jadero

I agreed to come out of retirement to be a spare driver for a rural school. It turns out that they hadn't found a replacement for my old route, so they basically wanted me to drive full time hours while they got someone up to speed.

Okay, that's not really what I was interested in, but I could handle a couple of weeks. So I get the paperwork by email late Friday, right before the long weekend, with school starting on Tuesday. That's when I learn that my old route, which was already pushing the time limits, had been extended by about 35 minutes (my estimate, the paperwork still showed a total time the same as last year, which was already an underestimate).

I spent about 6 hours on Saturday with no administrative support trying to sort things out with parents. When I looked closer at the schedule to see just exactly how admin thought this new configuration could work, I noticed that they had the route length at 100 km and the first pickup 1 hour before arrival at school. That's an average of, yes, 100 km/hr. No time for corners, stop signs, and yield signs. No time for farm equipment and graders. No time to get in and out of yards with kids loaded and seated.

Oh, and being grid roads (gravel) with no other signage, the actual speed limit is 80 km/hr!

So I let the parents know that they'd have to carry on with whatever their transportation plans were on Thursday. Then I emailed admin to say I'd changed my mind, and why. I haven't heard anything back from admin, but all of the parents completely support my decision and are planning a parent group meeting with admin to help me get paid for the time I put in. (Normally, route planning is not paid, because the route is supposedly preplanned by admin. Minor tweaks are supposed to be the responsibility of the full time driver, not just a spare.)

I've always hated working with incompetent people and dysfunctional organizations. Now I don't have to.

I've worked lots of places where working late meant overtime pay, which was against policy and therefore led to battles, "administrative penalties" like getting lousy shifts, and occasionally even labour board intervention. So yeah, it's not unreasonable to think that someone might push the problem on to someone else.

I don't know much about airline regulations, but I would hope that there are also limits on hours based on safety regulations. In that case, the entire flight might get cancelled when someone exceeds allowable hours. Now imagine the pressure the employer applies to the employees in that circumstance. And the outcry from the passengers booked on said cancelled flight.

Did you consider the possibility that OP knew all of that and expected enough people to know to feel confident in making not just a pun, but one with thorns?

In fact, even without the analysis, I recognized what I thought was nicely pointed pun.

I thought that's where they were headed on 21st Street and then on 2nd Avenue. Then they went backwards, at least on 21st. I think it was supposed to be a pedestrian mall, but it ended up being a parking mall, whatever that is.

The workers are the employer.

Not in any meaningful sense. If they were, they'd for sure have found a way to pay themselves and avoid labour disputes that put them on the picket line.

OpenGraph is definitely a great idea. That still leaves the problem of paid content getting pushed to the top.

The problem is not search engines per se, but how those engines work. When the search engine pulls so much more than just a link, there is no need to actually go to the site. That means the only party making ad revenue is the search engine.

Then you have platforms like Twitter and Facebook that have a "pay to promote" system. AYour feeds are not just what you've decided to follow sorted by how you prioritize things, but sorted by who has paid the most, including content that you never actually subscribed to. That means if the CBC, or anyone, wants to actually be seen by their followers, they have to both pay and provide enough content that makes visiting the site less necessary. So on top of reduced opportunity for ad revenue or to gain an actual subscription, they have to pay to get that reduced opportunity.

Yes, I know that the sites have some control over how much beyond a link they allow to be pulled, but the nature of human attention means that being too restrictive is basically equivalent to not existing.

To be clear, I don't have a solution. The current legislation is not the answer, but something needs to be done. I'm starting to think that news and journalism needs to be supported the way we used to support the arts. Government funding with very, very few strings attached. But I can see lots of problems with that, too.

Were any other employer in the country doing what the federal government is doing it would have been charged with gross violations of labour laws. The federal government just absolves itself with a, "Tee hee. Oops."

That's the part I've never understood. How is it possible for any employer to not be subject to labour law and contract obligations. Why weren't they on strike until it was fixed? It's not like they were being paid! I remember having gone on strike because the camp cooks decided to serve something other than steak on Wednesday (steak day, as it was known).

I've also never understood why local managers couldn't just cut cheques based on known wages and deductions while others work on rectifying the problems.

And strategic voting has to be actually strategic. All of the parties play the long game, so we have to as well. If we never show them what we really want by voting for the people and policies we want, even when we think there is little chance of victory, none of them will ever see that we like those policies and people.

Given that we have no "none of the above" option that would force the election to be rerun with different candidates, the best strategy now is to vote for one of the fringe parties, ideally one that is satirical. At this point, there is no party that stands for what actually benefits the masses, so we might as vote for the jokers. Could it really be any worse than the mainstream parties that seem to be actively working against our interests?

As a parent, I just have to say parents do a really shitty job of educating their kids. Me included. If I knew twice what I know now, I would have still been woefully underqualified to turn an infant into a healthy adult, prepared to take on the challenges of life without being a net drain on society. Thank goodness there was half decent schooling available.

School is the only thing that prevents most kids from growing up to be the kinds of adults we hate dealing with. The less control that parents and politicians have over curriculum, the better.

Ok, there is a lot more to it than I thought. As usual, there is always a lot more than what is obvious to the casual observer. Thanks.

Obviously something I hadn't considered. On the other hand, we buy plenty of canned and boxed food without being able to see the food itself, so this may be just a matter of forcing us to adjust. Although I'm not sure that I can ever be convinced to buy most meats without being able to see it.