Economy

Very Normal Things, Truly

A house was demolished on accident while the owner was away. Also, Canada is looking into UBI, a judge was fired for pointing a gun at someone in court, Reddit may pull out of search results, and a slightly successful device launched in 2001.

Endeavorance

Oct 23, 2023 — 5 min read

Sorry About Your House

Consider the following: You are out on vacation, having a good ol' time. Maybe you saw a dolphin. Perhaps you took a picture, or even ate a food item from a menu at a location.

Well then your vacation comes to an end, and so you board a mode of transportation and make your way home, only to find that someone came onto your property and demolished a house you own.

That is what happened to Susan Hodgson of Georgia, as she came home to a literal pile of rubble where an old family house once stood. I want to note that this does not appear to be her primary residence, but is instead a house that had been in her family for generations. It was vacant, but they kept it in shape and paid for its property taxes and whatnot.

A demo crew showed up on her property while she was gone and destroyed the house. When a neighbor got involved, the crew got mad at her and told her to mind her own business. It wasn't until later when a family member went over to see what was going on, and the person in charge of the crew checked their permit and saw they were at the wrong address. It was uh… too late.

Hodgson is currently figuring out what she'll do from here. My vote is have the demo company put the house back together from the rubble like a jigsaw puzzle.

Canada Considering UBI

Sorta. They're looking into it. Kinda.

The Canadian senate is investigate Universal Basic Income as a bill is making a bit of forward movement. Nothing is guaranteed (or even super likely) at this point, but its more than nothing.

The bill would provide a guaranteed "livable basic income" for Canadian residents 18 and older, including permanent non-citizen residents and residents with legal refugee status.

In the past, some Canadian provinces have tried smaller UBI programs and saw positive results. In 1974, Manitoba tried out a minimum income project, during which time they saw a notable drop in mental health hospitalizations and school dropouts.

Weird how when a society works together to help people who need it, people benefit and the society flourishes. Strange, that. It's almost like humans literally evolved to work in collaboration with each other to ensure health, safety and security.

Normal Shit, Like A Judge Pointing a Loaded Gun At a Defendant

New York Judge Robert J. Putorti has been fired after an investigation of an incident dating all the way back to the before-times, in 2015.

Back then, before the the hyper popular social media platform "X" even existed, Putorti pointed a loaded handgun at a man in his courtroom, claiming that it was because the man approached the stand too quickly.

Putorti would then go on to spend years boasting about the incident, often playing up how large the man was, and always emphasizing that he was a Black man, claiming he was "built like a football player," despite the man being 6 feet and 165 pounds.

But to be clear: this judge brandished a loaded weapon at someone in his court. Like. What. And then went on to be like "yeah, I pointed this gun at this huge Black guy." A judge. Who can like, put people in jail and shit.

Anyway, 8 years on, he's finally fired. I'm always out here talking about how the gears of justice turn swiftly.

Reddit Still Following Twitter

After a big meltdown earlier this year brought on by Reddit's CEO Steven Huffman (aka Spez) following in Elon Musk's footsteps and praising Musk's changes to Twitter, Reddit is making further moves to just fuck up what made their platform at all useful

Reddit is reportedly considering blocking Google and Bing from indexing the site, essentially removing Reddit from search results for the vast majority of internet users. It was originally reported by the Washington Post that Reddit was considering requiring people to log in to the site in order to read anything, but that has since been updated to say they're just considering pulling out of search.

Their claims are that the goal is to stop generative AI systems from using Reddit content without paying. I wanna draw attention to that specifically, though: "without paying." Reddit is gonna be fine with all the content you put on their platform being used to train AIs, but they want a cut. To be clear: you don't get a cut. They do.

This comes at a time where Google, Bing and other search engines are notably dropping in quality while also trying to figure out how "the next iteration of search" will work. Both Google and Bing are investing heavily in generative AI search assistants, while normal search results increasingly become cluttered with useless garbage, often also generated by AI.

The removal of Reddit from Google search results will further hamper things. Reddit search results became fairly useless earlier this year during the height of the protests to the policy changes I mentioned at the beginning of this section, as subreddits set themselves to "private" en masse, making most links on Google to Reddit useless. And unfortunately, Reddit remains a rare place online where actual conversation can happen, making it a useful resource for digging into topics such as product reviews or "how do I do this specific thing?"

Anyway, lol. We're finally so late stage in for-profit web infrastructure that all these massive sites are just trying to play chicken with each other. Don't mind me sincerely hoping things get so bad that people finally discover that it is a truly bad idea to let massive corporations run the vast majority of the commonly used web.

On This day…

On this day in 2001, Apple released the first iPod. Despite other personal audio devices already being on the market, the product line flourished to unprecedented levels of success, at times taking up more than 70% of the market share of all portable audio devices.

The iPod line was eventually discontinued in May 2022 after selling over 450,000,00 products.