Monthly Archives: February 2023

Migrant child labor

www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html

It’s been a while since I read something that has really shocked me in the Times, but this one did. Maybe partially because it’s such a predictable outcome of the lack of money for oversight and the venality of some of the sponsors involved.

Maybe the attention will get Congress off it’s ass to fund some real enforcement.

Update: yup, they’re paying attention: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/us/biden-child-labor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

History of tech companies

I read that Google won’t allow other companies to install browsers other than Chrome on new Android devices. Isn’t this what Microsoft was convicted and fined for with Internet Explorer back in the day, preinstalling their own browser on Windows so that users had to jump through some hoops to use anything else?

Test for TripIdeas map render

Various ways of rendering .gpx. The first couple use the “WP GPX” plugin, which uses a shortcode that points to a media file. The plugin’s settings in WP-Admin lets you upload such a file.

This is just stock from the .gpx. Interestingly, it generates an Altitude chart by default along with the map:

Not so good with a multi-route from the driving + walking routes with WP GPX concatenated into one file; it wants to merge them into one route and go back to the start (with a straight line!):

Here’s the two source .gpx files combined and rendered with GPS Visualizer, which has a couple of nice features:

  • better map tile selection (eg OS + texturing)
  • a select box that lets you pick which of the multiple routes you’re viewing, and lets you set the zoom to focus on any particular one, or encompass all of them
  • variable ticks en-route for, eg, km markers or …, using a selected icon
  • custom icons for markers. So, for example, a custom icon for a hiking waypoint from Canva uploaded to Media Library and referenced from a .gpx element marking the entrance to the trail
  • popups can also include notes, photos, … through simple .csv-based interface
  • popup for waypoint can optionally include driving directions to get there, from any google-style location (eg “current location”), and we can further customize this (I think) using leaflet-routing-machine (which in turn uses OSMR by default) to make it prettier/easier

Property

If a robot constitutes a corporation and the corporation owns land, does the robot own land? What if the robot is not owned by another (corporation/human) entity? Is a robot owned through intellectual property rights, or by virtue of its embodiment (you own the specific hardware)? How is this going to work?

A notification center for progress bars that sounds like birdsong (Interconnected)

A notification center for progress bars that sounds like birdsong (Interconnected)
— Read on interconnected.org/home/2023/02/10/progress

This came up at a conference I attended at Xerox Parc last century, where a sysadmin had sonified all the background processes running on his network. When everything was running as it should, it all descended into a subconscious multiphonic hum, but as soon as something changed the related sound changed proportionally, surfaced to his consciousness and thereby got his attention. This instead of a roomful of competing blinky lights that were endlessly distracting.

The other aspect of this I remember is that you could layer an infinite number of independent processes, vs the limited real estate of a screen. The hum occupied the room, not a specific device.

No notification sounds required. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Kaplan

Went to see Robert Kaplan at WICA last night. He reminds me of a 20th century Herodotus.

He kept making references to “the elites” and how they consistently get things wrong. He described his own education, at a small Connecticut public university, and his subsequent employment at a small regional paper because he couldn’t get a job with the major papers because he didn’t have the Ivy League education. I think he’s always viewed himself as an outsider, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

I wanted to ask him about these elites. I’ve been reading him for years in The Atlantic, itself a bit of an elite national journal, so I confess to having pictured him as a member of the elites. I’m wondering who they are, and how they work; is it like the courtiers of the Ottoman Empire, with various factions and intrigues vying for the attention of the Emperor? Are they all the people who move from faculty positions at Yale and Harvard to positions in the Federal administration to emeritus positions in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation? Who are these people?

After A Man Called Otto

Watch the movie “ A Man called Otto” last night. On the way home from the theater I wrote this.

There is a specific sadness to everyone’s life
A child that dies, a traumatic injury, a fractured relationship
Without which we would lose our connection to the ground and to each other
And simply float away.

The Ecstatics and the Penitents

I wrote this while we were visiting religious sites in southern Spain. I had noticed that tourists in the buildings were either holding their cell phones up high, or cradling them and staring at the small screens. They reminded me of the varieties of religious expression captured in the sculpture and paintings that we were looking at.

The Ecstatics, their hands and heads raised to the ceiling, phones recording the look of bliss on their faces while capturing another landmark to prove they exist.

And the Penitents, sitting, with phones in their cupped hands and heads bowed, reviewing their photos and contemplating their sins: the selfie from the bar the night before, singing in the street. How did I look?

A Modest Proposal

I get a lot of spam in email (and texts, and phone calls, and …) I pay for the infrastructure that allows this to happen, by paying my ISP a monthly fee, my phone provider a fee, … Why do I pay for others to abuse my communication tools?

In the days of regular landlines, the party placing the call was billed, not the recipient. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get lots of calls from random causes.

Let’s charge a (micro) fee for each message transmitted, to be paid to the recipient’s mail (SMTP/IMAP) provider. For example, WhidbeyNet would receive a small net positive for each email they are sent, and the sender would be charged that amount. Over the course of a month, say, WhidbeyNet’s service cost would be more than covered by the income they get from all the spam that gets sent to my account, and they would then completely scrap their telecom charges to me.

When I send an email, I’d get charged (the same) microscopic amount (everyone who sends mail is charged) and the recipient’s SMTP/IMAP provider credited. At the end of the billing period, that’d be netted against the amount that WhidbeyNet received from people sending to me. Unless I sent copious numbers of messages, I’d end up paying nothing but my ISP would more than recover a reasonable profit over operations.

In fact, I suspect that three things might happen if there was a cost incurred to the sender, paid to the recipient’s provider:

  • the ISP would become a bit of a gold mine. The incentive to set up an ISP and string infrastructure around the currently “money-losing” rural areas would be much stronger, and internet coverage would increase.
  • Internet access would be effectively free for end-users; in effect they’re saying “paid for by people trying to send me spam”.
  • Spam would decrease, because it would cost more to send (and be proportional to the volume of spam sent). So it would behoove advertisers to become more selective in deciding whose inbox to fill up.

This would need to be tied to a mail identity verification mechanism so the right party gets charged, of course, something we’ve all been talking about for a while. And it’s not a new idea; micropayments for mail and other transactions have been mooted for decades, some test systems implemented and their effectiveness and practicality debated. But: no one’s yet refuted the idea that costless comms lead to abuse. So let’s get the people who make money by abusing the system pay for the system, instead of the people who have to put up with the abuse.