in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

foxes-in-love:

2c0962bf1f8ce7418bcdae0a438f88e63af15b1a

Tags:

#speaking as someone who has worked in fast food for ~3.5 years now: #I’ve never seen anyone get into a *physical* altercation over who gets the warm altruistic fuzzies(?) of paying for the food #but I *have* seen people argue for several minutes about it #(they did this in between telling us what toppings they wanted on their large order so it wasn’t like things came to a standstill) #(I feel like the longest *standstill* I’ve witnessed for this is maybe somewhere between 0.5 – 1 minutes) #comics #art #in which Brin has a job #food mention

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

nuclearspaceheater:

brin-bellway:

https://brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org/81296.html

“When I put it on before work (so, more time-sensitive than the previous occasions), I *felt* like this time there was a little bit of leakage at the top of my nose, yet it still passed the plug-the-exhalation-valve test. Nocebo?“

I’ve had this apparently phantom sensation of air flow over the nose while still passing seal tests as well. ¯\_(ᐛ)_/¯ 

“Most importantly, I need to practice attaching the filters and making sure I can properly click them into place, because one of them fucking *fell off mid-task*.“

The filters don’t click into place, they’re twist-lock. This particular model of respirator, in my experience, has particularity tight connections, so I’d recommend installing them while not wearing it. It seems to me implausible that they would fall off if properly twisted into place, without simply ripping the rest of the filter from the plastic coupling.

>>they’re twist-lock

That’s what I meant, yeah.

—

>>It seems to me implausible that they would fall off if properly twisted into place

Yeah, I’m assuming it was some sort of newbie mistake, since there’s no way it’s even *remotely* normal for them to fall off during use. People trust their lives to these things in situations where one minute of masklessness will fuck you the hell up *even if you’re lucky*.

(I called it a “live-fire exercise”, but that was somewhat of an exaggeration: it’s more like an exercise where 99% of darts are blank and 1% contain *some* poison but not enough for a single dart to poison you. It’s just that there are a lot of darts flying around in a crowded restaurant, and you don’t know which ones are which.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #covid19 #illness tw #in which Brin has a job

{{next post in sequence}}

brin-bellway asked: Thank you so much for the heads-up on how P100 respirators are obtainable now! I just got one and I expect my “”essential work”” fast-food shift tonight to be much less terrifying.

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

nuclearspaceheater:

Glad to help.

Tags:

#I was going to ping nuclearspaceheater on the Tumblr syndication of the first respirator post #but the ping wouldn’t work right #so I sent this ask instead #covid19 #conversational aglets #illness tw? #in which Brin has a job

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

disabledprincesses:

Dr. : do you experience any of these (Covid) symptoms?

Chronically ill people:

017267abbfb158d06930275c25dd6b667c0c5e24

Tags:

#fortunately Canadian quarantine laws later added a pre-existing-condition exemption #(although thanks to my pollen issues being degenerative I *still* ended up #calling off sick for two days for what turned out to be a new pollen manifestation) #((lesson learned: pinch your masks shut *very* tightly! tape them if you have any doubts! #autumn pollen will get in through the slightest crack and it will fuck your shit *up*!!)) #(((it sure is convenient though that COVID and pollen take the same primary preventative treatment‚ very efficient))) #even after it stopped being Literally Illegal to show up to work while having an allergy attack #I still really didn’t want to deal with confusion/uncertainty about what I had (including internal uncertainty) #not counting commuting I’ve spent…maybe two or three cumulative hours outdoors this entire year? #(although really I suspect most mask ”failures” back in the day were actually from not wearing a mask at work) #(which is no longer an issue and I will *never* let the franchise owner take my mask away from me again) #((I’m glad I finally consulted my doctor about options in November 2019 even though I haven’t really been able to follow up on it properly)) #((I have official medical records dating back to before the pandemic #indicating that I require a mask in areas with sufficient air mixture with the outdoors!)) #((*suck* on it Meta-Boss!)) #anyway‚ I’ve noticed my co-worker with the chronic cough #(who‚ perhaps not unrelatedly‚ is also my only co-worker who seems to genuinely give a shit about the plague) #has not coughed in my hearing once since he returned to work in May #but he *does* clear his throat a lot more often #I infer that he is consciously suppressing his cough so as not to freak people out #tag rambles #covid19 #allergies #illness tw #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

marcusseldon:

I have been feeling increasing anxiety about AI given the success of gpt-3, and not because of the potential of a singularity or AI foom scenario.

What I’m worried about is that AI will soon make nerds obsolete. In the current world, you can be socially awkward and weird but still find success and status through your intellectual abilities. There are many jobs available for people who can write, code, or even just memorize a lot of information (like lawyers). But it seems like we may not be too far off from AI being able to take many of these jobs over. Perhaps not the most complicated and high status ones, but the bulk of the low and mid-range complexity jobs that most nerds work in will disappear.

If AI takes over most of these information jobs, then what’s left will be physical labor and people-oriented jobs. Everyone will be either a construction worker or yoga instructor. The salespeople will be fine, meanwhile most data analysts and entry level coders and writers will be laid off as one person plus an AI can do the work of dozens of people.

Right now, you can still get some level of societal respect if you’re smart even if you lack charisma or physical ability, but that may not be true much longer.

 

balioc:

…both physical labor and, uh, let’s call it “user interface labor” are already getting hammered by automation.  That doesn’t seem likely to stop or slow down. 

(A high-level salesperson dealing with high-value wares may not be replaceable by present-generation AI…GPT-3 can’t schmooze a client…but the McDonald’s cashier is getting replaced by a kiosk, and the ordinary floor salesman is getting replaced by the Amazon algorithm.) 

It is true that intellectual labor may be thrown into that basket as well. 

Social respect stems from economically productive labor is a mug’s game.  We’ve been falling down on the job of dealing with that truth, in part because nerds – who are, de facto, responsible for that kind of philosophical work – have been doing very well economically of late.  But it remains true.

 

bambamramfan:

The lucrative remuneration for analytical thinking of the past couple decades should be understood as a blip. Eventually it will die down, and that will suck for many people (including myself.) But you shouldn’t build your life counting on it to last.

 

eightyonekilograms:

But you shouldn’t build your life counting on it to last.

Ok, so… what should I do? This isn’t actionable advice.

 

bambamramfan:

Save the money you earn now instead of counting on a regular increase in pay throughout the rest of your life. Talk to lawyers you know about what their professional arc has looked like (given that they have had the same arc recently.) Vote for a strong social safety net because even if you earn 6 figures now you may need it later.

I don’t really have good advice for people. A lot of people are in very bad situations! But “I and my friends have well paying jobs and I expect this to never change” is not guaranteed to hold up.

+1

I’m going into accounting soon, and I plan to operate under the assumption that I will be permanently laid off at some point. Here’s hoping it’s far enough in the future to give me a good chance to prepare.

(On the bright side, my *baseline* expenses are barista FIRE†, and I have several Vimes Boot Theory plans that I would only need a few good years to be able to enact. Also I have my foot in the employees-only door at a local fast-food joint, which is in a small town where automation of fast food is less economical.)

I won’t make the same mistakes my father made, thinking that because he was a programmer†† he was golden and didn’t need to do more than basic 401k deposits. (I’m gonna make *new* and *different* mistakes, which will almost certainly revolve around having less fun than I could be getting away with having. I’m pretty okay with that.)

—

†”barista FIRE” = the ability to cover your personal expenses on 20 minimum-wage-hours a week (the shortfall is implied to be covered by interest on your investments, but I would *have* no shortfall on 20 minimum-wage-hours/week, though it’d be a bit tight and I wouldn’t be able to support anyone else)  ((okay, the lack-of-other-income is not quite true, ~half our rent is being covered by partial ownership of our home and absence-of-rent-cost-due-to-ownership is a form of interest income in its own right; upon reflection, people who come from subcultures where car leasing/loans are normalised would likely also be inclined to consider the absence of payments on our (admittedly shitty) car as a form of interest income))

††of devices that no longer exist, having been subsumed by Blackberries and then even further subsumed by smartphones

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #apocalypse cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

@rustingbridges​ replied to your post:

“under normal conditions a substantial fraction of influenza cases are “asymptomatic”, whatever that means in that context, so I’d presume there’s also a contingent of very mildly symptomatic cases”

—

Meta-Boss is dragging me back into the restaurant tomorrow now that he is no longer legally forbidden from doing so. If I *am* carrying something, I hope I don’t fuck anybody over too hard. We *will* be taking the now-standard precautions, so that’s something.

(And as for hugging my mom, unlike me she’s finished her flu-vaccination ramp-up period, so that tilts her odds favourably.)

—

TBH, if this was influenza, chalk another one up on the board of “we should just wear masks all the time by default”. I’ll gladly dull my sense of smell while outside the house and be unable to read customers’ lips if it means turning the horrific suffering of a flu into *this*.

(and if you have to talk to someone who really needs to read your lips (and you can’t just write to each other like civilised people), wearing a mask except when around them would still beat not wearing one at all)

Tags:

#replies #rustingbridges #illness tw #in which Brin has a job #influenza #covid19

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

maryellencarter:

brin-bellway:

maryellencarter:

so like. there’s this budgeting thing called the 50/30/20 method. apparently it is popularized by elizabeth warren? the idea is you spend only 50% of your budget on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings or debt reduction (after counting all minimum payments on your current debt as part of Needs).

So I know my bills take up more than one of my 2 paychecks a month. (I ignore the occasional third one for budgeting purposes till it rolls around, so I don’t overbudget for months that don’t have one.) So for curiosity’s sake, I broke down my entire budget into Needs, Wants, and Savings, then did percentage math at it.

For this purpose, you count your non-tax payroll deductions, like healthcare and 401(k) contributions, as part of your income and expenses, but you don’t count money that goes away as taxes. So the budget starts off with putting 401(k) contributions in Savings and healthcare deductions in Needs. Then you start listing off shit like rent, utilities, car expenses…

Right now, while I’m still catching up on a bunch of my COVID-deferred bills and loans, my Needs come out to about 74% of my income. However, my Wants are very minimal: I have my massage subscription and tip, I’ve budgeted for fast food or takeout maybe 2-3x a month, and I pledge to one Patreon at the $1 level. All together, my Wants are about 6% of my income, leaving the requisite 20% to go toward reducing COVID debt for now.

However, once my COVID deferrals are all paid off, my Needs go down to about 67% of my income – and this is with generous projections, like at least one specialist copay every single month and gasoline if we ever start driving again. My Wants stay at about 6%. So I could either use the other 27% for savings and debt reduction, or I could stick with the recommended 20% and have 13% of my budget for Wants.

And I’m like… this is so much money. This is $150 just unallocated *after* going out to eat at least once a month and keeping my massage subscription. That’s… I do not know what else I would want. I could buy my entire wardrobe at LL Bean. I could have a massage every single week. I could eat at a sit-down restaurant every week. I could buy the newest and most expensive iPhone every single year. I could buy a brand new American Girl doll every month with money to spare. Like I couldn’t do all of those at *once* obviously, but that’s with just 7% of my income by this method of reckoning.

Like, if I somehow did make twice my Needs expenses after tax. That’s not impossible; I’d have to make a little under $33k a year, or a little over $2700 a month, which would be about $17 an hour excluding taxes. I don’t expect to get there at my current job in the near future, but it’s not astronomical.

But like, at that point I’d be saving about $545 a month, covering all my Needs expenses, and I would have *over eight hundred dollars a fucking month* to spend on Wants! Like… jesus fuckwaffles. How would I… I could buy a new one of my current phone every single month and have money left over. I could go to one of those black-tie restaurants that are like $100 a plate *twice a week*. I could not only move into a bigger apartment but hire a maid service to clean it. I could buy every single book I’ve ever read in short order and pay to store them all. I could live on like… caviar and avocado toast.

Hell, even if my living expenses were somehow miraculously reduced and my Needs were only half of my tax-excluded pay *now*, I’d be living on a little over $1000 a month, saving about $400 a month, and trying to figure out how to spend $600 a month on Wants. How… I don’t fucking know what else I could want. I’m not used to having money to spare. It’s weirder than winning the lottery, even, because it’s just like… it’s not enough to go “I will pay off all my friends’ student loans and buy a condo!” but it’s enough that I’m like “Do I just… put all 27% of my income in savings? Do I save for a car? Pay off my student loans? Invest for retirement? Am I fundamentally missing something I should be wanting?”

That sounds like a sign that 50/30/20 isn’t for you.

A lot of budgeting methods have this…maybe not “problem” exactly, but this thing where they’re clearly aimed at people who start with an entertainment budget of “everything after necessities” (or in many cases even higher) and negotiate *downwards*, which makes the methods a bad fit for people who start with an entertainment budget of zero and negotiate *upwards*. I guess the people spending money they don’t have on things they could do without are the ones most in need of frameworks, so the frameworks are designed for them. Getting *down* to 30% is a good start for people who were previously spending *more*.

—

Personally, I do struggle to wrap my head around things that draw a bright line between “wants” and “investments”. Sure, there are *occasional* items–like restaurant food–that are just wants and not also investments, but by far the most common reason for me to want to buy something is because I think it will leave me better off in the long run. I have a long list of things to save up for, and it’s all stuff like “house repairs” and “things that give you a leg up on Vimes Boot Theory” and “retirement funds” and “hedging against the future being wildly different from the present, such that normal retirement funds don’t cut it [link]”.

—

I think it’s important to bear in mind: given how weird your life is in general, and in particular the fact that your ability to work has a history of fluctuating erratically, saving is even more important for you than for most people.

There’s a concept called “self-insurance”. (…actually it turns out that there are at least *two* similar-but-not-identical concepts called self-insurance, and the Wikipedia article is about the wrong one. Investopedia [link] has the right idea.) You, in particular, *really* should get disability insurance if you can possibly manage it, and while third-party disability-insurance companies *exist*, you’d have to file claims (during the periods of time when you are least capable of filing claims!), and take the risk that whatever shit happens to you next won’t technically be disability by their standards, and operate under rules designed to let the insurance company turn a profit. (The house always wins.) Ideally, then, what you’d want is to instead save up enough in the good times that you can cover the bad times yourself.

(For example: you mention you’re digging your way out of COVID-related debt. My brother was temporarily laid off in the spring, and because of [glitches in the hastily-expanded Canadian welfare system] was unable to receive any kind of unemployment payments in time to actually help him with it. But he had lots of money in his savings account, and he used some of *that* to cover his bills until the restaurant re-opened. Now that he’s working again, he’s replenishing it; in the long run, he plans to save up enough for a condo.

(We not-quite-joked that if the glitch had to happen to *someone* at his workplace, it’s good that it happened to him: his co-workers spend all their money on booze and weed and wouldn’t have been able to handle it. His co-workers, meanwhile, not-quite-joke that they should get him hooked on something so they can drag him back into the crab bucket.))

Yeah, idk if I’m just not looking in the right places, but the budgeting advice I can find all seems to skew really strongly toward “quit your starbucks habit! cut off the cable channels you don’t watch! do you really need a cell phone?” rather than like… you know, “I was raised on 3¢ a chore, I have absolutely no idea how financially healthy people cope with having discretionary income and I want guidelines”.

—

My priorities are different from yours obviously, but yeah, my list of things to save up for (other than straight-up debt reduction, which is a big one) are things like “new orthotic shoes” and “when my car breaks down again”. Freedom, essentially. Transportation is big for me, even though my current place of residence has by far the best public transit system I’ve used outside of Washington DC. (Buses every 10-15 minutes? Wtf is this sorcery?) Maybe moving into a ground-floor apartment eventually so I can stop carrying groceries up the fucking stairs, but I’d have to afford to pay movers because I can’t physically get my loveseat down the stairs by myself. And when it comes down to it, I kind of prefer not having to actually move everything.

—

I actually have disability insurance through my work, and then I managed to completely space on it while I was out on FMLA and didn’t realize I had it till I was back to work and scrutinizing my pay stubs – I thought I’d opted out of it last open enrollment. So I never got as far as finding out whether a depressive collapse counted as disability, or whether I could have filed a claim or anything. :P So yeah, with open enrollment just around the corner again, I am pondering whether to keep paying the approximately $15/paycheck toward disability insurance or not. I haven’t used my dental or vision insurance yet either but I keep meaning to… it’s just that for all I’ve lived here for over two years, I still don’t know things like “where is a good dentist”.

(My eyesight varies wildly with my diabetes. When my blood sugar is under control, I don’t seem to need glasses. When it’s out of control, I see so badly that I didn’t realize there were artificial cobwebs all over the call floor my first Halloween at this job and just thought my vision was inexplicably foggy in addition to being unfocused.)

—

I like the idea of having retirement income, and of employer matching, but yeah, the way my life tends to go, and especially with the way I burn out at irregular intervals, I’m honestly not sure when or whether the whole “tax-advantaged” thing (which I will freely admit I don’t actually understand) outweighs the benefits of cash on hand. Right now, my plans go approximately as follows:

* Catch up on car insurance payments before the new policy starts in November and stacks on top of my deferred balance.

* Pay the CPAP mask bill that went to collections like a year ago and I haven’t had the spoons or the money to get it out yet, also buy a new CPAP mask as this one is becoming elderly and I’m having to kludge it back together when the plastic pieces break.

* Pay off the cell phone deferral early just for the hell of it because I should have the money and it’ll drop my bill by $20/month. (I already finally got my employee discount applying so I’ll be down to like $35/month for unlimited data with no hotspot. God, the ability to *not* need hotspot is such a weird luxury…)

* Pay back @camshaft22 for loaning me like three months’ rent over the course of the pandemic. If all my budgeting is correct I might be able to do that by January.

* Assuming 2020 has not yet exploded in my face too disastrously, build up that emergency fund everyone talks about. This comes after the COVID debt because being able to sock away $400+ a month will be very encouraging for me at that point. Right now my savings is just, I’m manually doing the thing where you round up each purchase to the next dollar and put the change in savings. It’s… complicated, because my savings account takes several days to process a transfer from checking once I request it, so e.g. right now I have no less than five scheduled transfers, each under $1, requested as early as Thursday night, which are not going to process until Tuesday at the earliest because of Labor Day. Once I get the car insurance paid up, which is the situation with a definite time pressure, I might start rounding up to the next $5 mark if I think I can afford it. I know in the olden days, just having each purchase rounded up to the next dollar could wind up bringing me like $26 in savings a month, but I think that’s when I was like buying snacks from the vending machine and stuff.

* Once I have an emergency fund, find out what the deal is with my credit cards in collections and pay them off. There’s one I would have sworn I paid but my credit reports all still show it derogatory.

* Then it’s a decision between “Save every possible penny for a car made in this millennium that has not been totaled, before my current car explodes irreparably” or “Try to get my student loans out of default while also saving at a slower rate for a car, so that if my car explodes before I can buy a new one out of pocket, I might have a hope in hell of getting a car loan that’s not completely horrendous”.

Of course, the downside of this is if my car explodes *before* I have an emergency fund, I’m in trouble. Again. :P October has that third paycheck though, so it’s really tempting to put the whole bloody thing toward debt reduction and knock some of these out of the park.

>>(Buses every 10-15 minutes? Wtf is this sorcery?)

*impressed whistle*

—

>>FMLA

*googles*

I was about to say “holy shit, why can’t *we* have something like that”, but then I looked closer and it has so many exceptions that for all I know we *do* have an analogous law, and I just haven’t noticed because it would never come up in real life. I’m glad you managed to actually get caught in that hole-ridden safety net.

Our 2019!unemployment-system, because it makes the employer pay extra into the system every time they allow you to go an entire week without work, has the emergent effect of *banning unpaid sick leave*. Well, you can have up to six days at a time of unpaid sick leave, but of course that’s not enough to get over a cold.

(I am very glad they scrapped the idea of returning to the 2019 system in September, because the 2019 system *encourages* the spread of disease and that is the *last* thing we fucking need right now. Meta-Boss has, at least twice, coerced me into returning to (customer-facing!) work while still having coughing fits† because he didn’t want to eat the fine for allowing me to become technically unemployed (even though I wouldn’t have bothered actually applying for unemployment, knowing I would be returning to work in another week or two): I often wonder how many cases of illness can be traced back to the existence of the Canadian unemployment system. Between that and how hard it is to get them to actually give you any money, I think we’d be better off with *nothing* than with the 2019 system, especially with an active plague but even with just (“”just”“) baseline colds and flus.)

—

>>I haven’t used my dental or vision insurance yet either but I keep meaning to… it’s just that for all I’ve lived here for over two years, I still don’t know things like “where is a good dentist”.

God, I’m so looking forward to having dental insurance††. I’ve been paying for vision checkups††† out of pocket because it’s just ~$150 every two years, but in theory dental is about that much every nine months. I haven’t had a dental checkup in two years, and the previous one was three years before that, and also I’m tired of every little toothache being like “is this it? is it happening? is today the day my wisdom teeth become an emergency?”.

(several of the things on the List are dental-related, and originally some of them were high enough in the priority order that we would have reached them by now, but we are postponing all non-urgent in-person medical care and *especially* stuff where you physically can’t wear a mask while you’re doing it)

And yeah, one of the many benefits of a stable housing situation is that I’ve long since found local medical providers I like. Now it’s just a matter of being able to afford the money and disease-risk to go see them.

—

>>I’m honestly not sure when or whether the whole “tax-advantaged” thing (which I will freely admit I don’t actually understand) outweighs the benefits of cash on hand.

Might be good for you to talk that over with an American finance nerd. I could talk your ear off about Canadian investment accounts, but the American situation is not perfectly analogous.

(Definitely look into what the early-withdrawal penalties are for various account types. One of the Canadian ones has almost no withdrawal penalty (there’s no fine, and you only have to wait until next year before you can put it back), to the point that it’s very feasible to put money into it knowing you’re going to need it again. (*I’m* not allowed to have that one, because the United States government hates me and wants me to suffer, but it *exists*.))

—

>>Then it’s a decision between “Save every possible penny for a car made in this millennium that has not been totaled, before my current car explodes irreparably” or “Try to get my student loans out of default while also saving at a slower rate for a car, so that if my car explodes before I can buy a new one out of pocket, I might have a hope in hell of getting a car loan that’s not completely horrendous”.

Yeah, cars are tough. Car loans are Not Done in my family, but we’re torn between “spend ~$6k on a *somewhat* less shitty car to tide us over until I start working full-time and can afford something better” and “jump straight to the ~$14k hybrid we really should have in the medium term (while we wait for full-electric hatchbacks to [be remotely affordable + have a range capable of New York trips]: currently you can have at most one of those things)”. A 14k car would wipe out an uncomfortable amount of savings, but likely have *much* lower maintenance costs than a 6k.

(Of course, summer is ending (= broken air conditioner is ceasing to matter for another year) plus we’re still not driving much, so “keep using the beater until I start working full-time” might also be a workable option. But my parents occasionally make noises about maybe returning to delivery driving.)

—

†And of course masks were *also* forbidden back then, because in the Old Times they signalled (in this case correctly, but anyway) having a cold and the *appearance* of sanitation is far more important to Meta-Boss than actually *being* sanitary.

††not covered by government between the ages of 14 and 65, and maybe not rich children either

†††not covered by government between the ages of 20 and 65, unless you have a degenerative eye condition (diabetes counts!)

Tags:

#and because people are constantly opening the front door and letting in pollen #I used to get a lot of sore throats from the no-masks-allowed policy #I wasn’t confident that wearing a mask at work would be enough to stop it but now I know from experience #if I’m still working there after the vaccine #I’m gonna show up in a cloth mask with ”pollen mask” written on it and refuse to take it off #”it’s a disability accommodation” #”give me any paperwork you need me to fill out for that and I’ll fill it out‚ but I am not taking off this mask” #venting cw? #(the before-times Canadian unemployment system fills me with rage) #((for that matter the United States tax code also fills me with rage)) #((but y’all knew that one already)) #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #illness tw #poison cw? #covid19 #reply via reblog #medical cw #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #allergies #long post

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

transgenderer:

i guess now that phones are a thing you dont need a watch but pre-phone everyone who didnt wear a watch was a fucking chump, and itrs STILL a good idea now cuz what if youre in a no-phone situation, or just dontr want to bring your phone, etc

 

sigmaleph:

i used to wear a watch all the time and i miss it

(i stopped cause the strap broke and kept needing to be replaced and I decided it wasn’t actually worth the effort to figure how to find someone who would sell me a non-shitty watch strap when I already was carrying a phone with me at all times. The watch itself is fine and I could totally go back to using it)

i remember the era before everyone had a phone though. People kept asking me the time.

I get compliments on my watch sometimes at work. The customers think it’s a by-electronics-standards antique, guessing that it’s from the 80′s. Actually I bought it at Walmart in like 2013 for $20, and they’re still readily available for not that much more [link].

I really like this design: it’s elegant, shiny, doesn’t depend on Velcro (which wears out a lot faster than clasps) like most of my childhood watches did. It runs slow by about one second every 2.5 days: roughly once a month I sync it with time.gov.

Even now that I have a phone I plan to replace this watch if/when it wears out, preferably with an identical one. I like being able to just glance at it rather than have to take my phone out, dumbwatches are permitted in many contexts (work, exam rooms) where general-purpose computers are not, and the battery lasts much, *much* longer than a phone or smartwatch battery. I’m not sure I’ve *ever* had to recharge this watch, and if I did it was only once.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #recs #in which Brin has a job #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #and I’m not sure if this fits the spirit of the tag but it certainly fits the letter: #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

{{next post in sequence}}

It Should Be Legal To Have Sex In Public

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

danksy-lives:

brin-bellway:

danksy-lives:

By what right does a government, entrusted with the preservation of liberty, see fit to prohibit consensual acts? This question, which was the catalyst of the Sexual Revolution, has led this author to reconsider all manner of social taboos.

While considering the rise of PDAs on campus, I considered how the right to show affection had superseded the expectation of those around them to feel comfortable. This is a positive change, primarily because the taboo against this act is rooted in the belief that people have the right to control the expression of their peers. This value has no place in a free society. From this position, I considered more extreme examples of the same principle. If society has no right to prohibit public signs of love, why should it prohibit its members from the literal act of love? It is this question that led me to my thesis, that it should be legal to have sex in public.

The first objection that will be raised against this is that the other people do not consent to seeing this. This response misrepresents the nature of consent. Many of you have seen a video in which consent is explained using the metaphor of giving someone tea. In this video, consent is understood to be a state in which the two people involved in sex agree to the act. Nowhere in that explanation does the opinion of those around them come into consideration. Because of this, saying that public sex violates the rights of passersby, or that they should just “get a room”, holds no weight.

The second point is that public sex does no harm to those who witness it. As with PDAs, there is no injustice that one can point to in order to justify its prohibition. The most likely grievance one could have is that people having sex on the ground would cause people to move around them. This is certainly an inconvenience, but not one that warrants government intervention. The worst-case scenario is that the coitus occurs in an exit or other narrow location. In this scenario, the appropriate action would be to use applicable fire codes to identify this as a safety violation. They could then be punished accordingly, public sex not being relevant to the matter. In neither case can the public claim harm that comes directly from the act of making love, but from factors that would be relevant whether or not sex was involved.

As I end this, I should address the reader’s assumption that the author is a crazed sex maniac. On the contrary, I am only interested in freedom for its own sake. I have no desire to partake in the act, nor would I gain sexual pleasure from seeing this in my daily life. I am content to know that the government will not interfere with those who chose to do so. Being free does not require that you partake in an act, it only requires that you reserve the right to do so, should the desire come. That is why I write this, so that we may all be a little more free.

People should not have sex in public because–given the fluids involved–it is unsanitary and against the interests of public health. They also should not talk in public for the same reason.

would you then support the idea that those having sex should be responsible for the cleanup of their own fluids?

I highly doubt that would be enforceable in practice. Our current public-health measures are unreliable and generally inadequate: we can’t even prevent restaurants from serving rotting food!

(while you could argue the *later* instances were a natural punishment for forcing service workers into proximity with them during a plague, those poor bastards who simply ordered the least popular variant of chicken during Christmas break absolutely did not deserve what they got)

By requiring people who have sex to do so in (ideally) their own space or (at minimum) a space owned by people in a good position to trace the sex back to them, we both increase the probability that they will have disinfectant available and ensure that, if they fail to use it (or fail to use it thoroughly enough), it will either harm *themselves* or harm someone with the capacity to figure it out and seek restitution. One of many situations where we eliminate the tragedy of the commons by eliminating the commons.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #discourse cw #unsanitary cw #nsfw text #in which Brin has a job #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #illness mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

rustingbridges replied:

regional municipality sounds sort of like unincorporated areas of counties, maybe? I don’t know the procedures for your area but official stats of 1/550 probably implies pretty high actual rates… shit sucks

I agree mask wearing probably has better uptake in NY than anywhere comparable in the US since we’ve had such a large volume of cases it’s got to be enough to convince almost anyone it’s serious

Tags:

#(update: I saw an article in the local paper recently complaining) #(that tests in our area are getting rationed even harder than in the rest of the province) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #(oh also some good news: coworker-who-made-fun-of-me seems to be expressing interest in getting a cloth mask like mine) #(if I see her wearing one on multiple occasions I’ll remove the clip from my dirt file: sometimes people improve)