- Government Employees Are Being Recruited On Social Media To Work For Lyft, Uber, And Postmates
Companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, and Instacart offer these workers the opportunity to earn money as independent contractors without having to get a new job. Government employees are allowed to take outside work during the shutdown, as long as it doesn’t violate the government ethics rules that typically apply to their employment.
Already in the Washington, DC, area — where 71% of IT workers said they’d jump ship from their current jobs to work for Amazon — government employees have reportedly been turning to Uber and Lyft. And Postmates has also seen a “significant spike” in applications for delivery roles since Dec. 20, a company spokesperson said in an email to BuzzFeed News, although they declined to provide details about the increase.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/government-shutdown-recruit-gig-workers
- What Can You Buy With 5.7 Billion Dollars? (Trump’s Wall Cost)
- Older people more likely to share fake news on Facebook, study finds
Those who shared the most content in general were less likely to share fake news, suggesting the problem is not that some people “will share anything”, the paper said. Instead, people who share a large number of links are more media-savvy, and able to distinguish real from fake online.
That findings are backed up by the demographic data: over-65s, who came to the internet later in life, shared more than twice as many fake news articles as those in the second-oldest age group, even when controlling for ideology, education and the total number of links shared.
The authors wrote: “As the largest generation in America enters retirement at a time of sweeping demographic and technological change, it is possible that an entire cohort of Americans, now in their 60s and beyond, lacks the level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online.
- The Rise and Demise of RSS
RSS was one of the standards that promised to deliver this syndicated future. To Werbach, RSS was “the leading example of a lightweight syndication protocol.” Another contemporaneous article called RSS the first protocol to realize the potential of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a general-purpose markup language similar to HTML that had recently been developed. It was going to be a way for both users and content aggregators to create their own customized channels out of everything the web had to offer. And yet, two decades later, after the rise of social media and Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader, RSS appears to be a slowly dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters, programmers with tech blogs, and the occasional journalist. Though of course some people really do still rely on RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2019, is a political statement. That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, a web that hardly resembles the syndicated web of Werbach’s imagining.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss
Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash