And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly
are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?
are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?
are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.
Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.
If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.
How very depressing that Neil Gaiman had trended not even a tiny bit for demonstrating what a fucking horrific person he is.
As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.
The author says Wallner broke her NDA by sharing her story with the media, including with New York Magazine.
He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.
He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.
Share the story. Put it on Facebook and bluesky and whatever else you're on. Make it clear what a horrifying person he is. Tell your friends. He's paying Edendale a fortune to try and cover this up. Make this hard for him. Make it cost him money.
REMEMBER: you can´t break NDA by speaking out about something illegal. This??
Gaiman denied that he’d abused Wallner and told New York that it was she who had initiated their sexual encounters, but in 2021, Gaiman paid Wallner $275,000 in exchange for signing an extensive nondisclosure agreement that prevents her from suing Gaiman or telling anyone about her alleged experiences with him.
Has no legal basis whatsoever. This is paying someone off to keep them quiet and it's also a very typical way rich people hide their abuses, assuming their victims won't have the ability or knowledge to protect themselves. This is a textbook SLAPP suit. So yeah, she did nothing wrong, and fuck this loser.
Interviewer: There is something stereotypically masculine about the kind of chest-pumping, overly stylish translations of your predecessors.
Wilson: I’m really skeptical about any gender essentialism on that. Other women have published translations of Homer into Italian and into other languages I can’t read. I’ve read some of the French translation by Anne Dacier from the 17th century, and it’s fairly loquacious. Could you pick the translations of The Odyssey by a woman out of a lineup? Absolutely not. But journalists wanted it to be about that. I get that you’re trying to create a story, but I just don’t believe it.
Interviewer: Have you followed the online discourse about the film so far?
Wilson: It’s made-up controversy. Nobody’s seen this movie. It’s just the usual triggers about race and gender, and I just find it very tedious.
Interviewer: curious about what it would look like to make a feminist version of The Odyssey. It seems that could be a helpful framework to have ahead of Nolan’s movie.
Wilson: I’ve been watching a lot of Nolan movies in preparation for all of this, and it seems to me that we don’t know what the script’s going to be like. If it’s the usual Nolan plot of “A guy is on a quest far from home and struggling to get back to an objectified female character,” then I’m not sure I see that plot as inherently particularly feminist.
Interviewer: Looking at those two changes, it seems to me that your translation has a feminist function, whether it’s intentional or not.
Wilson: I think the bar should be higher for feminist translation. There are people whose project that is.
Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
I would still use my turn signals in the Mad Max Wasteland. They'd call me "Signal" because I'd hit my blinker before ramming the enemy hot rods into the side of a desert ravine. I'd use my turn signal every time. They would respect me for this.
This the report that JK Rowing doesn't want you to see. This report scares her so much that she is trying to destroy Amnesty International, a human rights organization, to stop you reading it:
Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their fundin
(Amnesty already pulled the report because of JKR's threats. Of course that didn't and won't stop her - capitulating to fascists and bigots is never the answer. Alejandra captured the report and posted it, so you can read what JKR doesn't want you to know.)
My good folks? Please stop reblogging this with incitements to violence. If you do, I will assume you are a terf fedposting, and report and block you as such.
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto, New York City and Miami! Full schedule here (New dates just added in San Diego and Denver!).
Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:
https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/
As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:
Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.
Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:
That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:
But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:
This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:
A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:
At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:
By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.
Of course, Shake Shack doesn't believe this should cut both ways. You can't slip out of Shake Shack's noose by walking into a restaurant with a t-shirt reading:
By reading these words, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.
Shake Shack isn't trying to create a simplified, efficient system of justice – they're creating a two-tiered system of justice. They get to go to court if you hurt them. Vandalize a Shack Shack restaurant and they'll drag your ass in front of a judge before you can say "listeria." But if they cause you to shit yourself to death, you are literally and figuratively shit out of luck.
That's really bad. Two-tiered justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism. The way to keep the normies in line while your brownshirts round up their neighbors and seize their property is by maintaining the "normal" justice system for some people, but not for the disfavored group:
Gradually, the group entitled to "normal" justice dwindles and more and more of us get sucked into the "state of exception" where you aren't entitled to a lawyer, a trial, or any human rights.
Trump isn't just dismantling the regulatory state: his fascist snatch-squads ignore the Constitution and the courts. His supine Congress ignores the separation of powers (Trump: "I'm the President and the Speaker of the House"). This rapid erosion of the rule of law is about to meet and merge with the long-run, Federalist Society project to give corporations their own shadow justice system, where they hire the judges who decide whether you can get justice.
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:
i really think we need better laws concerning eula and other click-through type contracts. they are not reasonable
you shouldn't need a lawyer to read your contract to use an app and it's wild that we have reached that point
personally i think it violates competency and duress, invalidating the contracts. but that's been shut down in courts. we need a new statute that basically says you cannot agree to something you don't understand well.
