Notices by Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop), page 3

Hung out with my niece and nephew today. I don't know how anyone can spend time around kids and still think humans are inherently cruel or selfish. My nephew spent the morning telling us about the tree house in his imagination. My niece spent the morning throwing herself at the ground trying to miss.

Sci-Hub is so effective that it's been ages since I last emailed an academic for a copy of their paper. But while it's a much longer turn around (and a bit more hassle for the author) it is nice to be able to thank them for their work and let them know it's being read - by non-academics, even.

@ntnsndr @skyfaller @Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist I also have a deep resentment of anything like technosolutionism. Over and over I've seen the people who push for tools or quantification to solve a problem be rewarded by capitalism with investment, grant funding, prestige. Over better efforts.

I was a developer advocate once. I barely wrote code - I was mostly using interpersonal/project management skills. Guess what got me the high salary, though? Which skills were listed as requirements?

@ntnsndr @skyfaller @Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist You wrote:* "I really dislike having to be a defender of blockchains, which I have actively criticized since before most people knew about them. But I don't understand the urge to write them off entirely."*

People argue their differences rather than their similarities. I actually have a fondness for DAOs, In an already-socialist world they'd be a fun way to experiment. But under capitalism, they enforce the status quo more than challenge it.

@ntnsndr congrats!

@ntnsndr @Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist Hmmm, that's an interesting point. How is power quantifiable, though? And I'm not sure the elements of money that are quantifiable are the elements that are important.

@Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist @ntnsndr @Stacco @alannairving @mattcropp

Strongly agree with Alanna Irving's take (unsurprisingly - she's consistently one of the most thoughtful people about online collaboration). Sharing here for emphasis:

"They are excited by the parts of the problem that are quantifiable or cryptofiable and forget that the important or hard parts of the problem (building trust, connecting your vision with the outside world) aren't quantifiable at all."

I'm looking for recommendations for books set in the tech industry. I'm interested in any genre (except, like, kids books, but why would you have middle grade fiction or a picture book set in the tech industry) and am open to wide definitions of tech. Like, a book about an uber driver counts, a book about a Silicon Valley venture capitalist counts, a book about a programmer at a mid-sized firm in Ohio counts.

Thank you in advance!

@bookstodon

@thisismissem Did Sanders open source any of his campaign software?

One common problem is that stuff will get 'open sourced' aka thrown up on github but not maintained going forward. The cyclical nature of campaigns means there's no one to do the work for long periods (1, 2, even 4 years between campaigns) and prog tech is generally under-resourced. Plus a lot of the big players in the space are proprietary (or even private equity funded, sob)

I appreciate that my most viral post on mastodon is a long-winded summary thread of a social science/public policy book. Bless you nerds.

I'm struggling to articulate how horrifying I find that previous section. It is some of the most reckless, arrogant, patronizing, and incompetent systems design I have ever heard of.

To think you could *possibly* design software that would always work. To think that pilots didn't even need to know about it. And yet to somehow think that a pilot that *didn't even know the software existed* could somehow compensate in the "unlikely" case that something went wrong?

You might ask: how could such a choice be allowed? Don't we have government regulators to oversee this sort of thing?

Two words: regulatory capture. The head of the FAA at the time was a former Boeing lobbyist. With the encouragement of George W Bush, who was trying to "deregulate" the airline industry, he worked to make the FAA more corporate-friendly. The decision to remove MCAS from the pilot manuals was supported by the FAA.

Corporations like Boeing make these decisions because they are legally incentivized to.

One way of holding them accountable for these decisions is through torts. Torts are a civil procedure whereby people who do harm negligently or intentionally can be held liable for damages even if they haven't broken a law or a contract.

It's a vital part of preventing wrongdoing in a changing world where many kinds of harms can't be identified and legislated ahead of time.

As you might expect, corporations don't like torts.

"Tort reform" has been a Republican calling card for decades. What tort reform actually means is restricting your right to go to court, especially against corporations.

For example, "tort reform" in Michigan has prevented people there from suing Merck for selling a pill that caused strokes or suing Purdue/the Sacklers for pushing opioids.

The conservative legislation-peddling outfit ALEC has been pushing these kinds of laws for years.

In chapter two (yes, that was only the first chapter, guys 😂) Singer brings us back to the late 1800s and the plague of railway coupling "accidents".

This topic is of particular interest to me, because my great-great-great-grandfather died trying to couple two train cars together. At the time he died, "automatic couplers" existed that would have done his job safely for him, but the railroads didn't want to cut into profit margins.

I wrote more about this story here: https://www.rethinkingpower.info/noble-fruits-motivated-reasoning/

Eventually congress intervened and forced the railroads to use automatic couplers. In the early 1990s, government intervened again, passing worker's compensation laws.

Previously, injured workers or bereaved relatives had to sue to receive compensation, and seldom won. New laws said that injured workers would *automatically* receive compensation from the companies that injured them.

Companies suddenly had an incentive to prevent injuries and deaths, and workplace accidents plummeted.

We see this pattern again and again: people dying in preventable "accidents" until companies are actually forced to protect people.

Hugh DeHaven, inventor of the three-point seat belt, in 1953 invited automakers to a conference to learn about safety technologies like the collapsible steering wheel. Most were not adopted until the late 1960s when Ralph Nader and the consumer safety movement started campaigning for them.

Hundreds of thousands died because it was cheaper for the auto industry.

Chapter 3 of Singer's book focuses on scale: "accidents" with low probability and big impact, like nuclear meltdowns and oil spills. I have fewer notes on this chapter, and they're mostly just "ugh!!!!!"

Like, fun fact: David Rainey, VP of BP, lied to congress about how bad the Deepwater Horizon spill was. He was acquitted of obstructing congress: https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/congressional-gamesmanship-leads-to-an-acquittal-in-deepwater-horizon-case-united-states-v-david-rainey-a-case-study.html (ugh!!!!)

Also: more than half of the fish species endemic to the Gulf of Mexico could be found after the spill (ugh!!!!)

(Pausing for the night; will come back and finish up the thread soon. Blogging one's notes takes more time than I predicted!)

Ok we're back. Time for Chapter 4, titled "Risk" but which I might title "Time to get mad about traffic engineering!"

Perhaps you already know that the crash test dummies used in test collisions are modeled after men. The "female" dummies are not modeled after women, they're just male dummies but smaller. *Too* small: at 4'11" & 108 lbs they represent only 5% of women.

The result? Women are "73% more likely to be injured and up to 28% more likely to be killed in a front-facing car accident".