Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There’s plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses’ wages. These apps buy nurses’ financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:
Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024)
Category: economics
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First Taxi Drivers, Now Nurses. Teachers next?
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Player drain for Japan Soccer
NYTimes article about the economics of football and how the exchange rate matters.
The third factor is that they are relatively affordable. The transfer fees asked for Japanese players are usually in the hundreds of thousands rather than in the multiple millions. The ones who sign straight from Japan are usually cheaper than those from other European or South American countries.
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You are the product
Even when you buy the product. In this case, Apple owners. Apple has been listening and sharing data with third parties (selling). Get in line, you can get up to $100 when they get things set up. From Ars Technica.
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Teen Use of Social Media in the US
Bryan Alexander has been watching teens and universities and how they use technology. Here is his latest update on social media.
I’m guessing hte federated media (Mastadon and Bluesky mostly) are too small to figure here. Hopefully that will change.
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Seaweed for Cows
Got too much red algae? Feed it to the cows. It reduces methane by 40%.
