McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 7th 2020

• Uber and Lyft’s Business Model May Be Dead. Good. "Lyft and Uber are basically making the case — and making it openly — that their businesses are not viable if they must guarantee their workers minimum wage and basic protections. That the people who make Lyft and Uber possible are so poorly paid and so precariously employed that granting them the benefits of, say, In-N-Out cashiers or Target warehouse workers would bankrupt these mammoth Silicon Valley behemoths. Which makes it a particularly sad fantasy indeed."
• When It Comes to Covid-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward. Interesting ways of thinking about the risks, and how it isn't all-or-nothing.
• A timeline of the maker community response to the pandemic. Great work by Marc Barto to capture as much of the manic early part of the pandemic, from the maker perspective.
• English universities are in peril because of 10 years of calamitous reform "We seem, for example, to be willing to allow wealthy parents to buy educational advantage for their children up to the age of 18, but then we believe that this advantage can somehow be made to have no consequences for their educational trajectory thereafter."
• On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic. Sad. Beautiful.
• ‘Magic pop-up allotment’ at CoFarm offers community food security. Just over the road from where I used to work at Microsoft, good to see a community farm (or market garden, why has that term fallen from popular use?) appear.