I'm surprised Katz didn't note anything about McDonald's own use of technology -- maybe it's not in this book, though it is in Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop, which someone else mentioned.
All McDonald's cash registers are hooked into a central computer -- one in the store, and one (unless I'm misremembering?) in McDonald's headquarters. It keeps track of trends in purchases by consumers. Cashiers are exhorted to sell more of one item or another based on the register records.
Based on this information, managers are given bar graphs telling them how much business they will (not should, *will*) be doing over the next week. They are told to staff their store accordingly.
I'm sure by now everyone's pretty aware that there is no need whatsoever for cashiers to have the basic math skills to make change. All the prices are entered into the store's central computer and can be changed any time. All the cashiers have to do is press pictograph buttons on the register.
Every machine in the kitchen is automated. Workers get to use no judgement whatsoever in deciding when food is cooked to perfection -- a beeper goes off, and that's it. (There's regulations about how many pickles or onion bits they can put on a burger.)
Garson notes that about 8 million Americans, or 7 percent of the American labor force, has worked for McDonald's at one point.
I don't know about you, but the way McDonald's uses technology to dumb workers down and uses information collected from its registers to market more insidiously unnerves me.
Catch22: If the kid hangs out with his "peers" he may well decide people aren't worth bothering with because they're stupid, or that he should toot his own horn all the time. If he hangs out with adults or on his own, he may have a hard time with social skills.
Why isn't there a Slashdot for smart geeky kids? It seems Slashdot is such a great tool for self-teaching, and also a wonderful way to "come out" and be supported in a community where people share your interests.
Every now and again I find a young person who ought to be reading Slashdot but in one way or another the material might be over his/her head. I would love to see a site where kids like my friends, who even in junior high felt that knowledge was more than just something you crammed into your head in order to get a grade, could share knowledge and experiences.
What timing-- I was just trying to work out an ideal scenario for event management for the Independent Media Center of New York.We're actually looking for people to help set up this system -- a volunteer effort, I'm afraid, we couldn't pay; you just gotta do it out of love of truth and hatred of corporate misdeeds;) Most of what we have so far is set up in php or perl, I think.
Indymedia is unusual in that we need a system which is not for a paid staff in an office, but rather for a bunch of freelance volunteers and the activists whose events they cover. Our mission is to get coverage for events and perspectives the corporate media ignore. We do not have an editorial board which dictates content, so we need the calendar for egalitarian coordination of who's going to cover what. We need a better slingshot for David to fight Goliath.
Right now we are working off a calendar at protest.net which serves our needs OK: anyone can post events; the calendar is accessable through the web, and viewable in day, week, and month formats. We just need it to mail out a digest to a) reporters who want to know what is going on so they can cover things and b) other activists who want to be involved in these events too. (The creator of the software that protest.net runs on, which is called Calendrome, is working on this aspect now). We might want to have two different kinds of digest for these two categories of people.
Then we will need to make it so that people can either reply to the email or visit the website to register that they want to work on the article in a print, audio, photo, or video capacity. There should be a page people can visit to see who is covering the event and whether there are gaps in one medium or another. It would be nice if this could be worked seamlessly into a way (web chat? message boards?) that reporters could talk with each other about the event.
Once an event has been covered, it becomes an entity in our article system, where it may be combined with other coverage of that event by an editorial team. People who covered an event should still be able to hunt down the info about the event in the calendar or somewhere in our system, so they can look up who else covered the event to share notes, coordinate how the articles/clips are displayed on the site or used in other media, talk about future collaborations, etc.
YES we need to be indoctrinating children! I teach a class full of wiggly third graders in the South Bronx. They love computers, but we have not been able to scrounge together the teachers and machines necessary to give them the opportunity to. And when we do, they will be using all Microsoft products, and learning more about word processing than they will about programming.
We are creating a caste of unskilled computer users this way. We shouldn't pooh-pooh the so-called "digital divide"-- it is a buzzword, and more of these kids have computers at home than you would think, but I can tell you the way these kids are learning to use computers is going to put them at a lifelong disadvantage. One of my kids told me the other day that he only uses a voice-input system with his computer-- doesn't touch the keyboard at all. They mostly access the Internet through AOL. They don't have access to stuff like Logo or Basic which would teach them the rudiments of programming
These kids are capable and eager to learn. The other day I taught one of them to count in binary-- now if only I had some way of helping him put that to practical use...
If anyone is working in New York City and looking for something good to do for the community, send me email. I want to help get more tech people involved in helping my community-- OUR way, not Microsoft's!
I went to the poll in the morning and think I forgot to flip a lever for the President
I went to work and a guy who does job training as part of a welfare-to-work program ordered me to vote Republican-- which would be voting him out of a job--
another co-worker voiced great surprise that the polls were still run on those huge crank-operated machines-- isn't it backward, he said? shouldn't we be using hi-tech styluses on computer pads?
in Jamaica, he said, once you voted you had to dip your finger in indelible red ink so they knew you'd been there, and you didn't want to vote anyway because they would shoot you coming out--
I went to the Green Party headquarters and a friend who had been volunteering at the polling sites in Brooklyn said that whole polling-areas-worth of machines were BROKEN and that as a result hundreds of votes in the area were lost
The talking heads yammered about how it was a dead heat at 242 votes for at least an hour; I am certain they knew who was ahead and only did that for ratings
nader didn't get his 5%, and gore looks like he lost, and I wouldn't be surprised if bush really is a functional illiterate.
I hate to burst everybody's bubble, but there has been at least one study done positively linking cell phones to brain cancer and malfunctioning pacemakers. Read this article, which comes from a really good listserv on corporate misdeeds.
Well, that's nice, dear. Very nice. So we like freedom. That's great. But that's been said already. The constitution was written over 200 years ago, and it said that freedom thing pretty well. I really wish geeks would branch out some and start talking about the REST of what they believe.
If we value freedom to market, do we value the rights of corporations over governments? If we value freedom of information and curiosity, how do we feel about schools? Are they doing what they need to to make sure everyone gets the information they need? (My own answer: Hell no. Poor and working-class kids, even the brightest ones, are automatically tracked into vocational training programs, while their more privileged counterparts are destined to gain the kinds of information we value so much. This seems to me to be an exceedingly important problem.) How do we feel about military spending and social service programs?
Could we get to talking about how these things play out, in concrete terms?
Am I the only one who doesn't plan to go to this movie because of bad associations with a crappy Disneyland ride of the same name? It wasn't even a ride, actually. It was this thing where you sat in an auditorium with some gimmick (I forget what it was... it wasn't like Captain EO, and it wasn't IMAX, and it wasn't one of those things where the chairs jerk you around) and watched an antiquated (ca. 1950s) movie about a mission to Mars. It was worse than the Tiki Tiki Room.
That, and my friend saw the movie, and said "I've come to the conclusion that in most American popular space flicks, there are two types of heroes: 1. the loud, macho, glory-seeking type and 2. Gary Sinise."
Yeah, my dad says the same thing about the X-Files, only he doesn't phrase it as well; he mostly says it's making people "believe in aliens." I remind him that a RADIO show, of HIS time, actually caused people to panic about the presence of aliens-- War of the Worlds. It's not like there's no precedent for people believing in TV too much; the X-Files isn't anything new. And what are you going to do about it? I'm always one to argue that the system of media we have now be completely overhauled, and that kids be educated to be better media consumers. But in the end I don't want to sterilize TV and make it only have messages that don't hurt or mislead us. besides, we all know that War of the Worlds was REAL. regards, John Bigbootie
Excuse me, how do we know the guy who sent this story in isn't some CBS shill who sent this message to Slashdot because series planners decided they needed some geeks on the show to appeal to the (18-49, male, white, RICH) geek audience? Does anyone other than me think Hemos and Taco and all should be more alert to marketing explotiation?
I always find it funny when nerds try to be politic, and try to get the world of marketing and spin to work to their advantage. I mean, aren't we nerds because we don't know how to sell ourselves to begin with, and think there's better things to do than go around kissing babies all day? ESR is wasting his breath trying to play the marketing game and make free software palatable to the popular kids in the business world. In the end, nerds and their vision are going to lose if they play that way.
Slashdot Mirror
All McDonald's cash registers are hooked into a central computer -- one in the store, and one (unless I'm misremembering?) in McDonald's headquarters. It keeps track of trends in purchases by consumers. Cashiers are exhorted to sell more of one item or another based on the register records.
Based on this information, managers are given bar graphs telling them how much business they will (not should, *will*) be doing over the next week. They are told to staff their store accordingly.
I'm sure by now everyone's pretty aware that there is no need whatsoever for cashiers to have the basic math skills to make change. All the prices are entered into the store's central computer and can be changed any time. All the cashiers have to do is press pictograph buttons on the register.
Every machine in the kitchen is automated. Workers get to use no judgement whatsoever in deciding when food is cooked to perfection -- a beeper goes off, and that's it. (There's regulations about how many pickles or onion bits they can put on a burger.)
Garson notes that about 8 million Americans, or 7 percent of the American labor force, has worked for McDonald's at one point.
I don't know about you, but the way McDonald's uses technology to dumb workers down and uses information collected from its registers to market more insidiously unnerves me.
Catch22: If the kid hangs out with his "peers" he may well decide people aren't worth bothering with because they're stupid, or that he should toot his own horn all the time. If he hangs out with adults or on his own, he may have a hard time with social skills.
Why isn't there a Slashdot for smart geeky kids? It seems Slashdot is such a great tool for self-teaching, and also a wonderful way to "come out" and be supported in a community where people share your interests.
Every now and again I find a young person who ought to be reading Slashdot but in one way or another the material might be over his/her head. I would love to see a site where kids like my friends, who even in junior high felt that knowledge was more than just something you crammed into your head in order to get a grade, could share knowledge and experiences.
What timing-- I was just trying to work out an ideal scenario for event management for the Independent Media Center of New York.We're actually looking for people to help set up this system -- a volunteer effort, I'm afraid, we couldn't pay; you just gotta do it out of love of truth and hatred of corporate misdeeds ;) Most of what we have so far is set up in php or perl, I think.
Indymedia is unusual in that we need a system which is not for a paid staff in an office, but rather for a bunch of freelance volunteers and the activists whose events they cover. Our mission is to get coverage for events and perspectives the corporate media ignore. We do not have an editorial board which dictates content, so we need the calendar for egalitarian coordination of who's going to cover what. We need a better slingshot for David to fight Goliath.
Right now we are working off a calendar at protest.net which serves our needs OK: anyone can post events; the calendar is accessable through the web, and viewable in day, week, and month formats. We just need it to mail out a digest to a) reporters who want to know what is going on so they can cover things and b) other activists who want to be involved in these events too. (The creator of the software that protest.net runs on, which is called Calendrome, is working on this aspect now). We might want to have two different kinds of digest for these two categories of people.
Then we will need to make it so that people can either reply to the email or visit the website to register that they want to work on the article in a print, audio, photo, or video capacity. There should be a page people can visit to see who is covering the event and whether there are gaps in one medium or another. It would be nice if this could be worked seamlessly into a way (web chat? message boards?) that reporters could talk with each other about the event.
Once an event has been covered, it becomes an entity in our article system, where it may be combined with other coverage of that event by an editorial team. People who covered an event should still be able to hunt down the info about the event in the calendar or somewhere in our system, so they can look up who else covered the event to share notes, coordinate how the articles/clips are displayed on the site or used in other media, talk about future collaborations, etc.
YES we need to be indoctrinating children! I teach a class full of wiggly third graders in the South Bronx. They love computers, but we have not been able to scrounge together the teachers and machines necessary to give them the opportunity to. And when we do, they will be using all Microsoft products, and learning more about word processing than they will about programming.
We are creating a caste of unskilled computer users this way. We shouldn't pooh-pooh the so-called "digital divide"-- it is a buzzword, and more of these kids have computers at home than you would think, but I can tell you the way these kids are learning to use computers is going to put them at a lifelong disadvantage. One of my kids told me the other day that he only uses a voice-input system with his computer-- doesn't touch the keyboard at all. They mostly access the Internet through AOL. They don't have access to stuff like Logo or Basic which would teach them the rudiments of programming
These kids are capable and eager to learn. The other day I taught one of them to count in binary-- now if only I had some way of helping him put that to practical use...
If anyone is working in New York City and looking for something good to do for the community, send me email. I want to help get more tech people involved in helping my community-- OUR way, not Microsoft's!
I went to the poll in the morning and think I forgot to flip a lever for the President
I went to work and a guy who does job training as part of a welfare-to-work program ordered me to vote Republican-- which would be voting him out of a job--
another co-worker voiced great surprise that the polls were still run on those huge crank-operated machines-- isn't it backward, he said? shouldn't we be using hi-tech styluses on computer pads?
in Jamaica, he said, once you voted you had to dip your finger in indelible red ink so they knew you'd been there, and you didn't want to vote anyway because they would shoot you coming out--
I went to the Green Party headquarters and a friend who had been volunteering at the polling sites in Brooklyn said that whole polling-areas-worth of machines were BROKEN and that as a result hundreds of votes in the area were lost
The talking heads yammered about how it was a dead heat at 242 votes for at least an hour; I am certain they knew who was ahead and only did that for ratings
nader didn't get his 5%, and gore looks like he lost, and I wouldn't be surprised if bush really is a functional illiterate.
some days are bouncers and won't let you in.
My mom always said that drinking milk led to drug abuse. Go back and look at the childhoods of drug users. Think they drank milk? Of course they did!
I hate to burst everybody's bubble, but there has been at least one study done positively linking cell phones to brain cancer and malfunctioning pacemakers. Read this article, which comes from a really good listserv on corporate misdeeds.
Well, that's nice, dear. Very nice. So we like freedom. That's great. But that's been said already. The constitution was written over 200 years ago, and it said that freedom thing pretty well. I really wish geeks would branch out some and start talking about the REST of what they believe.
If we value freedom to market, do we value the rights of corporations over governments? If we value freedom of information and curiosity, how do we feel about schools? Are they doing what they need to to make sure everyone gets the information they need? (My own answer: Hell no. Poor and working-class kids, even the brightest ones, are automatically tracked into vocational training programs, while their more privileged counterparts are destined to gain the kinds of information we value so much. This seems to me to be an exceedingly important problem.) How do we feel about military spending and social service programs?
Could we get to talking about how these things play out, in concrete terms?
Am I the only one who doesn't plan to go to this movie because of bad associations with a crappy Disneyland ride of the same name? It wasn't even a ride, actually. It was this thing where you sat in an auditorium with some gimmick (I forget what it was... it wasn't like Captain EO, and it wasn't IMAX, and it wasn't one of those things where the chairs jerk you around) and watched an antiquated (ca. 1950s) movie about a mission to Mars. It was worse than the Tiki Tiki Room.
That, and my friend saw the movie, and said "I've come to the conclusion that in most American popular space flicks, there are two types of heroes: 1. the loud, macho, glory-seeking type and 2. Gary Sinise."
Oh yeah, and I forgot to add: if the X-Files leads people to question the actions of the US government, more power to 'em. --john ya-ya
Yeah, my dad says the same thing about the X-Files, only he doesn't phrase it as well; he mostly says it's making people "believe in aliens." I remind him that a RADIO show, of HIS time, actually caused people to panic about the presence of aliens-- War of the Worlds. It's not like there's no precedent for people believing in TV too much; the X-Files isn't anything new. And what are you going to do about it? I'm always one to argue that the system of media we have now be completely overhauled, and that kids be educated to be better media consumers. But in the end I don't want to sterilize TV and make it only have messages that don't hurt or mislead us. besides, we all know that War of the Worlds was REAL. regards, John Bigbootie
Excuse me, how do we know the guy who sent this story in isn't some CBS shill who sent this message to Slashdot because series planners decided they needed some geeks on the show to appeal to the (18-49, male, white, RICH) geek audience? Does anyone other than me think Hemos and Taco and all should be more alert to marketing explotiation?
I always find it funny when nerds try to be politic, and try to get the world of marketing and spin to work to their advantage. I mean, aren't we nerds because we don't know how to sell ourselves to begin with, and think there's better things to do than go around kissing babies all day? ESR is wasting his breath trying to play the marketing game and make free software palatable to the popular kids in the business world. In the end, nerds and their vision are going to lose if they play that way.