right away - that's fine! Build your early library from old CDs or YouTube rips or whatever so you've got stuff to listen to. Giant Record Companies hosting already-millionaire artists don't need your money anyway.

Seriously you can do it. If you could make all your Spotify playlists you can make a music library. Unless you've just been listening to those algorithmically generated playlists, in which case I guess you and Spotify deserve each other.

[unogeeks234]

SAP SF EMPLOYEE CENTRAL

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central: The Heart of Your HR Transformation

In today’s fast-paced business environment, streamlining your HR processes is essential to staying competitive. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC) is a leading cloud-based solution that helps organizations manage their entire workforce through a centralized platform. Let’s explore what it is and why it matters.

What is SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central?

Employee Central is the ‘single source of truth’ for all your core HR data. It’s designed to handle everything, including:

Employee Profiles: Store detailed employee information, from personal data and job history to compensation and benefits packages.

Organizational Management: Build and visualize your company’s structure, departments, and reporting lines.

Global Compliance: Embedded tools and configurations help maintain HR compliance across multiple countries and regions.

Time and Attendance: Track employee work hours, absences, and leave requests for greater accuracy and efficiency.

Self-Service Functionality: Empower employees to manage data, submit time-off requests, and access HR resources.

Key Benefits of Using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

Centralized HR Data: No more scattered information or multiple systems. Employee Central consolidates everything into a single, easily accessible platform.

Streamlined Processes: Automate routine tasks, reduce manual errors, and accelerate HR workflows.

Improved Decision-Making: Access real-time HR data analytics for better workforce planning, strategic talent management, and informed decision-making.

Enhanced Employee Experience: Self-service portals put employees in control, boosting satisfaction and engagement.

Global Scalability: EC is designed to grow with your business, supporting international expansion with localized compliance.

Who Is SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central For?

SAP SF Employee Central is suitable for a wide range of organizations, but it particularly excels for:

Mid-sized and large companies: Those with complex HR structures and multiple locations benefit significantly.

Businesses seeking cloud-based solutions: EC’s cloud delivery ensures flexibility, scalability, and reduced IT overhead.

Organizations aiming for global expansion: Compliance needs across different countries are streamlined.

Companies prioritizing employee experience: Self-service functionality and ease of use are key strengths of the platform.

Getting Started with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

If you’re considering implementing SAP SF Employee Central, here are the general steps:

Assessment: Analyze your current HR process’s pain points and define the goals you aim to achieve with EC.

Planning: Develop a detailed implementation roadmap, including data migration, system configurations, testing, and training plans.

Implementation: Consider partnering with an experienced SAP SuccessFactors consultant for smooth deployment.

Rollout and Training: Provide comprehensive training for HR teams and employees, ensuring successful adoption.

In Conclusion

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is a powerful tool that can revolutionize how you manage your most valuable asset – your people. By centralizing core HR functions, improving efficiency and empowering employees, EC paves the way for a more agile and successful organization.

You can find more information about  SAP Successfactors in this  SAP Successfactors Link

Conclusion:

Unogeeks is the No.1 IT Training Institute for SAP  Training. Anyone Disagree? Please drop in a comment

You can check out our other latest blogs on  SAP Successfactors  here - SAP Successfactors Blogs

You can check out our Best In Class SAP Successfactors Details here - SAP Successfactors Training

----------------------------------

For Training inquiries:

Call/Whatsapp: +91 73960 33555

Mail us at: info@unogeeks.com

Our Website ➜ https://unogeeks.com

Follow us:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unogeeks

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnogeeksSoftwareTrainingInstitute

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unogeeks

[seo-vasudev]

In today's fast-paced and digital-driven world, providing exceptional customer experiences is paramount to the success of any business. That's where Salesforce Experience Cloud comes into play. With its cutting-edge capabilities, it empowers organizations to create personalized and engaging experiences for their customers, partners, and employees. At Nextbrick, we specialize in Salesforce Experience Cloud consulting, helping businesses unlock the full potential of this powerful platform. Our team of skilled experts is dedicated to tailoring solutions that align perfectly with your unique business needs and objectives. Through our consulting services, we guide you in leveraging Salesforce Experience Cloud to its fullest. From designing and implementing customer portals to enhancing employee productivity, we ensure your organization is equipped with the tools and strategies to thrive in the digital era. With Nextbrick as your trusted partner, you can harness the true power of Salesforce Experience Cloud and elevate your business to new heights. Experience seamless collaboration, increased customer satisfaction, and enhanced productivity - all while achieving your goals and staying ahead of the competition. Ready to revolutionize your business with Salesforce Experience Cloud? Contact us today and let's embark on this transformational journey together!

[fexleservices]

Elevate Your Customer Engagement with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Tired of generic marketing blasts?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation Services can help you personalize your customer journeys with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Create targeted campaigns, track customer interactions, and deliver exceptional experiences.

Learn more here!

[algoworks]

How do you achieve organizational growth by utilizing Salesforce Einstein? Salesforce Einstein is a complete enterprise solution that helps organizations improve their sales effectiveness and accelerate results. Get all the details here.

[bloom-bloom-pow]

enhypen masterlist

enhypen:

(a) = angst, (f) = fluff, (sf) = song fic, (mb) = moodboard

** = posts over 100 notes

head in the clouds (angst series) **

dream smau (a,f) **

as people from my high school (f)

cuddling after a bad day (1/2) (f) **

cute nicknames enhypen would give you (f) **

cute things enhypen would do (f) **

emoji response: wanna go out? (f)

enhypen as college students (f) **

enhypen as jealous boyfriends (hyung line) (f) **

enhypen as youtubers (f)

enhypen as texts #1 (f)

enhypen as texts #2 (f)

enhypen as texts #3 (f)

enhypen as texts #4 (f) **

enhypen as texts #5 (f)

enhypen around their crush (f) **

enhypen if they had a crush on you (hyung line) (f) **

finding out your tweets about them (f) **

finding out you’re dating a member (f) **

finding your perfume in their room (f) **

holding hands with enhypen for the first time (f) **

how enhypen comforts you (f)

hugs with enhypen (f)

ignoring their “i love you” text (f) **

kisses with enhypen (f) **

love languages: acts of service (f) **

love languages: receiving gifts (f) **

love languages: words of affirmation (f) **

moments that make enhypen think of you (angst ver.) (a)

moments that make enhypen think of you (fluff ver.) (f)

overhearing their phone call (f) **

pretending to forget their birthday (1/2) (f) **

pretending to forget their birthday (2/2) (f) **

pretending to reject their love (f) **

reaction to receiving a love letter (f) **

reaction to their crush setting up with their ex (f)

reaction to their staff walking in at the wrong time (f) **

reaction to their s/o being an idol (f)

reaction to you wearing their clothes (f) **

reaction to you wiping off their kisses (f) **

skinship with enhypen (f) **

the moment enhypen knew they liked you (f) **

wired interview: heeseung x yn [pt 1] (f) **

j2's podcast: jay park + jake sim [pt 2] (f)

wired interview: heeseung x yn (cont.) [pt 3] (f)

you as enhypen's wallpaper (f)

lee heeseung masterlist

jay park masterlist

jake sim masterlist

park sunghoon masterlist

kim sunoo masterlist

yang jungwon masterlist

ni-ki nishimura masterlist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2021

This is more-or-less my last blogging day of 2021 (I may sneak a post or two in before the New Year, but I might not), so it's time for my annual roundup of my book reviews from the year gone by. I've sorted this year's books by genre (sf/f, other novels, graphic novels, YA, nonfic) and summarized the reviews with links to the full review. Here's last year's installment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

As ever, casting my eye over the year's reading fills me with delight (at how much I enjoyed these books) and shame (at all the excellent books I was sent or recommended that I did not get a chance to read). 2021 was a hard year for all of us and I'm no exception. I ended up whiffing on so many astonishingly great and highly desirable books this year and I feel awful about it, to be honest.

I know what it's like to launch a book in a pandemic (I had four books out in 2020, ugh), and I so want to get those writers' and publishers' books into your hands. I might actually start an aspirational "books I wish I was reading" monthly or quarterly list for 2022.

On the subject of book publishing a pandemic: last year saw the publication of the paperback of my novel Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book:

https://craphound.com/homeland/2021/10/05/the-attack-surface-paperback-is-out-and-a-once-in-a-lifetime-deal-on-the-little-brother-audiobooks/

There's still signed stock at Dark Delicacies, and depending on the postal service, it's possible that if you order one (or the other signed books of mine they have on hand) that you'll get it in time for the Christmas break.

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Cory_Doctorow_-__Attack_Surface_HB_%26_TPB.html#/

And speaking of 2022, I'll be publishing the first of seven planned books for 2022/3/4 in September: "Culture Heist: The Rise of Chokepoint Capitalism and How Workers Can Defeat It," comes out from Beacon Press in September. It's a book on monopoly and creative labor exploitation that I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin and it's excellent.

Now, onto the reviews!

Science fiction/fantasy novels

I. Situation Normal, by Leonard Richardson

Technically, I reviewed this in 2020, but it came out *after* last year's roundup. Richardson's second novel is a droll, weird, fast-moving space-opera with a gigantic cast, myriad subplots, and fascinating premises – a novel so brilliantly conceived that it runs like precision clockwork.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#more-constellation-games

II. Rabbits, by Terry Miles

Miles' debut novel is a taut, conspiratorial thriller with overtones of PK Dick by way of Qanon and Dark City, a supernatural tale that illuminates the thrill and terror of ARG-like groups.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#rabbits

III. The City We Became, by NK Jemisin

A magic realist novel of New York City that is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his ilk.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

IV. When the Sparrow Falls, by Neil Sharpson

A tense dystopian thriller about the unraveling of a paranoid hermit kingdom established as a final redoubt against humanity's ascent to the cloud. Sharpson's debut is a claustrophobic nightmare of transhuman refusal and authoritarianism.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine

V. King Bullet, by Richard Kadrey

The final Sandman Slim novel was more than a decade in the making, and it is a triumphant capstone to a supernatural noir series that transcended the tropes of both noir and the supernatural with a tale of personal transformation, redemption, revenge and sacrifice.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/17/king-bullet/#sticking-the-dismount

VI. Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots

This debut novel is fantastic, funny, furious and fucking amazing. It is a profound and moving story about justice wrapped up in a gag about superheroes, sneaky and sharp.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#natalie-zina-walschots

VII. The Every, by Dave Eggers

The sequel to Eggers' 2013 techno-dystopian satire "The Circle," and it's a deeply discomfiting, darkly hilarious, keen-edged tale of paternalism and its discontents.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/05/masha-rides-again/#everywhere

Novels (not sf/f)

I. Scholars of the Night, by John M Ford

The first in a long-awaited, storied and fraught reissues of the works of the brilliant and versatile Mike Ford - a cold war thriller without peer.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/mike-ford-rides-again/#cold-war-zeitgeist

II. This Thing Between Us, by Gus Moreno

Gus Moreno's debut novel, "This Thing Between Us," is a genuinely creepy supernatural horror novel, a book that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and prompted me to turn on the nightlight at bedtime.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#cuycuy

III. LaserWriter II, by Tamara Shopson

"LaserWriter II" is Tamara Shopsin's fictionalized history of Tekserve, NYC's legendary Apple computer repair store. It's a vivid, loving, heartfelt portrait of an heroic moment in the history of personal computing: a moment when computers transformed lives and captured the hearts of people in every field of endeavor.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

Graphic Novels

I. Streamliner, by Fane

STREAMLINER is the story of a secret outlaw jalopy hotrod race that plays out with so much fucking noir it's practically vantablack, in a way that makes it clear why STREAMLINER and its creator Fane are great heroes of the French comics scene.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#streamliner

II. Cyclopedia Exotica, by Aminder Dhaliwal

An alternate world in which another race of hominids – cylcopes with one eye and one breast – have existed alongside us "two-eyes." Their relations are presented as a series of lighthearted gags, many of which made my literally cry with laughter. It's an incredibly, admirably sneaky way to tell a profound story about race and gender and class.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uniboob/#one-eye-and-three-dot-dot-dot

III. Bubble, by Jordan Morris et al

Bubble is a comedy/sf story about a distant outpost on a hostile planet where human colonists live under armored domes that keep out the hostile, overpowered critters that live on the surface. It's a wildly improbable artifact – a graphic novel adaptation of that turns podcasting into a visual medium.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

Books for young adults

I. Permanent Record, the Young Readers Adaptation, by Edward Snowden

Snowden's sprightly prose, his deep technical knowledge, his superb knack for explaining complex matters, his ability to articulate principled action all come together in a book that is, if anything, better than the adult version. Books for teens cast a long shadow. They can alter the course of a person's life. I was permanently affected by the books I read as an adolescent.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#ya-snowden

II. The Halloween Moon, by Joseph Fink

In "The Halloween Moon," Welcome to Nightvale co-creator Joseph Fink brings his superb, unmatchable gift for balancing the weird and the real to a spooky middle-grades novel that echoes such classics as Neil Gaimans Coraline.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/remedies-beyond-antitrust/#creepypasta

III. Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders

Anders' debut YA novel is superb – an exciting, engrossing book that captures everything great about young adult tropes while deftly subverting the problems those tropes present, without ever losing sight of the reason we love YA and space-opera: majesty and sweep, good and evil, bravery and sacrifice, treachery and danger.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones

Nonfiction

I. The Data Detective, by Tim Harford

This should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH STATISTICS - it goes beyond debunking bad stats and instead shows how stats can be part of how we discover truth. It presents a 10-part method for avoiding statistical pitfalls *and* doing *good* statistical analysis.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

II. Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air, by Sarah Bridle

Bridle's clear, nonthreatening, technical language, brilliant data visualizations, and examples grounded in our daily experience make this a powerful read. It comes to a devastating conclusion: our species' survival depends on eating more plants, with more centrally (and efficiently) prepared meals.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

III. Competition is Killing Us, by Michelle Meagher

Both an account of how Meagher rebuilt her understanding of markets, law and economics, and a smartly argued, fast-moving history of the neutering of monopoly law, a plot hatched and executed by the Chicago School of neoliberal economists. The Chicago School put competition enforcement in chains. Meagher's book shatters them. It's proof that this world is neither inevitable nor immutable, but rather, something that we can and must transform.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/competition-is-killing-us/#borked

IV. Monopolized, by David Dayen

Dayen weaves explainers and personal stories together, unpicking snarled knots of bullshit and laying them straight to reveal them for the turds they are; then showing how we're personally drowning in crap. From pharma to aviation, airlines to newspapers, Big Tech to Big Funeral, Dayen connects the scams that picks our pockets, robs us of dignity and life chances, and laugh in our faces.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

V. Broad Band, by Claire L Evans

More than a celebration of the hidden woman heroes of the computing revolution – also an epitaph for all the people whose talent, aptitude, dreams and contributions were squandered by a system based on mass exclusion. It's proof that the differences between fields are socially – not biologically -determined.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

VI. Prisoners' Inventions, by Angelo

A for-real version of those neo-neolithic Youtubers who show how to bootstrap advanced tooling from raw materials; a physical version of the beloved first-person accounts of daring feats recounted in the pages of 2600. This is true adversarial interoperability – treating the environment as a puzzle and a challenge, to be deconstructed and reconfigured, overcoming user-hostile designs and armed enforcers.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

VII. Jackpot, by Michael Mechanic

A pitiless – but empathic – look at the lives of the (mostly) American super-rich: the transactional relationships, the paranoia and fear, the greed, the lavish goods, the rootless pingponging from one home to another, the feuding, ruined offspring, the constant preoccuptation with accumulation… It's ghastly. Legitimately horrible.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

VIII. Mutual Aid, by Peter Kropotkin, David Graeber, and others

Painstaking researched and beautifully argued, MUTUAL AID reveals the scientific fraud of "social Darwinism," and its claims that hierarchy and exploitation are evolutionary inevitabilities baked into our very nature. This is a gorgeous illustrated edition with a new introduction by David Graeber.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#against-just-so

IX. Savage Love A-Z, by Dan Savage

Come for graphic sexual content, stay for thoughtful and well-thought-through philosophy. Savage's latest is an illustrated, alphabetical tour through the concepts and tropes of his decades-long corpus of sexual wisdom, humor and learning.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#ggg

[unogeeks234]

SAP SF

SAP SuccessFactors: The Future of Human Capital Management

In an era of constant disruption and digital transformation, managing your organization’s most valuable asset – its people – has never been more complex. Outdated HR systems can’t keep up with the demands of a modern, distributed workforce. SAP SuccessFactors could be the answer if you want to streamline your HR processes, empower your managers, and create exceptional employee experiences.

What is SAP SuccessFactors?

SAP SuccessFactors is a leading cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) suite that provides a comprehensive range of solutions to manage the entire employee lifecycle. From core HR administration to talent management, SuccessFactors offers modules covering:

Core HR & Payroll: Streamlines employee data management, time tracking, payroll processes, and compliance.

Recruiting and Onboarding attract top talent, automate the hiring process, and create a smooth transition for new employees.

Performance & Goals: Aligns employee goals with company objectives, provides continuous feedback, and promotes a performance-driven culture.

Learning & Development: Facilitates personalized learning experiences and development plans, boosting employee skills and engagement.

Compensation & Succession Planning: Helps you design reward strategies, identify high-potential employees, and plan for the future of your leadership roles.

Critical Advantages of SAP SuccessFactors

Cloud-Based Innovation: As a cloud-based solution, SuccessFactors offers rapid deployment, scalability, and access to the latest HR innovations delivered through regular updates.

User-Friendly Experience: Designed with the end-user in mind, SuccessFactors provides an intuitive interface promoting easy adoption and self-service capabilities for employees and managers.

Data-Driven Insights: Powerful analytics within SuccessFactors turn workforce data into actionable insights, informing strategic HR decisions and improving business outcomes.

Global Reach: Supports different languages, currencies, and local regulations, making it ideal for multinational organizations.

Integration with SAP Ecosystem: Seamless integration with other SAP solutions (like SAP S/4HANA) creates a unified business technology environment.

Are SAP SuccessFactors Right for You?

If you’re looking for a solution that can:

Replace cumbersome legacy HR systems

Enhance employee experiences

Optimize talent acquisition, retention, and development

Provide managers with HR tools to support their teams

Deliver real-time data on workforce trends and metrics

…then SAP SuccessFactors is worth a closer look.

Getting Started with SAP SuccessFactors

Implementing SAP SuccessFactors typically involves careful planning, configuration to suit your unique processes, and potentially change management initiatives. Here are some tips:

Define your needs: Clearly outline your current HR pain points and what you wish to achieve with SuccessFactors.

Partner selection: Collaborate with an experienced SAP SuccessFactors partner to ensure seamless implementation and optimal use.

Change management: Prepare your employees for the transition, offering training and emphasizing the benefits of the new system.

The Bottom Line

In today’s competitive business landscape, HR is more strategic than ever. SAP SuccessFactors provides powerful tools to revolutionize how you manage your most important resource: your people.

You can find more information about  SAP Successfactors in this  SAP Successfactors Link

Conclusion:

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[agent-cupcake]

just curious, what’s your favorite and least favorite character design? my least fav for sure has got to be female byleth for reasons i don’t want to get in to yep ok have a good day 😁

IOops this accidentally became a rant, sorry

Okay so, to preface this all, I’m not a character designer and I’m actually pretty bad at it, but my rule of thumb with really unappealing or fan-service outfits is whether or not it makes sense character-wise and how much it tells the player about the character. For example, I think we can all agree that there’s quite a bit of fan-service elements in Hilda’s design. Boob window. However, it’s not unrealistic to imagine Hilda picking out those clothes for herself. Her costume tells you almost everything you need to know about her character on a visual level. She’s confident, pretty, attention-grabbing, and high maintenance while the gloves and laced girdle give a nod to her Viking-maiden roots.

Taking it to female Byleth, I don’t think that her outfit works on either front. Her design is definitely my least favorite and it’s not helped by the fact that you have to look at her at all times. Whatever. The huge, solid mass of boobs, the buttoned bib, the big eyes, the feather hair, the bellybutton, the ripped tights, the booty shorts. She’s a merc out in life and death situations with an accessible, pale, tacky 2000′s “stab me” stomach cut out and a wedgie. Which could be excusable if, like Hilda, there was reason to believe that that her costume was character choice. But she doesn’t really have much character, and what there is gives the impression of a very stoic, dry, blunt person. I have no idea why they’d have gone that route when the sexual appeal of more “utilitarian” costuming (aka, form fitting armor that at least pretends to be functional) for characters like her is scientifically proven AND would say more about the singular personality trait she possesses. Okay, well, I know why they didn’t do that and I think it’s lame. This dysfunction of “character designer wanted a sexy girl but it’s kinda random and just shoved in the game without any thought” actually reminds me a lot of Xenoblade 2′s leading ladies, Hikari and Pyra. Although considering that their bad designs led to a lot of people hating the game for superficial reasons while accepting female Byleth’s design, I guess I’m just bitter. Jumping to a different comparison, then, look at 2B from Nier Automata. Her design is fine as hell which is kinda hypocritical of me considering that it's explicitly fan-service, but I think it also shows the most damning thing for female Byleth. Her whole look, despite having a dozen different element thrown in, is boring. Maybe it’s the colors (dressing her in all black and white would have been really interesting considering the colors of the three lords are so heavily emphasized as a part of their characters) or maybe it’s just the way the desperate elements come together. But, like I said, I'm not even slightly knowledgeable about character design and I know that despite Three Houses being mostly separate, they had to appeal to a larger aesthetic brand to which I have little experience with. And, ultimately, a lot of people find her cute or sexy which...To each their own, I suppose. I don’t pretend that fan-service doesn’t work on me (2B... Cloud’s arms in the remake... Seph's shirtless Smash skin...) but when it’s this obviously inserted in by the character designers rather than feeling organic in any way AND looks bad I'm just not super interested.

The other worst designs for me would be all four of the Ashen Wolves post timeskip. I don't think it's controversial to say that they didn't try with the clothes, even if I love their designs from the neck up (Yes, even Balthus. He looks like the type of guy that would let you sit on his shoulders at a rock concert so you could see the stage). While there are other designs I think are unappealing, those are for purely aesthetic reasons and so I can't maintain the opinion that they're actively bad or that I even truly dislike them.

As for favorite looks... I actually have a few so sorry you're getting all of them because despite the shit I'm talking, I actually really really love the character designs in Three Houses. 

Ferdinand's post timeskip is one of my favorite designs, if not my favorite. The hair, the coat, the armor, the spurs, the colors. You know exactly who Ferdinand von Aegir is just by looking at him. He’s wealthy, handsome, confident in his appearance, a hero, a princely type character, his battle form is mounted combat which is traditionally aesthetically reserved for nobility and leaders... I love it. The only reason I cannot say he IS my favorite is because of the three Lords. But before them, my honorable mentions include post timeskip Hilda, Dorothea, Lorenz, Felix, and Hubert. Granted, I could make a case for why I like almost all of the student’s post timeskip looks.

For the Lords, I obviously have to start with colors because, weirdly enough, Persona didn’t invent primary colors but are actually used as shorthand. Blue is the color of honor, loyalty, sincerity, sadness, and depression. Something I’ve always found very interesting is that blue is very rarely found in nature. To me, that’s always made it seem more lonely which, at least in this case, is thematically relevant. People call Dimitri boring pre timeskip and while I won’t defend his hairstyle (okay, actually, I probably would because he tucks it behind his ears and idk why but that’s one of the cutest things ever) I really like how unassuming he is. Bland. He’s supposed to be the plain shortbread cookie to caramel deLite Claude and strawberry meringue Edelgard. It is not in his character to draw attention to himself or stand out. To me, he kinda looks like an old Barbie prince, like he should have been named Dominic. Also I love the blue eyes/blonde hair thing and his more angular features. It really helps to sell him as the fakeout chivalrous prince type. Post timeskip, Dimitri's black armor is amazing. I love the fact that it’s a lot more intricate up-close with the different little shell-like pieces and the fact that his boots are furry. I love the big cape and the black and white fur around his shoulders. It’s really cool how they used his costume to change the shape of his in-game model to match the bodily proportions of the character art. It’s easier to see when you change his costume into the DLC ones, but the fur and cape build up his shoulders and chest look more broad while keeping that tiny little waist. The choice to give Dimitri an eyepatch is probably my favorite thing about this design. It’s genuinely inspired. Such a simple detail yet it tells the player everything they need to know about adult Dimitri when they see him post timeskip, in one frame the player can begin to understand the extent of his loss over the past five years. The subtle shadow under his eye in the first few Azure Moon chapters and the messy long-ish hair really help to sell the feral prince aesthetic as well, as it’s from those small cues the player gets that he’s exhausted (in more ways than one) and doesn’t maintain himself. None of these things are intentional choices by Dimtiri, they’re the result of what his character has been through.

Yellow is an intense, energetic color. Mostly, people think of it as being warm and inviting, the color of the sun and positivity. That intensity can be overwhelming, though, too visually demanding when compared to its primary counterparts. Don’t stare at the sun too long. Buuuut, it’s okay to stare at Claude. Claude not wanting to wear tight pants in either of his costumes is not only a mood, it is iconic. Pre timeskip, the softer lines of his silhouette makes him look kinda slouchy, kinda lazy. Like he’s not too concerned with appearances. But those adorably messy curls, the little braid, the clearly tended eyebrows, and earring make it clear that he DOES care about appearances and is very aware of his allure. And that’s before he even starts winking. It is honestly so in character that as many people picked him first on the basis of being thirsty, that feels like an intentionally Claude thing even if it was inserted by the designers. The contrast of his complexion with his seagreen eyes is gorgeous and instantly adds a kind of mystery and intrigue to him considering the setting... but it’s sf funny that nobody looked at bronze god Claude among a sea of white faces and thought something was up. Post timeskip, they used the same trick like they did with Dimitri to change Claude’s in-game model to match his canon appearance. The way they designed his uniform makes him not look as twink-ish, like he’s actually muscular and imposing and has the strength he’d need to shoot a war bow with a 120lbs draw weight. Also like Dimitri, you can instantly tell what Claude’s been up to. Like, he was very pretty pre timeskip but when he shows up in the Goddess Tower after those five years in all that gold, he demands your attention. Like a gentleman general with the excessive aesthetic ideals of the Alliance and details to imply his heritage. The quilted pants are amazing from both an aesthetic and practical standpoint. He’s a mounted unit riding a creature with scales, of course he’d want something on his legs for protection. And the chinstrap. I love that so much, it definitely makes him look more adult. He’s got such a cute soft baby face, it’s fun imagining him experimenting with different styles during the five years to get the most desired physical reaction to him as a leader. 

Frenchfries, meet forehead. No, actually, Edelgard’s design is really fantastic. Claude and Dimitri both have realistically colored eyes and hair and then there’s Edelgard. Dimitri shrugs off attention physically and Claude shirks it with a wink but Edelgard commands the players attention from the very start. Although I’m sure there’s a lot of things to associate with white hair and purple eyes, my first thought was Daenerys from Game of Thrones. Otherworldly beautiful by with an edge. Red, of course, is The power color. Strong emotions, love and hate. Red is also associated strongly with blood, which is very important to Edelgard’s plot. Granted, I think the red and black association is even more powerful than JUST red and red is the cheapest play to make in regards to displaying villainy (I mean, there are some pretty universally recognized associations with red and black and it led to people making some unfair comparisons between Edelgard and a famous dictator) but I think it was effective and well used and I genuinely enjoy its use in her case. Anyway, if I had a major complaint about her design it would be the weird ashy color of her hair whereas Lysithea’s hair is pure white. Which doesn’t even matter with the AMAZING hair horns. Ram horns can actually symbolize quite a few things, but their association with power and strength is pretty universal I think. They’re also used in demonic imagery. I love that THIS was her alternative to a crown. Edelgard views herself as a force of war and power before she thinks of herself as royalty. She also mentions that she isn’t super vain, but she loves to do her hair, so the hair being the most elaborate part of her look is entirely in-character. Edelgard’s ensemble is, like Claude, very militaristic. I love that they kept her in a dress that embraces femininity without showing skin as that wouldn’t really suit her Also, again, Edelgard demands your attention. She’s dressed all in bright bright red waving around a giant axe. She is a symbol as much as she is a combatant, someone to follow. I didn’t really mention their secondary lord costumes, but a girl in sexy armor is literally everything and I love that they had the balls to put their main sexy waifu girl in full body armor.

Okay I’m sorry I realize this was excessive and probably didn’t need explaining and I’m not sure I even articulated my thoughts properly but anyway I love their designs so here is the positivity I’ll put into the world.

[thenthbit1]

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[korbengiles]

SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification Description

The "SAP Certified Application Associate - SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning and Mentoring 2H/2021" C_THR95_2111 certification exam verifies that the candidate possesses the basic knowledge in the area of the SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning application. This certification proves that the candidate is able to apply this knowledge in practical projects, under the guidance of an experienced consultant. It is recommended as an entry-level qualification to allow consultants to get acquainted with the fundamentals of SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning and Mentoring. SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification notes SAP recommends that you combine education and practical experience in order to be successful at your C_THR95_2111 certification exam. Questions will test your ability apply the training knowledge. You are not allowed to use any reference materials during the C_THR95_2111 certification test (no access to online documentation or to any SAP system). This certification is not intended for customers. If you are a customer administrator, please explore the customer-specific instructor-led and self-service (SFALC) offerings and become accredited via the SFX Accreditation program. Please note that with passing this exam you will be asked to keep your certification current with every new product release. Click here for more information. Once you pass the exam, you will be required to pass regular assessments to stay current for all subsequent SAP SuccessFactors releases to maintain your C_THR95_2111 certification status and SAP Global Certification digital badge. SAP Learning Hub subscription will be required. This certification is based on a half year release cycle. This version is available for 6 months and a new version will be published with each new release. Click here to view details about version availability.

SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification Areas Below is a list of possible topics and courses that could be covered in this certification. This list is not accurate and SAP reserves the rights to change the exam content (topics/items, weighting) at any given time. Career Development v12 Template> 12% Career Worksheet v12> 12% Career Development Planning Tools> 12% Mentoring> 12% Career Development Planning Permissions and Provisioning Enablement8% - 12% Career Paths v2< 8% Learning Activities 8% SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification General Information SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification Exam Preparation All SAP consultant certifications can be obtained as Cloud Certifications through the Certification Hub. You can book with product code CER006. CER006- SAP Certification in Cloud allows you to take six exam attempts in a year, from wherever you are. You can choose and book your test dates individually. Each specific certification comes with its own set of preparation tactics. These are called "Topic Areas", and can be found in each exam description. The exam description will give you information about the exam's length, number of questions and the content that you can refer to. C_THR95_2111 Certification exams might contain unscored items that are being tested for upcoming releases of the exam. These unscored items are distributed randomly across the C_THR95_2111 certification areas and do not count towards the final score. The total number of items of an examination as advertised in the Training Shop is never exceeded when unscored items are used. SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification Details:- Exam Code: C_THR95_2111 Exam Name:- SAP Certified Application Associate - SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning and Mentoring 2H/2021 Sub-solution:- SuccessFactors Level:- Associate Exam:- 80 questions Cut Score:- 69% Duration:- 180 minutes Languages:- English Get more details on SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification Exam:- http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/seemaiyer-4819168-thr95-2111-success-story-crack-exam-sap-sf-cdp/ https://fdocuments.in/document/cthr952111-success-story-and-how-to-crack-exam-on-sf-cdp.html https://www.slideserve.com/carina1/best-tips-and-tricks-to-prepare-for-sap-sf-cdp-c-thr95-2111-certification-exam https://sap-cert-guide.blogspot.com/2022/01/tips-and-tricks-to-prepare-for-sap-sf.html Safeguarding the Value of SAP C_THR95_2111 Certification SAP Education has worked hard together with the Certification & Enablement Influence Council to enhance the value of C_THR95_2111 certification and improve the exams. Customers and partners are increasingly looking to certification as a reliable benchmark for protecting their investments. Unfortunately, the increased demand for certification has brought with it a growing number of people who to try and attain SAP C_THR95_2111 certification through unfair means. SAP Education has put a renewed emphasis on test security to address this ongoing problem. Please take a look at our post to understand what you can do to help to protect the credibility of your C_THR95_2111 certification status. For details about C_THR95_2111 questions you can check our web portal.

[simgaroop]

Simming Goals 2021

I was tagged by @beatricecrumplebottom and @mystic-hysteria. Thank you very, very much! 

I don’t have any goals to review for 2020, so let’s leave this shitty year behind and focus on 2021. I am aware that many things will continue as they have been in 2020, but the main difference to me is the hope of a vaccine and a chance to return to life as we knew it. I can’t wait to go back to my school and work with my students in person: Counseling and Guidance Lessons are a whole different beast when done virtually.

But... we are supposed to focus on The Sims, so let’s see...

1. Finish my portraits. This is the most realistic goal to be quite honest, because they can be done in short Simming sessions. Here’s my planned list for this year:

Tricou Family (Main family, the downtown teens and Rainelle Neengia)

Gilscarbo Family.

Langerak Family (including the mystery of Kaylynn from 50 years ago AND her younger self from current Sims 2 Pleasantview)

Muenda/Nigmos/Specter (including Olive’s past, her many marriages, Nervous and Ophelia).

Kat Family 

Monty elders (Valentine and Silvia) - I will need to do some extra research on these, but I will try to come up with something fun for these.

2. Try to downsize my Downloads folder. It is ridiculously large at the moment and the main culprits are my hair and clothing folders. I have done a good job keeping buy and build stuff in check (I only download Maxis expansions and recolors, and I have not downloaded any 3t2 or 4t2 conversions, no matter how tempted I am). Once I am done with the portraits, I will cull all the clothing I downloaded specifically for a character. 

3. Play the game. Nowadays, I can’t pay attention long enough to play a regular session, let alone continue a family. This happens with either TS2 or TS4. I think my issue is that I try to plan everything and prepare the hood and so much tweaking that by the time I play I am already bored. 

4. Switch back to my hair colors. I will need to recolor my current default set, so this is a long shot, but let’s see if I get the time and motivation for that.

5. Create a back up of all my stuff and find a reliable cloud service to share them besides SFS. I am very grateful for SFS, but its hasn’t been reliable for a while (it takes forever to download files in my case) and I don’t want to risk losing my CC. Mediafire is bad, Box is awful (so many issues downloading from them) and Dropbox is very expensive. Maybe One Drive?

6. Write again. Anything. 

Now, I don’t think I will be able to complete all of these, but it is nice to have some goals in mind. 

I tag @lauratje86 and  @krabbysims (but of course feel free to skip this!)

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