Everyone in the call center, hundreds and hundreds of people, despises you.
I think that’s already the belief of most people that call into one.
Likewise
Food bank in the US. Food drives and individual donations of food don’t really mean shit to food banks and they result in overwhelmingly low quality food. Your local food bank isn’t hurting for your expired cans of coconut milk or your forgotten boxes of Kraft mac & cheese. Sugary junk and expired food will be sorted out and tossed. Most staple foods at food banks are distributed by the federal government or purchased by the food bank. Most other foods are donated in large volume by supermarkets and manufacturers. What food banks really need from you is donations of money, not food.
Another thing about food banks is that some supermarkets and manufacturers abuse them to dump their spoiled, expired or overproduced goods and get a tax write-off on them. I worked at a medium sized food bank that would throw away multiple pallets of sugary bakery items from Walmart every day because they didn’t meet our nutrition guidelines and Walmart had been told repeatedly not to donate them, but they did it anyway for the tax write-off. Ever walk into a Walmart and wonder how they can have so much bakery crap on display and sell it before it expires? Yeah, most of that stuff will be marked down multiple times and then trucked to the local food bank where it will be thrown away. Trader Joe’s also does this with their returns (most of their donations are unusable). Whole Foods on the other hand is really amazing about donating tons of high quality stuff on a daily basis.
This only makes me hate walmart even more
I wonder if you could get some kind of IRS tax fraud bounty on Walmart for that, but I’m guessing the odds are pretty low especially with the current administration.
The last tech job I worked marketing for had a security product (you probably have used it without knowing it). They had a group in-house they called the “Tiger Team”: people who were supposedly tasked with testing the security of the product. You got into the “Tiger Team” by finding a flaw in the security.
The “Tiger Team” did nothing. At all. Didn’t even meet. Hell, half of them didn’t know who the other members were. The job of the “Tiger Team” was to sign the NDA that had dire consequences if you spoke to anybody else about the “Tiger Team” and/or the security flaws in the product.
So basically the “Tiger Team” existed only to conceal flaws in the product. Not to fix them or find more.
I swear, security companies have the worst security practices.
When does the NDA expire? I need deets
I didn’t sign an NDA, the guy I was dating did. And the company is long zombified (Entrust).
Then spill the beans!
What beans? I already spilled them: Entrust had “Tiger Team” that consisted entirely of people who’d found flaws in the security of the product; it existed entirely to NDA-bind the “team members” to squelch talk about the security failures.
You want me to spill the beans on the flaws? Can’t. I do marketing, not techie stuff. I just know about the “team”, not about the things people found to get into it.
They patent ways to generate green energy so nobody else can use them and they can continue to make obscene profits selling oil and gas.
I’m not surprised but lord that’s bad
Shell has caused a lot more oil spills, both big and small, than they’d ever admit. I didn’t work there, but I’ve been on ships around their oil rigs.
The physical infrastructure of the internet (fibre and copper cables) is held together with string and ‘temporary’ fixes. Not a metaphor in any way.
Wait 'til you hear about the software infrastructure.
Hey that random dude from Nebraska should not be lumped in with this.
Wait till you hear about our bridges and roads. This is standard human activity. Build something then ignore it till it breaks.
I feel like this should be common sense, but goddamn does it come up often as fuck. If you’re going to a built-in bakery, like in a grocery store or Starbucks little bakery display, we don’t fully make 90% of that shit. It comes in pre-made. The shit we do put in the oven is mostly to warm it or just finish it off.
We most likely don’t even have the box to tell you exactly when the supplier baked it. We sell them that quickly. We just slap icing on.
We have to put out so much product in a day, on such tight timing, that if we had to mix and bake our own cakes and bread, we’d be constantly out. That is part of why our shit is cheaper than a high-end independent establishment.
No one really cares if you have a nice day.
I promise you I care, I don’t know who you are but the idea that you’re happy fills my heart with joy.
😱😱😱
Automation is so incredibly resource intensive and generates so much waste. I can’t see how letting ourselves become more dependant on automation is as beneficial as businesses and mislead common people make it out to be.
As demand increases, so does maintenance, upgrades and power consumption. Everything electronic requires plastic. Which is shipped in more plastic. Which is shipped on skids wrapped in more plastic. And when those electronics fail, then that is just more waste plastic because it’s easier, quicker and cheaper to replace rather than fix.
Electronics and automation are so fun and interesting. It’s amazing watching a line run at full speed in production. But it’s so painfully depressing how awful it is for our environment. The dust and oils are awful for the living beings that work in those environments. The repetitive jobs that it creates is absolutely awful for the mental wellbeing for the people who work there.
The mental damage of being there was so bad to me that when it came time to discuss severance pay at the labour board meeting after my wrongful termination, I purposely let the lawyers keep in a part in the contract/paperwork saying I could no longer work at any company under that international organization. They thought I would fight that so they would have reason to lower my severance pay. Nah. I took my winnings, which included getting the HR manager fired, and fucked right off.
Years later and I still feel a deep shame and regret for the time I spent in the automation industry and for all the damage and waste I caused while being in there.
Along with eliminating wealth hoarders who generate extreme amounts of waste, lessening our dependence on technology and automation are things I personally believe will be key to a liveable future. It’s a bit shocking to me how often I receive negative or angry criticism when I share these thoughts though.
The Factory Must Grow…
/s
It’s a bit shocking to me how often I receive negative or angry criticism when I share these thoughts though.
You receive criticism because you are wrong. Automation is just using technology to make things with less effort. I’m very happy letting a machine weave my clothes, rather than having to sit down and twist the threads to weave my clothes with my fingers. Eschewing automation wouldn’t just result in less environmental waste - it would send us back to the dark ages, except worse, because we could not possibly feed and clothes the world’s population without automated systems. Humans, desperate for food and shelter, would constantly be at war with each other and would chop down every forest and slaughter every animal in a desperate attempt at survival.
Meanwhile, there is no reason it must be awful for the environment or people. If single use plastics are a problem because they are cheaper than the alternative, then the solution is obvious: make plastics more expensive. This is called a Pigouvian Tax, and it is very effective. Any time we notice something which has a negative impact on the world, but which has no negative impact for its user, we just tax it until its use has been decreased to an acceptable level.
Dust and oils in a work environment are solveable by wearing PPE.
The unpleasantness of a job is solveable by making life affordable for workers so they can just quit if they don’t like it.
These are all solveable problems, and I see no need to make the whole world way shittier to solve them.
I’ve spent time over the years wondering why I receive hostile or angry criticism. A few ideas float to my mind. Judging by the responses I do receive, many seem to be uncomfortable giving up any current personal comfort in order to address deeper questions about health, safety, how we work with the environment around us and who actually benefits from our current technology.
I’ve made no attempts to suggest solutions. The automation industry is far too complex for me to even try. The covid lockdowns showed me just how vulnerable the automation industry is to disruptions. Something that’s vulnerable to disruptions should be questioned. Especially when so many lives are dependent on it.
Those deeper questions may just lead us in a completely different direction. That is nothing to fear. In the process of that, we may just find a comfort zone between technology, nature and human creativity where it can all exist with minimal pain for us and everything around us.
Decreasing our dependence on technology will allow us, the ones who do not hoard wealth as a means of power over other people, to gain control and independence in our personal lives and our immediate communities. When we can be independent, we can become more resistent to disruptions in our communities.
All this requires us to be open, honest and to have the the will to attempt change. From my personal experiences and perspective, doing more of the same only enables to current situation.
The covid lockdowns showed me just how vulnerable the automation industry is to disruptions.
It also showed how valuable the automation industry was to cutting COVID-19 off at its knees if a bunch of pansy right-wingers hadn’t started to screech they couldn’t breath because of a few grams of paper on their face. (Weird how they can wear masks now when it involves being cruel to non-whites…)
When COVID-19 hit there was a shortage of surgical and N95 masks world-wide. Then a guy invented a machine that could “print” obscene numbers of surgical masks per day, each machine costing only about $50,000. Within weeks surgical masks were available to the point that they cost almost nothing. Then someone else figured out how to make KN95 masks easier to mass produce on the same kind of “printing” machine and now KN95 masks are also cheap like borscht and universally available.
Without automation there’d have been a whole lot more deaths to COVID-19 around the world, not just in snowflake countries.
I think people get upset with you because you piss on the floor when you get excited (like a confused puppy)
What you’re saying reminds me of things that vegans say: “If everybody knew the full story, they’d change their behaviour”. I think this is only partially true since change is hard.
I lurk in some vegan forums for the recipes but the majority of posts seem intended to invoke outrage, probably to help promote behaviour change.
Now, what if there were books and movies and forums about the horrors of automated factories? Would people change?
80-90% of the entire cybersecurity business is because Windows is still being used.
Pretending Linux doesn’t have vulnerabilities?
But 80-90% of successful cyber attacks succeed because someone does something dumb, like give out their password to the pizza delivery guy.
Many SQL servers use scripts that run as domain administrator. With the password hard coded in.
Several of the various servers are very old. W2K, 2003, 2008. SQL server, too.
Several of the users run reports via rdp to the SQL server - logging in as domain admin.
Codebase is a mashup of various dev tools: .net, asp, Java, etc.
Fax server software vendor has been out of business for a decade. Server hardware is 20 years old. Telecom for fax is a channelized PRI carrying POTS - and multiport modem cards. Fax is used for processing checks.
About a 3rd of the ethernet runs in the office have failed.
Office pcs are static IP. Boss says that’s more secure.
They were hacked about a year ago. They changed the domain admin password and restored the backups. That’s it.
They processed money to/from the Fed.
Many moons ago I was getting my W2K certs. I dropped a vanilla box into my home lab, installed W2K server, connected it to my LAN, and left to take leak and get a cup of coffee. By the time I got back 10 minutes later, some enterprising soul had installed SQLServer and Exchange 5.5 over the Internet in preparation for fuck knows what. I burped, farted, and disconnected my router. Then I sat down to reconsider my career choice.
The thing limiting it most is the last sentence, the rest I’ve seen as well :D
We used to routinely disable safety interlocks on production machines. A guy almost got decapitated once while performing maintenance.
We as in you did? If so, Fuck you. I know too many people who have been injured because of assholes who disabled those interlocks. LOTO is a lifesaver.
Edit: ok I saw in a later post that you didn’t do that. But still - to anyone who considers disabling a safety interlock - just jump right in after doing so.
Calm the fuck down. This wasn’t a “Russian lathe accident” situation. We were trained professionals, and never left the machines unattended in an unsafe state. There were no injuries and only that one close call (which IIRC was traced back to a faulty e-stop button).
We never fell victim to complacency and I am quite proud of that.
I tell all the new guys “if your manager doesn’t want you want to lock something out, call me. I’ll lock it out. There’s nothing in this place worth getting hurt for.”
Here, our equipment is old enough that sometimes powering things down means they don’t come back up properly. I’d rather fight getting a machine back up and running vs having to hear about someone being injured.
What? Why? It only takes one guy to refuse.
Not the original post, but it’s usually speed. Manufacturing employees get pushed for more output, and usually that means that maintenance gets rushed.
A decade ago I was working somewhere with massive production machines with big rollers to pull the product through. One guy left the machine running to clean it so he could just sort of buff the rollers to clean them instead of scrubbing.
He got his arm sucked in up to his shoulder before someone was able to hit the e-stop
Sometimes for maintenance, sometimes because manual intervention was necessary. The machines where we did this were built in the 90s and have been in near constant operation. Moving parts are worn out and the tolerances are gone. Replacement parts are difficult to find and expensive to manufacture, so if something more complex than a ball bearing or axle got out of alignment, we had to pound it back into place (sometimes literally).
I personally never bypassed the interlock, I wasn’t paid enough to take on that responsibility. I would just file a downtime notice and call the on-site mechanic when needed. I didn’t give a shit about reduced output.
Tagging @Remorhaz@lemmy.world
I’ve worked for the government. However chaotic, beaurocratic and badly managed it is, it’s 1000 times worse. Laziness is endemic and so many people just won’t work
It is truly incredible when you see how someone can make themselves be such a roadblock. Like how are you even this way?
How long have you been alive?
Shocking
They paid for the CEO to have an expensive townhouse downtown even though they only visited the area like 2 weeks total per year and lived on the opposite coast.
YMMV:
- Dollar General: nobody watches the cameras unless someone reports something
- USPS: exploitative. Has the ability to manipulate politics (political ads are not guaranteed to be delivered)
- Amazon Warehouse: exploitative
- Amazon DSP: exploitative. DSPs were created to bypass labor laws
- Restaurants: most fried foods, and many not fried, are frozen. This is not just fast food, think steaks.
What is a DSP?
Reading this in an ad tech context (Demand Side Platform, where businesses pay money to get their ads into the marketplace) read equally true. Their margin is roughly 50-60%
Edit: Amazon is a DSP in the advertising space
Delivery Service “Partner”
It’s the outsourced delivery drivers.
I don’t know why I read Delivery Service Panther and got excited. I would probably be dead after the first delivery, but still.
Your sandals are here. Fight me, human.
