How stupid can some people get?

Unless you are a small child or flying for the first time, airplane flights are a drag. No one takes airplane rides for the fun of it. The whole business of going to the airport way ahead of departure time, going through security, and sitting in a cramped seat for hours, has eliminated any pleasure that the experience may have originally had, at least for me. You do it because you must.

Any person who has ever had their flight canceled at the last minute knows that it causes a real disruption in one’s plans, even if it was just a vacation trip. So it baffles me when people who had planned to travel by air do things that they must know will get them kicked off the plane.
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An inside look at the awful working conditions in ‘fulfillment center’ warehouses

A recent episode of the radio show Radiolab had a story from seven years ago by an award winning writer and investigative reporter Gabriel Mac who managed to get hired at an internet retailer warehouse. The show is careful not to mention the name of the company where he was a ‘picker’ and worked in a giant warehouse that was the size of about 17 football fields, referring to it by the generic name of Amalgamated. He said that at the beginning of the day they are given these scanner devices that tell them where to locate an item on the shelves to put it in a plastic bag and place it on a conveyor belt. The items seem on the surface to be placed on the shelves at random with the same item scattered all over the warehouse and placed in bins with other unrelated items. But the seeming randomness is misleading. The computer knows where things are and they have been placed so as to make collecting the items ordered by customers quicker.
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Film review: The Day Shall Come (2019) and FBI entrapment

Back in 2019, I wrote about a comedy film that had just been released that I wanted to see. Unfortunately, because of the Balkanization of offerings that streaming has created, a problem that I wrote about recently, I could not because it was being streamed on Hulu for which I had no subscription. But my daughter visited me recently (we are both vaccinated) and she subscribes to that service so we watched it.
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An in-depth look at the trans experience

The radio program On the Media devoted this week’s entire 52 minute episode, titled Trans* Formations, to talking with trans academics, doctors, activists, historians, and artists, starting with a discussion on the many anti-trans laws that are being passed in state legislatures around the country based on various misconceptions and outright distortions. While the earlier efforts to pass bathroom bills seem to have run out of steam, the recent efforts to keep trans women from taking part in sports and athletics seem to be more widespread and successful.
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New documentary on opioid drug profiteering

Alex Gibney has a new documentary The Crime of the Century that looks at the opioid drug crisis and the shameless role played by the big pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and the Sackler family who profited greatly from the deaths of many people and the destruction of families and communities, topics that I have covered many times before. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by government officials and lawmakers who cut deals with the Sacklers and top Purdue executives to allow them to escape the consequences of their actions and retain their ill-gotten billions.

Here is a detailed review by Saloni Gajjar.
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Signs that the fossil fuel industry is getting increasingly desperate

As the cost of renewable energy keeps going down and the technology used to generate and store it improve, the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, is feeling the pinch as energy companies move away from using fossil fuels. Despite Trump’s electioneering promise to coal miners that he would revive the industry and bring back the mining jobs that were disappearing, he did not really do anything other than eliminate some clean air regulations.

The latest effort by Wyoming, one of the nation’s biggest coal mining states, is a measure of how desperate the situation is for the industry. It is telling other states, “Buy our coal or else!”
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Slumlord Kushner’s companies get reprimanded by judge

ProPublica’s investigative reporter Alec McGillis has been following the predatory practices of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that have earned him the label of being a slumlord. Kushner’s real-estate company would engage in deceptive practices, provide shoddy apartments, fail to make urgent repairs, and harass tenants with debt collection and eviction lawsuits even during the pandemic. ( I wrote about this last year. )

McGillis has a new report out that a judge has ruled that the Kushner companies violated multiple laws with their practices. The Maryland attorney general brought the lawsuit as a result of increased awareness created by ProPublica’s reporting.
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