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Office / business unit - Clearance & Removal available
#office#unit#business unit#recycling#recycle#warehouse storage#storage solutions#norfolk#suffolk#essex#london#clearance#removal#house clearance#house removal#land clearance
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long way home
#my art#jujutsu kaisen#jjk#yuji itadori#megumi fushiguro#itafushi#fushiita#fanart#jjk fanart#jujutsu kaisen fanart#megumi#yuuji#maybe doing bg studies is the activity of choice while waiting fr leaks its so good 2 zone out n not think fr hours#can't stress about canon if you're busy studying window grates and ac units#this ws gonna start as a more train station-y piece#but as i am wont to do i got swept up during my pinterest dive#brought me further and further in2 small town train crossings and i thought they looked so cute#so i am like. puts itfs there :)#i love the idea of them just . meandering whatever quiet town they end up settling down tgt in post-canon#discovering hidden alleys n meeting all the strays holding hands th entire time....#i am manifesting PEACE and TRANQUILITY goddamn it#also i realized after the last domestic itfs series tht my use of red is at an all time low?????? leaning heavy in2 the green/yellow lately#here also . but i like the lil pops of red i included i think it centers them#happy w this!! happy w my me!! as long as i ignore the fact that indoor environments exist maybe backgrounds arent all tht bad :3
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misc NU doodles part tres
last comic is based off off my nasb 2 clip
#nicktoons unite#danny phantom#jimmy neutron#the fairly oddparents#spongebob squarepants#el tigre#my life as a teenage robot#manny rivera#jenny wakeman#also HELLO HI ive been getting a surge of messages lately and i havent gotten to replying bc ive been a bit busy#and i also wanna say i love reading all the tags on my latest posts youre all so funny#thank you for enjoying my art theres more where that came from#im still i nthe middle of watching el tigre and i ended up getting hyperfixated i fear#mlaatr will be next hold ur horses jenny enjoyers#dewdles#comic
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Article | Paywall Free
"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.
The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.
The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."
-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024
#google#big tech#united states#us politics#justice department#doj#monopoly#big business#antitrust#monopolies#google search#amit mehta#good news#hope
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The gang is here
#guess who's back from the dead#been busy with portfolio but im done finally#gonna do all units cause I want to have headcannons down#if you guys want more headcanons do tell I hve a few#pjsk#project sekai#leo/need#l/n#l/n saki#l/n shiho#l/n ichika#l/n honami#shiho hinomori#saki tenma#ichika hoshino#honami mochizuki#prsk art#art#prsk#prsk fa#artwork#kraenny draws
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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting
Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.
Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.
Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
It used to be that we rarely heard about private equity, but then, as national chains and iconic companies started to vanish, this mysterious financial arrangement popped up with increasing frequency. When a finance bro’s presentation on why Olive Garden needed to be re-orged when viral, there was a lot off snickering about the decline of a tacky business whose value prop was unlimited carbs. But the bro was working for Starboard Value, a hedge fund that specialized in buhying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses.
https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/
Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant — the buildings it did business out of — pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed. They pulled it with Red Lobster,and the point of the viral Olive Garden dis track was to soften up the company for its own bust out.
The bust out tactic wasn’t limited to mocking middlebrow family restaurants. For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/
Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer — it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/
It’s a good racket — for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.
As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in. Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.
They can also borrow. A quirk of the credit markets is that a standalone small business is valued at about 3–5x its annual revenues. But if that business is part of a large firm, it is valued at 10–20x annual turnover. That means that when a private equity company rolls up a comedy club, ad agency or water bottler (all businesses presently experiencing PE rollup), with $1m in annual revenues, it shows up on the PE company’s balance sheet as an asset worth $10–20m. That’s $10–20m worth of collateral the PE fund can stake for loans that let it buy and roll up more small businesses.
2.9 million Boomer-owned businesses, employing 32m people, are expected to sell in the next couple years as their owners retire. Most of these businesses will sell to PE firms, who can afford to pay more for them as a prelude to a bust out than anyone intending to operate them as a productive business could ever pay:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals. PE-backed dentists hack away at children’s mouths, filling them full of root-canals.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”
https://hcpea.org/#!event-list
As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare — and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
Every part of the health care sector is being busted out by PE. Another ugly PE trick, the “club deal,” is devouring the medical supply business. Club deals were huge in the 2000s, destroying rent-controlled housing, energy companies, Mervyn’s department stores, Harrah’s, and Old Country Joe. Now it’s doing the same to medical supplies:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals
Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.
You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons
Where did PE come from? How can these people look themselves in the mirror? Why do we let them get away with it? How do we stop them?
Today in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik reviews two new books that try to answer all four of these questions, but really only manage to answer the first three:
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/
The first of these books is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/These-Are-the-Plunderers/Gretchen-Morgenson/9781982191283
The second is Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/
Both books describe the bust out from the inside. For example, PetSmart — looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners — is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals — failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.
All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/
Tkacik says these books show that we’re finally getting wise to PE. Back in the Clinton years, the PE critique painted the perps as sharp operators who reduced quality and jacked up prices. Today, books like these paint these “investors” as the monsters they are — crooks whose bust ups are crimes, not clever finance hacks.
Take the Carlyle Group, which pioneered nursing home rollups. As Carlyle slashed wages, its workers suffered — but its elderly patients suffered more. Thousands of Carlyle “customers” died of “dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls” in the pre-covid years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/opioid-overdoses-bedsores-and-broken-bones-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-sought-profits-in-caring-for-societys-most-vulnerable/2018/11/25/09089a4a-ed14-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html
KKR, another PE monster, bought a second-hand chain of homes for mentally disabled adults from another PE company, then squeezed it for the last drops of blood left in the corpse. KKR cut wages to $8/hour and increased shifts to 36 hours, then threatened to have workers who went home early arrested and charged with “patient abandonment.” Many of these homes were often left with no staff at all, with patients left to starve and stew in their own waste.
PE loves to pick on people who can’t fight back: kids, sick people, disabled people, old people. No surprise, then, that PE loves prisons — the ultimate captive audience. HIG Capital is a $55b fund that owns TKC Holdings, who got the contract to feed the prisoners at 400 institutions. They got the contract after the prisons fired Aramark, owned by PE giant Warburg Pincus, whose food was so inedible that it provoked riots. TKC got a million bucks extra to take over the food at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility, then, incredibly, made the food worse. A chef who refused to serve 100 bags of rotten potatoes (“the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”) was fired:
https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan/prison-food-worker-i-was-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-rotten-potatoes/69-467297770
TKC doesn’t just operate prison kitchens — it operates prison commissaries, where it gouges prisoners on junk food to replace the inedible slop it serves in the cafeteria. The prisoners buy this food with money they make working in the prison workshops, for $0.10–0.25/hour. Those workshops are also run by TKC.
Tkacic traces private equity back to the “corporate raiders” of the 1950s and 1960s, who “stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.”
The most famous of these raiders was Eli Black, who took over United Fruit with this gambit — a company that had a long association with the CIA, who had obligingly toppled democratically elected governments and installed dictators friendly to United’s interests (this is where the term “banana republic” comes from).
Eli Black’s son is Leon Black, a notorious PE predator. Leon Black got his start working for the junk-bonds kingpin Michael Milken, optimizing Milken’s operation, which was the most terrifying bust out machine of its day, buying, debt-loading and wrecking a string of beloved American businesses. Milken bought 2,000 companies and put 200 of them through bankruptcy, leaving the survivors in a brittle, weakened state.
It got so bad that the Business Roundtable complained about the practice to Congress, calling Milken, Black, et al, “a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.”
Black stabbed Milken in the back and tanked his business, then set out on his own. Among the businesses he destroyed was Samsonite, “a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock.”
The money to buy Samsonite — and many other businesses — came through a shadowy deal between Black and John Garamendi, then a California insurance commissioner, now a California congressman. Garamendi helped Black buy a $6b portfolio of junk bonds from an insurance company in a wildly shady deal. Garamendi wrote down the bonds by $3.9b, stealing money “from innocent people who needed the money to pay for loved ones’ funerals, irreparable injuries, etc.”
Black ended up getting all kinds of favors from powerful politicians — including former Connecticut governor John Rowland and Donald Trump. He also wired $188m to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons that remain opaque.
Black’s shady deals are a marked contrast with the exalted political circles he travels in. Despite private equity’s obviously shady conduct, it is the preferred partner for cities and states, who buy everything from ambulance services to infrastructure from PE-owned companies, with disastrous results. Federal agencies turn a blind eye to their ripoffs, or even abet them. 38 state houses passed legislation immunizing nursing homes from liability during the start of the covid crisis.
PE barons are shameless about presenting themselves as upstanding cits, unfairly maligned. When Obama made an empty promise to tax billionaires in 2010, Blackstone founder SteveS chwarzman declared, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Since we’re on the subject of Hitler, this is a good spot to bring up Monowitz, a private-sector satellite of Auschwitz operated by IG Farben as a slave labor camp to make rubber and other materiel it supplied at a substantial markup to the wermacht. I’d never heard of Monowitz, but Tkacik’s description of the camp is chilling, even in comparison to Auschwitz itself.
Farben used slave laborers from Auschwitz to work at its rubber plant, but was frustrated by the logistics of moving those slaves down the 4.5m stretch of road to the facility. So the company bought 25,000 slaves — preferring children, who were cheaper — and installed them in a co-located death-camp called Monowitz:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/r-tannenbaum/the-devils-chemists-by-josiah-e-dubois-jr/
Monowitz was — incredibly — worse than Auschwitz. It was so bad, the SS guards who worked at it complained to Berlin about the conditions. The SS demanded more hospitals for the workers who dropped from beatings and overwork — Farben refused, citing the cost. The factory never produced a steady supply of rubber, but thanks to its gouging and the brutal treatment of its slaves, the camp was still profitable and returned large dividends to Farben’s investors.
Apologists for slavery sometimes claim that slavers are at least incentivized to maintain the health of their captive workforce. This was definitely not true of Farben. Monowitz slaves died on average after three months in the camp. And Farben’s subsidiary, Degesch, made the special Zyklon B formulation used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
Tkacik’s point is that the Nazis killed for ideology and were unimaginably cruel. Farben killed for money — and they were even worse. The banality of evil gets even more banal when it’s done in service to maximizing shareholder value.
As Farben historian Joseph Borkin wrote, the company “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted”:
https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben
Farben’s connection to the Nazis was a the subject of Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, a 1943 bestseller by Borkin, who was also an antitrust lawyer. It described how Farben had manipulated global commodities markets in order to create shortages that “guaranteed Hitler’s early victories.”
Master Plan became a rallying point in the movement to shatter corporate power. But large US firms like Dow Chemical and Standard Oil waged war on the book, demanding that it be retracted. Borkin was forced into resignation and obscurity in 1945.
Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, 24 Farben executives were tried for their war crimes, and they cited their obligations to their shareholders in their defense. All but five were acquitted on this basis.
Seen in that light, the plunderers of today’s PE firms are part of a long and dishonorable tradition, one that puts profit ahead of every other priority or consideration. It’s a defense that wowed the judges at Nuremberg, so should we be surprised that it still plays in 2023?
Tkacik is frustrated that neither of these books have much to offer by way of solutions, but she understands why that would be. After all, if we can’t even close the carried interest tax loophole, how can we hope to do anything meaningful?
“Carried interest” comes up in every election cycle. Most of us assume it has something to do with “interest payments,” but that’s not true. The carried interest loophole relates to the “interest” that 16th-century sea captains had in their cargo. It’s a 600-year-old tax loophole that private equity bosses use to pay little or no tax on their billions. The fact that it’s still on the books tells you everything you need to know about whether our political class wants to do anything about PE’s plundering.
Notwithstanding Tkacik’s (entirely justified) skepticism of the weaksauce remedies proposed in these books, there is some hope of meaningful action. Private equity’s rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good — but unenforced — law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the “incipiency standard” — Sec 7 of the Clayton Act — the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
The US has a new crop of aggressive — fearless — top antitrust enforcers and they’ve been systematically reviving these old laws to go after monopolies.
That’s long overdue. Markets are machines for eroding our moral values: “In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20130607154129/https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/markets-erode-moral-values
The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money.
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers
[Image ID: An overgrown graveyard, rendered in silver nitrate monochrome. A green-tinted businessman with a moneybag in place of a head looms up from behind a gravestone. The right side of the image is spattered in blood.]
#pluralistic#kkr#lootersprivate equity#plunderers#books#reviews#monsters#nazis#godwin's law#godwins law#auschwitz#ig farben#pe#business#barbarians#united fruit#carried interest#corporate raiders#junk bonds#michael milliken#ensemble cast#carlyle group#monowitz#leon black
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Every recipient is on Epstein’s flight log … including Barack Obama.
Was this some sort of back door sicko “Island participation” award?
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#princess diana#nothing can stop what is coming#truth bombs#exposing the deep state and their puppets is everybody’s business#fighting for truth universal justice freedom peace harmony wealth and joy#fighting for the children#standing up for what’s right is essential#never give up#stay united#be strong#love your Neibour#standup#speak up#speaktruth#please share#wwg1wga
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Edward doodle before i stop posting for another 155356327 years
#Ed can u pls do my science hw#Love this guy . I bet he’s smiling cause he’s not the one taking like 5 unit tests next week#fmab#full metal alchemist brotherhood#full metal alchemist#edward elric#digital art#HAPPY PRIDE MONTH BTWW I’ve been too busy to do anything special for it :[#my art
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i tested positive for covid this morning and not six hours later mister joseph robinette biden tests positive.... my thanks to him for doing this to entertain me. however has he considered letting me have my moment
#me and joe experiencing ''general malaise''#it seems mild. im chilling out very hard about it. we'll see how the situation develops <- true for me and perhaps also joe#NOT speaking on the state of the united states of america NONE of my business
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leaks from the anime post bnha 430……. #REAL #NOTFAKE
#dabihawks#tododeku#bnha 430#mha 430#bnha spoilers#mha spoilers#boku no hero academia#keigo takami#touya todoroki#shoto todoroki#izuku midoriya#now I’m going to tag the fankid. the old art is terrible do not perceive it#kaito todoroki#hishiro todoroki#SO WHAT IM PROPOSING IS……#hawks goes to work with ochako on the quirk counseling business rather than wtf he’s doing on the ranking system#dabi lives and is reformed and gets plastic surgery (but wants to keep some of his scars as a statement…) and he works with natsuo#he and natsuo have a soba shop. that only sells soba and boba#still trying to decide if Hishiro is a dabihawks kid or natsuos kid#hence why hawks doesn’t say ‘son’#I also think endeavor isn’t done with his bs and before his . UGH. ‘redemption’ signed a quirk marriage pact for Shoto#shoto and his wife (haven’t decided on a name yet but she’s ballin) try to make it work but they realize it just. it doesn’t#BUT OOPS SHE WAS PREGANTE. and she figures Shoto would. honestly be fine raising the kid there’s danger out there in the states#shoto’s also winding down on heroism bc it’s really. honestly I think he would also like to work at a soba shop#he doesn’t. but. I feel like there’s a reason he just mainly goes on midnight patrols yk?#anyway he and deku raise the kid . the mom’s involved as much as she can be while being the . yeah I think she would be the most famous hero#in the United States . good for her …. good for her………#if you wanna see me elaborate…… u know what to do… hit up that inbox#or if u wanna know what happened to the rest of class 1-a in my future au……
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#I also think american exceptionalism and their bizarre cultural one-way street isolation plays a role#i think it's different if you actually see other countries as equals and see that they have female leaders and realise that it's#not going downhill it's not solving everything it's business as usual and it's just another boring fucking politician#and this makes the gender of the candidate LESS (not saying no) issue people obsess about or feel a need to discuss#(e.g. people laying into the appearance of female politicians? certainly misogyny. making jokes about cooking and shoes? definitely too#but I feel like that was more a 'gotta insult these fucking politicians' and gender being one of the targets when people want to do that)#but if you're the US and giant parts of the populace think they're the specialmost extra complicatedest country in this our planetworld#the fact that it works for so many other countries takes a much lower priority#because 'yeah sure a woman can govern a....'checks notes' Fineland and United Kingdom of England or Germanland'#but the US of freedom? we got a red button and what if she's on her period!!?! We are a REAL country!!'#not to mention how deeply entrenched the idea of the US as being CONSTANTLY under attack is and the president as the PROTECTOR#and that protector needs to be daddy of course#i also think the different attitude to leaders plays a role#because a part of misogyny is how much people love to HATE women - to sink their teeth into them and demonise them for every flaw#so any country that has some kind of weird worship of their leaders or sees them as some heroes or extra-class of person*#in my opinion might have a harder time to elect a woman because the moment a woman becomes a candidate#you just have to find the right flaw to go on and on about to make the population absolutely hate her or question her competency#meanwhile the general slack we cut men means they can do whatever but somehow still be compatible with that concept of leadership#(*not just the US ....though a lot of other countries with similar attitudes to their leaders are not standing out as democracies tbh)
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former youtube ceo susan wojcicki just died of lung cancer
"Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for millions of people all over the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond," Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to employees.
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#destiel meme news#destiel meme#news#united states#us news#world news#tw death#susan wojcicki#youtube#google#technology#tech industry#alphabet inc#business#business executive#ask
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I did say I was gonna make a female UB version 🫢 All I can say is, Nat Sewell is criminally beautiful huhuhu
#twc#the wayhaven chronicles#unit bravo#ava du mortain#a du mortain#natalie sewell#n sewell#farah hauville#f hauville#agent morgan#agent m#seraphinitegames#my art#no seriously#I really really love how Nat turned out#I know I’m busy with work and commissions#but I wanna draw something for myself lol
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rose was winning the idgaf war
#everyone else was busy fighting she was texting her friends like#doctor who#doctor who spoilers#rose noble#fifteenth doctor#unit
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Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.
[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]
The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said.
The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...
Why it matters
The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."
Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.
The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.
"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."
Real-life consequences
In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.
In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.
In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings.
-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024
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Note:
A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.
In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger King to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)
Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)
The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)
Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.
Noncompete agreements can restrict workers from leaving for a better job or starting their own business.
Noncompetes often effectively coerce workers into staying in jobs they want to leave, and even force them to leave a profession or relocate.
Noncompetes can prevent workers from accepting higher-paying jobs, and even curtail the pay of workers not subject to them directly.
Of the more than 26,000 comments received by the FTC, more than 25,000 supported banning noncompetes.
#seriously cannot emphasize enough that this is going to be a huge deal for so so many people#it could seriously drag up wages in food and service industries in particular#especially in the long run#and also massively reshape tech and video game industries#do you have any idea how many game devs are legally not allowed to start their own studios? probably most of them#and that's about to change for the better!!#ftc#noncompete#united states#us politics#business#business news#biden administration#voting matters#democrats#federal trade commission#video game industry#game devs#fast food#fast food workers#labor#labor rights#workers rights#blue collar#service workers#good news#hope
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#workers of the world unite#workers of the busy world unite#richard scarry#busy world#acab#fuck landlords
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