I haven’t bought anything via the Amazon site in years. At least three, possibly five or more. Anything I need I can get elsewhere either online or in person without supporting Amazon’s anti-union, worker-exploiting policies. I won’t even use AWS for business purposes because of how they treat their workers. Boycott away, there are plenty of Amazon options that are “good enough” if not actually better.
Ah yes, the fumes. That “Waste To Energy” incinerator is west of town in the area known as “West Plains”, near I90, near the airport, and not far from Fairchild AFB which these days is a locus of refueling operations and other support functions. Huge, 4-engined planes coming and going all day long. Long ago the AF firefighting ops polluted the groundwater there with PFAS chemicals and much of it is no longer fit to drink. Between that, the air pollution from military and civil air operations, and whatever comes out of the stacks at the W2E plant, I have to imagine the denizens of the area have evolved some powerful pollution-resistant genetics. Or maybe they just die young from cancer and respiratory and neurological diseases. Fortunately it’s a pretty low-income zone (think ‘typical military town’ - old skool Bremerton-ish) so all that disease can just be blamed on personal poor decision-making (like the decision to live there). A shame really, West Plains now has a ginormous Amazon warehouse that the residents could slave at (in addition to the super-Wally’s and the casinos) if they’d Just Say No to cancer and all those other tempting diseases.
Spokane burns its ordinary trash. It also accepts plastics and other “recyclables” at an every-other-week curbside pick-up, using a separate bin, just as you’d expect. Then they burn it. Yes, just like the trash. But wait, they do the burning at a facility they call the “Waste To Energy” plant, so that makes it all OK.
It’s all a big expensive greenwashing game, but everyone seems perfectly fine with it. La di da di da.
What’s this about John Cleese? Nevermind, I wish to register a complaint. I wish to complain about this presidential campaign that my techbros purchased not six months ago. It’s stone dead.
A “quick haircut” sort of place (kind of a barber, sort of , but super-high-volume and just one worker, the owner) that I’ve been using for a while now has a super-annoying dark-pattern in their payment flow. They book appointments, and take in-person payments using Square. After your cut, when you’re paying via their hand-held kiosk with a card, the screen shows you a bunch of huge “tip amount” buttons, and it’s implied that the customer has to choose one of them, while the provider looks on, in order to finish the transaction and leave (probably not true - they’ve already got your CC info by that point). Guess which button is highlighted/pre-selected and front-and-center! That’s right, 20%. If you want to select another tip, or no tip, you have to select another button while she watches you do so. The owner lists all prices on her square website, and it’s those prices you think you’ll be paying when you book an appointment online, but she still feels the need to be tipped. You KNOW that the provider/barber has configured Square to present that UI to the customer. Not quite the same as the restaurant fees scam, but it’s actually more manipulative though, in my view.
I think that’s overly optimistic.
The US is very fond of prison forced-labor (slavery) as well, and the general population doesn’t really care. In fact the general population most likely thinks the slaves (prisoners) suffering slavery is just a case of them getting what they deserve.
Yep, same.
The redundancies follow declining revenues and shrinking profits.
“Redundancies” is apparently now a noun that refers to employees being laid off.
Intel announced it was eliminating 16,000 people – to curb capital expenses.
Headcount is now a physical asset I guess. Corps must be taking depreciation expenses on employees now in addition to salary expenses. Ka-ching!
After my first browse of the article I was wondering if it had been spewed out by some of the crappy AI that Cisco is so keen on.
Davidson will move to a role advising the CEO during the borg
What does the borg have to do with this?
Yeah, I guess they forgot to appoint a Christian King.
Those accounts provide about $6,600 per student to attend any school, including private or home schools
This “act” is all about funneling public tax money into the pockets of religious grifters, and hell, it sounds like you don’t even need to be an organized business grifter any more. You can just open your house/trailer/shack for a few hours a day as a “home school”, do a little praying at minimum, and collect $6600/head/yr. Sweet deal. But it’s not welfare. Nope, not at all, not if you’re a Christian taking the grift.
Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?
There’s one church a few blocks away from here that went out of business a few years ago and is now being used as a homeless shelter by an area non-profit. I walk by it all the time and have seen the before/after. The property is finally being put to a use that helps humanity and the the neighborhood is much better off for it.
The AF also contaminated the groundwater in a large residential area just west of Spokane, WA adjacent to the Fairchild AF base. Until recently they seemed to be accepting at least partial responsibility but I wonder if that’s now going to come to an end. It’s not generally a wealthy area, lots of apartments and discount stores and has what I think of as a “military town” vibe. Apparently residents are largely dependent on PFAS-loaded well water and if the AF tells them to FO and be happy they’ve got anything to drink, they’re screwed unless some other entity with deep pockets will come in and clean up. https://ecology.wa.gov/about-us/who-we-are/news/2024-news-stories/feb-21-west-plains-sampling-for-pfas
It’s difficult for Vetrini to see the rhetoric espoused by right-wing media and not feel hurt. Since going viral, Vetrini has been subject to vulgar and offensive comments from people who disagree with her perspective.
“Those comments are really hard to deal with, mentally. The hardest part is my dad feels the same way as these vitriolic commenters,” she said.
But she still recognizes the qualities in her father that remind her of Walz. Those are what keep her maintaining a “complicated” relationship with him.
After her TikTok went viral, Vetrini called her dad to tell him about it – hoping to hear it from her first rather than a news show.
“He responded exactly the way I would predict he would respond. Which was to remind me that socialism will ruin America,” she said.
When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of the initial estimate.
The Christofascists won’t be satisfied until every school is a 100% Christian-run, 100% taxpayer-funded, stone-age-war-god-ideology fascist brainwashing center.
While I’d love to add my opinion to the Play Store reviews, there’s no way in Hell I’m installing some kind of Christofascist malware on any device that I control.
Thanks for the well-written, thoughtful reply.
I’m not convinced by the “poor representation” argument though. Every democracy I’ve ever heard of has some kind of “proportional representation” baked-in to it which rather naturally means that regions with gazillions of people in them will get more legislative attention than regions that are sparsely populated. How else would one organize it that would give farmers and other rural dwellers an equal voice as all those city folk? Allocation of representation by square mileage? Maybe there are tweaks that are being done, or that could be done, but I haven’t given the issue a lot of thought, maybe because I come from a tiny little state (both pop. & land area) and it’s pretty much understood we wouldn’t have the clout in D.C. that, say, MA would have, and that always seemed like “well of course, how else would it work and still be fair?” even if we were overlooked or, as you say “got the shaft” intermittently.
If people in E. WA were so concerned about not getting represented, maybe they could look to the kind of people they consistently elect. For example, CMR, who never met an orange ass she didn’t want to kiss but has done virtually nothing of note over her long time in office. Then there’s the premium Christofascist and domestic terrorist Matt Shea.
An investigative report commissioned by the House, issued on December 1, 2019, found that Shea “participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States”, organized and supported “three armed conflicts of political violence”, and advocated replacing the government with a theocracy and “the killing of all males who do not agree.” A former ally of Shea provided documents showing that Shea and his supporters were planning to seize control of the region after the outbreak of civil war, installing Shea as governmental leader in order to institute “constitutional changes” to “sanctify to Jesus Christ”.
And finally, off the top of my head, there’s the soon-to-be-former-mayor of Spokane Nadine Woodward who’s done fuck-all in office but is happy to cozy up on stage in public with the likes of Shea and others of his ilk. You’re saying that E. WA is wanting “good” representation, but look at who voters are electing, over and over again. Are they electing them for promising to go up against Big Ag Tech on behalf of farmers? I think not.
I’d love to find out that it was true that these right-wing secessionist-type fantasies were motivated mostly by sensible economic concerns (like right-to-repair, which I’m totally in favor of from what (little) I know of it) and environmental protection concerns (i.e. scientific management of water supplies with the good of the people and not corporate profits in mind, and with an front-and-center acknowledgment of anthropogenic global warming, including global warming contributed to, potentially, by farming practices - again not my area of expertise). I’d love to hear that, in the eyes of the aggrieved secessionists in the PNW, it’s 110% fine for old Tim and Jim to hook up down in, say, Rockford, and live happy lives together, but instead what we get is domestic terrorism at “gay friendly” churches.
As you say, the secessionists are primarily, as far as I can tell, E.OR/E.WA/ID Christofascists looking to establish a theocracy. If they were just regular, non-theocratic, non-totalitarian, anti-book-ban, pro-science, thoughtful people who weren’t dripping with hatred about Those (other) People, I might be be able to listen to them and reason with them and those allegedly-“over represented” people in the west might be happy to do the same. As it stands now though, they’re just seditionists who are hoping to “get ahead” through violence and intimidation.
Notes:
I take issue with there being “merit” to the idea. That would depend on what you consider meritorious. Is there more (or less?) merit to lumping all yer hillbillies and rednecks and racists and Christian fascists into fewer and larger geographically contiguous regions/governments? Why? Efficiency? What kind of efficiency? W/o all the tax dollars generated along the I-5 corridor this hypothetical state would have an economy running on fumes from the very start. Efficiency in achieving that elsewhere-mentioned Handmaid’s Tale perfect society? OK I’ll give you that maybe.
It might be meritorious in my view (though highly debatable) for the crazy backwards eastern PNW (namely ID) to be brought under the control of Olympia and/or Salem and thereby civilized, but, funny, this crowd I’m referring to isn’t talking about that, at all.
See also: the proposed State of Jefferson
Yeah, I was thinking something like this too when I first read the article. Around here, the right-wing mayor (a short-timer now thankfully) was pushing for the cops to be able to do homeless “sweeps” of “encampments”, something that I’ve little doubt has, and will, lead to serious roughing-up (maybe even murdering…?) of homeless who look at the cops the wrong way or give any backtalk or don’t 110% “comply” immediately if not sooner… . Hell around here a cop just beat the shit out of a guy (busting ribs and much more) who was simply taking a quick nap in his car in a public park parking lot, because he thought himself too tired to drive safely at that time.
The authorities around here pay attention to the homeless when it’s time for a little violent action (fun!) but that’s about it. So I too am surprised these LV ones are jumping on this incident. It would be a great thing if they were vigorously pursuing solving crimes against the homeless, but I’ve gotta wonder … seems awfully unlikely.
I actively boycott any and all ID businesses, because of the state’s shitty labor and reproductive-rights laws and its nurture of Christofascism. They can Gilead all they want but it won’t be with my financial support.