Mon, 29 Jan 2024 12:47:36 -0800

*Rohtak and New Delhi, India:* Dhuli Chand was 102 years old on September 8,
2022, when he led a wedding procession in Rohtak, a district town in the
north Indian state of Haryana.

As is customary in north Indian weddings, he sat on a chariot in his wedding
finery, wearing garlands of Indian rupee notes, while a band played
celebratory music and family members and villagers accompanied him.

But instead of a bride, Chand was on his way to meet government officials.

Chand resorted to the antic to prove to officials that he was not only alive
but also lively. A placard he held proclaimed, in the local dialect: “thara
foofa zinda hai”, which literally translates to “your uncle is alive”.

Six months prior, his monthly pension was suddenly stopped because he was
declared “dead” in government records.

Under Haryana’s Old Age Samman Allowance scheme, people aged 60 years and
above, whose income together with that of their spouse doesn't exceed
300,000 rupees ($3,600) per annum, are eligible for a monthly pension of
2,750 rupees ($33).

In June 2020, the state started using a newly built algorithmic system “ the
Family Identity Data Repository or the Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) database
“ to determine the eligibility of welfare claimants.

The PPP is an eight-digit unique ID provided to each family in the state and
has details of birth and death, marriage, employment, property, and income
tax, among other data, of the family members. It maps every family’s
demographic and socioeconomic information by linking several government
databases to check their eligibility for welfare schemes.  The state said
that the PPP created “authentic, verified and reliable data of all
families”, and made it mandatory for citizens to access all welfare schemes.

But in practice, the PPP wrongly marked Chand as “dead”, denying him his
pension for several months. Worse, the authorities did not change his “dead”
status even when he repeatedly met them in person.  [...]

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/1/25/in-india-an-algorithm-declares-them-dead-they-have-to-prove-theyre

The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of
workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/technology/tech-layoffs-millennials-gen-x.html

I was completely unimpressed by the Washington Post article on Tesla's
autosteering feature.  Cancel that: I was disgusted.

I am hardly a Tesla fan.  But the author of the article complained that the
automatic STEERING feature blew through stop signs.  No duh.  My Kia Niro
would do the same thing; steering has nothing to do with controlling speed.
Anybody who expects a steering feature to recognize speed bumps, stop signs,
etc. is far too stupid to operate an automobile, let alone write a
*WashPost* column on technology.

This item, as well as the next one about Tesla's Autopilot, show a strangely
ignored fact: These systems are simply not ready for public use.  Would you
accept an accounting system which makes simple calculation errors, or a
search application which invents nonexistent results rather than seek them?

> In freezing temperatures, the batteries of electric vehicles can be less
> efficient and have shorter range, a lesson many Tesla drivers in Chicago
> learned this week.

There is an old joke that we are lucky the car industry grew up in Detroit
rather than in Miami. Otherwise every time it snowed, all cars would come to
a halt.

Now we know it's true!

The ads on my phone have two sizes,
  1) A few lines at the bottom of the screen, and
  2) Full screen.

The full screen ones, no matter what app they appear in, these days all say
things like "press to continue" or "press for next step". I.e., fooling the
user into thinking it is the app doing the talking.

With the "few lines at the bottom of the screen" ads, no matter what
wild things it says, we still know it is just an ad, because the babble
appears in the ad spot.

So when apps get "one star ratings" it is often due to the ads in the
apps, not the apps themselves. But they are still deserved, due to the
developer taking the risk to allow full screen ads.