An employer trying to figure out how little they can offer an individual seems like a lot of work, which will blow-up in their face if/when the employees compare compensation packages.

I can't imagine an employer doing this on any sort of large group of employees. Unless you have a mono-sexual, mono-racial workforce, different individual compensation for the same job is just a shit-storm waiting to happen. What if Women are, generally, paid less then men in the same position? Or if minorities are paid less than Caucasian workers?

I've worked in places where one worker ;an older woman) learned she was paid about $5K less than her colleagues, but that was because she came to the job with no experience, the others had 5-10 years industry experience when they were hired. She felt she was 'cheated', it affected her work and her relationships with coworkers. Ultimately they quietly bumped up her pay, but she still complained - it turned out bad for her (impacted her review, cost her a performance raise at year-end).

Bottom line, the worker is owed what the employer offers and the employee accepts. If the offer is too low, don't accept it. It isn't anyone's fault but your own if you accept a too-low offer.

I don't understand the outrage of using publicly-available information to make a business decision - in realpage scandal a company used computers to determine the maximal rent a landlord/owner could charge a tenant, and in this case an employer is using a service to create a profile of a worker from public information to figure out how low an offer the candidate is likely to accept. These are things that have been manually done for decades, but somehow automating it makes it bad?

Employers look at candidates, review their job history, and arrive at a number they think the candidate will accept. That a candidate has gone and used payday loans is (apparently) publicly-available info - the issue is to maybe make the info private?

Employers do background checks, criminal record checks, and, I would assume, some sort of financial background check before hiring certain workers - it's labor-intensive, so probably not very common, but for certain occupations, I'm sure it's standard.

I think I understand why he never got anywhere with these. And no, it wasn't because of the web...

Apparently Waze exists for the sole purpose of avoiding speed traps.

I never knew that... guess I've been using it wrong all these years. I use it to minimize the time I spend on my daily commute.

Attacking nuclear facilities is at least moderately rational. Various countries have done that half a dozen times over the past few years. Attacking drone manufacturing and storage might also be reasonable.

But...

What does an illegal decapitation attack have to do with nukes? Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one? There is a fundamental difference between going after clear military targets to prevent Iran from developing weapons that threaten their neighbors and going after civilian and government targets.

No, they will keep doing this until they are a nuclear power. They've seen what denuclearization did for Ukraine, and it's hard to argue with their logic. Having nuclear weapons is a strong deterrent to invaders, who realize that the response could be swift and devastating at a scale that countries never recover from.

It's unclear what other things they will do at that point. We can only speculate. Mind you, I don't like the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran, but again, I see no evidence that anything happening over there right now is going to change anything, or even delay it enough to matter.

Is anything that the U.S. government is doing right now going to change that reality? The way you prevent them from laying mines is the same way that you prevent oil from leaving Iran — bombing ships the second they leave the harbor. If you're not willing to start with a full air and naval blockade, you've already failed, and the only thing continuing the war can do is increase the number of ways that you've failed.

Or, you know, obey the law and drive under the speed limit...

If everyone obeyed the laws, there'd be no need for this kind of "enforcement" exercise, and the third-party company will take down the cameras and move to a new city.

I just love the "pervasive" surveillance network argument - "I know I'm driving a car on a public road with an easily readable license plate, but you have no right to read my license plate and keep track of when and where I was!"

Where exactly does the presumption of privacy come into this argument?

Just a reminder of what can happen when workers strike...

https://www.labornotes.org/200...

I suspect the unionized facility is leased, and this whole adventure could end when the tenant (Amazon) can't negotiate a new lease with the owners (Amazon).

5,000 workers?!

I fully expect negotiations to drag out for years (longer) - Amazon is apparently intending to appeal the previous decision, and even if forced to sit down and negotiate with the workers union, that process will drag on...

I expect this is a war of attrition - Amazon can just maintain status quo and overtime the workforce will turn-over, perhaps to the point that Amazon can get the workers to vote down the union...

My AI says there aren't enough em dashes, so you're probably both wrong.

At 3 A.M.? Probably. At 3 P.M.? Unlikely.

Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is pedestrians. After dark, this concern goes way down. At some point, it becomes effectively zero, and the only thing increasing the risk is the number of driveway entrances, and in particular, blind driveway entrances.

And, of course, the presence of small children who behave erratically. In general, you should drive those speeds whenever you see evidence that small children are playing or are likely to be playing anyway, e.g. when driving past parks before sunset, when you see small children walking down the sidewalk while tossing a ball back and forth, etc.

And when there's no evidence of children, it doesn't make sense to slow down nearly as much.

Cyclists and pedestrians are also a big risk. They often behave in unpredictable ways. Also, if you pull out in front of cyclists, this is a very bad thing. But all of those factors are also highly timing-dependent. When there are no cyclists nearby, a road can be 45 MPH, but when cyclists are nearby, you need to slow down. Drivers need to have the situational awareness to realize that driving at the speed limit is not always safe, because the alternative is for the speed limits to be set so low that they are always safe, which results in miserably slow roads.

I've heard of neighborhoods pushing for 5 MPH (8 KPH) speed limits. When cyclists and even some pedestrians would be ticketed for exceeding the speed limit, you're doing it wrong. Even at 15MPH, there's only a 9% chance of an accident seriously hurting a pedestrian even if you don't slow down at all, so the benefit would only come from drivers who are completely not paying attention, and would likely be cancelled out by a higher number of drivers zoning out and not paying attention, in which case the chances of pulling out in front of a cyclist (who realistically won't be going that slowly) goes up. No free lunch. But that doesn't keep people who don't understand statistics from saying "If 25 (residential default) is good, 5 is better."

30 years ago was 1926?

Continuing, it can be argued that #1 & 2 have an influence on driver behavior, seeing a police car, drivers self-correct behavior, and knowing a police car typically hides behind a billboard can cause drivers to self-correct behavior as they approach the billboard, for fear there might be an officer behind it.

Getting a bill in the mail two weeks later does nothing to correct behavior, even briefly - the system lets you continue speeding, presenting safety hazards to the community, but the city get the cash...

There are roughly three ways to enforce speed limits:
1) Police officer in plain sight detects speeding, stops the driver, issues summons.
2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.
3) Camera/radar hidden along the street, it logs the vehicle speeding, issues a summons several days later.

Arguably, #1 & 2 have the effect of causing people to obey the speed limit, by stopping the driver they (likely) influence behavior, at least in the immediate aftermath of a traffic stop. #3 is purely about money - they have no interest in modifying driver behavior, they simply want to collect a fine. A speed camera in school zone does not make it safer for children, it doesn't stop the driver going 40 MPH in a 25 MPH school zone, it just sends them a bill.

Was it Wayze that got into trouble when it had an option to avoid driving thru high-crime areas? The provider was called racist, and community leaders insisted they remove the option, so that unsuspecting victims, I mean potential customers could drive by businesses in high-crime neighborhoods...

The purpose of the speed cameras was always revenue generation - it was never about safety.

The city hired someone to install cameras and give the city money. Over time the city wanted more money, so they kept changing speed limits. If they wanted to prevent speeding, the city would have increased interdiction, rather than installing a passive revenue-generating camera system.

Why would anyone think getting a bill in the mail two weeks after you went speeding down a neighborhood street would increase safety?