Link – Page 40 – Chris Aldrich

Read Opinion | California, Reject Prop 22 (nytimes.com)

Gig workers deserve the dignity of fair compensation.

Are gig workers employees or freelance contractors? It’s been a question for companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash for nearly as long as “gig work” itself — or at least the Silicon Valley version — has existed. California voters next month may finally help settle the matter.

This is another great example of companies attempting to privatize profits and socialize the losses, or in this case pass along the losses and lost productivity to their employees (or as described here their independent contractors).

Why can’t they do some of the hard “technology” work and solve the problem of helping their workers become dramatically more productive?

Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:58PM ❧

The backlash from gig economy companies was immediate, and Uber and similar app-based businesses have committed nearly $200 million to support a state ballot measure — making it the costliest in state history — that would exempt them from the law. ❧

This is a pretty good indicator that it will save them 10x to 100x this amount to get rid of this law.

One should ask: “Why don’t they accept it and just pass this money along to their employees.”

Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:50PM

Bookmarked Getting Started With Webmention and NextJS by

Monica Powell (aboutmonica.com)

This past week I had the pleasure of being on the Learn with Jason Show to show how to add Webmention functionality to a NextJS website. Webmentions let you pull tweets, other blogs, and other activity from around the web into your site? It was fun live pair programming the implementation of webmentions. Check out the video or read some of the highlights below!

Thanks for writing this up and bundling it with the video Monica! I can’t wait to see how you puzzle out sending Webmentions automatically as well.

Monica notes that they had issues with an .app TLD, which sounds a bit like Max’s previous issue with the .dev TLD. Any chance this is the case Ryan?

Read How to Cover a Sick Old Man (nytimes.com)

The president is hospitalized and reporters are fighting for basic facts. What should elderly leaders — many of America’s top politicians are over 80 — reveal about their health?

We definitely need to cover these things more closely and not be so precious about them. Once a leader is unable to function on a solid basis, it’s time for them to get off the stage and let others take their place.

Read Opinion | A Brief Guide to 21st-Century Blackface (nytimes.com)

Twenty years ago, Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” skewered America’s love of minstrelsy. Has Hollywood learned anything about blackface since?

There’s apparently been a lot more blackface in the past several decades than I was aware of. I’d love to read some of the more academic treatises on the topic from a media studies perspective.

Liked Unsubscribing from YouTube's recommender by

Marty McGuire (martymcgui.re)

First, some backstory. But feel free to skip to the good stuff! With topics ranging from media and social critiques, to making and tech topics that I care about, to death itself, regular content from creators that post on YouTube have been a part of my daily life for the last several years. This is...

Impressive how many hoops one has to jump through to get this type of simple functionality. This is the absolute definition of a silo.

Read A White Male Professor Reportedly Faked Being a Woman of Color, This Time to Troll Scientists on Twitter (Jezebel)

Somehow, beyond all reason and understanding, another person has been caught pretending to be a woman of color. At least this time around, the story has an extra fucked-up layer. Anonymous internet sleuths uncovered Professor Craig Chapman, who teaches chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, posing as a woman of color on Twitter under the name The Science Femme. According to The New Hampshire, Chapman was brought down by his own hubris when he tweeted about his brother’s brewery from both his fake account and his real account. The Science Femme and Chapman’s personal account have both been deleted, but unluckily for him, screenshots exist.

A good reminder that I really should unsubscribe to “people” I don’t know personally or have an exceptionally high expectation of who they really are and what content I’m actually consuming.

Ingredients