Backing In

This caught my eye...

"Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but many users still believe it happens. The result is a lack of trust in the internet."

This isn't the way the world works. The causal chain works like this: Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but there is a lack of trust in the internet. The result is many users still believe it happens.

Of course, I'm being nitpicky here with grammar and the order of things, but I still think that there's something important here. What's really happening is that certain people have an understanding of the way "the Internet," or, more accurately, their social media platform of choice, should operate, and they take deviations from that mental model that disadvantage them to be evidence of deliberate action against them. They don't trust the social media powers that be, suspecting corporate executives of collaborating with the enemy, as it were, and the result is that they believe that any part of the internet not run by a known ally can be turned against them.

Distrust comes from a violation of expectations. And a lot of people expect that not only will "the Internet" just work, but that they never do anything that may legitimately be considered over some or another line drawn in the content-moderation code. Because it's always someone else's fault.

Now it's true that many web services are opaque. I've had Blogger/Alphabet take down pictures that I've posted here without telling me... had I not had occasion to look at some old posts now and again, I might never had discovered the removal. Had I broken some rule, and Alphabet simply didn't bother to tell me? Or were they stored on some server that was disconnected along the way? Who knows? And even if I were given an explanation, how would I validate it? I can't read code.

In my case, it's not a big deal. I don't real on whatever pictures I happen to post to my blog for my livelihood, or to get out some message of dire importance. But there are a lot of people who have put themselves in a position that they rely on Twitter or TikTok or what have you. And to the degree that this reliance gives them the feeling that they are owed something, their sense of grievance when they don't receive it will fuel their self-important narrative that someone's gunning for them.

Telltale Cart

I was on a business trip earlier this week, and took the chance to duck out of a team-building activity to get in some exercise and take in the local scenery by walking back to the hotel. About three blocks from my destination, I was coming up on a Roku building and saw a trio of shopping carts standing by the corner. They were piled with stuff, mostly clothes, but also some other odds and ends; the sort of things that were only saved from being garbage by the fact that they'd been collected in the carts.

There was a stand of trees nearby, with a rather conspicuous trail that meandered from a gap in the foliage to about 10 feet away from where the carts stood. There was a small clearing visible, with some milk crates and an overturned plastic chair. And just the hint of a tent. It wasn't exactly concealed, but it had been placed such that it was only partially visible from the sidewalk, and even then only for a short time. At any sort of speed, it was effectively invisible; I hadn't seen it when I was being dropped off the previous night.

Whomever it was that had come to call the place their home, I felt for them. Thunderstorms had rolled through the previous day and it had rained for seven or eight straight hours. Spending that time in a tent struck me as unpleasant, at best.

I turned the corner. A slight gap in the leaves revealed that there were two tents erected in the space; the standard dome-like camping tents that can be had from any half-way decent sporting goods store. A blonde woman looked up from what she was eating to look back at me. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties (not that I'm a good judge of age), clad in in a light sweatshirt. She regarded me suspiciously as I walked past. Perhaps she thought that I might call the police to roust her from the encampment.

I had no such intent. Her life was already likely more than hard enough without someone like me looking to make things even more difficult for her. As I completed the walk to the hotel, I idly speculated about the circumstances that had brought her, and whomever else shared the little clearing with her, to that place. It was an exercise in futility; possible reasons ran from horizon to horizon.

Left Behind

I was looking for the office supplies in the local "hypermarket" (really just a small department store that also sells groceries and hardware) when I walked past this. On its face, it's not all that interesting, but it reminded me of the toy industry of days past. Back in the 1970s and '80s one might expect to see the same thing; the young boys who were interested in these sorts of toys (or their parents) would take all of the figures of men and dragons and leave the female figures behind. Maybe someone would buy one or two, but for the most part, they'd languish on store shelves until someone decided that they needed to be moved to the bargain bin.

Manufacturers responded to this fact by making adjustments to the assortments of toys to a case (and thus, their manufacturing) to favor the toys that the target audience seemed most interested in, and with fewer of the ones that sold fewer units. Which makes sense, when one thinks about it. The side effect of this was that the female figures, which were generally less popular, tended to be less common.

But in the 1990s, there was something of a breakout in the secondary market for action figures and the like, especially in complete sets. This meant that the once-overlooked female members of a set of toys were now in high demand. And as collectors rushed to stores to pick up the new toys that were being produced, manufacturers responded by keeping the female figures rare. This practice, called "short-packing" squeezed retailers; in order to be able to meet the demand from collectors, they needed to buy more cases of toys than they otherwise would. This left them with a surplus of the more common figures, which often went unsold, because kids were often less interested in them, due to the market chasing adult collectors; people who had full-time jobs and a willingness to speculate that a set of plastic people and animals would appreciate in value at a rapid clip.

Eventually, the toy collector/resale market crashed, replaced by another fad, and toy manufacturers stopped tailoring their business models to the secondary market. And eventually, more balanced assortments became the norm again. But gender-role stereotyping in children's play is still a thing, and perhaps that explains why a squad of neglected Daenerys figures were hanging out in a box, wondering where everyone else had gone. Whether history will repeat itself, I can't say. But I did detect the hint of a rhyme.
 

Flat File

I was listening to some or another talking head go on about income inequality in the United States when a question came to me: How much would a day-care worker have to make in order to be able to afford day care for their own child?

I understand that it's something of a silly question, so bear with me. Most jobs that pay well in the United States have large customer bases, such that each beneficiary of a good and/or service need only put in a fairly small amount towards the worker's wages. Think about someone who makes automobiles. They put in a little work on a large number of vehicles in a year. If all of those vehicles are sold over the course of the year, they can get by on a relatively small amount from each sale. Of course, in reality the economics are more complicated, and there isn't a direct connection between how much automotive manufacturing workers' salaries and the number of vehicles sold. But consider a day-care worker. They interact with only a relatively small number of children over the course of a year. And so each family represents a bigger slice of their final wage. And so for them to make a relatively high salary, each of those families would have to pay a fairly large amount.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this, as there always are. Individual craftsmen who produce goods and services primarily or exclusively for the very wealthy can live well from the patronage of a small handful, or even one, customer, and certain low-wage jobs pull in so little from each individual customer that there simply isn't time to provide services to enough people to make a good living. In the end, however, if a business can create an economy of scale, it needn't charge customers as much money as a business that's unable to reach very far.

And this creates the catch-22 that many people who have low-wage, labor-intensive service jobs find themselves in. Unless the people they're working for are wealthy themselves, those employers aren't going to feel that they have money to be insensitive to prices. And as long as they're employed by people who are watching their budgets, they're unlikely to be able to make enough money to take advantage of services similar to the ones they offer.

The only real way out of this would be for a third party to subsidize the whole affair. Which, in effect, broadens the pool of paying clients without adding as much to the workload. Otherwise, the inequality between the parties is baked into the system.

Feeling the Heat

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released it's most recent reports.. Cue calls for action from people the world over who are concerned about the impacts on Earth's climate, and, in theory, its capacity to support human life. It's pretty much a given that there's no chance of humanity managing to avoid at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Even 2 degrees is looking pretty dicey at this point. And there's nothing surprising about this. I recall learning about the Greenhouse Effect in the 1980s. (Popular Mechanics noted the Greenhouse Effect, and the fact that burning coal contributed to it, in 1912.) As Bill Maher pointed out, our generation has pretty much done nothing to address the problem. People have had other priorities.

And this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Because as Bill Maher also pointed out, the younger generation has much bigger idols than climate activists. The people they want to emulate, and the lives they want to lead are at odds with working to preserve the temperature status quo, just as it was when I was a young person. Hectoring messages from climate hawks are not going to change this. Finding a way to align incentives might. And this, to my way of thinking, is really the only way that humanity doesn't find itself attempting to bail its way out of the boat that it managed to drill a hole in the bottom of. The message of "pay for climate stabilization now, or pay to remediate the effects later" may be spot on, but it doesn't make the costs any more palatable, or reduce the feelings of poverty that make people so reluctant to pay anything.

Unless climate activism finds a way to make paying for a transition away from cheap, but damaging, fossil fuels seem like a clear benefit, rather than a burdensome tax, their message will continue to fall on deaf ears.