onfocus

"Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Food and Drug Administration signs off and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale."

Finally. This will be a huge relief.

"Our CEO, from 2020 to 2021, has taken a twenty percent increase in his compensation, as well as the top executives, they've been taking increases. So this contract that expired on October 4th, we are currently on a two tier wage system. Thirty percent of employees are on a lower tier making eleven, twelve dollars an hour less, higher insurance premium, less vacation, lower vacation pay. So we're all about the equalization of wages, we want to bring those thirty percent up to the higher tier level of workers. The company's proposal was to eliminate that thirty percent cap and eventually get everybody on that lower tier while the company is making record profits."

Asking for a fair share of higher profits seems reasonable.

"The loud, ideological anti-vaxxers exist, and it’s not hard to understand the anger directed at them. All this may make it seem as if almost all the holdouts are conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards who think that Covid is a hoax, or that there is nothing we can do to reach more people. Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it."

Zeynep Tufekci adds more depth to the picture of people who won’t get vaccinated.

"The statistics contrast starkly with the confidence in AI presented by Facebook’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who previously said he expected Facebook would use AI to detect “the vast majority of problematic content” by the end of 2019."

If your answer to an extremely difficult problem is "AI will solve it" you are not really interested in solving that problem. Facebook leadership knows this but they say it anyway while human moderators suffer with no resources because AI will solve this problem any minute now.

’I probably went through maybe 300 Gretsch images and I got pretty good at it so I could see them and I could know right away that it wasn't it,’ he said. ‘So it's eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.’

This story has it all! And by all I mean classic guitars, classic rock, internet sleuthery, and people being nice.

"Workers expect more in part because the company has been doing so well, boosted by high demand for farm equipment. The company reported a record $1.79 billion in profits for the second quarter of 2021, topping the record set the previous quarter with $1.22 billion."

Seems reasonable.

Post-election, the company dissolved a unit on civic integrity where she had been working, which Haugen said was the moment she realized “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”

Dissolving society for profit.

"Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?"

I’m guessing personal ambition, fear of a violent base, or loss of lucrative post-politics career options are why constitution-minded Republicans are silent. We will continue to be in a constitutional crisis until we address the failed coup attempt and ensure consequences for the participants.

"Win or lose, their claim to be the sole authentic inheritors of the American tradition means they are the only ones who can legitimately govern and are therefore justified in seizing power by any means."

This is all out in the open. There should be political, legal, or professional consequences for the people who tried to subvert the election, but nope.

"Both at home and abroad, labor is the ghost in the machine. The supply chain is really just people, running sewing machines or loading pallets or picking tomatoes or driving trucks."

This is a good explanation of the seemingly random supply chain disruptions that keep showing up.

"Facebook has conducted multiple studies confirming that content more likely to receive user engagement (likes, comments, and shares) is more likely of a type known to be bad. Still, the company has continued to rank content in user’s newsfeeds according to what will receive the highest engagement."

Placing engagement above any other consideration is profitable if you never have consequences for the harms your service causes. This is a shocking amount of coordinated inauthentic behavior even knowing Facebook’s poor record on moderation. Misinformation is just another externality to Facebook so they have no incentive to fix it. They need to be regulated. (He whispered into the void.)