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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • 100% accuracy is troublesome. Literally statistics 101 stuff, they tell you in no uncertain terms, never, never trust 100% accuracy.

    You can be certain to some value of p. That number is never 0. .001 is suspicious as fuck, but doable. .05 is great if you have a decent sample size.

    They had fewer than 1000 participants.

    I just don’t trust it. Neither should they. Neither should you. Not at least until someone else recreates the experiments and also finds this AI to be 100% accurate.






  • And then the problem will correct itself.

    It’s economics, but with people as the commodity being valued.

    Amazon currently has a wide labor pool to pull from, and so the value of any individual person is very low. As they saturate the market with people who are bitter and angry about working for Amazon, the pool will shrink, in this case, faster than the rate they lose people. There is a critical point where the growth of the “will never work for Amazon” pool of people will grow exponentially, and as they struggle to hire replacements, workplace conditions will improve. They will not improve before that moment, however.

    Because Amazon doesn’t see people as people. They see people as a resource to extract value from.

    This isn’t a problem unique to Amazon, everyone reading this can probably name at least one company they’ve worked for that did something similar, but Amazon is an outlier for how aggressively they’ve embraced that idea.

    This is a problem endemic to capitalism, as Amazon succeeds, more companies will be forced to adopt those practices on order to compete. Reducing the options people have to avoid Amazon like conditions, and lowering the bar for acceptable workplace culture.

    The only defense we have against this is to unionize. Aggressively. The current push should look like nothing more than a warning shot.

    If you can organize your workplace and get 75% of the employees in the union, you can write your own check. At a word, 75% of the workforce walking out absolutely cripples any employer. They know that, they don’t want the union because they don’t want you to have any power in the relationship. It’s your life, and they want the keys to it. Take the keys back.





  • I dunno man, the 5 minutes a week at a gas station doesn’t really seem like that much of an inconvenience. Especially if you live in a state that taxes EVs more than gas cars, my home state taxes EVs so heavily that it’s more expensive, even with fuel costs considered.

    Winter and summer conditions are also an issue where I live, temps from very cold to very hot, sometimes within the same week, and the fact that most of the people who live around me who can afford an EV, are in fact taking routine road trips. Often to go camping where EV support is pretty minimal. Meaning at minimum, 1 car cannot be an EV.

    Like, I get it. I’ve been trying to convince my wife to let me buy a sprinter van EV. Because you can’t get a decent pick up truck EV for a reasonable price. And even if you could you’re locked in to one of those giant 4 door monstrosities with a minimum sized bed.

    We’re not even going to talk about the horrifying lack of an affordable station wagon EV, at least in the US (Peugeot’s got one coming in Europe at least), honestly that’s the biggest crime here.


  • Some of the criticism is perfectly valid, frankly. I’m hyped for EVs but there’s a lot of work to be done before they’re really competitive. Glossing over glaring issues isn’t doing anyone any favors.

    Aging wheels did a great video on the charging station problem. He drove a Polaris and a Tesla on the same route and demonstrated really well how unreliable charging stations are, unless you have a Tesla. This guy loves electric cars and has been reluctant to actually recommend any.

    That problem is going to be addressed as American manufacturers adopt Tesla as a standard, but that won’t happen for two model years at least.

    And in the long run, they won’t address climate change in any meaningful way either. We’ve just exchanged one resource disaster for another, and there’s far less rare earth minerals than there is oil. And we’ll still need oil. The only way we’re doing that is by massively overhauling every city and going away from any individualized transportation larger than a bike.