An interesting retort, and not without merit. +1 (And thus my "generally" caveat.)

Doubly interesting when considering the correlations between prisoners and members of the military....

-bZj

Source is the same as cited: I was there, and that was the option on offer.

It falls under "refusing a housing move," or "refusing a job assignment" (all inmates are required to work and no inmate may refusing a housing move, per CDCR's regulating code, Title 15).

First link at www.cdcr.ca.gov/regulations

-bZj

CA inmate firefighters are paid between $2.xx and $4.xx per day . If they are on an active fire, they will earn $1/hr (and are generally on 24hr shifts). CA minimum wage is quite a bit above that. Also, if you are "eligible" for fire camp and refuse to go, you will receive a write-up, which will affect your security placement and your credit earning rate. This is what the quoted former inmate means when he mentions "duress." It may not be slavery, but it is not in any way equivalent to a "paid volunteer" situation (volunteers generally aren't 'paid' in any context).

Source: doing the books at a fire camp; being one of the more computer literate of the population. [It is indeed preferrable to prison, for most, and does feel better than rotting in a cell.]

-bZj

My 44 has been an interesting year... But I'm giving it up... as of tomorrow.

Does that mean I'm over this "hump" of accelerated aging? Easy-going until I hit the big six-oh...?

-bZj

+1

-bZj

The headline/plot reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface. Good book.

-bZj

I lived in the San Diego area years ago, and this was a news story then (~2019). The "wall" (more like 2 chain link fences 20-30 ft apart, it seemed from the news video) allowed cartels to just send a remote control truck from one side to the other. But new "detection" mechanisms were touted during a Trump visit. Then the story was just using flying drones to go over the "wall," and avoiding the detection countermeasures.

-bZj

This comment should be modded up. ^

Amongst the random arguments, the point is being missed: the inmates are (rarely) the customers here. Mostly the people on the outside, paying for the calls, are the customers of GTL. So the free ppl are the ones getting screwed here. Not surprising, given how terrible GTL is (they recently change their name: ViaPath Technologies, so no more GTL, now it's VPT).

-bZj

https://www.tvguide.com/videos...

-bZj

Multiple credit card companies are already doing this. Our merchant services company offered us this same data. Of course Google is tracking everything you do. But they can only do it with the willing help of Visa/Mastercard.

It's too late for everybody who isn't named "Tesla". Tesla's got over 100,000 charging stations installed already. Tesla's chargers are going to be the de facto standard at this point.

Unless you buy brand new hardware, hardware is absurdly cheap. Our hardware costs are somewhere around 1/20 of our software costs. It might even be less. I don't see any costs savings on hardware.

What I do see with "microservices" is crossing your fingers that whoever you're buying from knows what they're doing (ie: backups, non-faulty hardware, non-faulty sysadmins, etc.)

The other thing is that you have to rely on Internet access, which, in most of the US, is spotty at best. We're in a major metropolitan, high-tech area, and neither of the ISP's can provide us with reliable service. Hence, all of our software is built to run off-line during our very regular Internet outages. With "microservices", we'd just be stopped from doing any business at all every time the Internet dropped out.

If these companies even tried to end "hate speech" or whatever nebulous crime where a specific group of pigs are more equal than another group of pigs, we will see the end of these platforms and companies full sail.

Banning trolls will hurt their business, how? As an employer, I'm MORE likely to advertise on a platform that wasn't full of screaming, stupid Trump people. Those are not people that I want to advertise to, anyway.

How can Uber have trouble turning a profit? What expenses do they have? Are they literally wiping their asses with money, or something? I can't imagine how maintaining a few little apps would cost billions of dollars a year.

Wow. That's neat. In return for those cute little gimmicks, Amazon has a complete recording of everything that happens in your house. And, then they sell that to other companies. You're OK with that? Really?