May 21, 2023

Hit and Miss #298: Manure breach heat agreement

Hello!

I smelled manure from the Experimental Farm while out biking this morning, and it gave me a great smile—manure’s a smell that reminds me of home, growing up near where suburban Waterloo gives way to farmer’s markets and fields.

Three quick links for you, as I’m enjoying a long weekend away from screens and focused on making things with my hands—and I hope the same for you!

• An interactive news story to surface and contextualize how often your personal information has been breached online.
  • A good example of how digital security is much more than just “use a password manager” (but my goodness, please do—I happily use 1Password and am happy to chat about it).
  • AND of how there’s so much we can’t opt out of in the digital sphere, hence the need for genuine attention to and action on data brokers, among other actors, who enable this wild ecosystem.
• La Niña has wrapped, El Niño is coming—and it’s about to get that much hotter. We thought it was hot the last few years and Alberta is having a very intense fire season unseasonably early, and yet the El Niño heat doesn’t even start until next year!!
• A calculator to see the salary impacts of the EC tentative agreement announced this week.
  • As various waves of collective bargaining produce agreements, I’ve been frustrated with how salary changes are presented: %, %s simply summed, %s compounded, and so on—so much room to imply one position or another. When the tentative agreement for my group came out this week, I realized I could build a calculator to show the tangible impacts of the proposed agreement.
  • It’s a good demonstration case for Observable notebooks, which I’m increasingly using to explore JavaScript’s impressive in-browser computation and visualization capabilities (this is just a calculator, nothing really impressive under the hood, but more to come from another project soon).
  • One piece I’d love to add: a “tithe” calculator, to show what CAPE-represented employees could contribute of their salary to compensate the lost salaries of PSAC-represented employees who went on strike to get, essentially, this very deal, for themselves and the rest of the public service (but PSAC’s wasn’t even as good, in some dimensions, which tells you a lot about bargaining dynamics). That’d be something closer to real solidarity. That is, if CAPE were, y’know, something closer to a robust union.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas