#Today Jobs 2021
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youssefguedira · 6 days ago
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Truly stunning how good Luca is at playing Guys With Something Wrong With Them.
true!! i imagine playing Guys With Something Wrong With Them is somewhat more compelling than Average Normal Well-Adjusted Guy. and also more difficult lending itself to a more interesting performance. i say as someone who has 0 acting experience. but it's about the Diversity of Guys With Something Wrong With Them.
take villainous roles only. fabio's dramatic and flamboyant and obsessed with fame and the manifestation of what's Wrong With Him is a lot of screaming and dancing and also mass murder plots. and violent killing. diabolik, in contrast, is a guy who was very evidently raised around a bunch of criminals until the age of 22 and therefore has 0 social skills. and also likes crime and killing. what's Wrong With Him is much more subtle but still very clear. and primo is. well. primo. his problem is everything (been a while since i watched trust but specifically power and ambition and all that). guess what? also kills! but can act nice when he wants and violent when he wants. a real enigma of a Guy With Something Wrong With Him.
and yet? all the Same Guy. same actor. without even getting into like, paolo il padre d'italia, which is another one of my favourite performances of his for personal reasons. and other more restrained dramatic roles. for my top 2 compare martin martin eden to pietro le otto montagne and they are both super different from each other AND paolo. and again even though i know in theory they're played by famous actor luca marinelli whenever i see the movie i am less like 'wow that's famous actor luca marinelli' and more like 'wow that's my good friend pietro le otto montagne'. which is not true for all actors. super diverse range of roles super skilled actor very good at his job. oscar when
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toffeelemon · 2 months ago
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chapter 4? <3
hi anon! first of all i can’t believe you have been paying attention to any semblance of a posting schedule sksk
it is written! but my dad says no 🫶🏼 (jk)
i don’t know are you new here but if you look through my ao3 you would know that i’m a notoriously slow writer. hence why i never write chaptered fics. until princess simon. i wanna put out work as complete as possible so i can’t rush to post and between me and my beta we have like the attention span of a goldfish in our busy lives so.
chapter 4 is being kept warm in the rice cooker so don’t worry! she’s cooked!
it’s soooo delicious the wait would be worth it trust x
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llycaons · 2 months ago
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I just wanted to post this picture like
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him <3 and then I kept writing and got choked up 😭
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jakeperalta · 1 year ago
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spent weeks psyching myself up to stand up to my mum and then immediately got shot down by her 😃👍
#vent incoming i apologise in advance for the long tags#we've lived together just the two of us since dec 2021 (although her boyfriend is here like 2/3 of the time as well)#and since i got my job in march 2022 i have been paying half of all the bills (literally down to like tv license when i barely watch the tv)#which is £300 a month#plus i buy all my own food + pay for the amazon prime she uses + contribute to various household things like toilet roll etc#and she doesn't have a mortgage so i am paying the same amount as her to live in her house#(and it is very much her house not our house)#and I've never been very happy with any of that but never complained either#but then recently it turned out she never set up the water bill when we moved in (it's one of the only bills i didn't sort for us)#so we have a huge backdated bill from dec 2021 and i knew she was going to tell me to pay half#so for the past month or so I've been preparing myself for this conversation and sure enough today she came and said 'we owe £700'#so i was like 'oh i thought maybe it would've been covered by my £300/month' which is the biggest stand I've been able to work myself up to#and she immediately started going on about how i live here too and use water too so it's just as much my responsibility to pay#and how when we're both earning i should be paying my share and i was like yeah i know that's why i never complained about paying before#but also i already pay more than most people would to live with their parents#and she went off about how actually most people charge their grown up kids rent on top of the bills so really i'm lucky i don't have to#(when she got the original £300 figure it was actually rounded up from like £240 to include 'rent' but i wasn't gonna bring that up now)#and in conclusion she doesn't see why she should be subsidising my bills#like i don't know maybe because you're my MOTHER and i am your CHILD who is just starting out in the adult world#and maybe that entitles me to being treated better than some lodger???!!!!!#anyway i paid the bill and now i'm trying and failing at not crying at my desk 😃#talking
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a-high-femme · 2 years ago
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rant in tags bc I want to sob into a pillow
#I can’t describe to you guys what my job is like. I know I post ridiculous funny stuff but it’s very rarely funny in the moment#I’m a substitute teacher‚ which means that even though I’m in the building EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR#and even though I’ve known most of these kids since LAST DECEMBER (2021)#they just. don’t fucking listen to a word I say#it took 14 minutes and a dean of students in the room with me today to get one of my classes to stop talking over/ignoring me#and I’m not even yelling at them‚ I’m literally trying to 1.) say ‘good afternoon folks!’ and 2.) tell them what the assignment is#all day long I’m ignored and disrespected by the same kids and there are no consequences because this is a charter school#and day after day I’m also disrespected by staff because I’m ‘just a sub’ and you#everyone keeps calling out of work#we finally filled the last VACANCY we had TWO WEEKS AGO. we’ve been down 3 full time teachers since the beginning of the year#and as of two weeks ago we finally filled the last vacancy. so I could go back to JUST substituting.#but today the 7th grade ELA teacher just gave us his one-week notice which means that now that I am the ONLY BUILDING SUB#(we started the year with 3‚ now it’s just me)#I have this terrible suspicion that ​I’m gonna get stuck with 7th grade ELA for the rest of the year. while trying to do grad school.#I just… I’m exhausted all the time#and I act like I’m not but I am#this job is so demeaning and exhausting and I love my students (specifically my 8th graders and high schoolers)#but I’m not gonna see them for the rest of the year. I’m gonna be stuck in 7th grade ELA I just know it#when I say that the middle school is like an active war zone I’m not joking#I had to stop a kid from choking out his classmate today#I leave work every day with headaches because it’s always so fucking loud‚ even in the middle of lessons#I want my old job back‚ this year has been exhausting and I don’t know how I’ve ended up taking on so much more than I’m supposed to#I covered 6 out of 7 periods again this week. the most that any full time teacher has to teach is 4 out of 7#and the subbing coordinator keeps giving me the heaviest coverage loads and then telling me he’s ‘disappointed’ by how tired I am#he also gave every single person on the subbing team specific shoutouts in his daily emails… except me#tldr I’m feeling disrespected by students and overworked by my coordinator and undersupported by admin and taken for granted by coworkers
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berryberrytaeberry · 5 months ago
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I used to draw
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britishchick09 · 6 months ago
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senpai with grandpa sherman, grandma nettie and harold in davie, florida! :D
found by @robert-273-fan
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pronounrespector · 11 months ago
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day 2888
no :(
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txttletale · 7 months ago
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Saw a tweet that said something around:
"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"
I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.
i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.
'depleting the global power and water supply'
something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:
running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours
gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours
watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours
and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!
a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)
a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)
i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?
1-1.5%.
ah. well. nevertheless!
what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.
most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.
but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.
but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!
so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!
'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'
this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."
it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.
nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!
plagiarizing human artists
nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.
AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).
to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?
then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!
this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.
(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)
today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools
i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).
jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!
there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:
“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”
this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.
so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.
if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.
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spreejobs · 1 year ago
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Registered Nurse - PACU Job Vacancy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Registered Nurse - PACU Job Vacancy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Registered Nurse – PACU Job Vacancy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates JOB DESCRIPTION JOB SUMMARY:  Administers planned, quality nursing care in the OT in a safe and therapeutic environment for patients and personnel. RESPONSIBILITIES DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Operating room attire: Dons and adheres to operating room attire according to policy and procedure. (3.1) Room preparation and…
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somuchstrdst · 2 years ago
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pywackett-barchetta · 2 years ago
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vent.txt
The sign outside says Now Hiring
The sign next door says "understaffed"
"Nobody wants to work"
"Nobody wants to help"
I go in
The recruiter has a look of absolute relief
She talks and talks and talks, telling me all about how
I'm a perfect fit
My resume lines up just right
And the rest
I can pick up as we go
Because, you see
They really need the help.
An employee comes by
He says
"Hey, we getting a new guy? We need one!"
She says
"Here's hoping!"
I say
"fingers crossed!"
and soon
"Do you have any questions for me?"
I know
I know
I made it this far
But this is it
Because I see everybody here
is standing
on their own two legs
but me.
"Is it all standing during the shift?"
"Yes, it's-"
she doesn't finish the thought before
she gets it.
the light leaves her eyes.
her voice goes down in enthusiasm, in pitch, in volume, in everything.
her expression completely droops to a grimace.
The air has been let out of the band.
"Why, do you… have a medical reason, for… um… do you have difficulty… standing?"
"We'll get back to you"
is now
the most frequent lie I have heard.
I stand
on burning, shaking legs
across from the workstation
of my manager
at the last job I will have for some time.
"You sure do have trouble with your legs a lot!", she says, sarcastically, daily.
I know
you do not
approve
I cannot fix this.
I am working a position above my capabilities.
I am degraded daily for it.
I am
too slow
too stupid
too bad at everything
the reason everyone else has to stay late
failing everyone
making everything worse
clearly lying about my problems
Today, she asks why it is I work here
after my two-weeks' notice has been submitted
after heavy urging of medical advice
"Did you apply to the convenience store?"
"Yes. They wouldn't take me."
"Did you try the pharmacy?"
"Yes. They stopped returning my calls."
"What about"
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
"Did you apply for-"
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
"So, this, uh… syndrome of yours. Does it mess with your voice, too?"
"What?"
I look aghast. And to the judge's credit, yes, my voice shatters into a trillion tiny pieces like an ant huffing helium at that.
Because I'm destroyed.
"Is that why you sound like… that?"
"…no?"
"Then why do you sound like that?"
"…because I'm nervous?"
"Mhm."
He chuckles.
I'm a punchline.
Case dismissed.
I go to the convenience store.
The employee there raises an eyebrow.
"Wait. Don't you work here? You just interviewed here, and we really, really need the help…"
That's news to me.
I got a "thank you for your time."
I open the mailbox. My appeal has been denied.
I open my email. They've relisted the position I just applied for. It will be reappearing on my job searches every day for the next month
We need help
We're desperate
Please
We'll take anyone
Anyone at all
Anyone in the whole world
Except you.
You're broken.
You're useless.
You're not broken and useless enough for help.
You should fix yourself. You can do this.
You, you useless sack of shit, can pull yourself up. No, we aren't leaving a ladder for you.
How dare you try to climb up like you're a complete human like us.
If you just tried harder, you'd be better.
Why are you bothering to try harder? Just give up and accept you're broken.
They have programs for people like you, right?
Somebody's bound to have a use for you.
Just not me.
Just not anyone.
Please. Somebody help us. Anybody. We'll take anyone.
You? Um… Yeah. We'll get back to you.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Tesla's Dieselgate
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Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband
The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us
Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:
https://elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat
Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles
That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/
That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50
But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html
All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.
This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.
When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.
Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
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This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
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Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]
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Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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jobsolutions · 2 years ago
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sixdegreesofbali · 1 month ago
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Am I the only one who's thinking that these insane dramatics and headloss from Russell is precisely the behaviour in the stewards meeting that Max was talking about? And what Horner was referring to as 'hysterics'?
Russell literally held a press conference over Max calling him two faced, with Toto there to hold his hand. He's brought up Max being a bully, Max being capable of murder, Masi, 2021, RBR staff leaving the team, Mexico, Austin etc etc etc (basically everything except the issue at hand: Qatar).
Someone pull up that clip of Lollipop man with Max and Russell in the stewards room, cause that is exactly what it's like.
It's actually insane.
Russell did a great job at proving Max's point today.
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