Sam Whited @sam@social.coop

Actually, I wonder if this would be a good fit for the social.coop list of possible services eventually? One of the things I like about innoreader (and probably also some open source/hosted ones) is that you can share feeds with others which is a thing I wish more companies would setup for employees (having all ops people subscribed to the same security alerts feed for example). /cc @redoak

Fedifolks: I need a new feed reader that I don't have to host myself that includes an Android app and has a free tier. Innoreader has been great, but the free tier shows ads and limits the number of feeds you can have and I'm no longer making enough money to justify paying for it. Recommendations?

I vaguely remember an empty "FORCE" target being used for this (which is a dependency of the thing you want to always update). Feels jank, but maybe I should just go with that.

Is there a reasonably portable way (preferably POSIX, or at least NetBSD and GNU make) to make a file always re-generate regardless of access time? Something like NetBSD make's "!" rules except that works with GNU Make. PHONY feels wrong semantically since it actually is a file, but also it does exactly what I want so maybe I should give up and use that.

Alternatively: require that companies add hours to your timecard equal to your average commute time (we'll be handwavey about how this is calculated). Companies would probably only hire people who live near them which wouldn't be ideal, but maybe it would also encourage them to advocate for easier transit and what not.

Suddenly companies would have good reason to push for affordable houses, public transit hookups, etc. in rich areas. Or maybe they'd start lobbying the cities to build better bike infrastructure. Or maybe it would all be terrible, I honestly don't know.

Thought experiment: What would happen if you required companies with a physical presence to pay employees a wage that would let them live within, say, biking distance of work? I suspect it would make areas around public transit much more popular, and it might create an incentive for places to move to poorer areas (which may be great for the economy but could also make polluting factories in poorer areas even worse).

Final thought: before tech bros start shouting that they aren't doing it to deliberately pay PoC less: intentions don't matter. Saying "we're just paying market rate in those areas" is saying "we're just taking advantage of the effects racism" and if you're sitting in a position of privilege and using the racism of others to make money and more fully cement your privilege you might as well have done the deed yourself. Okay, rant over, thanks for listening.

That may be a bad example because Tulsa is majority white these days, but the point still stands. If you're complaining about how you can't find any people of color to hire and it's not your fault your San Francisco based tech company is all 20-something white dudes, maybe stop paying people in Atlanta less than their fair share and continuing the deliberate wage suppression of majority black areas. …

Ignoring for a moment that we could easily change how we think about that and give the same labor the same value anywhere (shout out to https://toot.cat/@zkat/106311086662275383), we have to take history into account. Tech companies may not have been responsible for the Tulsa massacre, but if they're paying people in Tulsa less for the same work they're still perpetuating the inability to build wealth that was created by racists wiping out a major economic center. …

Companies like to say that they're taking steps to make sure that black workers aren't payed less than their white colleagues, but then these same companies often refuse to release data about salaries. Their hiring pages often tell the story though: they explicitly say they'll pay you less if you live in the South East and in many majority-black cities. When pushed on this companies often try to use the excuse "we're just obeying market forces." …

I put this in a reply a moment ago, but it got me thinking about it and I wanted to try and write it out for everyone to think about. This comes with the disclaimer that I'm a white guy with no knowledge of economics who would also benefit from this practice changing, so I'm no expert. However… companies that pay less for the same labor because you don't live in San Francisco are perpetuating racist hiring practices. cont…

First day I've had off in a week or two and I *should* be working on the tech co-op I'm trying to start. Instead I'm working on a side project that will never pay the bills and going mountain biking. Oh well, I needed the outside time.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I'm pretty sure the book I was describing is Andre Norton’s "Here Abide Monsters" and at least one of the others I read was "Moon of Three Rings" (which I'm pretty sure was my favorite of the 3 or 4 books by her our library had). Now to start scouring paperback stores and local libraries.

I have been trying to figure out what these books were on and off for *years* now, so any help would be appreciated.