Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Today is the last day of voting for the unionization drive at the Amazon center in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon has pulled out all the stops to defeat the move because Amazon is a rapacious predatory company. Amazon boasts about the fact that it pays $15/hour but its working conditions are deplorable, as it uses advanced technology to drive its workers to the limit.
But the significance of the drive has more to do with the company itself. Amazon is now among the largest private employers in the United States; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is arguably the wealthiest man in modern history. The company has paid every one of its workers fifteen dollars per hour since November, 2018, while also pioneering second-by-second monitoring of its employees. “This isn’t just about wages,” Stuart Appelbaum, the R.W.D.S.U.’s president, told me, on Monday. It is also about the strenuous pace of work, and the real-time surveillance methods that Amazon has used to monitor employees. Appelbaum said some of the workers that his union has represented have had employers that monitored their locations with G.P.S. chips in their delivery trucks, “but there’s nothing like this, where you’re expected to touch a package every eight seconds.” It had been hard to organize within the Bessemer facility, he said, in part because many of the workers did not know one another. “It’s hyper-Taylorism,” Damon Silvers, the director of policy and the special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said. “Amazon has determined an optimal set of motions that they want their employees to do, and they have the ability to monitor the employee at all times and measure the difference between what the employee does and what they want them to do, and there is nowhere to hide.” Appelbaum said, “People tell us they feel like robots who are being managed by robots.”
I wrote recently about cheating in online chess tournaments. I no longer play chess but do play bridge quite a lot and with the pandemic have done so online, playing in tournaments frequently. Bridge has many more opportunities for cheating than chess, even when playing in physical space with all four players around the same table. This is because chess is played alone and the board is visible to everyone so that the only way to cheat is for a player to secretly get information from a superior player or a chess engine.
But bridge is a game involving partners where the cards held by each are hidden from the others during the bidding process and just one player’s cards are exposed on the table once play has started. So knowing what cards other players have is very helpful. The bidding process consists of conveying information about one’s cards using bidding conventions that have to be shared with opponents using a ‘convention card’ so that opponents know what your bids mean. If one uses a bidding convention that is not standard, you are expected to alert the opponents and, if asked, explicitly tell them what the bid means.
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In this episode, correspondent Roy Wood Jr. of The Daily Show investigates the deeply puzzling question of whether Donald Trump Jr. knows who his father is.
A container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal has created a huge backlog of shipping traffic.
The ship is 1312 feet long and the portion of the canal it was going through was only about 1000 feet wide so it was essential that it go really straight. But it appears that due to high winds and poor visibility due to a sand storm, it did not and got wedged. Now it requires over 700,000 cu. ft of sand to be removed from the bank to free the ship.
I have sailed through the Suez Canal on an ocean liner twice when I was a young boy, going from England to Sri Lanka. I still remember the weird feeling it generated because in certain sections, the canal was so very narrow that when you looked at the two sides of the ship from somewhere in the interior, you would see just the desert on either side moving past, so you had the illusion that the ship was traveling on land. You had to go to the railing and look over to see water below.
Dominion Voting Systems has hit Fox News with a $1.6 billion lawsuit for defamation for its wild allegations against the company that it engaged in massive election fraud to deprive Trump of the presidential election victory. It had earlier sued Trump’s erstwhile lawyer Sidney Powell for $1.3 billion.
The company alleged that the network “recklessly disregarded the truth” and participated in a disinformation campaign against it because “the lies were good for Fox’s business.”
n the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump falsely asserted that the election had been rigged against him. His allies promoted outlandish conspiracy theories about Dominion to support Trump’s false claims.
“Fox took a small flame” of disinformation and “turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion said in its lawsuit.
“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawsuit added. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
…In its lawsuit, Dominion specifically mentioned hosts Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro, three of whom were named as defendants in Smartmatic’s lawsuit. Fox is the sole defendant in this suit.
I am not sure what it says about my sense of humor that I find these kinds of cartoons funny.
Some congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to shift some of the spending for a new weapons system to other uses that actually help people.
Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.
The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.
Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.
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I had not heard of the term ‘milkshake duck’ until yesterday. This is not surprising since I am always way behind the trends in the fast-moving world of social media. If I blog about some social media phenomenon, you can be pretty sure that it is already a few years old and may even have passed into oblivion, replaced by something that I have not heard about as yet.
The term ‘milkshake duck’ apparently originated in 2016 with this tweet.
The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) June 12, 2016
The NCAA, the body that governs US athletics at the college level, has long had an unsavory reputation of enabling the exploitation of students so that everyone profits handsomely from certain college sports except for the athletes themselves. You would think that such a big operation would have at least the minimum awareness of public relations. So it is hard to explain how they could not have known that the way they treated the women’s teams in the college basketball tournament compared to the way they treated men would undoubtedly come to light and show how much they devalue women’s sports.
Samantha Bee described what happened.