#administratable remedies

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

I'm coming to Minneapolis! This Sunday (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Enshittification isn't merely a form of rent-seeking – it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers – everyone from grocers to oil companies – but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in algorithmic wage discrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

I call this process "twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Social media platforms are compulsive twiddlers. They use endless variation to lure in – and then lock in – publishers, with the goal of converting these standalone businesses into commodity suppliers who are dependent on the platform, who can then be charged rent to reach the users who asked to hear from them.

Facebook designed this playbook. First, it lured in end-users by promising them a good deal: "Unlike Myspace, which spies on you from asshole to appetite, Facebook is a privacy-respecting site that will never, ever spy on you. Simply sign up, tell us everyone who matters to you, and we'll populate a feed with everything they post for public consumption":

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876

The users came, and locked themselves in: when people gather in social spaces, they inadvertently take one another hostage. You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked you. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the collective action problem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie. Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your own site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer. As with gig workers, the digital flexibility of Facebook gave it lots of leeway here. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were being asked to post were a substitute for visiting their sites – and not an enticement – and drew down their posting to Facebook.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces. Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publishers in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "clickbait" and "malicious links"). Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's Danegeld to reach them. A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they want to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll pay to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

One reason this gambit worked so well is that it was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

For example, Facebook's product manager for its "photos" product wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to lay out a strategy of enticing users into uploading valuable family photos to the platform in order to "make switching costs very high for users," who would have to throw away their precious memories as the price for leaving Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The platforms' patience paid off. Their slow ratchets operated so subtly that we barely noticed the squeeze, and when we did, they relaxed the pressure until we were lulled back into complacency. Long cons require a lot of prefrontal cortex, the executive function to exercise patience and restraint.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man who seems to have been born without a prefrontal cortex, who has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated that he lacks any restraint, patience or planning. Elon Musk's prefrontal cortical deficit resulted in his being forced to buy Twitter, and his every action since has betrayed an even graver inability to stop tripping over his own dick.

Where Zuckerberg played enshittification as a long game, Musk is bent on speedrunning it. He doesn't slice his users up with a subtle scalpel, he hacks away at them with a hatchet.

Musk inaugurated his reign by nonconsensually flipping every user to an algorithmic feed which was crammed with ads and posts from "verified" users whose blue ticks verified solely that they had $8 ($11 for iOS users). Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.

Then came the squeeze on publishers. Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or shadowbanning their content unless they paid.

(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)

Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:

https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/

Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay. Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/05/x-twitter-strips-headlines-new-links-why-elon-musk

Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away." Publishers were advised to "post content in long form on this platform":

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/111183068362793821

Where a canny enshittifier would have gestured at a gaslighting explanation ("we're shadowbanning posts with links because they might be malicious"), Musk busts out the motto of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All this has the effect of highlighting just how little residual value there is on the platform for publishers, and tempts them to bolt for the exits. Six months ago, NPR lost all patience with Musk's shenanigans, and quit the service. Half a year later, they've revealed how low the switching cost for a major news outlet that leaves Twitter really are: NPR's traffic, post-Twitter, has declined by less than a single percentage point:

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

NPR's Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk's enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR's ability to reach those users to a negligible level. The 8.7 million number was an illusion, a shell game Musk played on publishers like NPR in a bid to get them to buy a five-figure iridium checkmark or even a six-figure titanium one.

On Twitter, the true number of followers you have is effectively zero – not because Twitter users haven't explicitly instructed the service to show them your posts, but because every post in their feeds that they want to see is a post that no one can be charged to show them.

I've experienced this myself. Three and a half years ago, I left Boing Boing and started pluralistic.net, my cross-platform, open access, surveillance-free, daily newsletter and blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

Boing Boing had the good fortune to have attracted a sizable audience before the advent of siloed platforms, and a large portion of that audience came to the site directly, rather than following us on social media. I knew that, starting a new platform from scratch, I wouldn't have that luxury. My audience would come from social media, and it would be up to me to convert readers into people who followed me on platforms I controlled – where neither they nor I could be held to ransom.

I embraced a strategy called POSSE: Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a WordPress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms – mostly social media – with links back to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There are a lot of automated tools to help you with this, but the platforms have gone to great lengths to break or neuter them. Musk's attack on Twitter's legendarily flexible and powerful API killed every automation tool that might help with this. I was lucky enough to have a reader – Loren Kohnfelder – who coded me some python scripts that automate much of the process, but POSSE remains a very labor-intensive and error-prone methodology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

And of all the feeds I produce – email, RSS, Discourse, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon – none is as labor-intensive as Twitter's. It is an unforgiving medium to begin with, and Musk's drawdown of engineering support has made it wildly unreliable. Many's the time I've set up 20+ posts in a thread, only to have the browser tab reload itself and wipe out all my work.

But I stuck with Twitter, because I have a half-million followers, and to the extent that I reach them there, I can hope that they will follow the permalinks to Pluralistic proper and switch over to RSS, or email, or a daily visit to the blog.

But with each day, the case for using Twitter grows weaker. I get ten times as many replies and reposts on Mastodon, though my Mastodon follower count is a tenth the size of my (increasingly hypothetical) Twitter audience.

All this raises the question of what can or should be done about Twitter. One possible regulatory response would be to impose an "End-To-End" rule on the service, requiring that Twitter deliver posts from willing senders to willing receivers without interfering in them. End-To-end is the bedrock of the internet (one of its incarnations is Net Neutrality) and it's a proven counterenshittificatory force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Despite what you may have heard, "freedom of reach" is freedom of speech: when a platform interposes itself between willing speakers and their willing audiences, it arrogates to itself the power to control what we're allowed to say and who is allowed to hear us:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

We have a wide variety of tools to make a rule like this stick. For one thing, Musk's Twitter has violated innumerable laws and consent decrees in the US, Canada and the EU, which creates a space for regulators to impose "conduct remedies" on the company.

But there's also existing regulatory authorities, like the FTC's Section Five powers, which enable the agency to act against companies that engage in "unfair and deceptive" acts. When Twitter asks you who you want to hear from, then refuses to deliver their posts to you unless they pay a bribe, that's both "unfair and deceptive":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But that's only a stopgap. The problem with Twitter isn't that this important service is run by the wrong mercurial, mediocre billionaire: it's that hundreds of millions of people are at the mercy of any foolish corporate leader. While there's a short-term case for improving the platforms, our long-term strategy should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

To make that a reality, we could also impose a "Right To Exit" on the platforms. This would be an interoperability rule that would require Twitter to adopt Mastodon's approach to server-hopping: click a link to export the list of everyone who follows you on one server, click another link to upload that file to another server, and all your followers and followees are relocated to your new digs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

A Twitter with the Right To Exit would exert a powerful discipline even on the stunted self-regulatory centers of Elon Musk's brain. If he banned a reporter for publishing truthful coverage that cast him in a bad light, that reporter would have the legal right to move to another platform, and continue to reach the people who follow them on Twitter. Publishers aghast at having the headlines removed from their Twitter posts could go somewhere less slipshod and still reach the people who want to hear from them on Twitter.

And both Right To Exit and End-To-End satisfy the two prime tests for sound internet regulation: first, they are easy to administer. If you want to know whether Musk is permitting harassment on his platform, you have to agree on a definition of harassment, determine whether a given act meets that definition, and then investigate whether Twitter took reasonable steps to prevent it.

By contrast, administering End-To-End merely requires that you post something and see if your followers receive it. Administering Right To Exit is as simple as saying, "OK, Twitter, I know you say you gave Cory his follower and followee file, but he says he never got it. Just send him another copy, and this time, CC the regulator so we can verify that it arrived."

Beyond administration, there's the cost of compliance. Requiring Twitter to police its users' conduct also requires it to hire an army of moderators – something that Elon Musk might be able to afford, but community-supported, small federated servers couldn't. A tech regulation can easily become a barrier to entry, blocking better competitors who might replace the company whose conduct spurred the regulation in the first place.

End-to-End does not present this kind of barrier. The default state for a social media platform is to deliver posts from accounts to their followers. Interfering with End-To-End costs more than delivering the messages users want to have. Likewise, a Right To Exit is a solved problem, built into the open Mastodon protocol, itself built atop the open ActivityPub standard.

It's not just Twitter. Every platform is consuming itself in an orgy of enshittification. This is the Great Enshittening, a moment of universal, end-stage platform decay. As the platforms burn, calls to address the fires grow louder and harder for policymakers to resist. But not all solutions to platform decay are created equal. Some solutions will perversely enshrine the dominance of platforms, help make them both too big to fail and too big to jail.

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.

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/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: JD Lasica (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_%283018710552%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[arisefacilitysolutions]

5 Main tasks of facility management

Introductions

One of the first matters that come to the idea when we assume the character of facility administration is janitorial offerings and property maintenance. This is due to the fact it is what most people understand that helps makes constructing surroundings conductive.

For residential buildings, this may additionally be simply about it. But, in commercial facilities, facility administration surpasses well-known environmental upkeep’s preliminary responsibilities. There are different things that facility managers do to preserve a corporation up and running.

Facility management has now become one of the pieces of equipment to assist groups in creating their completive advantage. Why? Because the intention is no longer to have simply welcoming surroundings that are protected and accommodating for employees but to create surroundings that foster commercial enterprise productivity.

Therefore, we can say that facility administration’s exceptional tasks/ features are derived from this goal: to create surroundings that foster enterprise productivity. In developing such an environment, facility managers work to combine people with the facility (place), conceivable procedures, and the terrific technological know-how to make sure a seamless operation in an organization.

WHAT ARE THE FIVE MAIN TASKS OF FACILITIES MANAGEMENT?

Facility managers are concerned with plenty of duties to assist commercial enterprise operations. But, what are the key areas?

https://arisefacilitysolutions.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/blog-posting-2.jpg

The roles and obligations of facility managers embody all areas of enterprise operation. However, you can crew them into 5 high-level categories; Supporting people, Establishing approaches, Facilities renovation and enhancement, Technology integration, and place.

These classes observe most types of amenities management. However, subtasks will fluctuate, relying on the commercial enterprise’s needs.

Helps in supporting people

The essential goal of a facility supervisor is developing accommodating work surroundings for employees. This serves many broader goals, inclusive of attracting and keeping pinnacle talent, enhancing effectivity and productivity, and growing a superb place of job culture. Facility managers furnish workers to aid in many ways, including:

Coordinating desking preparations

Managing worker directories

Facilitating strikes and house utilization

Handling emergency planning

Facility managers serve as a bridge between the place of the job and the personnel working inside it. Whenever troubles of accommodation, safety, or remedy arise, it’s up to the facility supervisor to clear them up.

By establishing approaches

What features of facilities management services besides a manner to govern them? Establishing procedures brings order to the workplace. Order creates a device of expectations, which breeds an employer that positively influences the way human beings utilize the workplace. The place of job runs on a multitude of processes, including:

Submitting a work order request

Reserving house inside the facility

Checking in company and traffic

Emergency motion planning

Facility managers serve the twin function of identifying governance areas and adapting tactics to cowl them. Whenever a new scenario arises, it’s up to the facility supervisor to create order from chaos and construct a repeatable framework for dealing with that state of affairs once more in the future.

https://arisefacilitysolutions.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/blog-posting-1.jpg

Developing methods additionally increases the scope of facility management by expanding its reach. New methods may additionally contain special departments, employees, assets, fixtures, and spaces—all of which join the many elements of the business.

This applies upward, as well. Facility managers are accountable for presenting essential planning records to the C-suite and identifying the long-term method for administrative centre optimization. Their day-to-day interaction with the administrative centre focuses on actual prices and competitive benefits at the worker level.

Renovation and enhancement of facilities:

As the identity implies, facility management is primarily rooted in amenities renovation and enhancement of the bodily building. It’s the most frequent reply when asked, “What does facility administration include?

But this is additionally the most sturdy scope of expectations for facility managers. It includes no longer solely tending the building but cultivating partnerships, future planning, and asset management. Some examples of this extensive variety of obligations include:

Finding and keeping dealer contracts

Repair, maintenance, and building improvement 

Workplace cleansing and décor

On- and off-site property administration

If it has to do with the physical building, it falls inside the services manager’s realm. Facilities are the 2nd most significant cost in the back of the workforce—it’s the job of a facility supervisor to flip the place of the job into an advantage, as an alternative to a fee centre. It’s about ensuring services meet the desires of the people using them.

Technology integration

More essential than ever is amenities managers desire to apprehend and use technology. Workplace administration structures mixture data, which drives necessary selections about how to run the enterprise and form the workplace. Identifying and imposing the proper technological know-how is the chief accountability of facility managers.

Integrating bodily science falls typically on the IT department. However, amenities managers are the first and ultimate phrase on how they’re selected, used, and leveraged. Some examples of what this appears like in a cutting-edge putting include:

Researching IT units based totally on records series wants.

Integrating IT gadgets into daily amenities methods

Determining the cost, ROI, and gain of clever applied sciences.

Using aggregated records to higher apprehend the administrative centre.

Using an Integrated Workplace Management System, facility managers can gather and analyze records from networked applied sciences to get insights into the workplace. This fuels higher decision-making on how to optimize the work surroundings for the people using them.

Upkeep the workplace

The enhancement and maintenance of a facility fall under a facility manager’s obligations. This is the most apparent function of facility management.

From the renovation of the physical building to ordinary cleaning, the decoration of the workplace, space association, and asset/ equipment maintenance, facility managers work to create the best feasible environment for everyone – staff, occupiers, clients, and visitors.

Facility managers provide repair offerings where necessary and cyclical/ preventative maintenance to make sure the equipment used would function exactly and work longer. With various facility management services, facility managers have a productive and efficient environment for most business growth.

Putting it all collectively for amenities administration

Facility managers guide people immediately and indirectly. They set up procedures for order and organization. They’re charged with renovation and improvement of the amenities themselves. They create complicated integrations to leverage information for success.

When you put these 5 features together, they paint an image of what facility managers genuinely do. Their focal point is optimizing the job’s place to aid every element of the enterprise it touches. But on a deeper level, it’s about giving the employer a constant basis for success.

Conclusion

Arise Facility Solutions helps groups fulfil their dream of a more productive and environment-friendly work environment. With our suitably designed facility management services for company organizations, we will ensure that your work surroundings create the competitive benefit you want to scale your business.

[driavast]

Driavast Software: Revolutionizing Patient Management in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is quite possibly of the most perplexing and high speed industry that require streamlined and effective cycles. Patient management, specifically, is a significant part of healthcare that involves a few partners, including patients, healthcare suppliers, and insurers. Manual patient management cycles can be tedious, blunder inclined, and inefficient, resulting in postponed patient consideration, billing mistakes, and administrative overheads. Notwithstanding, with Driavast Software, healthcare suppliers can alter their patient management processes, improving the nature of care and reducing administrative expenses.

Driavast Software is a far reaching patient management arrangement that empowers healthcare suppliers to streamline their patient consideration processes, from appointment scheduling and enrollment to billing and follow-up care. The software is intended to be easy to understand and adjustable, catering to the particular necessities of healthcare suppliers. Driavast Software is based on a versatile and powerful stage that can oblige the requirements of little clinics to huge medical clinics, providing them with a total answer for patient management.

One of the critical highlights of Driavast Software is its appointment scheduling and enrollment module. The module permits patients to plan their appointments online, reducing the waiting time and enabling healthcare suppliers to successfully deal with their patient stream. Patients can likewise enroll their own and clinical information online, reducing the requirement for manual information section and minimizing blunders. The module likewise empowers healthcare suppliers to send mechanized appointment reminders and warnings, reducing flake-outs and ensuring that patients are ready for their appointments.

Another basic component of Driavast Software is its electronic wellbeing record (EHR) module. The EHR module permits healthcare suppliers to get to and oversee patient information progressively, improving the nature of care and reducing clinical blunders. Healthcare suppliers can get to patient clinical accounts, lab results, and remedy information, enabling them to settle on informed conclusions about patient consideration. The EHR module additionally empowers healthcare suppliers to produce adjustable reports and examination, providing them with insights into patient consideration cycles and results. Visit Website driavast

Driavast Software likewise includes a billing and claims management module that works on the billing and repayment processes. The module empowers healthcare suppliers to produce invoices, process guarantees, and oversee installment exchanges, reducing administrative overheads and improving income cycle management. The module likewise guarantees that billing and cases are agreeable with administrative guidelines, reducing the gamble of legitimate and financial punishments.

Notwithstanding these modules, Driavast Software likewise includes a few other highlights, like patient gateway, drug management, and telemedicine, providing healthcare suppliers with a total answer for patient management. The patient entry empowers patients to get to their clinical records, speak with their healthcare suppliers, and deal with their appointments and solutions. The drug management module empowers healthcare suppliers to oversee patient meds, reducing prescription mistakes and improving patient wellbeing. The telemedicine module empowers healthcare suppliers to direct virtual counsels, improving admittance to mind and reducing the requirement for in-person visits.

All in all, Driavast Software is a distinct advantage in the healthcare industry, providing healthcare suppliers with a total answer for patient management. The software empowers healthcare suppliers to streamline their patient consideration processes, improving the nature of care and reducing administrative expenses. With Driavast Software, healthcare suppliers can zero in on what makes the biggest difference - providing the most ideal consideration for their patients.

[rubyhospital]

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[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Under [Relief Officers] Cooper and Bone, work in the [Vancouver] Relief Department was divided into sections based on the type of cases handled: married unemployment, family unemployment, women’s unemployment, single women’s unemployment, single men’s unemployment, and single sick. Each section was subdivided further, complicating administrative matters immensely. In August 1933, for instance, City Council passed a motion that created six subcategories within the general field of “single unemployed women.” Given that the overwhelming majority of employees were recent hires, the specialization inherent in the division of casework labour functionally limited the knowledge of the new relief workers that was required to perform their tasks. 

Distinct from these case-based divisions in the department were the pension, medical, and investigation sections, within which lay a host of tasks associated with the processing of applicants already grouped within the former categories. Most central to the question of administration, the staff of the investigation section was responsible for all relief cases save for those where special circumstances, such as mental illness, necessitated the use of specially trained visitors. It was the largest section, numbering thirty-four employees in 1934 — more than the entire staff complement in 1932. The largest subgroup comprised those labelled “routine visitors,” responsible for questioning applicants as to the particulars of their situation. There were also “investigators,” visitors assigned to troublesome cases such as those where fraud was suspected, and “file readers,” who monitored the progress of each case file. Someone from this section was usually assigned to “warn” department employees assigned to work relief gangs, such as the landscaping projects connected with the municipal golf course.

Cooper’s most significant administrative change to the work process lay in the separation of the tasks of investigating applicants from those of issuing grants, or in more abstract terms, the division of evidence production and evaluation. Visitors were to meet with applicants and other relevant parties face to face and record clearly the facts of the case according to criteria established by a small coterie of management. They did not, however, make the final determination as to eligibility. In fact, their own opinions about the best ways to assess genuine need and to relieve it were extraneous to the process, save in the form of bias, which departmental procedures had been designed in advance to identify and remedy. Instead, the petitioner’s fate was calculated by a separate group of clerks under the direction of the heads of each case-based section. 

Generally, this section of the staff was shielded from direct contact with recipients. Instead, they relied on formulae set out by municipal and provincial governments, taking the information provided by visitors on standardized forms — information already purified of much of its subjective dimension — and translating it into commodities for the recipient to consume. Here I feel compelled to note that, yet again, the recipient could be asked to endure an additional round of investigation if a clerk decided that the visitor’s initial report contained inadequate or inaccurate information. 

This division of labour made real the abstraction at the heart of relief policies: the calculation of the form and amount of relief had been wholly severed from the applicant’s articulation of need. An assessment of the Relief Department by provincial officials singled out this separation of the tasks of investigation and calculation as of particular value to the effectiveness of the administrative machinery.

Finally, the latest in business machines helped to advance the rationalization process. In August 1930, Cooper introduced a control card system and a new method of indexing relief cases that allowed employees to speed up the production of information vital to administration. Staff could, for instance, calculate the number of recipients who would be declared ineligible for municipal aid based on different cut-off dates for residency qualifications.

The control card system also facilitated deportations by allowing officials to sort out which applicants had not resided in Canada for five years before their initial application. Progress was slow, to be sure. In December 1930, W. Wardhaugh, one of the key bureaucrats in the comptroller’s office, reported that the reorganization of the Relief Department would be finished only “whenever the present unemployment crisis is over.” Yet there is evidence as to the effectiveness of this process. Helliwell, Maclachlan & Co. — the firm tasked with the investigation of George Ireland’s corruption — conducted a series of audits over several years upon the request of City Council. 

Over a two-week period in October 1931, the accountants found “very considerable improvement” in the area of investigative record keeping. Also improved were the records governing disbursement, which the auditors believed were kept “up-to-date.” Additional procedures had been adopted to improve the accounting and allow for accurate monthly audits. The firm offered a few suggestions as to the reorganization of staff duties in order to “cover work not being done or being done by the wrong people.” While Cooper had, to a large extent, lost the war against the transient, giving up territory in the jungles and ultimately having to call for provincial intervention to save his department financially, he did manage to centralize considerable authority in the position of relief officer and to begin the reorganization of work processes. The fruits of these labours would pay dividends in the future.”

- Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival images of a new world in 1930s Vancouver. Edmonton: Athabaska Univesity Press, 2014. pp. 139-140.

[clearwatercm]

Benefits of Petros PACE Finance

What are the benefits of Petros PACE finance? Read more to know more about PACE financing.

 Energy-efficient improvements are usually a good idea because they are better for the environment and your energy bills, but the upfront expense of installing those improvements can put businesses in a bind. It may take years to accumulate enough money for pricey upgrades, but in the interim your energy costs are still significant. Many property owners are looking for a solution that would enable them to start conserving energy right away. If you or a customer of yours identify with this, allow us to propose a remedy: the Petros PACE finance.

 Through a government funding scheme, the Property Assessed Clean Energy Program encourages property owners to make energy-efficient modifications. Property owners who want to make energy-efficient repairs can apply for the government-run PACE Program, which offers full upfront financing and is repaid over a 10- to 20-year period by a voluntary assessment on their property tax bill.

 The Colorado C PACE Program provides funding for initiatives that boost renewable energy production, disaster preparedness, or energy efficiency. Building insulation, new roofs, water-saving techniques, HVAC systems, upgraded lighting, solar energy installation, stormwater management, and other initiatives fall under this category.

 PACE Program Financing Advantages

It's crucial to weigh the benefits and drawbacks before starting any significant changes. The tax professionals at National Tax Group will explain to lenders what they need to know in order to make a wise choice.

 No Personal Expenses

PACE finance offers 100% of the money for energy efficiency projects, unlike other loans that only cover a percentage of the cost. Due to the lack of upfront fees, property owners have more money for savings or other endeavors. This feature of the PACE Program increases the number of business owners who may benefit from making energy-efficient property improvements because the upfront cost barrier is sometimes a hurdle for companies with restricted expenditure budgets. Businesses may start projects right away rather than waiting to save up money, which enables them to start cutting their energy costs earlier.

 Long Repayment Times

Within the average useful life of the renovation, property owners have 10 to 20 years to return their PACE financing. Low annual payments are made possible by the extended payback periods, and the savings from the energy-efficient renovation often outweigh the yearly cost. Property owners are now able to take part in more extensive initiatives that have greater energy-saving impacts than they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.

 Low Interest Rates, Fixed

PACE financing provides lenders with a high level of security because it is reimbursed on the property tax payment. The property owner gets a better bargain since lenders provide better interest rates and more benevolent terms in exchange than other kinds of loans and finance.

 A Quicker Way to Access Upgrade Benefits

Instead of having to wait until they have saved up enough money, PACE financing enables property owners to start their repairs right now. Owners can begin cutting their energy costs sooner as a result, which will increase the total amount of energy bill reductions over time. Additionally, customers won't have to wait as long to take advantage of the better temperature control and air quality. Depending on the location of the facility, making a resiliency update also means that the structure will be safeguarded from natural catastrophes sooner.

 How Can I Begin Using PACE Financing?

 It's time to go forward if you determine that PACE financing is a good fit for you. Find out first if the state and municipal governments in your area have enabled PACE legislation and are running programmes there. If so, you will require authorization from a PACE administrator in order to obtain finance. Your proposed property renovation must receive the administrator's approval in addition to that of the project's developers and contractors. Before you may proceed, the administrator will need approval from your mortgage lender if your property is mortgaged. Contact C-pace.com to find out how you can save your company the most money on your property upgrade before you take the next step.

[fumpkins]

EPA’s Superfund program, a Trump priority, is in shambles

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This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In an otherwise softball May 2017 interview about the Trump administration’s grand plan to clean up the more than 1,300 of the country’s most toxic and hazardous sites, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy posed an actual question to then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

“How much is that going to cost?” Doocy asked.

Pruitt, a career ally of polluting industries, had spent the last two minutes pitching himself as the man to save EPA’s struggling Superfund program, which was established in 1980 and is responsible for addressing areas contaminated with mercury, lead, radiation, and other toxic pollutants left behind at mines and other industrial operations. He blamed languishing cleanups on the failures of former President Barack Obama’s administration.

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What Superfund needed, Pruitt said, was the Trump administration’s touch.

“It’s not a matter of money,” Pruitt boasted to a friendly Fox audience. “It’s a matter of leadership and attitude and management.”

The administration has repeatedly called Superfund a priority. Pruitt described it as part of EPA’s core mission and “an area that is absolutely essential,” even as the administration proposed sweeping cuts to the program and the agency as a whole. Upon launching a Superfund task force in May 2017, Pruitt said he was “confident that, with a renewed sense of urgency, leadership, and fresh ideas, the Superfund program can reach its full potential of returning formerly contaminated sites to communities for their beneficial use.”

Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt as EPA chief in February, has made similar comments, and President Trump crowed of the “tremendous work” he and his team have done on Superfund during a July speech on the environment.

But three years into the Trump administration, Superfund appears to be in worse shape than ever.

The number of sites on the National Priorities List, which require long-term remediation, stands as 1,335 — up from the 1,322 that Pruitt told Fox & Friends was “unacceptable.”

The number of unfunded toxic cleanup sites has ballooned, from 12 in 2016 — Obama’s last year in office — to 34 in 2019, according to EPA figures released late last month. It’s the biggest backlog in at least 15 years, according to The Associated Press.

EPA posted the new data the day after Christmas — a move reminiscent of when the administration published a dire federal climate report on Black Friday, a popular shopping holiday the day after the Thanksgiving holiday. The sites are in 18 states and Puerto Rico.

While there is historically some ebb and flow to the number of unfunded sites, 34 is a “striking number,” said Mathy Stanislaus, a former EPA official under Obama who oversaw Superfund as part of the agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. He is not aware of any measure by which Superfund improved over the last three years.

EPA spokesperson Corry Schiermeyer said in an email that it is “misleading” to compare unfunded sites over time and that the latest figures do “not mean there has been a breakdown” in cleanups at EPA. Rather, “the real story” is that the administration has completed remedial design and construction plans at those and several other sites to bring them closer to actual cleanup, she said.

Asked about how the agency measures its success, Schiermeyer said, “EPA has been able to delete more contaminated Superfund sites off the [National Priorities List] in [Trump’s] first three years than the entire Obama first term,” including 27 sites in fiscal year 2019. Additionally, she noted that the administration has bested the Obama administration in assessing and verifying sites that no longer present an exposure risk.

“This is progress being made to protect human health and the environment,” she wrote.

But it’s been shown that the Trump administration has inflated its Superfund efforts by taking credit for work done during previous administrations. In early 2018, Trump’s EPA issued a celebratory press release announcing that it cleaned up and removed seven polluted sites from the National Priorities List in 2017. “This is more than triple the number of sites removed” during Obama’s last year in office, it noted.

What the agency didn’t mention was that the cleanup work at those sites was completed before Pruitt’s tenure, as AP reported. The outlet noted that delisting a site is largely “a procedural step that occurs after monitoring data show that remaining levels of harmful contaminants meet cleanup targets.”

Stanislaus argues the Trump EPA’s approach to Superfund was “based on a faulty premise” — that it could make it self-sustaining by incentivizing private sector investment in redevelopment. Superfund is designed to deal with expensive, complicated sites that often have no responsible party.

“I’ve always felt [Superfund] was the shiny object to point to to distract from the cuts to other parts of EPA’s programs,” Stanislaus said.

Superfund’s problems are nothing new and have almost everything to do with a lack of money. From 1999 to 2013, federal appropriations to Superfund declined from about $2 billion to $1.1 billion per year, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. As resources dried up, fewer and fewer sites have been remediated, from 85 in 1999 to just eight in 2014.

If the last three years are any indication, the Trump administration is unlikely to breathe new life into this critical and wildly underfunded program — no matter how many times it says it is laser-focused on protecting clean air and water.

In light of its own recent figures, EPA “should be knocking on the door of Congress” to request more funding, Judith Enck, another Obama-era EPA official, told AP.

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[jobsinmanatee-blog]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

The shell-games that platform owners play with surpluses, clawing them back from one group and temporarily allocating them to another, are not a unique feature of digital platforms - every business has dabbled with hiding costs from purchasers (think of "junk fees") and shafting suppliers (e.g. "reverse factoring").

The difference lies in the ease with which these tricks can be tried and discarded. The faster the shells move in the shell-game, the harder it is to track the pea.

If you're an analog grocer changing the prices of eggs, you have to send minimum-wage teenagers racing around the store with pricing guns to sticker over the old prices. If you're Amazonfresh, you just twiddle a dial on a digital control panel and all the prices are changed instantaneously.

A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Undisciplined by competition or regulation, the platforms can't keep their fingers off the knobs.

Remember when  Facebook conducted its infamous voter turnout experiment ?  61 million FB users were exposed to a stimulus the company predicted would increase voter turnout.

The resulting controversy was an all-too-typical exercise in tech criticism, where both side completely missed the point. Facebook's defenders pointed out that this kind of experiment was a daily experiment for Facebook's knob-twiddlers who adjusted the platform rules all the time.

Rather that focusing on what a fucking nightmare it is for 3,000,000,000 people to be locked into having their social lives mediated by tech bros who couldn't stop twiddling the knobs, the critics of the Facebook experiment focused on the result.

It was textbook criti-hype. The Facebook experiment increased voter turnout by 280,000, which sounds like an impressive figure. But the effect size is only 0.04% (remember, the experimental group had 61 million users!).

Rather than focusing on how badly Facebook's ads perform (and how advertisers are getting overcharged), or how the company's compulsive twiddling changes the rules constantly for tens of millions of users at a time, critics of the Facebook voter turnout experiment instead promoted Facebook's ad-tech market by repeating Facebook's hype around this unimpressive result.

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee

[mostlysignssomeportents]

That power starts with twiddling those sliders and knobs that change search results, pricing, recommendations and other rules of the platform.

Online performers know this well. If you're a Youtuber or a Tiktokker, you invest money and time into producing material for the platform, but you can't know whether the platform will show it to anyone - even the subscribers who explicitly asked to see it! - until you hit publish.

For an online creator, the platform is a boss who docks every paycheck and tells you that you're being punished for breaking rules that your boss refuses to explain, lest you figure out how to violate them without him noticing.

Part of Tracking Exposed's remit is to unravel these secret rules so that creative workers can avoid their bosses' hidden penalties. These secret rules were behind the #audiblegate scandal, where Amazon stole hundreds of millions of dollars from independent audiobook creators who used its Audible Content Exchange (ACX) platform to post their work.

Amazon hid the fact that it was clawing back royalties, withholding payments, and flat-out lying about its royalty structure. The key to hiding these financial crimes from Amazon's victims was velocity, the ability to change accounting practices from minute-to-minute or even second to second, allowing Amazon to stay one step ahead of the writers it stole from.

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee