#algorithmic management
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If Amazon Wants to Be the ‘Earth’s Best Employer’ it Needs to Listen to Employees
Harvey, G. (2022, May 5). If Amazon wants to be the ‘Earth’s best employer’ it needs to listen to employees. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/if-amazon-wants-to-be-the-earths-best-employer-it-needs-to-listen-to-employees-182016
Geraint Harvey writes: “In his farewell letter to shareholders last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new mission for his company: ‘Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.’ The company has since added these goals to its list of corporate values. ...But the company still has a lot of work to do. Amazon has been dogged by negative reports about working for the organization, including gender and racial bias toward workers and ‘abusive mistreatment’ by managers, an intensive pace of work leading to high incidence of worker injury and workers being underpaid.”
“So far, Amazon has vehemently opposed trade union recognition, engaging in union suppression practices, like resisting trade union recognition through coercion. For example, Amazon has been holding mandatory meetings with workers and distributing written information in a bid to influence union votes and situating mailboxes for ballots in parking lots that are near security cameras. ...At the same time, Amazon employs union substitution practices to reduce the perceived need for a union among workers, such as raising wages in response to the campaigns for union recognition.”
“Employee retention aside, trade unions play an important role in identifying operational problems and forcing management to resolve them, rather than to seek cost effective and ultimately counterproductive ‘fixes.’ In this way, trade unions impose beneficial constraints on firms through which they constrain managerial activity. For instance, unions force management to invest, rather than reduce costs, for the long term benefit of the company and its workers. If Amazon provides its employees with a meaningful involvement in the organization and a voice at work, there are implications for the nature of work elsewhere.”
Additional Information
Update on our vision to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. (2021, June 1). Amazon. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/update-on-our-vision-to-be-earths-best-employer-and-earths-safest-place-to-work
Freeman, R. B., & Medoff, J. L. (1979). The Two Faces of Unionism. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w0364
Soper, S. (2021, June 28). Fired by bot at Amazon: ‘It’s you against the machine’. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-bot-amazon-turns-to-machine-managers-and-workers-are-losing-out
Doucouliagos, C. (2019, May 8). Unions do hurt profits, but not productivity, and they remain a bulwark against a widening wealth gap. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/unions-do-hurt-profits-but-not-productivity-and-they-remain-a-bulwark-against-a-widening-wealth-gap-107139
Kim, E., Stewart, A., & Long, K. (2022, May 3). Insiders reveal what it’s really like working at Amazon when it comes to hiring, firing, performance reviews and more. The Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/work-at-amazon-jobs-performance-reviews-hiring-firing-interviews-warehouses-delivery-drivers
Photo source: Bumsted, R. (2022). [Photograph]. Associated Press. https://theconversation.com/if-amazon-wants-to-be-the-earths-best-employer-it-needs-to-listen-to-employees-182016
#Amazon#low wages#unionization#gender bias#racial bias#trade unions#union vote#employee voice#union suppression#union substitution practices#collective voice#algorithmic management#mimetic isomorphism
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Merfolk Fobo for @tastytoastz's Fitpac Mer AU fic 'Life is like the ocean, it goes up and down'. Click for better quality!
Design notes below the cut.
Master post of all designs for this fic
HOLY SHIT OK. So i know I did this to myself but Fobo was ROUGH to draw. Everyone gave me some trouble.
Foolish:
- Great White Shark but gold
- Foolish is always hard for me to draw cause everyone draws him differently. I decided to base him more off of the more human designs/ cc!Foolish for this to break up the yellow from the tail.
- I didn't want to make him straight up metallic, so I gave him a goldish color
Tubbo:
- Swordfish
- Did you know that swordfish and marlins look very similar? Well they do, so i had to make sure that I was giving him a swordfish tail and not a marlin tail. (I redrew it so much)
- I gave him a different shaped sail cause one big difference between swordfish and marlins are their dorsal fin. The tails are pretty similar, but the dorsal fin is different. (pic for ref further down)
- The scars are from when he got caught in the ship rudder causing him to end up at Chume Labs
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Marlin dorsal fin V Swordfish dorsal fin V
Sunny:
- Fantail goldfish (I got more specific than just 'goldfish' cause i wanted to >:) )
- Flowy ruffled shirt with a cut out in the back for her sail.
- This Sunny looks a lot different from my normal Sunny, but I like them a lot.
- by far the easiest of Fobo
Leo:
- Purple Lionfish
- Sail is like the spines of a lionfish but with webbing between the spines
- Ears inspired by lionfish pectoral fin
- The fin gave me so much grief... I wanted to have it face forward and not sideways, but I could not for the life of me get it to face forward and look good, so I gave up.
- Red t-shirt with white collar. I didn't draw it here, but I imagine it also has a little white hood that has the Walter dog on it, but it might get in the way of her sail, so unsure. Also has a hole cut in the back for her sail like Sunny's
Also close ups of Sunny and Leo cause they're small in the group shot:
#qsmp#qsmp fanart#qsmp au#qsmp foolish#qsmp tubbo#qsmp sunny#qsmp leonarda#LCDoodles#I spent like an hour and a half making sure I was giving Tubbo a swordfish tail#I eventually went to swordfish taxidermy and that was pretty helpful#I managed to find pictures of what actual propeller scars look like#Unfortunately manatees seem to get caught sometimes so i found a (non gruesome (looks like it had healed a bit actually)) of that#Leo was fun but that tail fin annoyed the hell out of me#I love how it turned out though#she looks so cool#my algorithm must be so confused#I'll probably do the humans next#cause im all caught up on the Mers we've seen#I have an idea for most of them#Richas specifically so im excited >:D
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The Vex Labyrinth: immense hostile computational network of impossible power and memory spanning unfathomable permutations of simulated and parallel universes from before the dawn of time
Asher Mir:
#Destiny 2#post-Lightfall spoilers#not huge spoilers though#my second-favorite grouch#defeating a genocidal algorithm through sheer obstinance#through pure tenured-prof energy#the raw power of ‘don’t you know who I AM!?’#we will win not through violence but through demanding to speak to the manager#love this ornery bastard#miss my first-favorite grouch though :(#love you always Red#this is the wager of existence
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Ignore this it’s just a tag rant
#*screams because I have the coolest story I want to tell for my channel but it’ll never got more than 200 views*#(which feels like it’s because I’m a girl and female VA channels don’t have as big of an audience)#(like the ONLY way I manage to break 300+ views are algorithm feeding videos)#(which are kinda boring)#like as much as I love werewolves I’d Really like to do my cosmic suspense#I’m sorry Escaped but your advice of ‘just make what you want and an audience will find you’ is So Wrong#(again. could just be because I’m a girl)#I have been doing this for Two Years and without feeding the algorithm I’d probably have less than 300 subscribers#if I only made stories that I wanted to make my channel never would have grown at all#I want my Welcome to the Forest series to be a staple of the channel#but the fact of the matter remains that barely anyone watched the first one#it’s a little too ‘unique’ maybe#I want to collab with a bigger name VA as an influential side character#but what’s the point when no one will watch it?
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conversations with gcc
gcc: hey bud, you did a forgor
me: oh thank <3
gcc: uh...is this what you meant ?
me: shit no sorry !/oh absolutely xD
me: i wanna do a thing
gcc: but..why ??
me, insistent: i wanna. do the. thing :)
gcc: knock yourself out ig ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
gcc: please, the memory. can you- please be- look just watch ou-
me, dangling pointers out the window, casting unsafely, shoving raw values into char arrays: heheheee hoohohoooo spaghetti code for me and you ! >:3c
#daemon.md#this abomination was my way of saying 'if you can't do x in c well yes you can'#i am very tired#and just hallucinated a tiny algorithm optimisation for like an hour until it worked#okay technically a memory management optimisation#but it does remove an unneeded malloc() and leaves room for an actual speed improvement
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You can stop capitalism and the attention economy from sucking the joy out of art for you right now*
*at the small price of, perhaps, your hopes and dreams.
Commodification and competition only suck the joy out of art when you buy into them. If you want to make art for fun and not worry about attention economies and algorithms then literally just stop worrying about them, and accept the consequences of that.
What are the consequences? There are artists who have successfully risen to a living wage off posting their art online, and in the shadow of these prominent but rare figures it is difficult not to dream of having even a sliver of their luck. And this is to say nothing about the social and emotional fulfillment of sharing art with others, but I'll be focusing on the economics here.
It's luck. Commercially successful artists who seem to have "gamed the algorithm" are prone to survivorship bias--it's impossible to know how many artists have tried the same tactics only to get nowhere. And most will attest that every step of these attention-economy-appeasing rituals is demoralizing and exhausting. Many--even those who succeed--give up or take a step back.
But if these rituals are so awful, why perform them? To potentially increase the meager chances of economic success as an internet artist? To see your engagement numbers go up?
I don't want to tell people to give up on this dream because I believe it is impossible. Instead, it is possible, which is the trap. And when the entire economy and job market are so dire, it's difficult not to dream of that lottery ticket.
I do believe we can live in a world where we can survive and make the art that brings us joy--Through significant effort and numerous systemic changes at every level of culture and society. And in the meantime, there is a huge grey area of economic sustainability--if you make even a little money off your art, that's more in your pocket.
But hobbyist artists have been making and continue to make art out of joy and curiosity regardless of how popular or commercially viable it is, it's just harder to find them on common online platforms. They're in your neighborhood, at work, in your family and probably among your friends, sitting at the library leafing through a "How to Draw" book or signing up for an adult beginner's class, if they have the money. And when we promote the idea that art is fun for everyone, we make more space for people to enjoy it.
We have a finite amount of time and energy every day. Our capitalist economy saps us of both such that we have very little left to devote to our passions. But we fail to realize how much more we lose investing in an arbitrary and fickle economy that is, in fact, entirely optional. If you work a day job with clearly defined hours, you may spend several hours miserably--and that is a problem that needs addressing--but your day ends. Meanwhile, the work of a professional internet artist is never done--You are always on the clock.
I feel heartbroken when I see artists lamenting how joyless, soul-sucking, and uninspiring art has become for them in the midst of our current circumstances. I think they are correct in identifying that the attention economy saps them of this joy--But they are not seeing the forest for the trees.
It is the difference between the expectation of success and the reality of disappointment, rather than the disappointment itself, that leads to such a depressing state of affairs. Let go of the idea that sufficient effort scales with reward in a system as arbitrary as ours. Save your energy. The best way to win is not to play.
Art is as beautiful and life-affirming as it ever was. Realize what it has to offer you, and realize what you need from elsewhere. We still need food and a roof over our heads. We still need friends and community. If we want art to occupy a joyful space in our lives, we need to rely on other parts of ourselves to get through the sometimes boring, tedious, and depressing work of living our daily lives.
Our capitalist system and its associated attention economy deserve every criticism they can get, but if we fail to question their fundamental assumptions, we will never truly move past them. We have the autonomy to untangle capital from our artistic lives, if not completely, at least to a more manageable state.
So, believe that art can be fun again. The things you want to see in the world are waiting for you to make them.
#indexed post#long post#Sorry I just get really upset when people talk about how art has been ruined for them by the internet or whatever#You can fix this. And then you get to discover all of the other things fucking up your relationship to art. And the adventure continues.#And hopefully I don't make it sound too easy. I think it's hard. But it's manageably hard#And at least then you're barking up a better tree#Like. I have a complicated relationship to art rn. But I can't relate to the idea that it's not fun any more because uh algorithm and AI#You can opt out of that stuff.#Anyways. There's the rant.#Appended edit: This isn't to say you should never become a professional artist - just that you have to accept the associated drudgery#I decided that I didn't want to be a professional illustrator bc i felt it would affect my passion but i do think i could handle better now#And I think there are many kinds of art and craft - Some may be easier to carry boredom and lack of inspiration than others
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i’m a barista and this is the best interaction i’ve ever had (probably in life)
me, steaming milk: i love your purse
woman in pink trench coat, holding an orange purse with eyes all over: omg thank you i got a targetted ad for it on instagram
me: ugh, love a targetted ad. i’m currently training my algorithm to show me the weirdest, niche posts people pay to promote
woman: right on. i deleted my account recently.
me: i wish. i’m also a social media manager
woman: *deadpan* you are the backbone of our society. thank you for your service
#social media manager#.txt#customer#customer service#internet culture#marketing#digital marketing#smm#internet#instagram#algorithm
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Accidentally logged into my old mistake blog and only notifs I had gotten in the past year were for that one post with almost 1K notes
And I remember absolutely hating it and now I have the reminder that I really don’t crave that kind of attention anymore
#there’s no real point to this just thoughts#I’m honestly happier sharing my work with a small group of friends and getting that validation#than managing accounts and worrying about putting stuff out in the wild#downside is it enables my hermit tendencies so I’m even less inclined to post#when I do have art#…not that I’ve had new art in MONTHS#(I say having opened an art show today with my stuff in the gallery)#(it’s just not the art you guys want)#something something notes and attention isn’t everything#there’s like a certain golden zone level of attention#below it you’re sad people aren’t noticing you#above it and you feel like shit and burnt out trying to appeal to everyone#I don’t give a fuck about feeding social media and esp algorithms anymore#Forreal though mental health improved when I stepped back more and found my group#getting too much attention when I was younger fucked me up#and I’m STILL working through the damage#which I know probs sounds like bullshit to people struggling for attention/recognition#but for me it’s true. maybe improves things for others#but for me it just enabled my worst tendencies that I even got praised for
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omg i can't wait until ive aggregated another 12 hours of music i deem worthy to add to my master playlist so that i can theoretically spend 7 days and nights in a row listening to music i like nonstop. say it with me fellow queers i am normal i am normal i am normal i am normal
#i also have a system for finding and compiling new music using the like function#so that a) spotify doesnt keep FUCKING playing the same 20 songs ive known for years over and over#b) i have developed a habit of looking for new music and#c) i now have a bunch of playlists showing what music i was listening to at that time#THIS is how you listen to music ok THIS is OPTIMAL SPOTIFY ALGORITHM MANAGEMENT.
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Alfred Fly-From-Fornication Jones, as a playlist made by my terrible music taste.
If anyone has any recommendations then i am more than happy to hear them
#the heam speaks#hws america#spotify#i managed to confuse the algorithm enough that it couldnt add any songs because it was confused to why supercalifragilisticexpialidious#was in the same playlist as dancing queen gay frogs and biggering#Spotify
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occasionally tumblr will pop up a "you might be interested in this" and without fail its one of three things: 1. a fandom I've never seen 2. a repost of a tweet or 3. a hot butch woman.
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i hate how broken twitter is they just randomly put a post about leaks onto my timeline,,, no one I'm following even liked this stupid post I'm fist fighting elon
#filters? what filters? those aren't a real thing on twitter ig#ive managed to avoid the leaks for So long i Hate it here tf is wrong with their algorithm 😭#not dc#about ml / miraculous ladybug
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I looked up The Transformed Wife on Twitter to show to my therapist and now I'm only getting her and other conservatives recommended to me I think it's time I deleted the bird app
#The main reason I redownloaded it was for social media management for my job#but then I started only doing graphics and others manage them#then I started 'microdosing on anger' on there#but it's not fun when I can't get angry at a transphobe tell them to ligma then hop out and look at trans accounts#cause the algorithm is all types of fucked there and I hate it#I also hate how disorganized it is#it's not as pretty and neat I can't say my piece in the tags#it sucks#but yea don't look her up if you don't know who that is#as her content is p triggering in regards to SA purity culture and other things like that#so yea I might delete the app for a little bit cause this is lame
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Why killjoys use masks and their development
At first they served as one would expect, purely to hide the wearers identity. This was one of the main reasons why everyone wore them even when the war was still hidden behind the horizon and BL/Ind was barely grasping at it's power. After the war and after the city hid behind walls and locked it's citizens inside, masks were more about protecting the wearer's family than the person themselves, they confused the algorithms and when the computer can't recognize your face and match it with your identity in it's database it can't tie you to illegal activities which means you can protect your close ones even when you can't be with them personally, when you're outside scrambling to survive under the scorching sun while they're waiting for you at the diner table with already cold meal. At this point the masks were nothing fancy, any cloth, plain domino mask or old carnival mask did the job and that's what mattered.
With the zones becoming more and more toxic as a direct fallout of the war full head masks and helmets with filters and sun rays protection became widely popular. Plain gas mask was your best grab but motorcycle helmets were also good enough.
This was long before the outcasts even thought of calling themselves killjoys and the rebellion was still on the edge of it's birth but as it goes even masks and helmets had to become part of fashion and so crazy colourful designs representing the wearers personality and name became the heat. Perhaps that did quite a bit for messing with the computers as well but who cared the old days were too far gone to hang onto safety.
Only long after all this happened the belief that your soul can be tied to a physical object such like a mask arose in minds of the people lost in endless sand. Perhaps in the beginning The Phoenix Witch wasn't roaming the lonely dunes, perhaps she was born from the electric waves and unheard prayers, perhaps she was there all along but the teenage martyrs didn't need a god to cry out to but now she's the main point behind it all.
#idk if anyone ever talked about masks beyond the soul part so here's my bit of cyber security to throw into the rink#also I visited the Ars Electronica center where you can play with some face recognition algorithms#which was definitely the main motivation for me to finish this post even thought it's been in my drafts for over a month#to explain it quickly you draw a face and the three algorithms try to recognize it#while your aim is to draw a face we can recognize but the ai can't#and it's so fucking difficult the computer is so good at it it's scary#I got rid of two of them pretty quickly but I didn't manage to get rid of the last one no matter what#and even though I'm deeply fascinated as the huge nerd I am it is terrifying as well#such a shame I don't have photos of my drawing in the beginning and end because it was a wild ride#anyway i won't annoy you with my computer nerdiness#you can go try it out on your own it was fun#my posts#killjoys#ttlotfk#ttlofk#danger days
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“Today I filed suit in federal court in New York City against President Biden, Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla, and the other people who believed that the mRNA jabs were more important than the First Amendment.
The fact that the vaccines have now provably failed is almost - but not quite - irrelevant to the lawsuit. Even if they were perfect, our Constitution would protect my right to criticize them.
Because Pfizer is legally immune from lawsuits directly related to mRNA side effects, this lawsuit may be the ONLY chance we have to learn what the company knew about the way its vaccines were failing in summer 2021, what it told the government about that failure, and if it and the government worked together to encourage boosters and mandates.”
:
Note: my position isn’t settled that Berenson is truly on “team freedom”. Similar to Rogan, Taibbi and Greenwald, they say a lot of the right things, but their access, success and reach implies that the algorithm favors them, and that should make us pause.
#alex berenson#matt taibbi#glenn greenwald#joe rogan#team freedom#algorithm#everything is fucking managed
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tagged by @catholicbutch
Rules: shuffle your On Repeat playlist and post the first 10 tracks, then tag 10 people
I'm Good (Blue) by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha
Heretic Pride by the Mountain Goats
Harlem Roulette by the Mountain Goats
hand crushed by a mallet by 100 gecs
Silverseal by Elvenking
Decretum from the PMMM OST
Cuscenza (live version) by I Chjami Aghjalesi
Thousandfold by Eluveitie
U Ciucciu è u Pallò by I Chjami Aghjalesi
Eeeaaaooo by Xguiz and Patricia Taxxon
Since basically everyone I thought of was already tagged, feel free to do this and say I tagged you if you see it!
#okay. the power metal is because we take the bus often#the david guetta song was from when we worked in an office and were concerned our headphones' sound was leaking#the shuffle algorithm somehow managed to avoid every vylet pony song in that playlist#as for tmg somehow spotify didn't notice the multiple times i listened to the entirety of lotwtc on repeat#think that's it for the commentary? we're very 'so what do you listen to' 'uhhhhhh'
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