Transplanting a Seattleite

I attended the OAC / MEPFP meeting remotely, so that R. could bring the tandem to Florence and try it out with J. It seems to have gone well. Also, the meeting with the metal artist that was supposed to be today has been moved to next Tuesday.

T. wanted to go to lunch, but I had that meeting, so we’re going to try for dinner tonight.

I’ve been digging through old email and catching up on reading and deleting. Today, I found in my climate newsletter email, a reference to this:

https://www.bioliteenergy.com/pages/backup?srsltid=AfmBOooMpuWiBf16Mgt_tJMO1TgAi5_BZgXyPqKKHwcoLXr94ejnrooO

I had no idea! Coming soon, apparently (this fall). I had been thinking we’d be in a world in which appliances incorporated a rechargeable battery, a la the fancy induction stovetop, but nope. Apparently it’s going to be a thing you plug into the wall and then you plug your appliance into, a la UPS, but even simpler. Sweet!

First, recycle your textiles! Don’t put them in the trash. Clean them and put them in a clothing and etc. donation bin, either at your municipal collection facility or wherever your donation bins are found. They will sort them, for sure in the United States, and probably relatively quickly all over the EU. They recently mandated recycling textiles.

Second, lots of people don’t know this, which is unfortunate. Find your textile recycling, and if you need help with that, feel free to ask in the comments and I will do what I can to identify an appropriate option near you.

There is a lot of rhetoric around “fast fashion”. I don’t want to dive too deeply into it, but I do want to point to this:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230227-how-to-recycle-your-clothes

“ Each year, more than 100 billion items of clothing are produced globally, according to some estimates, with 65% of these ending up in landfill within 12 months. ”

The links do not lead to a useful source on second claim, and the first claim is not technically true, in an important way that helps explain the second claim.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/how-many-clothes-produced

This has better sourcing and a lot more humility. We don’t really know how much clothing is produced annually. Also, a very large fraction “up to 40%” of clothing produced and offered for sale is never actually sold, according to that Vogue piece. That could actually be most if not all of the 65% in a landfill within 12 month.

I entertained the idea that small children and the rapidity with which they go through clothing being an explanation for the rest of the 65%, but ultimately concluded that there was something else going on. People latch onto another number — the (92?) millions of tons of textiles that go to landfills every year, convert it to garments and arrive at 60 billion, and I think that’s how we got the 65% in the landfill. But who knows! I’d love to see a source on any of this.

Obviously, if you have ever used a bath towel, kitchen towel, slept on a sheet, under a blanket or comforter or snuggled with a stuffie on a couch possibly with a throw blanket and a small pillow, you know perfectly well that there are plenty of textiles out there that are not garments. Don’t put those in the trash either! They, too, can be recycled as textiles.

But yeah, a lot of irresponsible, unsourced doom-y statistics out there. Like worrying about microplastics coming off your polyester clothing when you walk around or wash it, it misses the point entirely. Primary microplastics from those sources are miniscule compared to secondary microplastics from larger items that are landing in our oceans and rivers. And miniscule compared to tire dust, honestly.

Should you do clothing swaps and shop at thrifts? Sure, why not. I don’t really care, but if you need assistance in figuring out where to recycle textiles, ask for help, here or in your own community, so you know where to put textiles when you are done with them.

I recently learned about the disruptions of weather balloon launches due to loss of staff at NOAA because Those Awful People.

I started by asking the question: do we still need weather balloons or have satellites gotten Good Enough. When I asked that question, I found this pieces at ars:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/should-we-be-concerned-about-the-loss-of-weather-balloons/

This felt extremely ambiguous. A lot of other discussion of this topic focuses on the perpetrators of the change (agree that those folks are reprehensible!), rather than whether the change will make a meaningful difference in forecast quality.

Along the way, I learned that weather balloons contain, typically, helium. Under the previous administration, the helium reserve was sold off. Learning about that made me aware of two things. First, helium is mostly collected as part of fossil fuel extraction. Second, helium is very important for MRI machines; it is used in liquid form for cooling the magnets. I also learned that under the previous administration weather balloons in Alaska switched to produced-on-site hydrogen, so as to avoid having to ship in helium. Hydrogen poses its own safety risks. I then asked, can we do MRI using something else super cooling? I learned about i_Vision which may or may not be what is in this:

https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/technology/blueseal-helium-free-mri

To recap: we really needed weather balloons in the 1970s. Specific balloon launch failures identifiably led to missed forecasts and identifiable people dying as recently as the 1979 Windsor Locks hurricane. Decades of improvements in GOES satellites in combination with little to no research on the added benefit from weather balloons means it is impossible to know right now just how much is lost by reducing or eliminating weather balloon launches.

Weather balloons use a fossil mineral — helium — in limited supply and recently in shortage, and this is a one time use of helium. MRI machines are not single time users. While new technology (drastically reduced or eliminated helium needs in MRI machines) may reduce our competing needs for helium over time, it would be prudent to take a hard look at the weather balloons use of helium and consider whether it could safely be replaced with hydrogen. But there’s no need to do that if weather balloons are not adding identifiable value to weather prediction, versus GOES satellites.

When I started this process, this was not the answer I was expecting to arrive at. That’s been happening to me a lot over recent years. GLP 1s didn’t immediately turn into a fen phen style disaster. I actually value the AI summary of customer reviews on Amazon. And maybe we can reduce or eliminate our use of weather balloons or at least the helium in weather balloons.

ETA: I later learned that helium is also used in rockets, some but not all of which can be recovered. Helium is also used in deep diving (heliox) some of which can be replaced with hydrogen. Weather balloons have forced me to really understand helium in a way that nothing about my life prepared me for. I don’t know that I am grateful, but I am fascinated, and looking at the periodic table and contemplating methodically applying the same degree of research to the unfamiliar elements of it. Possibly the familiar ones as well.

I was having a great phone convo with K today about the various fiber machinery out there that has been downscaled to home level / hobby / craft production. I was trying to figure out if we’re headed into a world in which you can farm-to-sweater like you can farm-to-table restaurant.

Obviously, reddit was the correct place to figure this out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sheep/comments/18anz4h/has_anyone_had_sheep_they_sheered_then_had_the/?rdt=62532

ETA

I asked the expanded version of this mumble on FF last night, and P told me about a llama farm in the PacNW that sells stuff made from the fiber from the farm. He did not know if it was made on the farm or the processing was outsourced. The following is a link to a llama farm on this coast that does similar things:

https://www.outofsightalpacas.com/

He also mentioned Pendleton, which I knew about (having purchased their very nice products on occasion) but did not realize was a cooperative. I’ll try to remember to look into that later today.

And here is where he got the extremely cool hatchet he keeps in his car in case he needs to clear a tree.

https://bentelbowworks.com/

It looked like a really nice hatchet.

Finally, P is slightly older than me and still very, very active and so he had a solution for R.’s ankle compression issue. Ankle compression sleeves from here (altho you can also buy them at regular online stores as well):

https://kemford.store/


ETA:

I looked at Pendleton, and then for related articles about the ranches which supply wool to Pendleton. Pendleton is family owned, private, and while they continue to buy domestically produced wool, they also buy globally. The people they buy from domestically are, in the articles, often ranches still in family hands, often with a handshake connection to Pendleton that goes back a hundred or so years (to the beginning of Pendleton). This is not a coop on either side, but I can see how it might look and at times sound that way.

Recently, I read this column by Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-04/citi-traders-didn-t-know-the-rules, which includes this paragraph:

“That trader argued that “there was scarce compliance training while he was in his role from 2014 and had raised concerns numerous times about the processes.” Nobody told him that he wasn’t allowed to do this, he said, and a court agreed. Citi wasn’t allowed to do it, so it had to fire him, but he didn’t know that he wasn’t allowed to do it, so Citi wasn’t allowed to fire him.”

Shortly before that, I listened to the multi-part Odd Lots about the tournament system in raising chickens, Beak Capitalism.

Here is how that system is presented by the perpetrators: https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/tournament-system/

Obviously, random factors result in a ton of the flock-to-flock variance (did the flock get bird flu, say); it’s not all under the control of the person feeding and housing the flock.

Finally, I think we’ve all absorbed, from direct participation or consuming news or talking to friends who gave it a try, how the Uber/Lyft/Instacart/etc. all offload a lot of investment cost and a disproportionate amount of the risk-that-cannot-be-controlled onto “independent” operators who are locked into a system in which they will be lucky not to lose all their investment and have virtually zero chance of making their money back.

Obviously, franchising systems and MLMs have existed since forever, and are more of the same. Why do people do this? Well, people would like to “be their own boss”, “have more control over their schedule”, struggle to find regular jobs, etc., are all reasons, and often the fairly slick presentation of the people marketing these “opportunities” can pry capital out of the hands of family members that the person wanting to give this a try otherwise are struggling to access. Starting one’s own business is inherently risky, and these presentations provide answers to a lot of the questions people might have and create a sense that Oh, I Know How to Do This Now and If I Work Hard I’ll Be Successful because of course that’s what the company selling this tells them.

I think the thing that I can’t quite figure out is why we keep having journalism around this stuff, including really high quality financial journalism, and it just isn’t made clear how all of these things offload investment costs AND risk onto the people least aware of them and least able to bear them. The companies know they are offloading cost and risk. That’s the whole fucking point of these weird structures.

Are people just not noticing?

These are MY TERMS, and other people mean different things by these terms, so I’m going to explain my terms.

Once Upon a Time, R. and I went out to dinner at Bondir in Concord. We had a reservation. We were seated. The server rolled up with a big smile. I was like, do we know her? And she was like, ha ha, there’s a smiley face next to you on the computer. Turns out that restaurants often connect a phone number from a reservation to credit card payment information with the net result that if you are a big tipper, you’ll get better service starting when they have your phone number. This was not the beginning of my journey to massively overtipping on the regular, but it was definitely lit it on fire. Also, weird. I don’t think restaurants invented this system to reward overtipping; I think they invented this system as a side effect of other needs, but if they did invent it to keep tabs (har de har har) on customers, it was more to make sure they remember who they’d already 86’d, more than anything else.

I did not create an account at that restaurant. I don’t have the ability to log into, change the profile, add a profile pic, yada yada yada on the account at that restaurant. (The restaurant hasn’t existed for a long time, which is sad, but such is life.) An account was created for me implicitly by acts like, making a reservation and giving my phone number and paying with a credit card. A walkin who pays with cash probably won’t have an account created for them (altho you never know — there are other ways of identifying someone). Could you have privacy concerns about that? Am I still thinking about how odd that whole experience was, probably more than a decade later? Oh, heck yeah. Not opposed to any of it. Just… noticing.

Explicit account creation we are all familiar with. That’s the kind where they make you pick a password and HOPEFULLY round trip your email (*snarl* at all the ones that don’t) and ask you to add a profile picture and fill in a bunch of demographic information and whatever other crap they decide they want from you. That’s where you go to track your shipments, update your payment information, ask for a refund, etc.

LOTS of things that used to be explicit are now implicit. You go to buy something, and you can pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay or Amazon Pay or wtf (referred to for the balance of this post as *Pay) without setting up an account. This is an increase in convenience, and if you decide you want to access your implicit account, you can generally go set that up and it’ll attach your previous purchases either automatically or you can enter your confirmation number or whatever and it’ll figure it out.

My examples are shopping centric, but this is also true on various discussion sites. Someone sending you an invitation can trigger implicit account creation associated with your email or phone number or whatever, and if you want that account not to exist, you might have to take steps to delete it.

Recently (I think 18.1), Apple added a feature to its phone that causes it to revert to Before First Unlock status (harder to break into) if the phone hasn’t been unlocked in some amount of time. Apple (and other phone makers) are taking theft issues much more seriously, and a side effect (or maybe the other way around) is that it’s tougher for law enforcement to get into a phone that they have physical custody of. That MIGHT relieve some privacy concerns associated with using a device as a dongle or dongle-like item (tap to ride attached to apple pay, rather than using a credit card to tap to ride). But definitely not all of them.

Anyway.

I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time worrying about or being an activist around privacy issues. Like security in general, there’s a balance between access / convenience that is in tension with privacy/security. And I tend towards caring more about whether I can use the thing at all, vs worrying about someone noticing that I did. This is a little bit misrepresentative of how I live my life (understatement), but is a good description of how I think about things. If I’m concerned about someone getting into my stuff or spying on me, I’m going to address that problem directly, and not draw a ton of attention to how. If you think you’re super smarter than I am because you know how ineffective security through obscurity is, well, good for you! You’re super smarter than I can ever hope to be.

What open loop payment systems (some but not all tap to ride systems) and *Pay and similar contribute in terms of convenience is enormous. If you are driving around in your own car, or in a rental car, to avoid the tracking inherent in some public transit payment system, I have some super bad news for you.

One of the things I cannot stop thinking about in this space is whether there’s a way to make buying tickets to an opera or broadway play or a plane ticket “tap to pay”. It wasn’t that long ago that the way you bought tickets to any of these things was by going into or up to an office and paying cash. If you didn’t want to stand in line for the 7:30 pm showing of the new Bond movie, you stopped by the theatre earlier in the day and bought the tickets then. It was a big deal when travel agents could sell plane tickets other than at the airport. Now we live in an absolutely nightmare world in which people shop for tickets months in advance and then engage in advanced maneuvers to try to avoid paying to check their bag or to pay for advance seat selection or whatever. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to navigate the jungle and just pay for everything, but it still requires an intense amount of research just to book a vacation, or an outing for a group to a show or whatever.

Travel agencies (in the past, but even now, albeit in different formats) exist to take high level goals (2 weeks in a tropical location, good beach, fruity cocktails) and turn it into large payment and all the details worked out for you. Saving a bunch of money by doing all that work yourself significantly impacted that business (but did not completely get rid of it). Travel agencies were the high touch / mostly human version of hiding all the inconvenient details behind a simple service face. And in general, the Before Smartphones World was filled with these kinds of services, replaced now by algorithms and monetizable data, instead of humans making phone calls and operating difficult to use early computers and having paper files.

Implicit account creation is what happened when you walked into a business and started asking questions and someone took notes and your business card and/or your phone number and agreed to research the questions and get back to you in the future. And 100% the people talked about you after you walked out of the business, and then when they went home, compared notes with their spouse or friends or whatever. Particularly entertaining people might wind up discussed at church and really entertaining people might become part of a weekly sermon. No wonder we don’t like it in automated form!

But if we can get over ourselves enough to remember that we all forgot all those stories a week later, it does seem like it might be nice to fill out one or a few profiles that capture things like our dietary constraints (OpenTable’s little box that stays filled in), our seating preferences (aisle vs. window, how many rows back from the stage, whatever), our overnight stay preferences (no feather, high or low floor, near / far from elevator) our budget constraints (min / max for meal, per hour of entertainment, per mile of travel, whatever). Better still, if it figured out our constraints over time. Then maybe we could hit the I Am Bored button, and be offered a suggestion for how we could entertain ourselves that we would enjoy, that we could afford, and that we could get to before it starts.

It’s not that I want that, per se. It’s more a matter of, I think it’s possible and it would be very, very, very cool not to have to plan that far ahead all of the time.

ETA: Also, are we going to wash up on the beach of some future in which everyone using cash loaded cards to pay on the public transit are immediately put on the suspect list, because no one else uses cash? That’d be weird.

Someone signed up my gmail over on Samsung. They do roundtrip and claim to close the account if it isn’t verified within 7 days. No negatives for this, but no positives here; a lot of companies with this kind of language do not suspend the account.

But Samsung includes a link that says, not you? Click here. And if you click along, you can suspend the account.

LOVE IT! Good Job Samsung! May all other signup procedures follow the admirable example you have supplied!

Everyone else may have seen this kind of option elsewhere, but I get a lot of this kind of Someone Gave My Email Accidentally situation and this is the FIRST time I have ever seen anything remotely like this.

So, there will be linkage!

Readers who’ve been at this blog a few times will recognize “A Few Remarks” as an intentional understatement.

https://www.mastercard.com/gateway/expertise/insights/closed-open-loop-transit-payments.html

This is a genially written article describing contactless public transit payment systems and the difference between The Before Times of Transit Payments and the two major categories now: closed loop (Orca Card and similar, where you have to set up a card — can be virtual, can be in an app / in a wallet / on your phone — and you manage balance through that) and open loop (OMNY’s tap to ride and similar). (I’m trying to stick to just one example of each type, and ones that I and/or my readers are likely to have experienced or talked to someone who has experienced. Yesterday’s post included a partial enumeration of systems around the world that I found when I went looking for them.)

The opening of the article is profoundly relatable for me, in that the inconvenient version presented first is “normal” for me over decades of riding public transit while traveling, and the second was my revelatory experience of OMNY a few weeks ago. The balance of the article covers what we discussed on FF last night: closed loop systems like ORCA, especially if they let you do everything on the phone, are an improvement over making you use a kiosk. I was happy to set up the app for our local commuter rail and use it to buy train tickets when I took the train to TD Garden for a concert. I am completely fine using the Amtrak website and app to buy Acela tickets ahead of time, choose seats, etc. Honestly, I don’t think I’d be comfortable planning plane travel and expecting to tap to pay! Weird! (I wonder if it exists? I mean, obviously, the major Tap to Pay efforts involving planes are for buying snacks or alcoholic beverages or whatever inflight.) I do understand — and value! — that more airlines are letting you pay for your tickets using Other Than Giving Them the Credit Card Information (Various Pay systems, but also PayPal, Venmo, etc.). But Open Loop systems mean that you don’t have to set up a card to traverse a city or a country as part of a longer trip. Back In the Day, you didn’t need a different system for getting a taxi everywhere, and the reluctance of the taxi industry to adopt a universal standard led to our world of Uber and Lyft. You don’t need a different Uber for every state / city / country.

Tourist and business travel destinations like NYC, Las Vegas, and similar work really hard to try to get travelers to use public transit instead of renting a car or taking a taxi / Uber / Lyft. Congestion is real and roads are expensive. Convincing commuters is one set of skills; convincing travelers is a different problem. Open Pay conceals a fair amount of complexity behind the simplicity of buy-a-ride-like-you-would-a-coffee. (To be fair, buying a coffee _also_ has a closed loop option in many cases, but again, you don’t need a different Dunkin or Starbucks app in every city you visit.) Complexity exists in several forms: discounts associated with under an age or over an age, paying for more than one person, and pay-at-start vs pay-at-end, and whether payment requires checking in, or checking in and checking out (I suppose there’s a transit system that is only checking out, but I haven’t found it yet).

OMNY supports passback (pay for second, third, etc. person using the same card or device) only after first use. Most systems do NOT support passbacks in any form. If you want the kid or senior or some other discount, you usually need to register your card or device in an account that validates your access to that discount. But the checking in vs checking in and checking out is deeply embedded in the idea of using public transit in a system and is pretty mind-boggling when first encountered. In systems where you check in, do your thing (including potentially multiple transfers) and then check out, and checking out is where you are charged for all those legs, errors can accumulate for a variety of reasons (system failures, user error, etc.), and recourse is generally by editing the route charge in an app. I just don’t know what to think of any of that.

At least one system addresses the kid issue by just letting kids ride free, altho I have no idea how that works, altho it looks like it’s mostly buses so presumably just waving them through?

Discounting schemes actually can become more flexible, and align very well with regional incentives to reduce use of personal vehicles. OMNY and many other systems charge less per trip to use tap to pay, and cap total fare over a period of time. This approach helps convert commuters, occasional users who live in the area, and people who are traveling in the area for work or leisure. Both Google Maps and Apple are working to integrate up to the minute (second?) arrival times for public transit and include that in their itinerary recommendations. THIS IS CRUCIAL! No amount of discounting is going to convince me to use public transit when I’m not sure I can actually get through the entire journey successfully (with an acceptable amount of walking and arriving in an acceptable time frame).

I have not yet seen any discussion of how EMV payments become viable for public transit as a result of reduction in interchange fees — still waiting to see that go by. It’s clear that a lot of systems, at least in the 2021 era, were very concerned with consolidated daily trips into a single charge at end of day. Judging by my experience of OMNY, at least when using Apple Pay, there is less concern, or they are relying upon the *Pay services to do the consolidation for them. For a very long time in the US, credit cards and cash co-existed, but legislation around debit card transaction fee charges (and interchange fees in general) tipped things pretty hard and we now live in a largely cash-free environment. While EMV works best with realtime internet access, it kinda worked in a batch version, but was subject to certain types of fraud. With internet access much more consistently and broadly available, it’s easier to rely on it for public transit payment purposes.

Germany has this odd closed system and you can buy a Deutschland Ticket or a 49E ticket.

https://handbookgermany.de/en/mobility#

It doesn’t work for intercity trains and buses but it does work for trams, in-city buses, subway, light rail, etc. They seem light on turnstiles and checking but if you are caught without a ticket more than once they really might prosecute you. Feels very German somehow. Everyone over 6 has to have their own ticket. It’s monthly, and you can cancel every month but it is a subscription. I just don’t get it, altho it is less weird than Swiss systems, which is also on brand.

ETA:

This article is a “white paper”, so less enjoyable as a read than the Mastercard one, and less Here’s How You Do Things than the Germany handbook. It includes a naming system for the different check in / check out schemes that I describe above: Known Fare (check in only), Accumulated (check in and check out), and a Pre-Purchase model (this is where you have discounted fares for people on social support, or kids or seniors who get a discount or to reflect the value of a pre-purchased pass, etc. And you have to use the same device to use as you did to acquire or registered on).

https://cms.uitp.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WhitePaper-OpenLoop-10June-online.pdf

Wording in this thing is at times unintentionally hilarious. For example, many real world systems warn about what the rider should do to avoid card clash.

“When a contactless terminal is correctly configured, it will ensure that it is impossible to charge two cards or more if multiple cards are presented. This process then ensures that only the card that the passenger intends to pay with is charged when presented to the terminal.”

Somehow, that just feels both blame-y and optimistic.

Similarly, the Accumulated Model gives me the heebies, because I have no idea what the charge at the end of the journey is going to be, and knowing that recourse is possible does not reassure me when it’s an unfamiliar system and I have no idea whether I will be able to figure out the recourse system or how seriously that place will take my request for redress, if I’m only passing through. And yet here is the description:

“Accumulating multiple journeys into one financial transaction helps reduce costs for payment processing and also offers the best customer experience through clarity of fare charges.”

Yeah. I doubt it. I mean, I believe the payment processing, sort of, altho maybe only sort of, depending on how often people seek recourse. And I really doubt it on the clarity of fare charges, given how much website space is devoted to explaining to people the importance of checking out, and how to fix things when you didn’t check out (or where you needed to check out was broken, and now you have some open-ended trip and possibly an awful charge associated with that).

Then there’s this bit of confusion:

“Processing of the Pre-purchase Model approach is in any case a totally different scenario in terms of through- put since the passenger needs to interact with the validation device or the bus driver to identify the desired fare product to purchase.”

I don’t know what’s going on here. I assumed the Pre-purchase model was as I mentioned above (discounted bus passes, senior discount, kid discount, etc.). But maybe not? ETA: From the GenFare sales pitch, I think this answers my questions: “ The only time the driver may need to press a button with open payment is for the approval of student, senior, or other discounted fares. ”

Here’s a bus centric sales pitch, focused on the costs, equipment and employee requirements of handling cash, and how tap-to-ride can reduce all that:

https://genfare.com/blog/open-payments-operational-benefits/

It also mentions pandemic era logistics and cost pressures and provider collapses in the closed loop media space:

“The cost of smart cards rose considerably during the pandemic, when the demand was low, and several vendors shut their doors. The lead time on ordering cards also grew to months rather than weeks. With open payments, banked customers will no longer need to use dedicated fare media, so not only will you need to buy fewer cards, but your workers can also spend less administrative staff time distributing cards and performing customer service functions.”

GenFare white paper linked in that above piece: https://genfare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/GenPayPaymentProcessing.pdf

The GenFare white paper includes a detailed description of how tap-to-ride works with bus fares:

“When a cEMV bank card or mobile wallet (“the card”) is presented
to the card reader on a farebox or validator, the reader confirms
the card is authentic and checks it against a locally-stored “deny
list” of declined cards. If the card passes these tests, the rider is
allowed to board, even though the transaction hasn’t yet been
approved by the issuing bank.
2. Meanwhile, the reader encrypts sensitive cardholder data (card
number, expiration date, etc.) using an encryption key. The
encrypted transaction is then sent to Genfare Link®, Genfare’s
cloud-hosted central data system, which passes the encrypted
transaction to the payment processor. The processor uses
a matching encryption key to decrypt the data and send the
transaction request to the issuing bank for authorization. It also
tokenizes the transaction for tracking purposes in Genfare Link.
3. The issuing bank returns an accept or decline message to
the payment processor, which relays it to Genfare Link. If the
transaction is accepted, Genfare Link records the transaction in a
central account database. If the transaction is declined, Genfare
Link adds the card number to the deny list, which it broadcasts to
all fare collection devices every few minutes. Cards on the deny
list are rejected the next time they are presented. To remove a
card from the deny list, the cardholder must pay for rides obtained
using the denied card.”

That last bit is a little horrifying. On the one hand, you maybe rode but didn’t have the money tp pay. Making you catch up makes sense. But if there was an error, or if someone stole your device or whatever? Especially given that a lot of this stuff works without PIN or face or anything? Hmmmm. Presumably there is some onerous recourse out there. But yikes. OTOH, I can absolutely imagine using low or no-balance prepaid cards to ride being used as a scam around this whole thing, too.

https://www.kittelson.com/ideas/the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-a-cashless-public-transit-system/

This is a blast from the pre-covid past. Open Pay isn’t really described, and there’s a more explicit concern about inequity, and not everyone having smartphones.



In the course of this reading, I’ve learned about FitBit Pay (which is gone as of July 2024, rolled into Google Pay) and Garmin Pay. This is from Garmin about transit payments:

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/garminpay/transit/

I did a lot of research into lighting not that long ago, and around the time I was feeling like I knew All the Lighting, I tripped over a bunch of really cool solar lights, and then I figured, okay, NOW I know All the Lighting. But nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

There is always more lighting.

For future readers, a little backstory. Back before batteries were cheap, rechargeable, powerful and ubiquitous, small, powerful, battery operated lighting wasn’t that small or that powerful, and the batteries didn’t last very long, and they were called “flashlights” (or “torches”) and were somewhat rod-shaped, often made of metal. They were kind of expensive, altho obviously like everything else, the details evolved over time. We hit a really interesting point when you could make a super tiny, powerful light and put it on your keychain, and then Most of Us Stopped Using Keys. But that was fine, because everyone kind of started using their phone as their watch so it was natural to then start using your phone as your light as well. You knew you were well into this trend, when the butane portable lighter was replaced at arena rock concerts by cell phone flashlights for holding up and making lots of bright little lights in a dark stadium.

We also had the “puck” light, which was a hockey puck shaped plastic device with buttons that you could stick up on a wall or whatever somewhere you needed light but where wiring a light was inconvenient. Inside your dry-bar cabinet. Your kitchen drawer. Your closet. In roughly this same time frame, you also so proliferation of small solar panel + rechargeable battery + LED devices, aimed at campers, and for use in a power outage. Around this point, the flashlight kind of ceased to be a recognizable as such device.

And that’s the backstory.

Now, you can buy E26 (“normal” light bulb base) but not always A19 (“normal” light bulb shape) bulbs that have Extra Features. I ran across this today, but it’s NOT a new trend. GE sells bulbs in their GE+ range that do a variety of things. They have a speaker bulb that connects to an app or whatever, and you can link up to 10 of them and that lets you play music _through the bulb_. Is that weird? Sure. R. already knew about it.

You can buy GE+ backup, which you can screw in, and it works as a “normal” bulb, but if the power goes out, it’ll run for quite a while off the rechargeable battery. There are tons of variants on this themes from other brands that have a hook to hang it in your tent, a remote to remotely turn it on or off, color changing, dimming, you name it. Some of them screw into an E26 base, but don’t run power through it and you have to charge them through a USB-C port. These seem aimed at putting a “nice” lamp somewhere you don’t have power (maybe a sconce or on a high shelf or whatever).

There are dusk-to-dawn bulbs (turn themselves off when it’s light around them). There are motion sensor bulbs. There are timer bulbs. All of these build the smarts more or less completely into the bulb, vs. buying a “smart bulb” that you then program via an app.

It is absolutely wild what is out there. I’m trying to figure out whether I feel smart to focusing on lighting options that have E26 / A19 lighting element assumptions, or if this is one of those weirdo extinction bursts and in 10 years, no one will even know what a “normal” bulb means anymore.

ETA:

And yes, there are Amazon Basics, and all kind of list of letters brands out there with all of these product types as well. I mention the GE line, purely because it indicates that someone felt like the market was big enough to bother layering on the added cost of a Boomer familiar brand.

Also, just to be super clear, I haven’t bought any of these, I don’t plan to do so, I’m not recommending any of these, and there are absolutely some negative reviews out there about some of the products not behaving as advertised. So if you decide to explore this area for a large project, you might want to order one of each of a couple of the brands you are thinking of using to make sure you are able to get at least one that works as described. It also looks like anything that offers “linking” features will require you to use an app for that/those features, so maybe get the app before ordering the device or read reviews of the app before ordering the device. Some of this stuff seems to “just work”, but not all of it. Forewarned, etc.

I do a lot of Duolingo. I really love Duolingo, because it’s easy, and it’s effective, and it supplies most of its own motivation. I want to learn multiple languages, so I’m supplying that amount of motivation, but it does all the rest, really. I do a very minimal amount of supplementary language learning, mostly I am learning languages because I have had things I have wanted to be able to read and couldn’t and this is an effort to fix that. I naturally stumble across a fair amount of stuff that constitutes “outside practice” or whatever, and I travel a little, which is a bit more.

Anyway. That’s background. I’ve been using the product/service for years, and I have “attended” a couple online Duocons, and I reflexively absorb information about the intersection of finance and tech so I’m marginally aware of some of the key people.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7196909776696475648

That _should_ be a link to a post by Severin Hacker, describing how he put together a document describing himself so that new people he is working with will get through the Getting To Know process more nimbly. I may have screwed the link up, tho.

I became aware of this, because over on Threads, Some Guy On the Internet took issue with this, and it turned into a pro vs anti thread in which a bunch of Very Online People called him a narcissist, a horrible boss, took issue with his work hours, and so forth. The initial take included this:

“Also can we talk about this line: “I am good at the first 20% of a project and I'm terrible at the last 20%”?

AKA “I’m going to take your ideas because I can’t think of any, get it approved from the higher ups, then have you figure out the logistics to complete it. Thanks!””

On the initial post, under Severin Hacker, it says “Duolingo CTO and Cofounder”. So, first off, this is probably a person who had at least some initial ideas. And also, there aren’t any “higher ups”. He _is_ the “higher up” when it comes to technical ideas, and he is not super likely — judging by the limited number of CTOs of the cofounder flavor I’ve had interactions with — to be all that interested in any ideas that are not technical. Also, it is literally the job of a CTO to have people below him work out the logistics to complete it. Literally, the Hot Take _against_ this post was a wild failure to understand the nature of the poster’s job.

For background — and I confirmed this with R., so we’ve got at least a couple of industry folks weighing in here, with minimal overlap (that’s how we met) decades ago — the job of a CTO at a successful startup that the CTO was involved in founding is generally architecture plus. All the regular meetings and management are handled by a VP or VPs of engineering or some similar title (and that does appear to be the case at Duolingo, and yes, that person is a woman, which again, not a surprise). The CTO is responsible for making sure that the technical direction (the architecture plus) is correct, which as a practical matter means you will meet the CTO when you have to spend a half hour giving a whiteboard presentation to the CTO about what you intend to do, and then answer 15 or so minutes of questions, hopefully most of which you have anticipated and have prepared answers for, but anything in that series of questions that surprises you is likely to be what you will be working on for the next six months, and it will keep you awake at night and interfere with your ability to find joy or even simple pleasures in life.

Or, you know, the questions will indicate to you that the CTO is fundamentally incompetent and you will hopefully have the sense to start a job search. That can happen too. There isn’t necessarily a lot of evidence for that situation in this case, altho incompetence eventually comes for all of us.

The Thread went on to attack Hacker for things like saying he did his best work between 3-9 pm (which, given the global nature of Duolingo, and his position in that company, might actually work out really well for a lot of people he works with directly who are physically located in other timezones). Obviously, the autistic folx in the Thread chimed in occasionally pointing out that it was pretty helpful to have this type of document, and noting that they, too, worked unusual schedules and generally saying the kinds of things I might have said.

I became aware of this Thread because a friend sent it to me. I think we’re all clear on which perspective I took on the whole thing. My friend also works with people in many time zones, and described their schedule as follows:

“I usually start by day by 6:30 am to sync with coworkers in NYC and usually work until 5 or 6 pm to deal with folks in LA. I'm usually online 10 pm-1 am so I'm available to folks in India.”

I absolutely want to cut all the slack in the world to anyone working those kinds of hours. I worry about this person, but I don’t try persuasion on people who work hours like that. I just express concern and leave it at that. I’m not going to convince people who work hours like that to work fewer hours. They have their own issues. They are adults.

But I will say some things about this hostility to a 3-9 pm shift, and the focus on “normal business hours” being “7-4” or whatever. Morning software devs are not super common — they do exist! But also! 7-4 pm is super hostile to being an involved parent. To be at work at 7, you are going to miss the entire get the kids up and ready for whatever in the morning AND you are going to be there too late to pick them up after school, altho you might be able to pick them up from their aftercare program. You’ll be around for dinner, and then young kids will be going to bed. With older kids, you might be able to pick them up after their sports or whatever activities, or drive them to various things, etc., and possibly supervise homework. But who is doing the morning shift? It’s generally helpful to society if there are some people working earlier and other people working later, and in any kind of global company, where there is a ton of remote work and remote interactions across timezones, time flexibility and diversity is hugely helpful.

I would normally ask, well, would you be equally hostile to a 3-9 am shift? Or a 5 am-2 pm shift? And honestly, the people being hostile here are gonna be hostile. I have another friend who works nutty hours, but had to cut back because of some health issues. When they cut back to their early morning hours, from before they were working 12+ hours a day, lots of pushback on their workday starting early and ending early. When you are in the middle of compliance culture pushing down on the lever, there is no compassion. There is no sanity. It’s just harsh.

I am a middle-aged woman, and that’s being generous. This year’s milestone for me is the Sammy Hagar I Can’t Drive birthday. I sure hope I’m past the halfway point. It would be so easy to respond to the complaints — especially the one about taking your ideas, clearing them with the higher ups and then making you figure out the logistics — by saying, meh, kids these days, don’t know what work is all about! I hope I’m not.

Mostly, I just really hate when people bash on autistic people for being autistic. We’re trying, and a lot of the people responding to the thread I am _not_ linking to were just straight up being ablist. Among other things.

There was this brief, blessed period where Twitter was no longer something that people shared widely, and nothing had fully stepped up to replace it. Alas, that is over, and now I’m getting bluesky stuff shared on FB, and Threads being texted to me. I may have to just straight up say, no, I’m not reading that bullshit. I have plenty of bullshit in my life. I have a pantry of the apocalypse stocked for years against a possible future in where there is no bullshit. I have enough bullshit to supply everyone with two bites of bullshit for the rest of my life.

I don’t need any more.