Y’all need to have a greater degree of 1- healthy suspicion in Alexa and corporate surveillance devices personal assistants, and 2- understanding of how dangerous this kind of algorithm is in the hands of a multinational company (and anyone for that matter.)
To begin with, that data is both available for sale and able to be subpoenaed by the government. Alexa’s records and recordings have already been used in criminal trials. In the US, a digital record of your emotional patterns can be used to deny you housing, jobs, and to rule on your ability to exercise your basic rights. Consider that psychiatric stigma and misdiagnosis can already be wielded against you in legal disputes and the notion of a listening device capable of identifying signs of distress for the purpose of marketing to you should be made more clearly concerning.
Moreover we have already seen the use of algorithms like this on Facebook and other “self-reporting” (read: user input) sites capable of identifying the onset of a manic episode [1][2][3], which have been subsequently been linked to identifying vulnerable (high-spending) periods to target ads at these users, perhaps most famously in selling tickets to Vegas (identified in a TedTalk by techno-sociological scholar Zeynep Tufekci where she more generally discusses algorithms and how they shape our online experiences to suggest and reinforce biases).
The notes on this post are super concerning- we are being marketed to under the guise of having our emotional needs attended to by the same people who inflicted that emptiness on us, and everyone is just memeing.
Basically, what’s going on right now is that the GOP is trying to push Heidi Heitkamp, democratic senator for North Dakota and first woman to hold the seat in our state, out of her seat by means of voter segregation. Following Kavanaugh being accepted onto the supreme court, she’s been seriously dropping in the polls. It’s been an absolute shitshow here because our state makes or breaks the Republicans gaining control of the senate. There’s a REALLY good piece on what’s going on here.
I know I have, like, two and a half fellow Fargo natives following me, so I’m gonna stress this: If you’re in North Dakota, your vote carries some serious weight! You don’t even need to go through the registration process, all you have to do is show up to a polling place with a valid ID. It’s that easy!
Remember to vote! November 6th! etc etc
I wanted to reblog this version because of the info and links, but also @thundercaya reblogged with a link to a Tweet on how Native voters in North Dakota on reservations can get around it: link to their reblog with the link here
Looks like it’s the correct procedure according to a news article, link here
Coloured and fixed up versions of my previous FMA:B sketches that I’ll be having as miniprints for Sydney’s Smashcon 2018! (Table A18 with Bok and Lia)
fuck if it’s this easy why do they close the goddamn road for like five months shit
all outta soub 😦
I work for the road crew in the summer. Crack sealing (the process you see above) is fairly quick and simple. (Though holding a hose that pumps literal tons of 350F tar into the road in the middle of the summer is NOT easy)
I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.
For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.
Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.
Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.
So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.
A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of road, not many of us, and soup is expensive.
Plot Designing 