Rather for the sake of profit, transparently.

Republican state representative Tiffany Esposito, who sponsored the new workplace heat bill, spent years as an operative in the business lobby before being elected in 2022.

When we were trying to book a hotel, my partner clicked on the top link of a Google search, which was of course a sponsored link and took her to some completely off-brand intermediary whose website was designed to mimic the appearance of the hotel’s. She completed the booking there before ever realizing it wasn’t the hotel itself, and when I quoted the same stay directly with the hotel it wound up being some $100-$200 cheaper.

I had to have a lengthy phone call with their customer support and exchange a few emails before they finally agreed to refund us. I suppose we’re lucky they even had a reachable customer service, but I was and remain infuriated by the conditions that created the situation in the first place.

I’m a California restaurant operator preparing for the $20-an-hour fast-food wage by trimming hours, eliminating employee vacation, and raising menu prices

No media outfit should be covering these anecdotes unless the business owner is willing to divulge their margins and expected impact to them. Is Mr. Fatburger here protecting a 1% decrease in his 9% margin? Cut a hole in a cantaloupe and fuck it. Uncritical coverage like this also assumes that owners are operating efficiently and that the minimum wage increase isn’t unduly affecting them because they suck at operating a restaurant.

No argument here. There’s a global paradigm shift needed to break out of that mindset should it even be possible, but it still boggles my mind in the meantime the resources invested in sustaining this ecosystem.

That came as a surprise to me too. 2.5% is just so little.

“Tracking protection” sounds more like “alternative tracking.”

Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, just like its name implies, was designed to be an alternative to cookies that will allow advertisers to serve users ads while also protecting their privacy. It assigns users to groups according to their interests, based on their recent browsing activities, and advertisers can use that information to match them with relevant ads.

Lot of time, money, and effort toward a moderate improvement rather than just not perceiving users as products. But…improvement is improvement.

What’s the downside?

Me? Not at all. I actually posted this out of concern because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a Firefox user, and my layman’s impression was that its reputation has been improving over the past couple years. I assumed its user base was doing the same as people grew increasingly concerned with Google’s intentions.

Apparently ZDnet has some reputational issues itself I was unaware of.

Boy that paints a grim picture.

I don’t think so. The article claims Firefox lost some of its lead developers to Google when it started developing Chrome and then took a long time to regain its footing around 2017. That sounds about right to my recollection. I had admittedly switched to Chrome myself for a while (I’m not terribly tech-savvy, maybe a little more than average) but switched back to Firefox last year. I am still pretty deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem though in other ways.

This is a very good example of the skewing I imagined. If you’re unable or prohibited from using Firefox on work devices (as many environments restrict), all that workday traffic will be coming from “approved” browsers.

Haha yeah, when I say I had a cell phone, I mean that I was essentially reachable at all times. I didn’t start using text messaging regularly until like…2009, and didn’t use it for anything else until I got my first Droid a few years later.

Fair point though, my response was very American-centric.

I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL.

😄. Get yourself a decent burr grinder, a French press, and some Aldi oat milk (if you don’t want black) and you can make as good a cup of coffee as you can get at the best coffee shops.

As a relatively elder millennial (1987), I’d concede the title of last true pre-internet generation to Gen X. My family got AOL dial-up when I was in 6th grade, which was a little behind the curve compared to my peers, but not much. So I certainly lived through a seminal transition period as the internet developed and became…what it is today.

But the hallmark experiences of the pre-internet times, payphones, paper maps, coordinating with others, I only did so in my limited capacity as a child. I had a cell phone by…10th grade, I could at least print out MapQuest directions, etc.

I remember a lot, but didn’t truly interact with most of it.

Neutral party here, I read it naturally as a supplement to your comment, not an opposition. I don’t detect an argumentative tone personally.

Comcast said it “promptly patched and mitigated its systems,” it said it later discovered that prior to the repair operation, between Oct. 16 and Oct. 19, “there was unauthorized access to some of (its) internal systems that (it) concluded was a result of this vulnerability,”

Where “promptly” means at least 9 days later. I understand patching production systems isn’t just a point and click operation, but vulnerability and patch management is a competency that Comcast is responsible for. The fact that they’re not named as a defendant in the suit is really, really weird.

I am a total ignoramus about law, but this sounds more like a legislative failure than a judicial one.

But the appellate judge ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act’s standard that a plaintiff must prove that “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation” has been threatened.

If we had comprehensive federal data privacy law, then we wouldn’t have to challenge these practices against wet-noodle state laws that weren’t actually designed for it, right?

I caught this too, very strange. I could speculate that it’s due to the finite timeline on the program itself and the anxiety about what comes next, but who knows. Interested to see the final results next year.

Fair enough. I think it’s a silly line to draw in this particular context, personally, but I jumped the gun on questioning your intentions. Thanks for taking the time.

This the second comment in a week I’ve seen making a nonsensical criticism of a headline (metaverse is the thing the unit works on), and I swear the other was from lemm.ee too. You folks organizing some brigade or something?

Edit: I was wrong, see fer0n’s response

Being in a union,” Schrager complains, “costs money.” Even beyond membership dues, “unions work by compressing wages (and often the terms of advancement) in negotiations on behalf of all employees.” This, she says, hurts more “productive” workers by dragging their wages down to a level closer to that of their “unproductive” fellow workers.

Ceilings for thee but not for me. Libertarian ideology insists that there are select, exceptional people–extraordinarily innovative or productive Randian heroes–who must be rewarded limitlessly at the expense of the plebeians. Unfortunately for them, you really have to believe yourself to be one of those exceptional people to buy into that belief system, and unions by their nature are a repudiation of it.

This type of commentary is frustrating, but the labor momentum despite this “traditional wisdom” and other factors detailed in the article is a sight to behold.