Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

Realistically, a lot of it could just be continuation of existing Biden policy:

• Aggressive antitrust enforcement from the FTC and DOJ, slowly changing the inertia of the last 40 years of allowing consolidation and the neutering of century-old antitrust laws.
• Continued pro-labor rulings from the NLRB to give workers more bargaining power as we unionize at Starbucks, Amazon, and other major workforces. Big union wins at automakers, airlines, logistics companies have emboldened new unionization drives at places like VW provide the momentum that need to be backed by government. Even places where unions have seen setbacks, like Mercedes Benz in Alabama, management has been running scared and trying to stave off unions with promises of unprecedented raises (which they’ve since reneged on after the union vote failed). We need to keep the pressure on, especially as the business cycle potentially turns to a tougher job market.
• Marijuana rescheduling is proceeding along, and hopefully will be complete by the end of Biden’s term. The next administration will need to defend it in court, and implement the details for things like banking and medical research and licensing.

Some Biden policies need to be bolstered with a combination of both continued executive action and new laws passed through Congress:

• Many of Biden’s environmental regulations have been rolled back in the courts. A Harris admin should keep pushing on these fronts, but with coverage from Congress where possible.
• Same with economic/workplace regs. The Department of Labor’s minimum wage exemption guidelines are being challenged in the courts right now, with Biden trying to push for the minimum salary of overtime-exempt workers to be at least $58k next year (the $44k minimum took effect on July 1, 2024). The FTC’s noncompete regulation, which would prohibit noncompete agreements for almost all workers, is tied up in the courts now.
• Biden’s Department of Education has tried to implement student loan forgiveness, and lost at the Supreme Court. Now their watered down measures (easier repayment plans, interest forgiveness for certain borrowers) are in the courts, too. New legislation could fix this.

Abortion, contraception, and family planning in general needs a combination of both strong executive action and new legislation:

• Biden’s administration has fought, with mixed success, to make sure that state bans on abortion don’t interfere with federal priorities. DoD has official policy that pays for servicemembers and their families to travel to states where abortions are legal, if necessary to get care. DOJ and HHS are fighting to make sure that states can’t prevent life saving care that some extremists believe constitute abortion. The FDA has expanded access and availability of abortion medication through telehealth and prescriptions by mail.
• Legislative areas worth fighting for include bolstering the authority of Medicare and FDA to preserve access to abortion and contraceptive care, including across state lines, removing the ban on federal funding for abortions, etc.

These are all pretty modest, but very important. The actual machinery of government is immensely important, and we need people who are effective at making sure everything is working for the people.

So just fuck the 700,000 who live there, then? Don’t give them the right to political representation that everyone else in the country has?

What “cooking chemicals” are in grains that are harvested from a plant and then dried?

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

In the US, because the minimum required by law is so low, the actual distribution of vacation days varies a lot from employer to employer.

This chart, updated annually, shows the average by length of service time: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick-vacation-days-by-service-requirement.htm

Seems like the average for people in the private sector with 1 year is 7 days sick, 11 days vacation.

This fact sheet, as of 2021, breaks down the details a bit more: https://www.bls.gov/ebs/factsheets/paid-vacations.htm

Table 1 breaks it down pretty well, with people at the 1 year mark hovering mostly between 1-3 weeks, people at the 5 year mark mostly between 2-4 weeks, and people with 10 years at 3+ weeks.

People with government jobs, which is about 15% of the workforce and about 20 million workers, tend to get better benefits, including paid time off.

Shouldn’t the DE/Window Manager be handling that? Seems like doing it on a window by window basis would be inefficient (and look inconsistent).

I think this is a picture before the most recent expansion. (They saw this picture and said “hmm not wide enough, too congested.”)

In the normal parts:

• 2 express/toll/HOV/carpool lanes
• 5 regular highway lanes
• 3 feeder lanes (in Texas, the highways tend to have “feeders” or “service roads” or “frontage roads” that run parallel to highways so that people can exit and enter, turn onto intersecting roads, and access local businesses, and Houston calls them “feeders”).

That’s 10 in each direction. But at any given time there might be merge lanes between the express and the regular lanes, between the highway and the feeder, or between the feeder and a turn lane. So at the widest point, around the major freeway intersection with another huge toll highway, they bump it up to one more of each type of lane, for 13 lanes in each direction.

There’s also a fair debate about whether the feeder lanes should count. After all, they have traffic lights and intersections to deal with. But on the other hand, driving on them is necessary to get on and off the highway lanes, so in a sense it’s part of the same highway.