This has been kicking around in my “to blog” bucket since July, 2008 when I had many more posts on Charity. I originally copied this from judaism.about.com, and Wikipedia has a version of these too.

Maimonides organized the different levels of tzedakah (charity) into a list from the least to the most honorable.

8. When donations are given grudgingly.

7. When one gives less than he should, but does so cheerfully.

6. When one gives directly to the poor upon being asked.

5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked.

4. When the recipient is aware of the donor’s identity, but the donor does not know the identity of the recipient.

3. When the donor is aware of the recipient’s identity, but the recipient is unaware of the source.

2. When the donor and recipient are unknown to each other.

1. The highest form of charity is to help sustain a person before they become impoverished by offering a substantial gift in a dignified manner, or by extending a suitable loan, or by helping them find employment or establish themselves in business so as to make it unnecessary for them to become dependent on others.

To be critical, 8 and 1 are most meaningful to me, and the gradations between the others aren’t particularly strong, though I think 4 and 3 could swap places.

I think this essay has come to mind more often than any other in the past decade of my work as a developer, and sometimes distressingly, in life. From Tim Rogers “who killed videogames? (a ghost story)”
:

One click in one of these social games will take the user to the Real-World Money-Costing In-Game-Currency-Unit-Buying Shop. Here, the player will see that the game indeed offers him an option for paying $100 for something which is not real: an in-game currency with which to buy things in the game.

At the time he makes the conscious decision to wait for his energy to refill, the player likely already knows that “micro”-transactions exist which have $100 price-tags. Now he learns how much energy costs — usually, it’s nowhere near $100, or even $10.

Do players buy energy? What sorts of players buy energy? The short answer is: actual idiots. The long answer is: people who don’t understand why they have so much real-world money.

In social games, energy doesn’t exist to be bought. It exists as an engagement-regulating filter. The player attaches to it some vague notion of “value”. Backward-like, he comes to associate waiting an hour in the real world before coming back to the game with “working” and “earning” the “value” of the thing the game is giving him for “free”.

This isn’t exactly a truthful impression. The impression the player should take away — and gets confused about — is that in social games, time is a currency. Time is what you use to buy energy. Energy is a currency for purchasing in-game money, and some less-abstract in-game currencies (the premium in-game currency which the player must use real money to purchase) and more-abstract in-game currencies (namely virality and chance) can be used to purchase energy directly.

Energy’s multiple conversion rates into multiple in-game currencies mystify the idea of time as a currency.

The old idiom “time is money” has many meanings, you see.

“Energy” is a money that literally directly represents time.

…It’s a compulsion trap.

From First, break all the rules:

Managers were encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics. The stages on the mountain reveal that if the employee doesn’t know what is expected of him as an individual (Base Camp), then you shouldn’t ask him to get excited about playing on a team (Camp 2). If he feels as though he is in the wrong role (Camp 1), don’t pander to him by telling him how important his innovative ideas are to the company’s reengineering efforts (Camp 3). If he doesn’t know what his manager thinks of him as an individual (Camp 1), don’t confuse him by challenging him to become part of the new “learning organization” (Camp 3). Don’t helicopter in at seventeen thousand feet, because sooner or later you and your people will die on the mountain.

And a quote about performing the performance:

A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage.

This book review in the New Yorker of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” has been kicking about my brain for a long while, especially in regards to the phrase “variations within groups are greater than variations between groups” concretely in my work on accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion.

The evidence proved, Boas said, “the plasticity of human types.” It also showed that variations within groups are greater than variations between groups.

…

Boas devoted his life to showing people that the science they were relying on was bad science. “He believed the world must be made safe for differences,” Ruth Benedict wrote when Boas died.

…

It’s true that Boas and Benedict spoke of “relativity,” and that at the end of “Patterns of Culture” Benedict refers to “coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.” But everything else in Benedict’s book contradicts the assertion that all cultures are “equally valid.” The whole point is to judge which practices, others’ or our own, seem to produce the kind of society we want. The anthropological mirror has a moral purpose.

The term “culture” is responsible for some of the confusion. We think that to call something part of a group’s culture is to excuse it from judgment. We say, That’s just the lens through which people in that society view the world. It’s not for us to tell them what to think. Our ways are not better, only different. What it all boils down to (to paraphrase Montaigne) is: We wear pants; they do not. That would be relativism.

But to say that a belief or a practice is culture-relative is not to place it beyond judgment. The whole force of Boasian anthropology is the demonstration that racial prejudice is cultural. The belief that some races are superior and some inferior is learned; it has no basis in biology. It is therefore subject to criticism.

Boas spent his entire life telling people that intolerance is wrong. King says that cultural anthropology pushes us to expand our notion of the human. That may be so, but it has nothing to do with relativism. King’s anthropologists are prescriptivists. They are constantly telling us to unlearn one way of living in order to learn a way that is better by our own standards.

Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty writing in a “Mama Lila Cabbil Tribute: Pushing Us Toward Deeper Thought, Still”, published in Riverwise Magazine.

Through my organizing and teaching, I have asked that anti-racist circles step away from performative testimonials of privilege for whites and lack of privilege for Black and Brown people. I have asked that all allies move from ally-ship towards co-liberation, with the belief that we can only make systemic change if we understand our liberation is tied up with one another’s. My historical and current analysis of this moment pushes me to interrogate the notion that (most) white people “benefit” from their forced relationship with white supremacy.

I have asked that white allies (aspiring co-liberators) seek to understand the impact that the myth of white superiority and the system of white supremacy has had on their own communities. I have asked them to deal with school shootings in their communities, opioid abuse, domestic violence, and rising incidents of suicide. I have asked them if they truly believe what they say when they testify to their privilege.

For many, this way of thinking may not appear to answer the questions that plague Black and Brown people in America. However, I am of the mindset that a dehumanized being cannot see another as fully human. I am of the mindset that the white children who are shooting up schools have fallen victim to trying to live up to the myth of white superiority.

White men, even in progressive circles, are taught they are superior to white women, Black women, and every other living being on the planet. What would it mean for the anti-racism movement to teach white men that they have the furthest to go in efforts to reach their full humanity? What would it look like if they don’t enter spaces acting inherently superior (privileged), but rather with a lot of work to do to shed the legacy of violence that comes with their perception of superiority?

From Susan Casey’s The wave:

Teahupoo, with its timeless power, brought to mind the age-old philosophical quest to distinguish between beauty and its twisted cousin, the sublime: for the merely pretty to graduate to the sublime, terror was required in the mix. “The Alps fill the mind with a kind of agreeable horror,” wrote one seventeenth-century thinker, summing up the concept. And while humans were capable of creating the lovely, the dramatic, the sad, or the inspiring, only nature could produce the sublime. It was a concept both comforting and disturbing: there are many things out there more powerful than we are. No one was more aware of this than the men who’d ridden Teahupoo on this day (except, perhaps, the ones who had fallen on it).

From Cyd Harrell’s excellent “A Civic Technoligists Practice Guide”, via a Twitter convo, reformatted by me:

Because its goal is change, civic tech embodies an interesting split between demonstrating and operationalizing the potential of modern tech. I like to call these two branches showing what’s possible and doing what’s necessary. Many projects are a mix of the two, but they require different mindsets.

“Showing what’s possible” is about speed, prototyping, design, public feedback, and data. These are often web projects because web tools are great for those purposes.

“Doing what’s necessary,” on the other hand, is about shifting the underlying practices and systems: back-end systems, security, and procurement; hiring and team composition; even shifting budget priorities.”

[…]

But our job as civic technologists isn’t to be the hero of the stories we stumble into halfway through; it’s to understand and support the people who have already been in place doing the work, and who want to use tech to make improvements.

They line up with Code for America’s pillars of “Show what’s possible”, “Help people do it themselves” and “Build a movement” (though the latter is rather more grandiose than understand and support).

As we called these in my previous career, Direct Service, Capacity Building, and Roy Johnson (“Put some gratitude in your attitude!”).

GoodJob version 1.3 is released. GoodJob is a multithreaded, Postgres-based, ActiveJob backend for Ruby on Rails. If you’re new to GoodJob, read the introductory blog post.

GoodJob’s v1.3 release adds a mountable Web Dashboard and improved README documentation and complete code-level YARD documentation.

Version 1.3’s release comes five weeks after v1.2 and three months after GoodJob’s initial v1.0 release.

Shoutouts 🙌

GoodJob has accepted contributions from 9 people total, and currently has 559 stars on Github. The project just passed 150 combined Issues and Pull Requests.

I’m grateful for everyone who has reached out to me on Ruby on Rails Link Slack (@bensheldon) and Twitter (@bensheldon)

🙏

Mountable web dashboard

GoodJob v1.3 adds a web dashboard for exploring and visualizing job status and queue health.

The web dashboard is implemented as an optional Rails::Engine and includes charts and lists of pending jobs.

I expect the web dashboard to be a hot area of ongoing improvement. This initial release contains a minimum functional interface, a chart, and some necessities like keyset pagination. The dashboard is familiar to develop (Rails Controllers, ERB Views and ActiveRecord), and I’ve adopted Bootstrap CSS and Chartist to ease and speed development.

Improved documentation

GoodJob’s README has been edited and rewritten for clarity and comprehensiveness, and GoodJob’s implementation code is now thoroughly documented with YARD.

Good documentation is vital for open source projects like GoodJob. I worked with Rob Brackett, who consults on complex software and open source challenges.

Upcoming

In the next release, v1.4, I plan to continue adding views and charts to the web dashboard and improving thread management.

Contribute

Code, documentation, and curiosity-based contributions are welcome! Check out the GoodJob Backlog, comment on or open a Github Issue, or make a Pull Request.

I also have a GitHub Sponsors Profile if you’re able to support GoodJob and me monetarily. It helps me stay in touch and send you project updates too.

Doublespeak from Pro-Publica’s “Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You”, via Pluralistic’s ongoing chickenization coverage:

Arise carefully monitors the language agents use to reinforce that it does not have an employment relationship with them. Stung by lawsuits that claimed Arise had actually employed agents but didn’t pay them fairly, Arise’s legal department has become a kind of word police, one former staffer told ProPublica.

“You don’t schedule ‘hours,’ you schedule ‘intervals,’” the former staffer said. Agents were not to be addressed as “you,” but “your business.” They were not “working,” they were “servicing.” There were no “supervisors,” only “performance facilitators.” Agents were not “coached.” Rather, their services were “enhanced.”

Once, an Arise manager, testifying in an arbitration hearing, was asked about meetings that performance facilitators have with agents. “They’re not meetings,” he said. “They’re informational sessions, or hosts.”

In an internal announcement in 2012, Arise listed “new terminology” for eight terms to avoid “the misconception” that agents are Arise employees. The corporate link between Arise and the agents went from being called Virtual Services Corporations to Independent Businesses. Service Fees became Service Revenue. Central Operations became Support Operations.

Arise seems particularly unable to settle on a term for the agents. Early on, the company called each a CyberAgent. Later came Arise Certified Professional. In 2012, that was changed to Client Support Professional. Nowadays, Arise’s website calls agents “onshore brand advocates or Service Partners.”

“Arise-speak,” as one opposing attorney called it in legal proceedings, could be a wonder to behold. Client Support Professionals (CSPs) would work with Quality Assurance Performance Facilitators (QAPFs) in a Performance Enhancement Session (PES), or they might reach out to Chat Performance Facilitators or Escalation Performance Facilitators, and none would be an Arise employee, all would be independent contractors.

And a disturbing exchange:

Rice said he worked out of his bedroom, in his mother’s home, helping customers for Arise’s clients, including Barnes & Noble, Disney and Sears. While testifying, Rice referred to performance facilitators in the Arise network as supervisors. This elicited a challenge from a lawyer for Arise.

“Where’d you get that term from, supervisor?” the lawyer asked.

“Growing up in America,” Rice said. “That’s the term people use for people that are above you.”

“… You never referred to them as supervisors while you were providing services, did you?”

“Well, yeah,” Rice said.

“You did? To who?”

“Well, obviously I’m on the phone with a customer, I’m not going to say, ‘OK, let me go check my chat performance facilitator.’ Usually I just said, you know, ‘Let me just talk to my supervisor.’”

“Respect our vendors” is foreign enough to me in software engineering that I took this picture of Costco’s values. The opposite of respect, perhaps “contempt for vendors and tools,” seems endemic.

At one job, memorably, a coworker was fired over it. Our engineering team had a shared email list used when setting up root accounts on various 3rd party services, including our primary infrastructure vendor for whom we were one of their largest customers.

The infrastructure vendor sent a Net-Promoter Score-like survey to our shared email list. Receiving this kind of marketing junk was frequent enough that I ignored it, but my colleague filled it out:

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our service?: “1”

Why?: “I hate you.”

This survey response led to the vendor’s account executive making a frantic and fearful call to our leadership team. The blowback of that led to my coworkers’ termination. (This was not my colleague’s first warning; my team and I were also targets of their trolling and bullying.)

This is a funny story to reflect on. And it’s terribly toxic the multitude of things engineers will despise, wear on their sleeve, and eagerly share at the slightest opportunity, myself included.