partial_accumen

I appreciate alternate methods of business, but some of your statements here are worrying.

there is the temporary furlough route,

but you also said earlier…

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire at “the top” needing a second yacht.

Furlough sounds like another name for layoff here.

but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.

Ideally sounds like wishful thinking. They’re already limiting their work because they only work with NGOs or non-profits, which are usually cash strapped. Further, the lower pay to tech workers mean that the workers have less of a financial cushion should the work dry up for a time. This goes back to my first post that tech workers that don’t live a country with strong social safety nets may find tech co-ops a risky employer.

more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims

Yeah yeah fuck the rich, but billionaires are a small fraction of the owners of IT consulting companies. The majority of them are small boutique firms rather than giant fortune 500 companies.

One answer could be that the organization maintains a large fund to act as a buffer to maintain salaries between contracts instead of operating “paycheck-to-paycheck.”

Thats great in concept, but keep in mind they’re already taking customers that likely have small or limited budgets. Where does this extra buffer come from? The only income stream is delivering on limited contracts to cash strapped NGOs and non-profits. Remember, they took corporate work at one point, but hated it. Corporate work is where the bigger bill rates for delivery of contract service come from.

An even simpler answer could be that the co-op chooses to take on a large number of small contracts instead of a small number of large ones, such that the revenue is relatively consistent to begin with.

Its amazing if your org can get so much contract work that there’s jobs available to turn down. This usually requires a dedicated sales and marketing staff, which don’t generate any revenue for the co-op, only delivery of services to. So the sales and marketing arm are yet another drain on the already meager amounts earned from contract awards.

If there was surplus money to be made large for-profit contracting companies would be in here already doing some or all of this work.

the difference in salary they’re talking about is more along the lines of small business vs venture capital-backed startup or established huge corporation.

That would make sense if the organization is revenue generating with its own business efforts instead of enabling other organizations, which is what it sounds like is the case for this tech co-op. The co-op doesn’t seem to generate anything of their own. It sounds like they get contract work from NGOs and non-profits. If there is no work, or not enough, what happens to the co-op workers?

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire

So when the NGO and non-profit contract work declines or dries up entirely for a time and there is less or no money coming in, how do salaries get paid at 100%? Does each tech co-op worker simply get a small percentage of the remaining income? How long do workers actively working contracts for NGOs/non-profits in the co-op continue to subsidize those that don’t/can’t get placed on work?

Certainly, but this is a different animal. What you’re describing is non-profit organization that retains employees doing IT. Like a for-profit, the employee has the expectation of a job irrespective of the level of project work the organization has. The non-profit will have a similar reporting structure and expectations on the IT worker, with the upside that the IT worker is deriving not only benefit from their salary, but from the good the non-profit is doing.

Contrast that with the IT contracting world were rates for IT work are much higher than a standard retained IT worker. The reason the pay is higher is because of the risk to the worker they may be unemployed with the work dries up. So from what I gather from the article this tech co-op is the worst of both worlds: low pay, low job security.

I’d love to be corrected if anyone has IT co-op knowledge/experience.

You also don’t have to make redundancies once the contract’s finished. It’s a universal fact that being a co-op is a tick in your favor.

I’m interested in specifics on this. If the co-op is purely doing contract work and the contract ends, how are they able to continue to pay workers on the bench? How long are workers allowed to be on the bench if they can’t be place on contract work?

We did some work with a couple of corporates and our developers hated it. So, we said we’d focus on charities and NGOs, the public sector and education.

There are a limited number of charities and NGOs, and many times these customers are the most squeezed for budget, meaning lower amounts of income to the co-op.

Another significant hurdle is salary competitiveness. Generally, programmers can secure higher wages outside the tech worker co-operative sector in both countries.

I think this is the buried lede. How much is income reduced to tech workers vs traditional employers? Without strong social safety nets in the country a co-op with a much lower salary may not be a viable option because unemployment would leave the former workers without resources to live on.

If anyone has any experience with tech co-ops and can fill in the gaps of my understanding, I’d be interested to hear it.

Remember 2015? A Tesla parked in your driveway told your neighbours that you valued innovation, that you possessed an environmental conscience, that you had a stake in the future of the planet. The cars weren’t perfect, but they meant something. They represented hope - for clean energy, EVs, and a world beyond fossil fuels.

This was me years go. I knew climate change was real and an imminent threat. I wanted to vote with my wallet for a cleaner future. I also wanted to strike a blow against the National Automotive Dealers Association for their regressive practices that hurt consumers and drive prices for cars higher for everyone. Buying a Tesla did those things. I charge the car on sunlight from my house. I don’t have to support the petroleum industry’s damage to environment and people around the world. I was proud to be doing something rather than just talking about needs for changes against climate change.

Musk doesn’t get any of my money from this car. I don’t pay for any of the Tesla monthly services. I’m don’t want to be seen driving with a Tesla logo on the car. I’m ashamed that my good intentions funded a fascist.

I’m getting that now too. I don’t know the players in Mozilla. The quote without context made me think this was one of those Mozilla execs.

Really? I would think most would consider them for what they are: evasive and probably deceptive

Pornhub now remembers what sort of porn you like while browsing incognito.

Are you sure? All incognito windows run in the same memory space. If you open one window and do something in it, that session data is available to any other open incognito window open. To clear this ALL incognito windows need to be closed. Once they are all closed, you should be able to open a single new one and have no remnants of the previous sessions left over for the website to know you. The exceptions to this are if they are tracking activity from your IP address or if they are using Browser Fingerprinting on your session so they know even if you come from a different IP they know its your computer.

I run into the IP tracking sometimes. The wife will be doing searches for some specific thing, and I’ll see youtube recommendations show up on those topics even though I’m running youtube via incognito on completely different hardware (but we’re both using the same public IP).

“I am doing things that are not selling your data which some people consider to be selling your data”

Why is he so cryptic? Neil, why don’t you tell me what those things are and let me be the judge?

For example, in Italy, the workforce is highly fragmented due to numerous small and medium-sized consultancy firms working for the same client. Each company might assign only a few workers to a project, scattering employees across different locations. Since workers serving the same client have different legal employers, it’s unclear whom to address with demands, making organizing particularly challenging. This dynamic doesn’t exist in the same way in the US.

Ouch. This absolutely exists in the US too. It is concerning that organizers that claim to be experts in tech organizations don’t have this awareness.

The full cure is a non-Chrome-based browser, obviously.

I know, I use one as my primary browser actually!

I’m not arguing in bad faith. I want to have a Chrome based browser with Manifest V2 in addition to that. For those that have the same desire, I’m offering info on that. Thats it.

There are Chrome based addons that require manifest V2 that are NOT adblockers. Again, just because you want it for adblocking doesn’t mean your use case is the only one that exists.

There is no full cure. Nothing will offer a Chrome based browser support Manifest v2 after July. Your “cure” is “give up now”. Which, hey, if you want to, go for it. But for those that don’t for their own reasons, why are you so upset about them having the info about other browsers? I’m offering people information on a option that will preserve the functionality of manifest v2 Chrome based browsers or if they’re already using them that are still working meanwhile the article we’re talking about is referencing that functionality being removed early.

I find it bizarre that these downvoters are so obsessed with people not having this information. How is this information in peoples hands hurting YOU so much? If you don’t want to use Vivaldi? Don’t! I’m not your dad. Move on and the people that want this info have it.

Yes.

I really appreciate the honesty, thank you. I now don’t have to care that those downvotes are rational.

Following this same logic I imagine you downvote news of any treatments that extend the life of cancer patients because the new treatments aren’t full cures.

Wait, is that all? Because its not a permanent forever fix for Edge users its downvote worthy?

• Maybe Vivaldi or Brave users are reading this article thinking their Manifest v2 support is ending at the same time as Edge? It isn’t and I’m letting those users know.

• Maybe there is some critical functionality someone needs in a Chrome based browser and they’ll take Manifest v2 support wherever they can get it for as long as they can?

Do you think your specific situation, and therefore your specific desired solution, is the only one in the world that exists?

Vivaldi still supports V2 Manifest (including ublock Origin) until July, I believe. Brave too, I think.

edit: I find it fascinating how mentions of Vivaldi (or other browsers) always gets so many downvotes. Why do downvoters care so much about browsers they don’t use?

Gulfy McGulfface? Are we still doing that meme?

Jan 26 2024

"For a few minutes on Jan. 26, 20 people were in space at the same time. The International Space Station (ISS) hosted 11 of them — seven long-term crewmembers and four visitors on the private Ax-3 mission — and three occupied China’s Tiangong space station.

The other six were aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane, which reached suborbital space on the company’s Galactic 06 mission. Four of those six were passengers, while two were piloting Unity on Galactic 06, which lasted about an hour from liftoff to touchdown. "

source

As you can see on the site right now, the number of people in space right now is ten. For those of us that follow spaceflight, the most exciting day was when, for a few minutes, there were TWENTY. That is a record for all of humanity. We’ve never had that many in space at once ever.