An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by New York City to help small business owners is under criticism for dispensing bizarre advice that misstates local policies and advises companies to violate the law....
Look, just because the AI says it doesn't work doesn't mean you should stop using it! Things not working is normal in technology! It's okay if everything gets worse!
It’s a day of reckoning today for Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and a long-awaited culmination for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones for defamation. A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas is expected to force Jones to liquidate his personal assets, including ownership of his media company, Free Speech Systems, in...
Good. I'm not usually one for wanting to see someone lose everything, but if anyone deserves it it's this asshole. Imagine knowingly lying about dead children for a decade.
How the hell do these kinds of people live with themselves?
If you read the article, Lloyd grew up in Haiti and went to the US for college, which is where the two met. They then moved back to Haiti together. They're not some silly American couple with no business in Haiti, their family runs an orphanage and a school there.
Not really sure murdered missionaries trying to run an orphanage is a 'lol' situation.
I wasn't so much talking about having the knowledge to make it safe as like actually having some business being there. It's certainly dangerous, just like it's dangerous for anyone who's living in proximity to that. But it's not like they're some idiot tourists, that's actually the life their family has focused on. Like, it's what they do.
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Good! We benefit from exposure to different circumstances, and immigration is a great way to do that!
A massive portion of what people tend to typify as 'illegal' immigration is actually asylum-seeking, which is in fact legal. Entering a country to seek asylum is not illegal.
What we probably should consider illegal, however, is the genocide, displacement, enslavement, and exploitation that was used to steal and develop the land the United States claims.
Especially in the case of Mexican immigrants, who are often literally trying to move to territory that was once Mexico, that shit is kinda wild. Like, you're really going to sit there in the furthest reaches of encroachment on our southern neighbor and claim nobody has a right to come in? Not even asylum seekers? On stolen land? Are you kidding?
Another positive step in the right direction for an organization rife with brokenness. There's a lot I don't like about the organization, but this is something a love--a scouting organization open to young women and the lgbtq community. The next step is being inclusive of nonreligious agnostic and atheist youth and leaders. As...
There are definitely some people that have gotten really fucked up ideas about sex from unexamined consumption of porn. Not that that means it shouldn’t be available, but it’s not like totally devoid of impact.
Honestly a little acid would probably do better things for your brain than excessive porn.
They’re going to be real upset when animal rights activists take advantage of this and sabotage every factory farm in Idaho and they can only hit them with property destruction charges.
Officials said the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) may be cyberstalking, physically intimidating and harassing Chinese citizens, naturalized U.S. citizens and families of dissidents who speak out against the party.
I mean, it’s not an investigative piece. It’s literally just ‘hey, the FBI made an announcement’. Presumably because most people aren’t checking on FBI announcements, and it’s probably something people should know about. Relaying the announcement as a public service doesn’t preclude also being able to do investigative journalism.
This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this, not even on beehaw. Seems like it’s worth it to provide an FBI warning to people who might be vulnerable; both so they can be aware and so they can know who to reach out to if they have an issue.
So what would you say is the appropriate course of action? For the FBI to out the identities and statements of people who report Chinese state harassment in the US? To keep the information entirely a secret otherwise?
Like, the FBI warning people that there’s a danger without totally tipping their hand seems like a reasonable move to make if they have such evidence. They don’t need to present it in order to do that.
Likewise, while it would certainly make a better story and a better read if it provided some additional background information, that’s not what this piece is. It’s literally just reporting the announcement.
Honestly, I’m not sure where your opposition to it is outside of simply reacting to criticism of the Chinese government. Which, honestly, is a little shady.
It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess....
This is a really bad take. If you think their business model doesn’t support its workers, don’t engage with the company. To choose to do so anyway in a country where tipping is the standard and choose not to tip, you are exploiting workers. The employer may be exploiting them as well, but taking part in that system and deciding to skip out on the part that makes the job a living wage is actively malicious.
I drive a taxi. If people don’t tip, I shrug it off, but they’re basically asking me to subsidize their ride. I do not make enough to live without tips. I’m not going to charge myself extra by getting upset about it, but it does impact me financially. And often people who don’t tip are folks who are much better off monetarily than I am.
Yeah, I feel like the offense at the mere idea of a tip comes from the same place as people who get upset when they misgender me and I gently correct them. Or like, people who will call for a cab ride and then literally apologize the whole way because they somehow feel like me driving (which I like to do) is putting me out.
If people didn’t put so much emphasis on having to be perfect all the time, they’d probably be a lot less horrible when they don’t meet their own standards.
So think about it this way. If you were at a restaurant without table service (like a pizza place or deli) that had a tip jar on the counter, you probably wouldn’t get upset. You’d either tip or not tip and leave it at that, but unless you’re a very specific kind of classist you probably don’t mind the general concept of a tip jar quietly existing.
Square literally is just leaving the option of a tip jar. If they don’t prompt you to leave a tip, you can’t leave a tip if you want to. Either there’s a tip jar or there isn’t. If somebody decides to give a little extra help to the people they’re asking to help them, it gives them that option. It’s nice to have even if it doesn’t get used all the time, because someone who’s feeling generous can tip extra, which is great.
You should not feel like the existence of a Square POS immediately means you’re being pressured or obligated to tip. If you’re in a situation where you’d traditionally be expected to tip, like sitting in a restaurant or getting a ride in a taxi, then yes, obviously the social obligation remains. But if it’s not one of those situations? Simply being given the opportunity to do so doesn’t mean you have to. No more than you have to donate to St Jude.
You couldn’t get me to drive a cab in Vegas for a $20 tip with every ride.
I’ve definitely run into Europeans that are totally clueless about tipping and it sucks. I can absolutely see adding a gratuity during an event with a disproportionate number of Europeans attending.
If you don’t like it, you’re free to not take a cab.
I mean, shouldn’t that say something to you, then?
Like, if it bothers you that they can see what you’re tipping, maybe you’re not fulfilling an expectation that you know you should?
Like, what do you owe to the people who spend their days enabling your comfort and convenience? What do we owe to each other in general?
I feel like you know in your heart that we owe something to others, and that when you’re afraid of owning your actions it may be an indicator that you know you’re not living up to that.
Personally, as a tipped worker who herself tips generously, I’m proud to give the tips that I do and glad to see the response to them. It’s worth more than the little bit extra beyond what would be a mediocre tip, even if I’m pretty broke myself. Keep it going around, you know?
I feel like the world would be a lot better if we stopped worrying so much about our own defensive tendencies and started worrying more about making the kind of world we could have with a little more empathy. Selfishness literally will make you miserable no matter how much you have, because it doesn’t feel good to nitpick about what you ‘deserve’. It feels better to help.
If you think that workers aren’t being paid an equitable wage and you continue to spend money on something that isn’t essential, you’re complicit. The employer may be putting the idea of underpaying their workers on the table, but you’re the one allowing him to continue to operate. He doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
The entitlement here comes both from the greedy employer and from the greedy consumer. Greed is wrong regardless of what side of the counter you stand on. No ethical consumption under capitalism, sure, but that doesn’t mean you have to participate in stiffing someone.
I mean, I can tell you from experience as a cab driver that the customers with shitty attitudes will pass their baggage on to the driver in whatever form it takes. It may be complaining about the fare, it may be failing to tip, it may be trying to weasel their way out of paying some of the fare, or it may be doing their best to make up the difference in emotional labor.
There are some people who won’t tip me or will tip me poorly, but will also spend the entire ride making me assuage their guilt about not tipping enough. People with that particular outlook will try to recruit me to feel bad for them when they’re putting me out in some way, and will even try to recruit me to feel bad for them about them doing things that literally don’t bother me at all. Like literally just driving around or making a stop.
The folks who don’t tip aren’t going to magically become more cooperative and less dickish if the price is included. Some of them won’t take a cab, some of them will take a cab and threaten to take an uber, literally anything to reclaim the power they lose from shorting me.
I’d love it if I got a bigger percentage of my fares or a bigger guaranteed minimum, but the reality is that our market can’t really support yet another price increase at the moment. You might say ‘well that means your business model isn’t profitable and shouldn’t exist’, but we’re literally a vital service in the area. We have deals with hospitals and senior centers and stuff. If we didn’t exist, people would be regularly stranded. In some cases us being able to go help someone is literally the reason their lives don’t fall apart. My boss has driven four states away to bring a regular home in the middle of a blizzard. Our existence is justified by more than profit.
People need cabs, they’re literally essential. But not everyone wants to pay the cost of them. Tipping means I can still give a ride to people who can’t or won’t tip, while also getting a more reasonable wage from people who do. There are some folks whose regular tips literally keep me afloat.
Hell, when I was younger I waited tables at a local diner for four hours on sundays and I’d walk out of there with $200 in tips easy every time. There’s no way that would have been a decent job without tipping.
Tipping for everything is kind of stupid, but tipping culture in general can work really well if people actually participate. Especially in places that need services that they can’t always fully support.
I think people do have a responsibility for the systems they’re complicit in, but I also think that we actually owe one another something as human beings, and most people seem not to.
I’m not being shown the same degree of courtesy that I worked hard to show others, and that bothers me.
I don’t think this is ever a measure that we can really use constructively. If you do the right thing in some category of behavior, you’re going to find that often people don’t do the right thing.
Think about it like driving. A competent driver is going to notice how terrible a lot of people on the road are at driving safely. People do some wild shit. The question, though, is what are you going to do with that? Are you going to use it to make yourself frustrated and potentially make your own driving worse as your focus shifts to it? Or are you going to be someone on the road who’s paying attention, reacting to their environment, and not letting their sense of entitlement to a clear road get in the way?
We can’t be good at everything and we can’t make everything our focus; as humans we prioritize what we think is important. If something isn’t on our radar, we probably aren’t thinking about it at all.
So, like, the effort you put in to make sure that customers don’t feel pressured is based on your morals and ethics, your outlook, and your feeling of what people want and should be able to expect. That’s you living your values, but those aren’t everyone’s values. People won’t even know that you’re internalizing that value unless you tell them.
If you look at your values as some sort of transaction, where you do others the ‘courtesy’ of following your values in regard to your interactions with them, you’re going to continuously be disappointed when they fail to have the same values as you in return.
The reality, though, is that you’re doing your values for yourself, because you believe in them. You feel they ought to be done, so you do them. But they’re not my values. It’s not a favor to me for you to do your values, it’s a favor to you. You can’t expect that just by you doing them I’ll suddenly possess them. I value different things because my experiences have very likely been very different.
We can talk about how they differ, but I feel like if you set out a path for yourself where you end up resentful of a world that doesn’t share your values, which is just statisically incredibly likely to be the world you live in a vast majority of the time that you interact with other humans, it’s probably going to be kind of frustrating.
Obviously the stakes matter here. Like, if by values we’re talking about not killing one another, that’s pretty dire. But if it’s like what the best way to be a service worker is? Ehh, probably less so.
Honestly, framing it this way works pretty well when people don’t tip, too. To my values, if people ask for a ride and don’t tip they’re essentially asking me to pay for part of their ride. But that’s not how everyone feels. I’m not going to charge myself extra in the form of cortisol for the trouble if I can help it.
That doesn’t really line up with reality though. We’re living in a world where the gap between the rich and the poor is expanding and wealth is being consolidated. Minimum wage fails to be enough to support a person, but most service-oriented companies seem to manage to get away with paying it pretty readily.
Workers can try to unionize, but that’s an uphill battle and it doesn’t immediately guarantee a living wage for their labor. In the case of a lot of service jobs, it may make a lot more sense individually to just get out of the industry rather than try to improve it.
Like, I’ve worked in places that would benefit from a stronger bargaining position for workers, but that doesn’t mean unionizing is going to be achievable in all of those contexts.
And for some jobs, tipping is literally what makes them sustainable. Outside of a metro area, tipping may well be the reason you even have a taxi company or any restaurants at all. I don’t know about you, but I like living in a world where we get the stuff that we need. To me, that means that I should participate in those systems in good faith when I use them rather than subverting them and making the margins thinner for the most vulnerable people involved.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has described the situation as a crisis and has begun to warn that shelters are so full that migrants will soon be forced onto the street as winter approaches. “I cannot say this enough. You know, we are out of the room,” he told reporters this week. “And it’s not ‘if’ people will be...
I don’t know if you’ve ever been homeless in New England in the winter, but I definitely have and if you’re not from the area you’re straight up not ready for how cold it’s going to get.
If I was homeless in New York I’d take a ticket in a heart beat.
I think the point in this case is not freezing to death. We’re always going to have homelessness as long as our society is an evil capitalist dystopia. I’m not sure that NYC is equipped to tackle that particular problem on their own.
Right, but at that point how can you still claim support?
Israeli apartheid isn’t some hypothetical or imaginary situation, it’s what’s actually happening. Obviously the forces that uphold that apartheid are going to make a stink if anyone they think might be listened to blames the Israeli government for its result. Israel isn’t able to keep up this behavior because it’s weak, but because it’s powerful.
Bowing and scraping to the corporate elite who vaguely threaten their futures when they’re prompted to put their money where their mouths are shows the reality of their politics. Yes, apartheid might be bad, but it’s not worth pointing out if it means the loss of a hypothetical job that doesn’t exist yet at a pro-apartheid company. That’s their level of support. Nil.
Everybody’s all enthusiastic when speaking up doesn’t cost anything. Tell me what they’re doing when the chips are down.
When Israel continues to uphold and even ramp up the kind of policies they have been, they’re going to bring the most violent extremes in the population they’re oppressing to the forefront. The Israeli government may not perpetrating the violence of Hamas with their own hands, but they are every bit as much a part of its coming about as those carrying out these acts. And their retaliation is every bit as gruesome and inhumane, as is the constant ongoing violence perpetrated against Palestinians.
At any rate, those who excuse genocide while falling all over themselves trying to please their corporate masters show their political priorities pretty plainly.
One problem may be the extreme restriction of autonomy that sometimes accompanies public housing. You see this tendency to treat adults receiving any sort of aid as if they were children.
It also tends to be the case with VA housing. The way they treat veterans living in VA condos is absurd. It’s on par with what you’d expect to see in like a halfway home, except these folks usually haven’t done anything illegal. They signed their lives away, came home with PTSD, and get treated like trash by the VA for their troubles.
The strings that go with public housing often make the idea of looking for another way to get a leg up more appealing.
NYC’s AI chatbot created to help small business owners was caught telling them to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down. ( apnews.com )
An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by New York City to help small business owners is under criticism for dispensing bizarre advice that misstates local policies and advises companies to violate the law....
Alex Jones faces day of reckoning over what he owes Sandy Hook families ( www.npr.org )
It’s a day of reckoning today for Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and a long-awaited culmination for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones for defamation. A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas is expected to force Jones to liquidate his personal assets, including ownership of his media company, Free Speech Systems, in...
In sweeping change, Biden administration to ban medical debt from credit reports | ABC News ( abcnews.go.com )
Tragic Attack in Haiti: U.S. Missionary Couple and Haitian Colleague Killed by Gangs ( thenarinder.in )
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Boy Scouts of America changing name to more inclusive Scouting America after years of woes ( apnews.com )
Another positive step in the right direction for an organization rife with brokenness. There's a lot I don't like about the organization, but this is something a love--a scouting organization open to young women and the lgbtq community. The next step is being inclusive of nonreligious agnostic and atheist youth and leaders. As...
An earthquake just rocked NYC, New Jersey, and the surrounding areas ( www.theverge.com )
Sean 'Diddy' Combs faces sweeping sex-trafficking inquiry: What the feds have, need to prove ( www.latimes.com )
The town that can’t live without migrants, but isn't sure it wants to live with them ( www.nbcnews.com )
Pornhub Pulls Out of Texas ( www.404media.co )
Archive link: archive.ph/Tol6G...
Biden Is Bankrolling Israel’s War Amid Growing Financial Hardship at Home ( theintercept.com )
Frozen embryos are ‘children,’ Alabama Supreme Court rules in couples’ wrongful death suits ( www.al.com )
This Idaho plan to get rid of domestic terrorism doesn’t involve fighting it ( www.msnbc.com )
FBI issues warning of China’s government possibly targeting US citizens who question Chinese Communist Party in Texas ( www.click2houston.com )
Officials said the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) may be cyberstalking, physically intimidating and harassing Chinese citizens, naturalized U.S. citizens and families of dissidents who speak out against the party.
Senate aide out of job after purported sex tape apparently filmed in Senate hearing room | CNN Politics ( www.cnn.com )
Federal Regulators Seek to Force Starbucks to Reopen 23 Stores ( www.nytimes.com )
There’s contrasting reporting on this:...
A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he’s no longer a U.S. citizen. ( archive.is )
The Northern Virginia doctor was born in D.C. and given a U.S. birth certificate. At 61, he learned his citizenship was granted by mistake.
Minnesotans aren’t happy about the six finalists for the new state flag ( minnesotareformer.com )
Report showing graphic aftermath of mass shootings raises questions about avoiding images ( www.pbs.org )
Americans are confused, frustrated by new tipping culture, study finds ( www.washingtonpost.com )
It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess....
New York City sets up office to give migrants one-way tickets out of town, to anywhere in the world ( english.elpais.com )
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has described the situation as a crisis and has begun to warn that shelters are so full that migrants will soon be forced onto the street as winter approaches. “I cannot say this enough. You know, we are out of the room,” he told reporters this week. “And it’s not ‘if’ people will be...
Harvard students scramble to take back support for letter attacking Israel as some CEOs look to blacklist them ( nypost.com )
In Rare Alliance, Democrats and Republicans Seek Legal Power to Clear Homeless Camps ( web.archive.org )
My reading spot for the weekend ( beehaw.org )