dougmccune

This was studying Facebook circa 2004-2006. That version of Facebook was laughably basic at that point. If I remember right it was a chronological list of posts on your wall. There was no algorithmic feed. Hell, the news feed at all was only launched in late 2006. There was no video. There were no ads. Nobody made content hoping to get rich and outrage didn’t sell. If only we could go back to such an innocent time.

I spent 3 years living in one of the co-ops briefly mentioned in the article ("In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals."). I wouldn't call it an "anarchist house" but it sure as hell was a lot of fun to live there. I painted some of those murals that are now apparently gone. We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled. The alumni association owned the house, so we had to deal with all the maintenance. We came back to campus a week before everyone else every year to work on the house. We cooked and cleaned for ourselves. I've never since experienced anything close to that same feeling of communal pride. It was a mess, but it was our beautiful mess.

I recently got my first Apple Watch with a cellular plan specifically so I can leave my phone at home and still be reachable via phone and text message. Mostly it’s great. The watch barely works well enough as a phone, I can play Spotify, Apple Maps kind of works for directions (not nearly as well as Google maps on the phone IMO), and that’s basically all that’s usable, which is nice.

However, when dropping off my kid at school they require a Covid screening app (phone only) that you have to show every morning. I got half way to Whole Foods before turning back realizing I needed my phone to scan the Amazon Prime code to get better prices.

I expect more and more everyday activities will require smartphones sadly.

I know folks are disagreeing with you a bit in this thread, but I just wanted to say that I 100% agree with you. 17 year-old me could have written the same words after the loss of my mom. I know loss. I will never know your loss. To me, that acknowledgment is a show of respect.

Agree. And we haven’t even mentioned the new normal of the yearly smoke-filled skies from the increasingly severe wildfires.

All I was trying to do was push back on the bleak vision of boarded up commerce-less, restaurant-less, people-less streets being roamed by criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill. Yes, we have all sorts of issues, but the scene outside is much more like pre-pandemic life than the Walking Dead.

Homelessness has definitely increased in the last 2 years, as it has throughout all of California. The high cost of housing and income inequality are absolutely massive problems that have gotten significantly worse since the onset of the pandemic. We certainly have problems, and housing costs and drug overdoses are absolutely serious issues that are trending the wrong way. But to claim that Berkeley is a ghost town with almost no retail and half of restaurants shuttered is just pure fiction. I drove through campus the other day and a group of kids was playing beer pong on their front lawn. People are everywhere. The commercial areas are back with foot traffic. It’s not anything like the original commenter described. It’s like they went out once in March 2020 and then never left the house again.

This is so far from reality I have a hard time even knowing how to respond. Just in case people who don’t live here think the Bay Area cities have become this dystopian hell hole as described, no, they absolutely have not. Life is honestly nearly back to normal. I’m going out to dinner with a friend in Berkeley tonight. The streets will not be empty or filled with drug addicts.

This is probably just grass is greener stuff, but I've seen the opposite. Now, that said, this was post acquisition, but my anecdote is that in our case the ICs were shielded from all the office politics shenanigans and were able to just focus on delivering work. Meanwhile, those in management positions were repeatedly pulled into agenda-less meetings, were "voluntold" for tasks unrelated to their jobs, and were generally unhappy. Obviously it all depends on the culture within an organization. But in our case we worked really hard to shield the ICs from the BS, but those in management bore the brunt, and the burn out and resignations reflected that.

It’s not paywalled. OP probably saw the name Elsevier and assumed it was paywalled, but it’s open access and licensed CC BY.

The article wasn’t about Messenger Kids though. If you click through to the actual slide deck that was leaked it shows that the current status quo is that Messenger Kids is the only product in the portfolio that is available for kids. The future state they envision is one in which all their products are available to kids, but tailored for those users. So that means IG and FB.

I’m a parent of a 9 year old and 7 year old. My 9 yo has Messenger Kids. I agree it’s a pretty well designed app. But it’s just messaging (and some games). It’s like the telephone. I don’t mind that. But IG and FB are different things entirely. My concern isn’t that my kid can chat with his friends. It’s in the compare and despair, the constant posting of fake versions of your perfect life to make others feel jealous, and the algorithmic promotion of outrage (sorry, I mean high engagement) content.

Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend days going back and forth over email with a customer trying to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the phone!

> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...

My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.

That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I think this stems from the assumption that the response will be useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.

I live in Oakland. This incident seems to be back in early March. Back then the large vaccination sites were all listed on myturn.ca.gov (ie the Oakland Coliseum). They'd post new batches of appointments and they would be all booked really fast (within minutes or hours). But Curative was also running vaccinations sites in Oakland and Berkeley. They weren't listed on the myturn website, so people didn't know about them. They would post new appointments and they would be available for days, sometimes even available right up until the appointment time. This was during the time when you had to be 65+ or have a health condition. In my social circle there were many ineligible people sending links around for the Curative appointments. There was definitely a mentality of "there are so many open appointments, they're just going to go unused." Whether that was true or not I don't know, but there was definitely a reality that certain vaccine sites that were not integrated into the central database had tons of openings, while people who didn't know how to find the secret links were left to reload myturn.ca.gov constantly hoping to find appointments. It was also public knowledge that nobody ever checked that you qualified with a valid medical condition. So getting a vaccine appointment at that time for a totally healthy 25 year old was as simple as someone texting you a link and clicking a single checkbox to say you had a medical condition. In my small social circle, I know of that happening at least a few times.