deweydecibel

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.

These days? It’s sucked to be an American for decades.

The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.

Even the independent or non-profit media sources that have a lot of credibility and seem generally pretty chill will fall back on this every now and again.

You see it anytime you hear people talking about division or hyper partisanship “on the rise” in that clinical, abstract way that sounds objective. It’s always in a discussion about the current state of “discourse”, and it’s nearly always remarked on like the story is the spike in “disagreements”, and not about what the disagreements are actually about.This pervasive idea that somehow people being upset about the current state of affairs and the rise of actual fascism is some kind of aberration.

Like “Gee, people sure are arguing a lot these days. Boy howdy, they’re sure a feisty bunch, aren’t they?” Women literally had their right to an abortion taken away from them, we had armed fascists storming our God damn capital on the word of a President and current candidate, we had thousands die to a preventable illness because of rampant misinformation and right wing individualist propaganda, and still you hear this tone that people being really angry right now is weird.

Fucking Kurkusagst, a channel I have a lot of respect for, just the other day dropped a video blaming social media on the mounting political and social divisions in our country, and implying all will be well if we just stopped using big media platforms. Social media is definitely part of it, but anyone seriously acting like it’s the primary reason people are fucking pissed right now has to be some well-off straight white man, because the rest of us have some pretty damn good reasons to be pissed. I don’t need Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to make me angry, I just need to be paying the fuck attention.

It’s insulting to every women, every LGBT person, every non-white person, and every single person struggling to make a living right now to imply “social media is just getting us riled up.”

The saddest thing is that as I get older, I find my recall starting to fail. I’m struggling more and more to pull facts I know that I know. The deluge of information coming from my yammering maw is increasingly choppy and punctuated by trying to remember exact bits of info.

Should also be said that for various edge cases where a extension doesn’t exist, uBlock’s element selector function lets you get very granular with filtering things. If you know a bit of html/css, you can get creative with it and consistently hide just about any element you like across many different sites.

For example, recently I’ve been on a quest to de-rating all my favorite media sites and Google results, etc. No more wayward rotten tomatoes, metacritic, or imbd scores when I want to look up info on media unless I go looking for them on those websites. No addon that I’m aware of exists solely for this purpose, so I’m basically using uBlock to do it by using the element selector any time I see them. Some sites make this tricky, and any adjustment to the design of the page could break it, but the joy I get from being able to curate my web experience to exactly what I want to it to be can’t be understated.