combatwombat@feddit.online

I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of being a call center employee as a ticket to the middle class. I think I see the “call center employees might be trafficked” narrative more often than “call center jobs are an entry to white-collar employment”

The ILO paper calls the underlying risk a white-collar bypass: the office jobs that carried a generation into the middle class in higher-income countries may not fully materialize in today’s lower-income economies. The broader version of that story is not yet visible in the headcount data. White-collar employment in these countries is not only growing but paying well. Nevertheless, the decline in call centers in middle- and lower-income countries may be a harbinger of what is to come, since the occupation that best fits the description of the exposed, entry-level, formal office job is indeed the one disappearing so quickly and so broadly after the release of ChatGPT.

I gotchu fam: https://archive.ph/SuXwX

You can call me a grumpy old man if you want, but the late 2000s are years like 2095, not 2008.

Live a happy life, and then when they ask you what the secret to your happiness is, hit em with the “I haven’t looked at a Grok summary or a Facebook post in 37 years.”

Its quite the opposite in the US, in fact. If I say “I went to the football match last night to watch the Sounders, and they were poor. Pedro finally saw the pitch and stayed tight to the touchline until he came off with a knock,” it sounds like I’m trying to be posh. A working class person would say “I went to the soccer game last night to watch the Sounders, and they are bad. Pedro finally saw the field and stayed close to the sideline until he came off injured.” Soccer’s history in the US is immigrant and working class – the Philadelphia Ukrainians who organized around their immigrant identity, or Bethlehem Steel who organized around their union – and when Americans attempt to affect Britishness, it does not sound working class at all, it sounds like pretense.

We call it soccer in the PNW because that’s what the lumber workers who brought the game here called it when they immigrated. I’m not sure they were particularly posh.

My city has removed the minimum wage exemption for tipped employees and raised the minimum wage to $21.30 so I have stopped tipping.

I don’t have the setup but if you do, they have a way to share your data with scientists

As I wrote in BAN Issue #1042, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket is going to hit the moon next week, on August 5, 2026. The impact time is predicted to be 06:34:33 UTC (02:34:33 Eastern US time). The upper stage will impact near the crater Einstein in the northwest portion of the moon, which, unfortunately, will be lit by the sun at the time. That will make seeing any impact flash difficult.

But not impossible! A paper has come out detailing the event, and the plans to observe it. It’s not likely to be visible by amateur telescopes, but hey, “amateurs” have pretty sophisticated equipment these days, so I would encourage anyone with a good setup and some experience give it a try. You’ll need to take video — the flash will be very brief, so capturing it during a short image exposure of the sunlit moon is extremely unlikely. The paper also talks about how to share data if you get any.

I am reminded of this passage from the Ministry of Time:

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”

And I might point out that it isn’t what history is written that is important, but what history is studied and taught.