Hasnain says:

TIL.

“A similar dynamic surfaced in the used-car market. While it’s common knowledge that used-car prices shot up during the pandemic, it’s less widely appreciated that a key reason was the decline in auto repossessions.

Since even used cars are well beyond the means of many Americans, about two-thirds of all auto purchases in the United States are financed with some kind of loan. Over the last decade, auto lending has expanded into the subprime market, as financiers embrace the kind of risky lending that led to the mortgage crisis in 2008. As a result, about two million cars are repossessed by lenders annually. These cars are then resold by dealers, forming a crucial part of the used-auto supply chain.”

Hasnain says:

“Even if the favorable economic conditions giving people the ability to turn down crappy jobs swing back in the other direction, the shift in attitudes could last longer. Devon Price, a social psychologist and author of Laziness Does Not Exist, says “the culture is changing rapidly, and dramatically.”

He says the obsession with work and productivity in the U.S. goes back to the Puritans and that over the centuries, it’s helped to justify colonialism, slavery, and the gutting of social supports for vulnerable populations. Living through a once-in-a-century pandemic, however, has exposed the hollowness of that belief system, and many people are exploring new ways of existing in the world that don’t center work.”

Hasnain says:

We just saw the documentary tonight and it’s every bit horrifying as the blurb makes it out to be. I don’t get how people can be this evil.

“Jennifer Turpin, and one of her sisters, Jordan Turpin, are telling their story for the first time in an exclusive interview with Sawyer. They are the first of the 13 Turpin children to share their stories. In their interview, the Turpin daughters described years of their parents, David and Louise Turpin, abusing them and their siblings, some of whom were shackled to beds for months at a time, and being deprived of food, hygiene, education and health care.”

Hasnain says:

““See you’re dodging it,” another worker interrupted, raising his voice. “A lot of [members] get better benefits when they join a union. That’s the whole point of this. Why would Amazon workers decide to form a union if Amazon was doing everything they wanted it to do?”

The representatives attempted to cut the worker off, but the worker continued, “No, I’m going to talk….You mentioned all these [mechanisms] that workers have to speak out. And what has Amazon done? Nothing. I’ve been at Amazon for six years, bro. What are we talking about here? The issues that were occurring in 2015 are occurring now. So you talk about using your voice? There has been no change at all. The same amount of personal time. The same amount of vacation time. The same amount of [unpaid time off]. People get fired left and right. People get sick. Amazon didn’t even want to tell nobody about COVID. What are we talking about?””

Hasnain says:

This is so horrifying.

“Other people in Warner’s orbit have declined to participate in this story, citing their fear of Warner and the need to protect their own mental health. “That’s in part why he got away with it for so long: Because victims of his felt completely ashamed that they still didn’t realize what was happening to them until it was way too late,” Bianco says. “He told the whole world and nobody tried to stop him.””

Hasnain says:

This was a scary and worrying read at how practices can be poor at large tech companies. So many scary quotes in here, but I’ll pick one that is really ironic because the PR response, while technically and legally correct, really misses the point and is misleading.

“In the midst of all that expansion, Gagnon wrote, breathtaking things were slipping through the cracks. Just that May, staffers had discovered that, for a period of two years, the names and American Express card numbers of up to 24 million customers had sat exposed on Amazon's internal network, outside a “secure zone” for payment data. It was as if a bank had realized that some sacks of cash had been left in a back office, outside the vault, for several seasons. The exposure was corrected, but the scariest part was that there was no way to be sure whether anyone had snooped on the payment credentials during all that time—because the data set's access logs only went back 90 days. “So we had no idea what the exposure actually was,” Gagnon remembers. “I was astonished by that.” (Bemisderfer says, “There is no evidence to suggest the data was ever exposed outside of our internal system in any way.”)”

Hasnain says:

“So far, management has made no internal comment on the suit, which is expected to play out over the next few months at least. It has created an awkward situation for a group of folks used to holding the powerful accountable. As one Post staffer put it to me, “We’re constantly demanding and shaming governments and companies for not being transparent. And here we are, the least transparent about our own internal issues — it’s stunning that management doesn’t seem to recognize the hypocrisy in that.””

Hasnain says:

Great reporting on a terrible situation. Don’t even know where to begin. I’ll probably start with two call outs I saw in follow up articles from gaming media where they called for his resignation.

First, (partly) in response to gender discrimination and allegations of unequal pay, they fired their old president and appointed two co-leads, one male and one female. And then proceeded to pay the woman less for the same job.

Second, in response to the initial allegations, Frances Townsend sent an incredibly shortsighted response that directly prompted a walkout. Kotick called the letter tone deaf and removed her from her position on an internal committee for employees concerns. Turns out Kotick had written the email and sent it from her account so it wouldn’t come from a man. Yikes.

“Those documents, which include memos, emails and regulatory requests, and interviews with former employees and others familiar with the company, however, cast Mr. Kotick’s response in a different light. They show that he knew about allegations of employee misconduct in many parts of the company. He didn’t inform the board of directors about everything he knew, the interviews and documents show, even after regulators began investigating the incidents in 2018. Some departing employees who were accused of misconduct were praised on the way out, while their co-workers were asked to remain silent about the matters.”

Hasnain says:

I’m glad the FTC is finally doing things to improve our lives.

“But it’s not just hedge fund-owned publishers that have adopted the subscription practices that have caught the government’s attention. Again, most U.S. news organizations don’t give readers an easy way to cancel online. When I checked — more than a week after the FTC announced it planned to crack down on companies who don’t make it easy to cancel — The New York Times still requires you to talk to someone if you want to unsubscribe, either by starting a live chat or by picking up the phone.”

Hasnain says:

This piece resonated a lot with me. Lots of interesting lessons relating to project management and engineering productivity - and how planning is quite hard to get right everywhere. I ended up side tracking and reading through most of the references because they were engaging.

“What I've seen happen instead is, when work starts on the projects, people will ask who's working the project and then will make a guess at whether or not the project will be completed on time or in an effective way or even be completed at all based on who ends up working on the project. "Oh, Joe is taking feature X? He never ships anything reasonable. Looks like we can't depend on it because that's never going to work. Let's do Y instead of Z since that won't require X to actually work". The roadmap creation and review process maintains the polite fiction that people are interchangeable, but everyone knows this isn't true and teams that are effective and want to ship on time can't play along when the rubber hits the road even if they play along with the managers, directors, and VPs, who create roadmaps as if people can be generically abstracted over.”