#driver shortage

[artisticdivasworld]

Top Trucking Industry Trends of 2024: Adapting to a New Era of Innovation and Challenges

The trucking industry is experiencing significant changes, driven by advancements in technology, economic pressures, and environmental concerns. One of the biggest trends is the adoption of electric trucks. Many companies are feeling the push to reduce carbon emissions and meet sustainability goals. Electric trucks, while expensive upfront, are being seen as long-term investments due to lower…

[rigonwheels]

Trucking Industry Offers Career Advancement Opportunities - Driver Retention

Driver Retention in the Trucking Industry is a critical challenge faced by companies operating in this highly competitive sector. The ability to retain experienced drivers is not only essential for maintaining operational efficiency and profitability but also for sustaining a positive reputation within the industry. To address this challenge, trucking companies need to implement effective strategies. Offering competitive compensation packages, including salaries, bonuses, health insurance, and retirement plans, is a fundamental step. Additionally, transparent communication channels to address driver concerns, ongoing training and development programs, and a strong commitment to safety are crucial. Embracing modern technology solutions such as route optimization and electronic logging systems can streamline operations and reduce stress for drivers. Promoting work-life balance, recognizing exceptional performance, fostering a sense of community among drivers, providing career advancement opportunities, and establishing a feedback loop for continuous improvement are key elements in achieving driver retention in the competitive landscape of the trucking industry. With these strategies in place, companies can not only retain their experienced drivers but also attract new talent, ensuring long-term success.

[smartlogisticssolutions]

Smart routing and capacity solutions could be a way out for you during driver shortage

Drivers are the backbone of any successful last-mile strategy, and that's not just hyperbole. Whether you're a retailer or a courier company, your products and services are only as good as your ability to get them to your customers. Without drivers, you might as well pack up and call it a day. Unfortunately, driver shortages are becoming more common, and they can cause a lot of problems for companies trying to stay ahead of the game.

Trucking Troubles: The Driver Shortage and Its Ripple Effects

According to ATA, driver shortage in the United States is said to reach 160000 in 2030 from current 80,000. Driver scarcity is impacting retail and courier industries by hurting their supply chain operations and ultimately revenue. 71% of all commodities in the USA is moved by the trucking industry, including retail and couriers. So how exactly is the driver drought hurting these industries?

Unable to accommodate orders during peak seasons:

During the holiday season, for example, retailers often find themselves scrambling to find enough drivers to handle the influx of orders. If they can't keep up, they risk losing revenue and disappointing customers. 

Delivery and reverse logistics:

Managing delivery and reverse logistics during a driver shortage is a problem of its own. With capacity levels already stretched thin, it can be difficult to keep up with SLAs and manage returns, leading to frustrated customers and lost business.

Shortage in stores:

Due to drive shortages, retail stores face product shortages. This will ultimately affect the consumers and businesses. Business/brands will also have a dip in revenue due less sales.

So, what's the solution? It's no secret that technology has transformed the last mile industry in recent years, and capacity and route optimization solutions are among the most promising options for companies looking to weather the storm of driver scarcity. 

Advanced Routing and Capacity Optimization

By implementing a better version of these solutions, with intelligence and automation, companies can ensure that they're making the most of their available resources and keeping customers happy.

Capacity Management 

When it comes to capacity management, legacy solutions simply aren't up to the task. They lack the automation and smart order assignment capabilities that are necessary to handle the sheer volume of orders that companies face during peak season. But with cutting-edge technology, companies can take advantage of advanced capacity management solutions that can assign orders to available resources with precision and plan ahead for peak season. These solutions can even handle on-demand orders and assign drivers during time-off, ensuring that every order is fulfilled without waste or loss.

Route Management Solution

When it comes to routing, legacy solutions simply don't match up to the demands of modern dispatch management strategies. Static routing is no longer enough, as urbanization and other real-world variables make dynamic routing a necessity. Legacy solutions simply can't handle the exceptions that companies face on a daily basis, such as traffic, road closures, accidents, and more. And when it comes to reverse logistics, legacy routing solutions often require additional resources to be deployed, making it difficult to manage during a driver shortage.

But automated routing solutions are far more intelligent, and they offer a range of benefits that legacy solutions simply can't match. By taking into account real-world variables like traffic,road closures and more, automated routing solutions can help dispatchers deploy fewer vehicles, which is essential during a driver shortage. These solutions also offer smart routing capabilities that make reverse logistics seamless, without the need for additional resources. 

With the help of advanced routing solutions, companies can optimize their last mile operations and ensure that each and every order is delivered on time and with minimal disruption.

In conclusion, the solutions outlined in this article offer promising ways to address the challenges of driver shortages for retailers and courier companies. By investing in cutting-edge capacity management and routing solutions, companies can improve driver satisfaction, reduce costs, and provide better customer experiences. Ultimately, this can lead to higher revenue and a more successful last mile strategy for companies looking to stay ahead of the game.

[arkhammaid]

Had a daydream I would love to share about your fem Charles story.

If max and her would have a kid while staying in F1 (Charles taking a year to have a baby and then train back up for the next season) i daydreamed Charles revealed her pregnancy at Monza and all the Italian fans just go nuts. Baby toys are being bought for the future baby and max would joke about the future baby either being a Ferrari or a red bull fan (spoiler: Forever Ferrari)(also max would just be running round after Charles all day, being all protective and stuff)

any child of charles will be ferrari fan first and human second, despite having verstappen genes LMAOO

honestly, if charles would announce her pregnancy, it would be probably after she retired but we love some good daydreams 🙂‍↕️

[changingplumbob]

The weather was supposed to be bucketing rain today and I got lucky, while I was outside today it didn't rain on me, except for once. The bus had pulled up at the mall (where it starts its run) and let the previous passengers off. So I pull up my hood and go stand in the line.

The first few to get on had gold cards (In NZ if you are over 65 you get one, benefits include free public transport at off peak times). Then came a youngish dude who wanted to use his bus card. The driver told him he had to wait as he needed to change over the bus info (i.e. numbers on banners, data for card readers).

So he waited, as did the man behind him who technically could have gotten on with his gold card, as did me, my mum and another couple of people. It's maybe 3 or 4 meters (10-13 feet) between the sheltered seats and the bus. The driver obviously knew we were waiting and therefore would not leave without us. I amend my statement, young dude waited maybe 15 seconds before letting himself onto the bus and sitting down.

Driver asked what he was doing as he'd told dude to wait. Dude said he didn't want to stand in the rain. I repeat it's a mild drizzle, and did I mention we live in a place known for bad weather? Older gentleman that was behind the young dude asked what he was doing to, dude said getting out of the rain. Driver asked him who he thought he was. Dude said he was sick and didn't want to be in the rain. Older gentleman asked why wasn't he at home if he was so sick. Dude said he was on his way to the docs and was adamant he'd done the right thing. I repeat the sheltered seats are a hop, skip and a jump from the bus.

Anyway it took less than a minute for the driver to switch the system then, after letting the rest of us on, he went and had a smoke in the sheltered area so we were like 3 minutes late leaving. Tell you what, I have never been less annoyed by someone smoking. Why would you show a bus driver such disrespect? I mean I've seen worse but like, this individual is driving you somewhere that you can't get yourself.

Long story short, please be nice to your bus drivers and train conductors etc.

[guinevereslancelot]

getting spam ads for online jobs....its that bad out here

[rhirhidamiengurl666]

Low wages, rude teachers and parents , look down upon by the higher ups and lability. That is why my mom had retired as a school bus driver for 18 years. This had started before covid.

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Financial Times di Oggi martedì, 25 febbraio 2025

[artisticdivasworld]

How Immigration Policies Are Squeezing Small Trucking Businesses

If you run your own truck, you don’t need me to tell you how rough things are right now. Rates are garbage, fuel prices keep jumping around, and brokers seem to think you should haul their loads for free. But here’s something else that’s making life harder: immigration policies. Now, you might be thinking, What does that have to do with me? But if you’re out here trying to make a living with one…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"WOMEN TRAM OPERATORS AND TAXI DRIVERS NOW "ON THE JOB"," Toronto Star. October 22, 1943. Page 2. ---- WOMEN OPERATORS appeared for the first time today in Toronto street cam. One of them was Mrs. M. Corbin, formerly in the C.W.A.C.

"IT'S SWELL and I like it very much." declared Mrs. M. Muir, one of the three who will undergo a 21-day probation period. All have husbands in the armed forces and are determined to make a go of it.

MRS. I. V. LAMPERT says she prefers the work to an office job. T.T.C. already employs women bus drivers.

FIVE taxi drivers' licenses have also been issued to women in Toronto. Two of the recipients were Mrs. Phyllis Murray (at wheel) and Mrs. Phyllis Webb. All five have had many years of driving experience.

"MOTOR-MATRONS RUN TRAMS OTHERS BEHIND TAXI WHEELS," Toronto Star. October 22, 1943. Page 2. ---- "This Is the Life," Says One as Toronto Transport Turns to the Ladies ---- HUSBANDS SERVING ---- Transportation in Toronto took on a "feminine twist" today with the Introduction of "motor-matrons" to drive street cars and the issuing of the first taxi drivers' licenses to women.

Each of the three new motor-matrons has a husband in the armed forces, and one has a four-month-old baby at home. The feminine version of street car operators are training on the Bay St. run for their new job. They must serve a probationary period of 21 days.

Three women applicants for taxi-driving authority were given licenses at police headquarters. Two others, Inspector Edward Dunn said, had also passed "a very strict test in handling cars and the rules of the road." All five will start work Monday with a Yonge St. taxi firm.

"This Is the Life" Mrs. M. Muir, one of the new T.T.C. drivers, started as a conductor, and before that worked at the Inglis plant. This is the life" she said as she took the controls.

The second driver is Mrs. I. M. Corbin, formerly a motor transport driver in the C.W.A.C.

Mrs. U. V. Lampert, formerly an office worker, was concerned over her car being late on the run.

"We are late," she demurred as she stopped the car at the Wychwood barns. "I have never driven a motor car... my husband is in the R.C.A.F. at Lakeview, training to be a pilot... I have two brothers In the R.C.A.F. Sorry, but we must start this street car moving we mustn't be late and she was off down the tracks.

Taught Others Before "I was a private driving instructress, and put some 400 persons through for their driving permits, "said Mrs. Ella Murray, Castlewood Rd.. the first to pass her taxi-driving test. "I drove trucks and private cars with the R.CA.F. for two years during the last war. This war I was a civilian driver at Malton airport." Mrs. Phyllis Webb, Laird drive, a major with the women's volunteer corps, was a private driving instructress for five years, and has two daughters going to school and a on stationed at Camp Borden in the R.C.C.S. Her husband is a veteran of the last war.

Driving Since 1916 "I've been doing war work since the outbreak of war, and I want to continue to do my it," said Mrs. Esther Burns, Delaware Ave., who sald she has been driving since 1916.

The other licensed drivers are, Mrs. Emma Gorrie, Glenrose Ave., and Mrs. Dorotny Buchanan, King St., Weston, Each will wear the regulation badge and a uniform consistaing of navy blue tunic and skirt, blue shirt, black tie and chauffeur hat.

"The women will clean and polish their cars just like our men drivers," said P. E. Amie, president of the Deer Park Livery, "and if they get a flat tire while they're out on a trip, they'll change the tire. They'Il work ten and a half hours a day, and receive the same pay as the men."

[alpaca-dave]

That's a lonnnnnnnnnnnnng day, school kids getting off the bus at 10 PM! Ugh... hope they can fix that.

How did they not know this was going to be a problem ahead of time?

[reasonsforhope]

"When a severe water shortage hit the Indian city of Kozhikode in the state of Kerala, a group of engineers turned to science fiction to keep the taps running.

Like everyone else in the city, engineering student Swapnil Shrivastav received a ration of two buckets of water a day collected from India’s arsenal of small water towers.

It was a ‘watershed’ moment for Shrivastav, who according to the BBC had won a student competition four years earlier on the subject of tackling water scarcity, and armed with a hypothetical template from the original Star Wars films, Shrivastav and two partners set to work harvesting water from the humid air.

“One element of inspiration was from Star Wars where there’s an air-to-water device. I thought why don’t we give it a try? It was more of a curiosity project,” he told the BBC.

According to ‘Wookiepedia’ a ‘moisture vaporator’ is a device used on moisture farms to capture water from a dry planet’s atmosphere, like Tatooine, where protagonist Luke Skywalker grew up.

This fictional device functions according to Star Wars lore by coaxing moisture from the air by means of refrigerated condensers, which generate low-energy ionization fields. Captured water is then pumped or gravity-directed into a storage cistern that adjusts its pH levels. Vaporators are capable of collecting 1.5 liters of water per day.

Pictured: Moisture vaporators on the largely abandoned Star Wars film set of Mos Espa, in Tunisia

If science fiction authors could come up with the particulars of such a device, Shrivastav must have felt his had a good chance of succeeding. He and colleagues Govinda Balaji and Venkatesh Raja founded Uravu Labs, a Bangalore-based startup in 2019.

Their initial offering is a machine that converts air to water using a liquid desiccant. Absorbing moisture from the air, sunlight or renewable energy heats the desiccant to around 100°F which releases the captured moisture into a chamber where it’s condensed into drinking water.

The whole process takes 12 hours but can produce a staggering 2,000 liters, or about 500 gallons of drinking-quality water per day. [Note: that IS staggering! That's huge!!] Uravu has since had to adjust course due to the cost of manufacturing and running the machines—it’s just too high for civic use with current materials technology.

“We had to shift to commercial consumption applications as they were ready to pay us and it’s a sustainability driver for them,” Shrivastav explained. This pivot has so far been enough to keep the start-up afloat, and they produce water for 40 different hospitality clients.

Looking ahead, Shrivastav, Raja, and Balaji are planning to investigate whether the desiccant can be made more efficient; can it work at a lower temperature to reduce running costs, or is there another material altogether that might prove more cost-effective?

They’re also looking at running their device attached to data centers in a pilot project that would see them utilize the waste heat coming off the centers to heat the desiccant."

-via Good News Network, May 30, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

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

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

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

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

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

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

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

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

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

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

[lewisvinga]

new date | lando norris x fem!reader / x daughter

summary: due to low staff at work, y/n isn’t able to make it to an important gala with lando. that just means it’s up to him to find a new date and luckily, he has the perfect girl in mind.

warnings; hmm reader is mentioned to be a healthcare worker , idk what other warning

notes; girl dad lando! girl dad lando! girl dad lando!

masterlist !

As much as y/n loved to work in the hospital and help her patients, she also loved going attending galas with Lando, her husband. So, she was blown when she couldn’t go to a grand gala for the Formula One drivers due to a worker shortage in the pediatrics section of the hospital.

She wasn’t the only one upset.

Lando loved being able to show you off. He loved to show off his wife, his wife who helps people for a living. But when you broke the news that you couldn’t attend and jokingly told him to ‘find another date’, he already had someone special in mind.

His focus went to the curly haired one ( and a half ) year old girl sitting beside him on the couch. She was an exact copy of Lando, only having your nose. Her laugh, eyes, mouth, and even her curls was just like her father. If he couldn’t bring his wife, why not bring the mini version of himself?

Y/n didn’t believe him when he wanted to bring their 18 month old Evie to the gala. She thought he was joking and bursted into laughter which immediately stopped when he ran to Evie’s room.

She couldn’t help but sigh and follow him. When she stepped into the room, she didn’t expect him to be searching through Evie’s closet. “Love, what are you doing?” Y/n questions with a chuckle.

“Finding an outfit for Evie, duh.” Lando replies like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He pulls out a lilac dress. He frowns and quickly puts it back. “What should Evie wear…” He mumbles to himself.

“What team do you drive for?”

Lando turns around with a confused expression on his face. “You’re telling me after 4 years you don’t know what-“ He pauses when noticing her amused smile. He finally realized what she was trying to say. “I should dress her in orange!”

“Bingo.”

A week later right before it was time for the gala, you received a selfie taken by Lando of course with Evie next to him. She wore a white dress with orange floral print and a matching orange sweater. He even styled her brown curls into two little ponytails at the top with orange bows.

Lando was ecstatic to show his daughter to everyone. It was a special day for him and for little Evie, even if she had no idea what was going on. The moment he stepped on the red carpet with Evie in one arm and a baby bag in the other, the cameras went crazy.

He half expected her to shy away from the cameras but she’s as extroverted as her father. Evie smiled widely at the cameras and even signaled Lando that she wanted to be put down.

She immediately posed for the cameras. Remembering the past times of Y/n taking pictures of her. Although she was only a year and a half, she acted with confidence and spun around for the cameras.

Evie seemed so comfortable in the spotlight that Lando was taken aback, but nonetheless, he bursted into laughter. Once she felt like she was done posing, she went to her father to take a couple pictures with him.

At the end of the carpet, little Evie saw the familiar face is Lissie who watches her with a wide smile.

“Is that the Evie Norris?” Lissie exclaims as Lando walks up to her. She bends down to gently pinch the baby’s cheek.

“She’s my date tonight.” The McLaren driver says with a proud smile, picking her up in his arms. Evie leans her head against his shoulder.

Lissie lets out a chuckle and asks, “No Y/n? Well, I’m glad to have this munchkin!”

“Ah, you know, work got her busy but she’s savin’ people so I’m proud of her.”

Lissie proceeded to ask him a couple of questions in relation to the gala and upcoming events. By the time Lando answered the last question, she notices how Evie was patiently waiting.

“So, Evie,” She says, her smile turning wider as the one year old immediately leaned up. “Who dressed you?” She asks, holding the microphone close to her.

“Mama.”

Lando lets out a dramatic gasp which made his daughter burst into fits of giggles. Even Y/n, who was watching the live stream during her break, bursted into laughter.

“Evie Abigail Norris!” He gasps, “It’s not good to lie! Tell everyone who really dressed you.”

Evie lets out a squeal into the microphone before admitting, “Papa!” She exclaims. She points to the orange flower and mumbles, “Papaya. McLaren.”

Lando wore the proudest smile on his face as he hears the mumbles of his daughter. She was his pride and joy. Her voice, despite only being one, was so much like his. Her laugh was exactly his. Everything about her was exactly like him and he loved it.

Lissie couldn’t hold back her laugh as Evie continued to repeat her words. “Well, princess Evie, Lando, I hope you both have a wonderful night. Not too many sweets for the little one, eh?”

“Trust me, if I gave her sweets, Mom would be upset.” Lando replies with a smile. “Say ‘bye’ to Lissie.” He says to his daughter. Evie immediately waved at Lissie and mumbles a ‘goodbye’ before Lando excuses himself.

Evie lays her head against Lando’s shoulder as they made their way into the venue. He pressed a kiss on her messy curls before gently resting his cheek against hers. “We’re gonna have so much fun tonight, aren’t we Evie.”

In response, she wraps her arms as much as she could around Lando to press a kiss on his cheek. “Fun. Fun.” She mumbles, already seemingly tired.

“I love you, my sweet girl.”

[stele3]

Blood donations through the Red Cross: a guide

Blood drives are always going on. You can go to the Red Cross website and find one in your area.

The website sends you text reminders the day before, as well as a link to the Rapid Pass, a questionnaire that determines you eligibility.

Yes, you can give blood if you’ve had gay sex; Biden fixed that. Yes, you can give blood if you’ve got tattoos, so long as they were conducted in a licensed facility.

On the day of, you go to the drive. You need your driver’s license, which they’ll scan. If you didn’t do the Rapid Pass ahead of time, you do it there.

They then check your hematocrit — usually by pricking your finger — your blood pressure, and your temperature. You sign a form saying you understand they’re gonna test your blood for diseases and will contact you if you’ve got any.

Time for the scary part. You walk over and lie down on what looks like a massage table. They put a blood cuff around your arm and have you squeeze a squishy thing to enlarge your veins. Once they’ve found a good one, they mark it with a pen.

They apply disinfectant to the whole area.

Steps 4-7 take about half an hour.

They insert the needle, tape it to your wrist, and wait while the bag fills. The normal blood donation takes 3 units, or 3 pints. Each unit is one transfusion, which is why the Red Cross says every donation can save 1-3 lives.

How long step 9 takes depends on you. Several factors are at play: your cardiovascular fitness, your hydration level, and the size of your veins. My speed record for filling the bag is 4 minutes and 4 seconds, but I’m told that’s insanely fast. (I guzzle water the day of.)

Once you’ve filled the bag, they take the needle out, apply gauze, and tell you to hold it over your head while they secure your donation. Once they’ve done that, they wrap tape around your elbow, which is to stay in place for an hour. The gauze needs to stay in place for about 4 hours.

SNACKS.

There is a critical shortage of O type blood, both O- and O+. There is always a critical shortage of O types, because O- is the universal donor (can give to anyone). However, because of its rarity (only 7% of the population), its use is restricted to babies and pregnant people. The most common blood type used in ERs is type O+.

Yes, this has the potential to cause side effects for people who have any type of - blood. Considering the beyond-critical shortage of O- and the prevalence of + types (85% of the population) vs - types (15% of the population), ERs will usually roll the dice and give you O+ until they figure out what blood type you actually have.

IF YOU HAVE TYPE O BLOOD PLEASE DONATE. Everyone should donate but especially type O.

If you don’t know your blood type, good news! The Red Cross will tell you after you donate! That’s very useful information for you to have, and they give it to you for free.

And I mean….theoretically, you could use this process to check for blood diseases like HIV. It’s free! If you have no other way of accessing that info, the Red Cross will absolutely test your blood and alert you if you’re positive. Scratch that, irresponsible advice. Apologies!

I’m not scared of needles, but I faint at the sight of my own blood. I still go every 8 weeks, because doing so SAVES LIVES. I have donated 8 times. That means I’ve saved the lives of between 8-24 people. Can you imagine how good that feels? 8-24 people are alive because every 8 weeks I plop my ass down in a gym or church or whatever and white-knuckle my phone for 5 minutes.

50% of people are eligible to give blood but only 5% do, and that number falls to catastrophic levels among young people. Millennials and Gen Z give 40% less blood than older generations, and that’s placing us all at risk.

So if you’re in the 50% of the population who’s eligible to donate, roll your sleeves up and avert your eyes, guys. This is THE most basic form of mutual aid you can possibly do.