#airline tickets allow

[antisocialxconstruct]

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[flatoatchi]

the sheer logistical nightmare that is figuring out how to fly with both of your cats

[dcxdpdabbles]

DCxDP: Travel Buddy

"I already told you I'm not going to another country! I'm going to New Mexico!" The shout echoes with frustration across the airport. Dick looks up from his phone to where a man is arguing with a woman behind a counter. She has a pinched grimace on her face, an expression only those who have worked in customer service are familiar with.

It's the look of someone who dances on the line of "I don't need to up with this bullshit. I don't need this job" and "Think of your bills, think of your check, stay calm."

There is a long line behind him, where everyone is making faces at the delay.

Dick often preferred to travel with Justice League tech, as nothing beat the speed of instant teleportation, but he needed to have some records of traveling the normal for his civilian identity. It would be suspicious if he was seen worldwide with no signs of how he got there.

It was a necessary evil to have his loveable wanderlust persona that was Dick Grayson-Wayne. He had taken a few aspects of Brucie Wayne but replaced the playboy reputation with a restlessness that couldn't stand being in one place for too long.

Growing up with people constantly pointing out how attractive he was, which would have been fine were it not for the rich old men and women who leered at him through his teen years. He could not stomach being a playboy, allowing those who objectified him to think he enjoyed their attention.

It was easier to be the easily distracted, pretty son who was always away from home instead. It helped that Bruce had plenty of private jets to gift his son for whatever whimsy urge to move hit him. That was why he was in Illinois today.

Dick's jet had needed to stop for some fuel, and like most commercial airlines, they were told that they needed to wait before heading up again. They may have enough money to afford their own planes, but commercial planes have the right of way.

Then a storm was reported at Gotham Airlines, and his pilot told Dick they were grounded until it cleared up. It could be a delay of six hours.

Dick didn't mind, having told his staff to take a break. If it got too bad, he would buy everyone a hotel room to try again tomorrow. His private jet staff seemed stunned by the offer, insisting they could wait to see if it was clear enough to fly in a few hours.

He had decided he wanted to have some crappy airport snacks, as it was part of the experience, and walked around the airport munching on his chocolate donut. He found a little booth selling local coffee, prompting him to find a seat near the welcome counter and scroll through his phone.

He still had three hours to kill, so he considered exploring the area a little. I suggest finding some hotels just in case. There was little in this place. The closest city was Amity Park, but it was only beside the mall and a decent burger joint; there was little to do.

It was one of those small towns that, despite not having many people, was well spread out due to all the open spaces. The people who lived there either raised a family, retired or had bloodlines traced generations back to the town's founding.

"Sir, as I stated before, you need a passport, and you have to pay for an international ticket to go to Mexico," The woman hissed. Some people in line began muttering about how annoying the man was for arguing.

"All I have is my driver's license. I could go home for my passport. That's no issue, but I am not paying for an international ticket to Mexico when I am not going there! I'm staying in the US! New Mexico is a state!" the man shouts, flailing his long black trenchcoat. It makes the black ponytail swing side to side as he leans on the counter. "How do you work in travel and not know that!?"

"What is going on here?" A man demands, stepping beside the gumming woman. Dick can tell he is the manager just by the way his uniform looks different.

"This man is refusing to listen." The counter lady practically spits and is now leaning well over the "I don't need this job" side of the customer service line. Dick finds himself standing up as the manager gets a quick rundown of the problem.

The crowd was getting impatient, even with the two other representatives slowly calling up the next customer. Curious by the outcome, Dick drifts closer, listening to the man explain that he wants to go to New Mexico to study the enormous reports of violent paranormal sightings.

He was apparently visiting all highly haunted states in the US to write a book about the history of the hauntings, but when he was attempting to get his ticket, the woman had been convinced he was leaving the country. Dick watched in real-time as the manager also seemed to think New Mexico was in Mexico because he began to explain the international policy to the fuming man.

They threatened to put him on the no-fly list if he continued causing them trouble. That angered the traveler even more, and he raised his voice and waved his arms as he insisted the location be within the country.

Dick pulls out his phone, typing with one thumb quickly and pulling up a map of the country. He slid right next to the trio, standing at the stranger's left with an easy smile.

"Excuse me, can I have a moment of your time?" He asks

The woman's frustration is now nearing its tipping point, but the manager must have recognized him, for he hastily scrambles to make his expression more pleasant.

"Mr. Grayson-Wayne! Please give me one moment to sort this out. I can help you if that's okay with you. I'm sorry for the delay. Karen, call security to have this man escorted out."

"What!?" Demands the guy as the woman grins.

"With pleasure."

"New Mexico is a US state, " Dick cuts in, displaying his screen. "It's been one since 1912, I'm afraid."

The airline employees are pale as they stare at his phone before the manager pulls it out of his pocket and types rapidly on it. A few seconds later, his already white face goes even whiter.

Dick considers the man next to him, who has a grin starting to bloom on his face. It's a pretty handsome face if he's honest. A dig has him looking away towards his phone.

It's a message from his pilot. It seems the storm was due to Mr. Freeze, and they weren't expecting it to clear for at least four days. He was asking if there was anywhere else Dick wanted to fly to.

"I'm so sorry. I'll bump you up to first class." The manager says to the stranger, who is looking rather smug now. Dick considers his pilot's question before thinking, why not.

He does have an image to uphold, after all.

"Would you like a ride in my private jet? " Dick turns to the man, who blinks at him while cutting off the rambling of the woman and the manger. "I can drop you off wherever you want in New Mexico. Where were you headed?"

"Ugh, I wanted to visit Dawnson Cemetry, " the man stammers. "I-do you really have a private jet?"

"Yeah. Would you like to go with me?"

There is a moment of hesitation before the man grabs his wallet off the counter and nods. "If it's not too much trouble," he responds cautiously.

"It's not. I'm Dick Grayson-Wayne, by the way."

"Danny Fenton."

Dick waves the two employees away, winking at them as they slump in relief that Danny doesn't seem to want to make this into an incident. Likely, he had just been upset they weren't listening.

"Most haunted places in the US, huh?" Dick asks while sending a text to his crew. He gets confirmation that they can head over to the southwest post haste. "Aren't you scared of ghosts?"

Danny gives an odd little smirk. "I haven't been afraid of ghosts since I was fourteen."

Dick stares at his mouth a little too long, swinging his gaze back to his phone when he gets a message from Bruce. His dad had been informed of the flight change and was using the coded message to confirm Dick being the one to change it.

He types out a response, ignoring the fluttering of his heart. If he checks to see what other states are highly haunted as Danny looks around his jet with a fallen jaw, that's only because he has four days to kill.

[ew-selfish-art]

DpxDc AU: What’s an adoption paper or two between bros?

Danny is starting to realize that since Jazz left the house for university, his parents aren’t really good at well, being his parents. They’re obsessed with his alter ego to the point that they ignore his normal ego, and that uh, hurts his feelings. Like, a lot. Meal times have gotten weirder and more inconsistent, and he’s starting to wonder if they suspect what’s really going on with him.

They’ve started to say “You know you can tell us anything” these days when he sees them outside their lab (which isn’t frequent) but the normal amount of ghost hate speech hasn’t changed. If anything it’s gotten worse. Just like everything else.

Danny joined the whole-ass justice league to fill his spare time after high school and his parents are literally none the wiser. Like, he's a part time high-school senior at 17 and a full time international hero. His parents only comment on the fact that the menace Phantom is costing them a lot in airline tickets as they try and apprehend him all over the world. Hell, they caught Ellie for a second when he was in Morrocco and it got ugly fast. She's a junior member now but mostly spends her time with some doofus that has a magic traveling house.

And really, he's fine with his schedule of going to school, going ghost and making a difference, and then returning to a dramatically silent house. Really.

Then one day his new friend and co-team lead Red Robin makes a brief mention about his own childhood of neglect and Danny makes a joke, "What, no adoption papers for the homies?"

He laughs as he says it but something in his leader's eyes looks sharp, and Kon is sighing in the background something that sounds suspiciously like dear Rao you've done it now.

Next time Danny is on the Watchtower, he's brought into a meeting with Red Robin, Batman and various other JL team leaders.

"Adoption papers are very much for the homies. I've also included the option of emancipation, as you'll see in the green folder, but I am one hundred percent serious about adopting you."

"Red, you're like, 3 months younger than me." Danny deadpans.

"Adoption is for the homies and I'm emancipated. And If i'm reading Batman correctly, you're facing three outcomes right now."

"Three?"

"One: I adopt you and you become my legal dependent. Two: Batman adopts you and I become your legal brother. or Three: You emancipate yourself while allowing us to provide for you while your housing situation is sorted out."

"... Uh. Door one?" Danny is having too many feelings. Why does batman look disappointed? What is Jazz going to say? What on earth???

"Welcome to the Drake Family." Red shakes his hand up and down, the grin on his face feral and the plan towards being emancipated from the Fentons and adopted by his boss is a weird one.

But eventually, a few weeks later, he's had a pretty delicious dinner by his new adoptive grandfather-tler and is watching a movie with Tim and Kon on the couch and he's just so happy and comfortable and warm...

"Will this make Kon my dad if you two get married?" Danny laughs and it's the closest he gets to being disowned.

[collapsedsquid]

Consider, for example, the following situation. A characteristically modern form of social interaction, familiar from the rail and air travel industries, has become ubiquitous with the development of the call centre. Someone – an airline gate attendant, for example – tells you some bad news; perhaps you’ve been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you’re brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can’t do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you’re told that’s not company policy. The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself. Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage, and they may give some lacerating feedback online. Meanwhile, the managers who made the decision to prioritise Gold Elite members are able to maximise shareholder value without any distractions from the consequences of their actions. They have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion.

[macgyvermedical]

Moving vs Fleeing (and what you need to flee)

I was on a call last night with a very reputable LGBTQ+ organization in my state that discussed the difference between moving and fleeing.

Essentially, moving is planned. You get an apartment and a job in another city- hopefully you visit that city to scope it out. Then you move your life. It takes, at minimum, months.

Fleeing is unplanned. Something is happening that is so bad in your area that you have to cut and run. It may not be police at your door. But it might be legislation that prevents you from using restrooms without the risk of being killed or arrested. It might be lack of access to medications and something that makes it illegal to get those medications in a different state. It might be the classification of your life (as someone gay or tans) as a sex crime, and sex crimes being punishable by death (a goal of project 2025).

And, they recommended, get things together before it gets to that point, even if you aren't sure that it will happen, so fleeing is as easy as possible if you need to do it.

Here's what you can do:

Pick a location you can get to either by bus, train, or car that has a good track record for your needs and that you think you could live. Do your research- are there jobs there in your field? Housing?

Then get yourself a bag or large backpack.

Get a file folder and put your documents in it. I mean things like your passport, your birth certificate, your social security card, copies of any professional licenses you have, a checkbook, name change documentation, copies of financial documents like mortgages, copies of insurance cards and policies, copies of marriage licenses, and a copy of your driver's license. These are things you might need if you have to prove your identity or get a job or apartment. Then print out maps of several routes to your destination. Put the file folder in the bag.

Add to that: a couple of changes of clothes for each person including a hat and a cloth or disposable face covering (people don't question them as much since the pandemic, and they're convenient to hide your face). Lightweight, caloric foods for at least 3 days that don't require cooking (protein bars work great for this). A month of medications and an emergency script for each medication for each person (get a paper prescription from your doctor that is good for a year or the max allowed for each medication) if you can get it. Pay out of pocket with a coupon card if your insurance won't cover your refill early. 1-2 containers of baby wipes so you don't necessarily need to shower. An empty water bottle for each person. A phone charger.

Buy a gift card that can be used for anything. I won't say how much because I don't know your situation, but make it enough that you can pay for gas or bus/train/airline tickets to your destination and (if you can) temporary lodging/food once you get there. Gift cards are less traceable than debit/credit cards and aren't easy to cancel. An alternative is cash, but that can be an easier target for theft if people see you with it.

Finally, bring something of comfort, like a blanket or memento or stuffed animal.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

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

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

 — 

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

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

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[fuck-customers]

I just need to vent about something that happened last week.

I work for an Airline at a small airport. Couple weeks ago, we had a flight come in, pretty late due to delays in the plane’s route. When it landed, it was super late, and the Pilots were going to time out. For some reason the Airport’s Weather system was down

Ops told us to proceed as normal. Pilots didn’t notify us anything was wrong until the end. We had all the bags loaded and passengers on and THEN they decide to tell us something is wrong :)))

Pilots time out, and the flight is pushed back to the next morning and we have to remove all the bags and passengers. Reaccommodate or refund those that want those options.

We unloaded the bags, and my coworker takes them to the baggage carousel. Then I go help unload the plane. Eventually it comes down to the wheelchair passengers, who always come off last. I took care of 5 of them. One at a time. Took them to the baggage carousel helped them get their bags, and take them to their cars separately. All 5, by myself

That matters because, once I help the final wheelchair passenger, my coworker that was putting the bags on the carousel takes off the bags that weren’t picked up, and drives them to our office so we can contact the passengers about their bags so they can get them.

As I come back inside after helping the final wheelchair passenger to their car, I hear a shrill yell from a woman standing by the Carousel. She yelled out to me asking where her bag was. I TRIED to tell her that after a bag has been on the carousel too long we take it off and back to our office. I say tried because she kept cutting me off yelling “Where’s my bag?”

This woman, who was not a wheelchair passenger, and was sitting in the front of the plane, so she was one of the FIRST to get off the plane, did not make it to baggage claim in time to get her bag. In the time it took to unload all 155 Passengers including the 5 Wheelchairs I did on my own at the VERY END, she was the only one not able to get her bags.

At this point it was 2 AM, I had been up since 6 AM, I was so close to just telling her to fuck off. But I bit my tongue and kept a professional attitude.

Once I was able to tell her that it’s being taken to our office, and if she follows me to the ticket counter I can help her. And she starts going off on me, asking why couldn’t we just leave it there. Why we take it back to the office, don’t we know they’re coming?

I did my best to keep calm and tell her that if she just comes with me to the ticket counter I can give her her bag.

I tried to explain our policy at the airport. First, we can’t just leave bags unattended, because we have to treat it as a threat or it could get stolen.

Then she asked why we can’t just pull it off and stand there with it. They do it at X Airport that is 10 times larger with 20 time more employees.

I explained to her we are not allowed to, it is airport policy and we could lose our SIDA privileges and even get a ticket. And on top of that, we are a team of 6 fucking people. We do not have the man power.

Eventually we make it back to the counter. I tell her to wait there as I go into the back to find her bag. I’m going through the bags left behind, I’m back there for less than a minute. Then comes this loud banging on the door.

She walked behind the ticket counter, and started slamming on the door so she could get her bag. She couldn’t even wait the 2 minutes it took me to find it.

I grab it, then go to the door she’s slamming. I open it and she almost hits me because she’s mid bang.

I ask her very politely not to do that or I will have to call the police. She just scoffs and asks for her bag. I ask for her ID to confirm the bag is hers, and she’s about to lose it. She was ready to blow and I was very much done with the situation. She started going off about how bad this airport was and how she’s going to blast us on social media.

She kept asking why we could take her bag to the back but not have anyone watch it at the carousel like Airport X does. I told her what I did before, We are not allowed to, it is airport Policy, and we don’t have the man power.

She said “No you just don’t care”

I was 🤏 this close to blowing up on her. I wanted so badly to lay into her. But I didn’t. I just kept calm, centered myself, and just let her go on with her day. Thankfully there were other passengers that saw and were understanding and helpful to me.

Anyway once that was all done I got her itinerary number and had her black listed from our airline. :)

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but please for the love of god, if your flight gets canceled, don’t take it out on the ground crew. We want you gone just as badly as you do. We lose money on canceled flights, we lose hours, and it just makes our lives harder.

If you know anyone that acts like the ground crew has ANY control over the operations of the airline and abuses them, please slap some sense into them.

Posted by admin Rodney

[phoenixyfriend]

IDK how many of you remember @professorsparklepants's post about the unintended tragedy implied in Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boy from a while back, but uhhhhhh it's basically Ballerina Farm.

If you've heard the edges of that drama and are curious but don't want to get in too deep, here's the rundown:

I heard about it in two videos:

Tyler Bender has more focus on the ways that an influencer may be specifically presenting herself for the interviewer, and the impact of Mormonism on the choices (Bender is herself a former(?) member of the LDS church, and speaks from that perspective, and has experience in the field of marketing)

Film Cooper, while I often have issues with his videos, does a lot more focus on just how relevant Julliard and the 'first student in decades(?) to get pregnant' are to the story, and clips of how happy she seems to be when dancing on camera

If you'd rather have a summary in text form, here we go:

BallerinaFarms is an influencer considered a big name in the tradwife community. Mormon, eight kids, runs a farm with her husband. She got a lot of press earlier in the year for winning Mrs. America two weeks after giving birth.

As a result, a journalist interviewed her ,and the 'perfect' image that has been presented to the world has been firmly shattered, and that's after a lot of cracks were showing in the socials already.

(Mrs. American is not a typo. It's not a tradwife pageant, to my knowledge, it's just a Miss America for married women.)

Basic timeline/summary of the article...

She got into Julliard. She was on track to be a world famous ballerina.

She did not want to date this man. She turned him down for six months. He snagged a seat next to her on a plane ride from salt lake city to nyc, by making a call, becaus his dad OWNS JET BLUE. They talked a lot on the plane, and then she agreed to date him. Insisted on a year of dating before engagement or marriage.

They get married after three months instead. She gets pregnant pretty quick. First Julliard student to get pregnant in a Very Long Time because generally, if you get into Julliard, ballet is your life. She was also on scholarship. She was That Good. Performed overseas and everything.

So that's her career ambitions down the drain. But it's Fine, Totally Fine, because she's got a baby, and a husband, and he is moving them to South America for a few years.

She has about one baby a year.

They move back to the US to a semi-isolated farm in Utah, not too far from civilization but not all that close, either.

She does not get to have childcare. No nannies. Babysitters are allowed one night per week (date night) and otherwise not at all. She is also homeschooling the eight children.

She did not get to have any painkillers for the kids… except one, which she only mentioned to the reporter when the husband was out of the room, and says that the epidural was amazing.

She still loves ballet. It's the only time in her videos that she seems truly happy.

Her husband really wants to be a cowboy but, again, his dad owns airlines. He's a billionaire trust fund baby.

This was his dream life. She repeatedly Seems To Stop Herself from saying things about how unhappy she is and how it wasn't her plan in life. (Is this calculated to get enough attention that she can get away? To get more clicks on her videos? Actual slips? Unclear.)

There's a notable video where she's filmed opening a birthday present and she keeps talking about tickets to Greece (clearly something she's been dropping hints about enough for her to assume that he got it for her, especially since she's on camera) and it's... an egg apron.

One of her only requests for the farm was that they would renovate a barn into a ballet studio for her. It is, instead, a schoolroom for the children.

She apparently collapses of exhaustion regularly, from having to look after eight children with minimal help, in addition to the content creation, the cooking--they have cleaners, but she does the food herself--running the farm, homeschooling, and being pregnant more often than not.

It's a shitshow and people are rightfully horrified. I'm sure I missed some stuff but it's really sad.

The snippets of video that FilmCooper shows, and the excerpts that both videos have from the article, paint a picture of a REALLY controlling husband even in settings where you'd think the man would at least try to act like he's not evil.

Explains the title on that Film Cooper video.

(You can also see why this made me think of the Prof post.)

[kiragecko]

A few weeks ago, I flew to visit my grandma with my little brother and sister. My little brother had never been on a plane, and my sister only has once, almost a decade ago. It was an experience.

All three of us are in our 30s and neurodivergent¹. My little brother has Down’s Syndrome² and is probably autistic. He communicates mostly through echolalia³.

I suspected there might be challenges, so I tried to contact the airline before purchasing tickets. This did NOT work. The Westjet agents weren’t allowed to discuss anything with me until I had booked a flight. I was purchasing nonrefundable tickets. The website was quite clear that they could kick us from the plane if they couldn’t support our needs. And they wouldn’t tell me if they could support our needs!

I ended up calling around 8 times. Finally, after purchasing tickets and jumping through all the hoops, someone was willing to talk. They mostly said that everything was up to the people letting us on to the flight, but at least they talked to me!

My main concern was the pacing. My brother’s favourite activity is pacing in circles and repeating movie/song quotes to himself. Once we got on the plane things would be fine (we had movies for him to watch), but I was concerned that other passengers waiting to board would find this stressful. Like - that isn’t our problem, it’s their’s - but flying is hard! If there was a way for us to not add more stress, I wanted to find it!

The airline was zero help, so we did our best to prepare on our own. My uncle died the day before the trip, and that increased stress levels. My autistic sister was dealing with that, a sense of responsibility for my brother, and also anxiety about a mostly-new experience (flying).

-

And then the plane gets delayed.

By an hour, at first.

The airline said we should be there TWO HOURS early for domestic flights. Which is ridiculous. TWO HOURS??? Especially since everything before security can now be done online? But we obediently turn up two hours before the new flight time, and are immediately directed to the priority security line. Which is good. Even the short line is boring for my brother, and I can’t let him pace in the few open spaces. But ten minutes later we’re at our gate, ready to leave.

Now we just have to wait for an hour and fifty minutes!

We had hoped my brother would want to watch his first movie. But he's riled up from lines and crowds and gets right to pacing. A few people have to slow down as they pass, but he’s not hurting anyone, so I let him be.

I’m more worried about my sister, now. She lives with the aunt that found my uncle. She hasn’t slept in days, worrying about the trip. She isn’t handling the noise and crowds. So I keep an eye on my brother (at least 50% to make sure he doesn’t take some of the chocolate he keeps eyeing when he passes the gift shop), occasionally ask if he wants to watch a movie, and watch my sister slowly descend into a panic attack. Not fun. Eventually I send her to the bathroom, hoping that it will be quieter and she can calm down.

BUT! Events have happened during this time! The plane has been delayed another 15 minutes! It is explained that they have had to replace the plane with one they haven’t yet finished retrofitting. This new plane doesn’t have as much overhead baggage space. They need at least 15 pieces of carry-on luggage to be checked. If the passangers aren’t willing to do this, there will be large delays once loading starts, as people are FORCED to check their luggage. Also, there’s no first class on the new plane. Or charging ports. Or meals. Or in-flight entertainment. First class passengers can request some money back. And if anyone misses their connecting flight due to the delays, tickets to their new flights will be provided upon landing.

People start to get tired and stressed. The intercom keeps threatening them. Now it’s 30 bags that need to be checked. Delays will be even longer if this doesn’t happen!

At this point, security shows up. They ask if anyone will take responsibility for the pacing guy. I do. They show visible discomfort with the situation, and his disability. Can I make him stop pacing? I can try, but probably not. Please do that, it is bothering the other passengers. Oh? Really?? Who could have guessed that?!

My brother is NOT willing to sit down. We stand in the concourse, while I talk to him about sitting down and he makes annoyed sounds at me. I’m not about to force him. I don’t want us to get kicked out of the airport, but can they do that for something as minor as acting weird in public? Mostly, I’m worried about all our electronics, which I abandoned in the open when security showed up. I’m not sure if security will try something with my brother if I leave him to pace while I clean things up.

And now, the hero shows up. The head of security has been called, and he comes over and asks me if there’s anything my brother needs. No, there isn’t, he’s quite happy to pace. It’s everyone else that is being bothered.

“I don’t care about them. He has just as much right to this space as they do. I just want to make sure you guys have everything you need. Would he like a sensory package?”

He wouldn’t like a sensory package, but this guy’s offer of the chapel as a quiet space IS interesting. Mostly because my sister is off in sensory shut-down somewhere, and needs a quiet space. But also because I could relax a little nobody would be watching us, and I could relax if my brother had an enclosed room to pace in. (No chocolates!)

As I’m agreeing to this, my sister returns. Head of Security respectfully tries to explain the situation to her. I look at her hunched body language and tell him to just talk to me. Then I send her to pack up our stuff. He wants to Include Her. She really, really does not want to be included.

He also wants to Include my brother. It’s kind of cute. He’s overflowing with good intentions, but obviously hasn’t had a lot of chance to put them into practice yet. He’s incredibly respectful, but in ways that would work a bit better for people who are more interested in their own decision making than my brother. I’m charmed.

Another person shows up. She is introduced as the Accessibility Specialist, and we are asked if we’re okay with her support. Oh yes, I am very okay with this. After she gets caught up - and she reiterates that everyone else can suck it, my brother is allowed to inhabit this space how he wishes - we get ready to head for the chapel. But the plane is about to land. There probably isn’t enough time to transition there and then back. So instead, we all wait around and listen to our two heroes conspire.

Accessibility Specialist has had the job for a month. Or, at least, she's been PAID to do this job for a month. She's been doing it unofficially much longer. She has IDEAS. So that’s where all the unpolished We Respect Everyone energy is coming from. Head of Security is one of her co-conspirators!

In-between plotting, Accessibility Specialist asks me questions. She hears about the amount of phonecalls, and the unsatisfactory answers. The complete lack of support. The fact that I had told the airline that this exact situation was likely to happen, and then got security called on us anyways. She tells me that this information is very helpful. Her plans will benefit from specific examples.

She tells me how unsatisfactory it is to have to send people to the chapel. They're pushing for a quiet room. I agree that this would have been helpful. My brother would probably have been calmer in a quiet space, which would have helped us AND reduced the stress for others. (Also, both me and my sister would have benefited from the quiet. But I didn’t say that.)

In all the commotion, I’ve forgotten to talk to the boarding people about priority boarding. But Accessibility Specialist is on the ball! We stand off to the side, behind a rope, while the plane disembarks. (My brother starts off pacing RIGHT in the way of the disembarkment, so sneaking into the roped off area is a good idea.) We’re going to be the very first ones to board, even before the people in wheelchairs. I pray that my brother is willing to walk onto the plane – he hasn’t been willing to follow me since we got out of security.

The boarding people are on their best behaviour. They make a special trip over to us to scan our tickets. They send someone down the ramp to check on the plane’s status. We are now VIPs. And we seem to have made the Accessibility Specialist’s day. She is so SMUG as she whispers with the Head of Security!

They ask if we’re okay with them accompanying us to the plane. Sure! I’m having a great time watching their excitement. It’s changed a very difficult experience into a pleasurable one. (For me. They are thankfully respecting my sister’s desire to be ignored. She is still not having fun. And my brother is pretty done with this experience. He’s found some quotes about ‘going home’ and ‘not doing this’ to share with me.)

Finally, we get the nod. My brother calmly follows us down the ramp. We get to the plane and are asked to pause for a moment while they finish moving some storage carts around. Seems reasonable to me, but Accessibility Specialist darts forward and takes photos, documenting SOMETHING. And then we get on the plane.

-

The plane itself would have been great. My brother happily took a seat. Enjoyed looking out the windows. And was excited to watch Shrek. My sister relaxed. And I LOVE flying. But, sadly, electronics must be stowed during liftoff and landing. My brother did NOT take these unreasonable demands from me well. He eventually forgave me for the take-off misdemeanor, especially after I put on my own headphones and quoted the movie with him. But my sins at landing were too much. For half an hour after he left the airport, he kept repeating, “NO more flying!” and “Not like this!” Any comments about flying for the next day got his hackles up.

So, I won’t do that to him again. But it was a very interesting experience for me! I am glad I got to have it.

And if anyone has flown through Winnipeg’s Richardson International Airport⁴ in the last while, and wants to tell them about any good or bad accessibility experiences, I think there’s someone there that would appreciate it. I want to see what she can accomplish.

-

PS. She’s also started a program where you can practice getting ready to board a plane! You sign up and they take you through the whole experience, from signing in to walking the boarding ramp. (Or, possibily, just whichever portion is concerning you.) I wish I had thought to contact the airport itself, rather than just contacting the airline and looking at the government’s resources. Good things are happening there.

-

¹ neurodivergent – brain works in a non-typical way

² Down’s Syndrome – an intellectual disability

³ echolalia – communication by repeating/echoing things heard, either right after hearing them, or a long time later

⁴ Winnipeg is in Manitoba, Canada

[yokohamapound]

BSD Boys With a Nervous Flier S/O

For Amulet! <3

(I added Chuuya for me. :P)

Characters: Dazai Osamu, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edogawa Ranpo, Nakahara Chuuya

Contents: NSFW jokes/references, fear of flying.

Dazai Osamu

Don’t bother trying to hide it. Dazai can pick up on every tiny little tell, so unless you’ve got the world’s best poker face, he’ll figure it out before you say a single word. It’s all there, the shrunken pupils when he shows you the tickets, wiping your sweaty palms on your pants when you’re booking the taxi to the airport, the harsh, unsteady breathing when you’re queueing to check in. 

For once, wisely, he drops the double suicide jokes. The last thing you need to think about right now is you or him dying, and he’s that much of an ass. Most of the time.

He wraps an arm around your shoulders, leaning in and whispering in your ear so it doesn’t carry to the other passengers in the boarding queue. “Guess what?”

You frown, distracted momentarily, and look at him. “What?”

His eyes glitter with mischief, and his smile widens into a full blown smirk. “You know how your ears sometimes pop when the cabin pressure changes? They say you should have chew gum or suck on candy.”

Your eyes narrow, suspicious. Dazai leans down to look into your eyes, grinning. 

“I don’t have any candy, but I’ve got something you can su—oww!”

He deserved to have his foot trodden on, really. Dazai might pout, but internally he’s smug that his plan to distract you worked. He’s got plenty more like that up his sleeve. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Flying with Fyodor is something different entirely. With the weight (and wallet) of the Decay of Angels behind him, he would never fly on a commercial airline. Normally he doesn’t care much - he’ll take a helicopter or some other type of solo plane. If he’s taking his precious myshka though, he’s flying in style. 

Naturally, he already knows about your fear of flying.

You can take comfort in the fact that Fyodor has literally already thought of everything. There are multiple contingency plans for any conceivable emergency onboard the jet. He has a backup helicopter. There are parachutes. There are backup parachutes. 

All you have to do is get dolled up and sit pretty on one of the luxurious recliner seats, being fed little tidbits of fruit and cake and sipping champagne. Fyodor has his laptop out, watching the endless screeds of incomprehensible information, one resting on your thigh, thumb tracing circles into your warm, soft skin. 

If you want a sedative, he’ll allow it, though his tone is subtly disapproving. He doesn’t like seeing you passed out (unless he’s been the one to drug you or exhaust you, naturally.) Still, if it makes you feel better.

He has…other methods to distract you however. Ones you’ll learn all about when he orders the cabin crew out of the main seating area and draws the curtains. You’ll be flying so high you might not even notice you’ve landed. 

Edogawa Ranpo

Ranpo has an easy solution to all your fears and anxieties—he’s such a baby that you have to look after him and you just won’t have time to worry about the plane going down, because you’ll be trying to convince him he can’t cram a whole gumball machine in his suitcase.

“It’ll fit!”

“You know it won’t! It’s physically impossible. You’re supposed to be a genius!”

“Well, I'm on vacation!”

He’s exuberant and excited to wander through Duty Free and buy all the varieties of chocolate and snacks they sell. Ranpo isn’t getting on that plane without snacks. Have you eaten plane food? That’s simply not going to cut it for the World’s Greatest Detective. 

It’s almost…calculated, the way he seems to rush off to a new thing every time your jitters start coming back. Your heart starts to race, your mouth goes dry, and then you notice Ranpo is gone from your side again. 

By the time you get onto the actual plane, you’re lowkey exhausted, and he still looks as smug as ever, his bag of chips rustling as he snacks in his seat. He opens his eyes, looks around the plane with that sharp, green gaze, then shrugs and settles against the backrest. 

“Nothing wrong with the plane, we’ll be fine,” he declares, tossing a chip into his mouth. “Do you think they have Ramune?”

Nakahara Chuuya

Chuuya is a well-travelled guy due to his position as a Port Mafia executive and enforcer. It seems as if he gets sent abroad now and then to look after the mafia’s foreign interests and contracts. Koyo seems to stay back more, acting as Mori’s advisor, so it’s Chuuya who racks up the airmiles. He generally travels first or business class, because he’s not about to be back in the cattle runs—sorry, economy. 

He’s so used to it by now that booking the flights, packing, and getting to the airport are a breeze. It’s so mundane to him that he’s a little surprised to find out how frightened you are. He has to admit, it’s kinda cute. 

He lounges next to you in your first class seats, a glass of wine in one hand and your hip in the other, cuddling you against his side. 

“Dollface, what’re you shakin’ for?” he teases, poking you in the ribs. “You forgettin’ who you’re flyin’ with?”

Oh. That’s right. Mr. Gravity Master himself. 

“So if something happens, you could stop the plane falling?” you ask, almost in disbelief. 

He scoffs. “What do you take me for? You’re gonna be on the safest flight in existence. They should be paying me to fly.”

[fangirl-docintraining]

Okay trying out posting some headcannons about the Curtis gang (including Betty for my fic readers cause I’ve written 100k words and I do what I want)

So without further ado I give you: How airport traveling goes for the gang (modern AU)

Darry is peak stressed eldest child™️ at the airport. Soda and Ponyboy make fun of him for this relentlessly

However, the gang overall is absolute chaos, so his stress isn’t necessarily unwarranted

Soda is still packing 5 minutes before they’re supposed to leave for the airport and it drives Darry insane

Dally only brings a backpack. No suitcase. He brings like some random clothes and whatever he just tosses in the bag. Pretty sure he doesn’t even know what he’s packed

Darry parking the car is so much of a production for no reason, man is cursing every time he thinks he finds an open spot but it’s just a car that’s hidden

He parks in the far lot because they aren’t paying the $30 a day garage parking fee because wtf (honestly same) and they have to take the shuttle

When they actually are walking into the airport for their first plane trip with Betty coming along Two Bit takes pity and pulls her aside to warn her about Darry being a bit… high strung at the airport

They forget that she is an eldest daughter™️

They always try to fly an airline where you get a free checked bag with your ticket because these boys refuse to travel without their pocket knives and so they gotta have them in checked luggage.

The second they’re at the luggage counter and getting boarding passes Darry immediately takes all of them. He doesn’t trust a single one of them to be in charge of their own boarding pass. Betty snatches hers before he gets the chance to hold on to hers though.

The second their bags are checked behind the counter Betty turns into some insane drill Sargent and starts just marching towards security with or without them with her pink tote bag over her shoulder.

The duo that is Darry and Betty in the security line. They both are like barely holding on every time some random person holds up the line or slows things down.

Soda and Steve get in a full on wrestling match in line. They almost take Ponyboy down on accident cause he wasn’t paying attention

Speaking of Ponyboy not paying attention, his bag gets pulled by security and Darry just lets out the most long suffering sigh.

Ponyboy forgot he had a full water bottle in his bag. Everyone but Darry and Betty think it’s hilarious

Dally has to go through the metal detector like three times cause he keeps forgetting things on his person that will set it off. despite being told he’d need to take his belt off like eight times, he still didn’t the first time he tried to walk through.

Johnny somehow silently got through security five minutes before everyone else and like already has his shoes back on and everything and it just watching it all unfold

The boys all want to get food immediately after getting through security. Darry and Betty refuse to allow anyone to do so until they’ve visually confirmed that their gate does indeed exist

Two Bit disappears for like an hour and just comes back to the with a new pair of Bose headphones, an armful of snacks, and like four magazines

Steve and Soda bring a Switch and occupy themselves and most of the gang by playing games while they wait

Darry and Betty get in a full on fight because mans wants to just stand in line before they’ve even started boarding and she won’t let him. Sir you are in boarding group 4.

Eventually she says fuck it and lets him go stand there cause he gets so mad, so she simply leaves to go to Hudson news and get herself some candy.

Once boarding actually starts Darry makes them all line up early, he about pops a blood vessel because half of the guys immediately have to pee and leave for the bathroom

Betty very pointedly does not get up to come stand and wait in line with them until the group before theirs is almost done. Darry is convinced she’s gonna miss the flight despite the fact he can SEE her

Darry handing out boarding passes in this line and being like don’t you dare lose this. They have to walk approx 5 feet to the check in counter lmfao

Seats are duos as follows: Dally and Two Bit, Johnny and Pony, Soda and Steve, Darry and Betty.

Soda legit asks if they need to swap seats as they’re like in the aisle of the plane cause literally no one has seen the two of them fight this bad ever. They snap at everyone including each other over everything. Betty gets mad at how Darry puts his backpack into the overhead bin and he just softly bangs his forehead against it in exasperation

They second the they’re all sitting everyone’s convinced they’re gonna kill each other because the seats are tiny and there is no leg room or personal space

Betty simply takes the people magazine two bit bought (stole?) and opens her skittles as if she and Darry weren’t about to throttle each other thirty seconds prior

Darry passes out everyone’s snacks and then says no one speak to me for the next two hours.

Soda realized the two of them were meant to be when he looked over and saw that they both were currently glaring daggers at someone for arguing about seats and holding up the flight, they were sharing candy and just somehow sharing their mutual type A meltdown together

[apoptoses]

Have you ever been reading Devil’s Minion and thinking to yourself, “damn, I just can’t nail down a face for Daniel”? Have you watched Interview with the Vampire and felt like neither Christian Slater nor River Phoenix hit the mark for you?

Allow me to introduce you to James fucking Spader.

Look at him! Is that not the face of Daniel, completely fed up with Armand feeding his cigarettes down the garbage disposal?

He’s got the naive and beautiful face but ALSO the defiant yet beseeching thing down! Also he was like 22 here, which is right around the age Daniel met Armand so he’s at peak Healthy, Pretty Molloy here. No wonder Louis decided to take him home!!

“Do you know what a zip code is, or a tax bracket? I’m the one who buys all the goddamned airline tickets. Millions. How are we going to get millions! Steal another Maserati and be done with it, for God’s sakes!”

Spader is the original 80′s pretty boy you’d assume starred as the leading man in some schmoopy romances or schlocky teen dramas and he did that for a minute. Like check him out in Pretty in Pink-

 Is this not peak Night Island Daniel, in his Miami Vice looking bespoke suit ready to head out with Armand for the night?

Look at him snuggled into his blanket in Tuff Turf, like Daniel hungover and forcibly woken up to honky tonk piano tunes!

But the deliciousness doesn’t end at his looks. Because in true Molloy fashion that man said ‘you know what? I wanna make movies for freaks and weirdos only’

In Sex, Lies and Videotape he plays the sweetest pervert who loves interviewing women about their sex lives, video taping it, and then watching them back naked but not actually getting off! He’s impotent, he’s a gentle and lovely weirdo, there’s vampire!Daniel fodder for days in this one.

Crash is a horny flick that defies all explanation and really you need to go in blind if you’re gonna watch this one, but let me just say this: If Spader and his Wife in this film aren’t the most Daniel and Armand coded couple in cinema history I will eat my shoes. Also there’s tons of beautiful footage of him driving around at night with his blond hair ruffling in the breeze.

Your prefer your Daniel with glasses? Oh, perfect, because in Bad Influence he plays a sweet guy who gets into a fucked up situation with a toxic friend and a sex tape!

In Storyville he lets himself be thrown on the floor and lays there submissively before getting involved in yet another sex tape scandal!

Don’t even get me started on Dream Lover, another smut filled romp (with some filthy deleted scenes if you google the uncut version) which has the most Devil’s Minion promo photos of all time-

Like! Get the fuck out!

I could just go all day about his body of work but some of it you’ve just gotta see for yourself. In pretty much every film you’re guaranteed smut with him being deliciously submissive, extremely gentle with his hands, and down for all kinds of kink. And in most of his movies he gets bloody at least once, like-

this is a shitty picture i took of my laptop but look at the blood at the corner of his mouth! Vampire activities!

In summary, let me hit you with a photo dump:

Daniel laying in a cheap motel room during the chase years!

Daniel with delightful 70s hair!

More glasses!Daniel!

Daniel with a half-buttoned 80′s shirt looking so beautiful it’s no wonder Armand couldn’t NOT turn him!

It’s dark, he’s wet, he looks exhausted!

He’s the ideal beautiful Molloy Weirdo and I will not be accepting any other arguments, goodbye!!

[hyperfixatinator]

I like the DC x DP AUs where the Justice League and Amity Park (and Elmerton by proxy) never noticed each other due to an information blackout. I also find it neat when the idea's taken a step further.

For example, what if the government built Amity Park on insanely haunted land on purpose? Let's say, years ago, the whole LoA and Ra's Al Ghul situation made the U.S government curious about Lazarus water. They wished to find it's source in order to harvest it themselves.

The U.S preferred to avoid Lazarus pools that already existed to prevent conflict with the LoA. Instead, they decided to seek out the perfect location to "dig a well" of their own.

GIW scientists established that Lazarus water, a heavily condensed version of ectoplasm, was linked to ghosts and other ectoplasmic entities. They also observed that these entities are highly attracted to human populated areas.

This gave them the idea to settle a whole population of people on a liminal hotspot to lure ecto entities into the human realm. With the Anti Ecto Acts in place, the GIW were be free to capture ghosts and other creatures for their ectoplasm. The end goal was for the Fenton portal to be used as a well to harvest mass quantities of ectoplasm directly from the Infinite Realms.

How might this work for Amity Park and it's place in the world?

The information blackout is heavier outside the Amity-Elmerton territory than inside. Amity residents are only cut off from info that could threaten the government project (EX: the existence of real life superheroes, the Meta Protection Acts, certain major events, etc.).

All devices that enter the Amity-Elmerton territory are unable to send or receive video/pics of the above "blocked" topics. In fact, it's difficult for social media users within that territory to connect with any posts or profiles from outside unless they look hard enough.

Amity residents are still allowed to travel, but airline ticket prices are jacked ridiculously high, especially for specific destinations (i.e: common superhero locations) to deter those residents from going there. GPS devices and maps bought in Amity or Elmerton are also set to misdirect users away from these same locations if they opt for a road trip.

Most Amity-Elmerton residents hardly bother leaving at all since there's a hefty fee for crossing beyond a set perimeter. They've all been lead to believe this is a normal part of traveling in the Midwest.

To everyone outside the Amity-Elmerton area, that area is virtually non-existent. It's not listed on any map, globe, or basically any public geolocation tool outside those provided in Amity (not even Google Maps). The only hints of it existing are in certain forms of documentation, such as birth certificates and tax forms. Even then, these people are hard to come by.

At most, Amity Park is a little known myth where people occasionally debate on it's existence.

In general, the government limiting Amity-Elmerton residents access to outside info while giving them just enough to stave off suspicion.

[eaglesnick]

“You know you’re priced right when your customers complain—but buy anyway.” — John Harrison

Dynamic pricing is not new but it has not been widespread up until recently.

We all know about train fares being more expensive during peak times and parents know that holidays cost more during school breaks than at any other time of the year. Airline tickets are subject to dynamic pricing and there was a trend towards off-peak electricity tariffs at one time. This summer we saw tickets for Oasis concerts subject to dynamic pricing, resulting in massive spikes in the cost of a ticket.

Dynamic pricing is when a company changes their pricing to match demand and supply. Hence train journeys are more expensive during the rush hour than in the middle of the day when demand is lower. Holidays are more expensive during school breaks because demand is higher from families with children.

Few of us like this traditional method of dynamic pricing but we have accepted it as part of our way of life. The old fashioned dynamic pricing model was fairly unsophisticated and based on the time of day in the case of rail and airline tickets and specific weeks and months of the year in the case of holidays.

This is no longer the case. Artificial Intelligence allows companies to literally change prices in line with changes in demand every second if they so want. Some of the companies using AI to set prices are Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Tesco, Ocado and Sky. Amazon is said to reset prices every ten minutes.

The days of “fixed pricing" are fast disappearing. Long gone are the days when a company added up all of its production costs to work out the cost per unit and then added a little bit more in order to make a profit. This was basically what is known as the objective or labour theory of value. This has been supplanted by the "subjective theory of value" (STV).

According to the subjective theory of value a products worth (price) is not determined by how much it costs to produce but by how much people are willing to pay for that good at any given moment. At its worst this means that ALL goods and services should be sold for maximum monetary return regardless of the cost of production. No wonder supporters of neo-liberal economics favour STV.

At one level this doesn’t really matter. Oasis concert tickets may have doubled in original price due to dynamic pricing but not being able to afford a concert ticket is not a matter of life or death. It is however, symptomatic of a growing social problem.

The assumption of neo-liberal economists and their support of STV pricing is that individual choice is paramount in all economic transactions. For the neo-liberal societal values do not exist, there is only individual choice. Mrs Thatcher, the woman who championed neo-liberal economics in the UK, famously said: “There’s no such thing as society”. Many Tory's still believe this to be true but they are demonstratively mistaken.

During Covid we all stood at our doors every Thursday night clapping and banging pots to applaud the bravery of our dedicated health professionals. Yes, we did this as individuals but also as a society. When the England football team were progressing through the stages of the European cup we watched each game as individuals but also as a nation. The same is true of the recent Olympic and Paralympic games.

Ironically, some of our most ardent neo-liberal Tory MP’s have been recently admonishing us for not being proud of our English identity. Robert Jenrick, a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party said yesterday that English identity had “started to fray” due to mass immigration and public institutions “dismissing our history”.

Sorry, the neo-liberals cannot have it both ways. Either there is an entity called English society, with its own history and set of values, or we are just individuals all acting according to our own individual needs. The fact that latter view is obviously mistaken does not deter the advocates of dynamic pricing. For them the goal is maximisation of profit regardless of social cost.

A thousand reasons why dynamic pricing is good for the consumer will be rolled out as more and more companies adopt this system of pricing, but the bottom line will always be making more profit. And in a system where pricing is determined by what price the individual is willing to pay rather than the actual cost of production, in the end it is only the rich who benefit.

South West Water has recently introduced the cruder form of dynamic pricing to their customers. They will be charging more for water use in summer than in winter. Consumers were given no choice about this and they have yet to be told what the charges will be. This “trial" will last for 2 years.

This is the spin:

“These pioneering trials are designed to make sure that water bills are fairer and more reflective of individual consumption patterns and are part of our wider commitment to making customer-first decisions in everything we do.” (CornwallLive:19/09/24)

Note the emphasis on “individual consumption". To my mind water is a public good, a societal necessity. As such I want to see pricing evened out over the whole community. Under dynamic pricing  the rich can consume as much water as they like because they can afford to pay, while the poorer members of society will have to suddenly become use conscious. While the rich fill their swimming pools and have the lawn sprinklers on day and night, the poor will have to think twice about how often the toilet is flushed, how often the washing machine is used and can they afford to shower everyday. The poor pensioner will be calculating whether or not they have enough money to water their beloved garden.

Ok, my pensioner being unable to afford to water the garden is a hypothetical scenario. The cost of music venue tickets isn’t, neither are the prices you pay for an Uber, a holiday let from Airbnb, the food you buy from Tesco or Ocado. Even the price of a pint is now affected by dynamic pricing.

“A campaign group representing pubgoers has criticised the move by Stonegate, Britain’s largest pub company, to raise the price of pints during its busiest trading hours in some of its venues by 20p..."  Financial Times: 12/09/24)

If the price of a British pint of beer is now subject to dynamic pricing then nothing is sacred!

More seriously, when the market economy becomes the market society, when those in power promote the value of maximising profit for the few at the expense of the happiness and well being of the many, then, as a society, we lose all sense of humanity, morality and common decency.

There has been much theoretical discussion of late about the threat of Artificial Intelligence to humanity. I would argue that maybe we should be more concerned about those  humans using AI to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

[beardedmrbean]

The Biden administration issued final rules Wednesday to require airlines to automatically issue cash refunds for things like delayed flights and to better disclose fees for baggage or canceling a reservation.

The Transportation Department said airlines will be required to provide automatic cash refunds within a few days for canceled flights and “significant” delays.

Under current regulations, airlines decide how long a delay must last before triggering refunds. The administration is removing that wiggle room by defining a significant delay as lasting at least three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international ones.

Airlines still will be allowed to offer another flight or a travel credit instead, but consumers can reject the offer.

The rule will also apply to refunds of checked-bag fees if the bag isn’t delivered within 12 hours for domestic flights or 15 to 30 hours for international flights. And it will apply to fees for things such as seat selection or an internet connection if the airline fails to provide the service.

Complaints about refunds skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, as airlines canceled flights and, even when they didn't, many people didn't feel safe sharing a plane cabin with other passengers.

Airlines for America, a trade group for large U.S. carriers, noted that refund complaints to the Transportation Department have fallen sharply since mid-2020. A spokesperson for the group said airlines “offer a range of options — including fully refundable fares — to increase accessibility to air travel and to help customers make ticket selections that best fit their needs.”

The group said the 11 largest U.S. airlines issued $43 billion in customer refunds from 2020 through 2023.

The Transportation Department issued a separate rule requiring airlines and ticket agents to disclose upfront what they charge for checked and carry-on bags and canceling or changing a reservation. On airline websites, the fees must be shown the first time customers see a price and schedule.

The rule will also oblige airlines to tell passengers they have a guaranteed seat they are not required to pay extra for, although it does not bar airlines from charging people to choose specific seats. Many airlines now charge extra for certain spots, including exit-row seats and those near the front of the cabin.

The agency said the rule will save consumers more than $500 million a year.

Airlines for America said its members “offer transparency and vast choice to consumers” from their first search.

The new rules will take effect over the next two years. They are part of a broad administration attack on what President Joe Biden calls “junk fees.” Last week, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that his department will let state officials in 15 states help enforce federal airline consumer protection laws.