Underthinking

Yet another senseless, irrational tumblr

[gleemie]

[mango-habanero-autism-deactivat]

I just imagined some sort of nightmarish future where DNA tests are used to ascertain your citizenship rights to enter certain countries and then I remembered Canada already uses DNA info to deny refugees citizenship by “debunking” their claims for asylum based on their phenotypes and decided that reality is scarier than anything my brain could cook up

[allthecanadianpolitics]

ICYMI:

Canada is using ancestry DNA websites to help it deport people

[gleemie]

The UK does this too. Ruha Benjamin writes about it in this paper around pages 13-16: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/s/2016-Informed-Refusal.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjhxZqgyqTjAhWVvJ4KHfl9D_IQFjAAegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw2c82uY3s5djh0U20D2Z_Mq

[gleemie]

Current mood: 

“The change will do you good I always knew it would Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you But I know it's only lust”

[feministism]

[swiftlywiththefoxes-deactivated]

January 2019:

[suite-dee-reynolds]

I lost weight when I went on my medication initially because it made me very sick and when I told people that was why, more than a couple would say stuff like “I wish I could get some of that” like you want a weird disorder that is awful and to be violently ill? just to be skinnier?

[existentialismandmakeup]

“After I got the biopsies, they did another mammogram. And I had to have my shirt off. And I was standing there at the machine. And the technician said, oh my gosh, you have such a flat stomach. What is your secret? And I was like, oh, I’m dying.“

-Tig Notaro

[gleemie]

"I got mono. It was the best diet ever." Romi and Michelle's High School Reunion

[isitjamie]

[stimman3000]

.

[static-behind-green-eyes]

That’s such a hauntingly beautiful sound.

[sewickedthread]

I need this right now

[quoms]

GrubHub is buying up thousands of restaurant web addresses. That means Mom and Pop can't own their slice of the internet | New Food Economy

It also appears to publish shadow pages without owners' consent—sometimes in direct competition with real websites

Frustrated, Shivane started exploring other options. She says she thought about bulking up her restaurant’s web presence and offering orders on her own site through a different service, one that offered a flat monthly rate and no commission fee. 

There was just one problem: Someone already owned the web domain that matched her restaurant’s name. She looked up the buyer. It was GrubHub. 

The New Food Economy has found that GrubHub owns more than 23,000 web domains. Its subsidiary, Seamless, owns thousands. We’ve published the full list here. Most of them appear to correlate with the names of real restaurants. The company’s most recent purchase was in May of this year.

Grubhub purchased three different domains containing versions of Shivane’s restaurant’s name—in 2012, 2013, and 2014. “I never gave them permission to do that,” she says.

Shivane believes GrubHub purchased her restaurant’s web domain to prevent her from building her own online presence. She also believes the company may have had a special interest in owning her name because she processes a high volume of orders. She rattles off a list of names of local restaurants that she suspects may be in the same predicament. I find versions of about half those names on the list of GrubHub-owned domains.

Additionally, it appears GrubHub has set up several generic, templated pages that look like real restaurant websites but in fact link only to GrubHub. These pages also display phone numbers that GrubHub controls. The calls are forwarded to the restaurant, but the platform records each one and charges the restaurant a commission fee for every order, according to testimony from GrubHub executives at a hearing at New York City Hall on Thursday. This happens on the GrubHub platform itself, too. The phone numbers you see displayed in the app typically aren’t a restaurant’s actual phone number, they’re the numbers that GrubHub uses to make sure it’s getting its commission. [...]

In a hearing at New York’s City Hall on Thursday, company executives estimated that GrubHub made about $30 million in phone commissions last year. And those commissions are under increasing scrutiny of late. The company uses an algorithm to determine whether or not a phone call has resulted in an order, a system that results in mistakes. GrubHub has said it expects restaurants to log into its back end and listen to all phone recordings to make sure they aren’t being charged for calls that didn’t yield orders. A Philadelphia restaurant recently sued the company over its practices. (More here.) Shivane says she just learned about this, and estimates she’s owed about $30,000 in overcharges from the company.

[gleemie]

This is the future of algorithms and work. Tech Co boss and algorithms instead of arcane bureaucracy -- so more bad decisions at scale

[thatnanda]

Our grocery store has giant robots now.

As you can see, they put giant googley eyes on them to make them more endearing and less menacing. Except they’re on the side of the robot’s “head,” so you can’t see them when this 6 ft black obelisk with glowing blue eyes starts rolling up on you and your small defenseless child while you’re innocently standing in the baking aisle looking for pancake mix.

[thatnanda]

Today a woman at the grocery store passed me and said “That stupid goddamn robot!” and smashed her cart into it. The first blow in the human/robot war has been struck.

[jpssampson]

This is juul’s new concert design for 2030

[laughterkey]

WHAT. ARE. THEY. FOR.

[st1ngerm4n]

hey y’all, Stop and Shop employee here. Let me explain these things. This is “Marty”. A bunch of martys were installed at stores all over the country. When we were first told of Marty the managers said they’d be used to clean up small messes and to help customers find products. They don’t do either of those things. They putter around the store constantly beeping and getting in the way. If they find a ‘mess’ on the ground.. (a mess being anything as small as the stem of an apple) they don’t clean it up. Instead it starts saying to be wary of the hazard and broadcasts over the PA system for someone to come clean it up. They have no interface to help customers find items and they don’t clean anything themselves. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DO!?! Spy on workers. These things are just an extra security camera that can move all over the store and watch the employees to make sure we aren’t doing anything the company doesn’t like. And here’s the real kicker… each unit costs about $40,000. And these were unveiled a week after we came back from striking about unfair policies they were trying to push onto us.  So tl:dr, Marty fucking sucks and so does Stop and Shop

[furbearingbrick]

[bluelivesaintshit]

Tired: Robot War where the robots destroy us in order to save the planet

Wired: Robot War where the proletariat destroys the machines because they serve the bourgeoisie

[anti-capitalistlesbianwitch]

Alabama Woman Who Lost Pregnancy in Shooting Is Charged in Fetus’s Death

Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. The police say she initiated a fight that led to the shooting.

Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with another woman.

But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.

Ms. Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and booked into jail on a $50,000 bond, according to the authorities in Jefferson County, Ala. The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.

“The only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department, said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

The unusual case comes amid a heated debate over the rights of pregnant women and fetuses nationwide, and Alabama is ground zero for the issue.

WHAT.THE.HELL, ALABAMA?

[gleemie]

This from the people who also make stand your ground laws.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

IPOs have sent Uber and Lyft fares skyrocketing, while driver pay plummets

The public markets are hungry: as Uber and Lyft look to IPOs to let their investors – who have been subsidizing 40-50% of every ride – redeem their shares through sales to the public capital markets, the companies are desperate for ways to reduce their unprofitability and increase those share prices.

Luckily for them, the rideshare companies operate “two-sided markets,” a darling of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, wherein they are able to control the prices that customers pay and the share of those payments that reach drivers, and that means they get to fuck everybody over.

Both companies have been ratcheting up fares as they have increased their exposure to the public markets, but not only are they not sharing these new revenues with drivers – they’re actually cutting real wages to drivers.

Drivers are figuring this out by sharing screenshots of the fares charged and their remittances with passengers (Uber and Lyft otherwise hoard all information about the spread between fare and wage).

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/19/opacity-n-gouging.html

[anti-capitalistlesbianwitch]

Post by Mar:

I know that the Notre Dame is a very important landmark but the fact that billionaires have pledged over 600 million dollars in under 24 hours to help fix it just really puts into perspective how easily rich people could help solve world issues if they cared

From the Girl Du Jour Facebook page

[snowflakeeel]

- @jistring

[wizzardbaby]

PUT YOUR HAND IN THAT CRACK

AND YOU WONT GET IT BACK

[chickenwhite]

WHEEEEN THE JAWS OPEN WIDE

AND THERE’S MORE JAWS INSIDE

[your-mouths-a-constellation]

WHEN IT SWIMS ON A REEF

AND HAS TWO SETS OF TEETH

[snowflakeeel]

[memewhore]

[klubbhead]

[tekka-dan]

How do you unintentionally ruin the own point of your message

[gleemie]

@kmtam

[mostlysignssomeportents]

California's Right to Repair Bill, killed last year by Big Ag and Apple, has been reintroduced

Last year, California was one of several states to introduce right to repair legislation that would force companies to end practices that discourage the independent repair sector, creating a requirement to sell replacement parts, provide documentation, and supply codes to bypass DRM systems that locked new parts out of devices until the company activated them.

The bills were mostly defeated, thanks to coalitions led by Apple – which subsequently warned its investors that its profits were threatened by customers’ unwillingness to abandon their old devices and buy new ones.

In California, the farm lobby did a deal with the devil, selling out to the ag-tech sector and throwing its weight behind Apple’s push to kill the bill.

But the California right-to-repair legislation is back in play, thanks to California State Assemblymember Susan Talamantes Eggman [D-Stockton], whose Assembly Bill 1163 is substantively similar to last year’s r-to-r bill.

Depending on how you count, the repair sector is worth 1-4% of total US GDP, and most repair businesses are neighborhood-based small firms whose profits stay in your community. By contrast, Apple (and other Big Tech firms) are notorious tax avoiders who funnel their profits offshore and then direct them to their distant shareholders in the form of massive stock buybacks and other forms of financial engineering.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/20/thinking-different.html

[mckitterick]

[youdidloveitso]

The bills were mostly defeated, thanks to coalitions led by Apple – which subsequently warned its investors that its profits were threatened by customers’ unwillingness to abandon their old devices and buy new ones.

[gleemie]

Retweeted with a 4 year old Android!

[gleemie]

I see a pattern where men around me in academia fail utterly at things and nobody will tell them the truth so they declare mission accomplished.

[mydogisabutt]

more things i’ve discovered after 2 years of raising garden snails:

- they will wiggle their eye stalks in excitement - they have favorite places to sleep and favorite friends to sleep with - they’re good for your skin so let them run around on ur face!!! - they can feel their shells, which means they can feel u pet them (pet gently!!) - u can help a snail with a broken shell by giving it eggshells or cuttlebones to scrape (the calcium helps them patch up!) - they like a change of scenery and will explore all day if u change something - absolute cuddle bugs. love to snuggle with u, with friends, with dirt - u can hear them chew!! listen closely when u feed them….. asmr - as distinct as snowflakes, every single one is different!! i can tell all of my snails apart easily - babies. absolute baby children - speaking of babies, baby garden snails are no bigger than raindrops and translucent… delicate!! keep in a separate enclosure until they’re bigger!! baby jail!!! - some snails are shy……… kiss them. they are important

[thebrightsideofthebluemoon]

This is so sweet and I absolutely didn’t know I needed this till now

[i-raised-you-danker-than-this]

[jervae]

😭

[gleemie]

Tumblr did more for me than most animal studies right here

[marieannelise]

When there’s too much shit you need to get done at once