#ftc tag

[peliginspeaks]

Realizing that if the Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist lived in modern times, she would absolutely be one of those centenarians that people come to for pointless interviews on how they got so old and she'd give out absolute nonsense advice just to fuck with them. You see her on National Geographic or whatever and the interview holds out the mic and she folds her hands and tells you in her dry little voice that the secret to long life is to dump cold water down your neck and yodel every morning. Every time she hears somebody on her street doing it she puts a penny in a jar and laughs.

[13leaguestories]

Feel free to ignore this if you don't want to answer ofc, but those asks about Superstition & Insight made me wonder about For The Crown. It's my fave out of your WIPs, I loved the child soldier/assassin MC + the whole going undercover in a royal court aspect!

I checked and the last post in the tag was this one (https://www.tumblr.com/13leaguestories/744748222113808384/i-just-realized-that-for-the-crown-was-canceled). Since it was 6 months ago, is that still where you are now, that it may or may not come back altered in some way? Or are you leaning towards a particular direction?

Um ... I'm still pretty much still there. It's still teetering in limbo though so don't get excited. I think if I do get back into it I might do something similar to ToA and make routes out of it. But at the same time I'd have to go through and see exactly how that would work. It'd be great on one hand because let's say you wanted Lord Doran, well the original story you won't see much of him until the second half but with routes you'd see and focus on him more. But then that also means a lot of story twisting.

So, we'll see. I haven't really given it much thought but I know I 100% want to put that art to good use.

[sketchydesign78]

Could you draw Ellie?

I could! I also felt like adding a little bit of a story to the doodle, if that's alright ^^

[firstinspires]

[peliginspeaks]

Hallowrove is completely unmusical as far as instruments go, and frankly not a talented singer, but a very joyful one under the right circumstances. They take easily to songs that have a good rhythm or a story to them, and know a few work songs from the Surface or zee shanties picked up from their crew. They're the type of singer whose enthusiasm and genuineness is infectious enough to make you tap your foot along even if a few notes are slightly off key.

Null can play any instrument they've seen played in enough detail before, but can only follow sheet music. They physically cannot make a tune of their own.

The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist probably knows several instruments, but strikes me as a flute person above all else. She might pull it out and recreate some ancient melodies to entertain the Stewardesses in the Adulterine Castle during whatever doesn't pass for an evening there on occasion.

i'm curious so! question time!

do your ocs play any instruments or sing?

elias sings and play the viol!

they were taught how to sing first by the servants they hung out with in their early days, and then refined it at mahoghany hall during their light fingers days!

they learned violin at jericho locks, and the swan bride taught them how to play it as a fiddle as well.

thursday doesn't currently play anything, put i want to have them learn how to sing and play an instrument in the future

marigold sings a little, but they're best when in a group, and plays piano! their brain make connections with how their fingers weave and knot their bobbins when tatting with how they play the keys

[biophucker]

these lesbians have been on my mind for WEEKS. lovigh and elysia you will always be famous elysia (cerulean) belongs to my sweet pal @yellowcorps ! please check out his blog for all your dc needs

[zeebtrolls]

whups… another emo and i’m still trying to get rid of the yellow! i might keep them both atp if they don’t sell they slay to me… bringing down the yellow to $20 tho!

1. star racer - CLOSED 2. purple skullboy - CLOSED

TERMS OF SERVICE under the cut.

payments upfront in USD through venmo is preferable, but ko-fi and paypal are fine! holds are case by case basis.

you acknowledge this is a digital artwork! nothing physical will be sent to you.

you can repost my art as long as you credit me as the artist!

non-commercial use of my artwork only.

please do not put my art on physical merchandise and do NOT use my art as an NFT.

i reserve the right to use my artwork as examples for my portfolio!

[byrdstrolls]

Bulk anon wannabe

I have unsurprising news

[peliginspeaks]

Hallowrove bundles up, but often not enough since he doesn't really step outside to test how cold it is first. Sometimes he'll put on some layers, step outside to test if he needs more, and then forget that's what he's doing and just sort of Keep Walking and go to whatever thing he's going to and end up shivering later.

Null has yet to figure out that the sensation of cold is connected to how much or little clothing it is wearing. It is cold. It does not like this. It will continue wearing dresses with no sleeves and having no idea why it's shivering.

The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist is. Well. She doesn't feel the cold anymore. She feels the absence of heat instead. She feels many things in absences alone, these days. She doesn't mind it in the slightest.

Convo on discord made me think; how well does your fallen london OC react to the cold? Do they bundle up or try to brave it?

[astrumocs]

Mik anon you’re never gonna fucking believe this but you can draw characters that aren’t yours, it’s okay.

[peliginspeaks]

Been having a lot of thoughts about The Themes Of It All lately so here are my characters and their major themes/recurring through-lines:

Hallowrove

Cycles - the paradox of being both trapped in and relying on them. Dreading the next loop but not really being sure how to live and be happy if the wheel stops turning. Slowly becoming self-aware and having to make the decision on whether or not to try and break free, amidst the quiet fear of not being able to if they tried.

Going from searching for a place for themself -> creating one in their shape in the Neath, and the difficulty of accepting a place and a life as home after so long spent internalizing that a true home wouldn't be possible.

Sub-themes of relationship to future/present/past, use of free will to make small change in the face of oppressive power structures, distraction vs confronting, rebellion against being seen as anything other than a whole person of many parts

Null

Personhood and subtraction - asks the question What is the minimum requirement for truly being a person? Is reacting like one enough, if the mind is fully gone? Does it matter, if no one will ever know?

Greed and consumption purely for its own sake, wanting just to have, destroying just to take, the effort to fill a bottomless void

The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist

Personhood and addition - How broad can an individual's experiences be before they stop being traditionally individual? Does living thousands of years, experiencing several lifetimes, and purposely acting against your core self for decades just for a different experience dilute or expand that core enough to no longer be one? If you are everything, everyone, does it not spill over to become nothing?

Time and scale - hard to describe this one, feels like it needs a bit more development, but there's definitely something here related to her grey morality and the belief that if a harm or joy won't matter in 200 years it never really mattered at all

(Feel free to add on your own! It was really fun for me to think about my guys like this, feels good to pick out the heart of them and look at it as it were)

[hussyknee]

Made in the USA: Wage Theft, Fraud and Hidden Sweatshops

Unrolled twitter thread by derek guy (@dieworkwear)

4 Oct 24 • Read on X

ALT enabled on all images. Video has closed captions but is not transcribed.

Not trying to create a pile-on here. But let's talk about why something might still be made in unethical conditions even though it bears a "made in USA" tag. 🧵

The first thing to understand is that not all workers are covered by US labor laws. You might assume that workers get paid a minimum wage (after all, it says "minimum"). In fact, many garment workers in the US toil under what's known as the piecework system.

Piecework means you get paid not by the amount of time you work but the number of operations you complete. This system should be familiar to many of you. As a writer, I get paid per word. The pay is the same whether it takes me 100 or 10 hours to write a 1,000 word article.

My situation is fine bc I get paid enough to eat. But for a garment worker, the pay structure can be peanuts: three cents to sew a zipper or sleeve, five cents for a collar, and seven cents to prepare the top part of a skirt. These are real numbers for LA-based garment workers.

Piecework is how companies skirt minimum wage laws. Among labor organizers, the term "wage theft" refers to the difference between what a worker should have earned under min wage laws and what they actually earned through the piece rate system.

This system is incredibly common. A 2016 UCLA Labor Center study showed the median piece-rate worker in Los Angeles scrapes together $5.15 per hour—less than half the state’s mandated minimum wage. Labor conditions are also very bad: poor ventilation, dusty air, rats and mice.

A Federal Department of Labor investigation the same year found that 85 percent of Los Angeles garment factories were breaking labor laws. In 2016, these violations amounted to $1.3 million in back wages owed to 865 workers in a sample of 77 factories. This is wage theft.

In 2021, labor organizers won a fight to get piecework banned in California. But two years later, it's still incredibly common. I interviewed an LA-based garment worker who toils 12 hrs a day for $50. She sleeps in the corner of a kitchen. From my article in The Nation:

Currently, there's a new fight get piecework banned nationwide through the FABRC Act. I would link, but Twitter throttles threads that have outbound links, so I would prefer if you Google how you can support this legislation. Or follow @GarmentWorkerLA for more info.

The other reason why a "made in USA" tag may not mean much has to do with how the label is applied.

When you see this label inside your garment, what do you assume? Think about this before moving on to the next tweet.

The Federal Trade Commission has pretty strict rules on who gets to apply that label. For clothes, the item has to be cut and sewn in the US using materials that were made in the US. The FTC tries to match its rules with the common understanding of what "made in US" means.

If you're a giant company like Levi's or LL Bean, you may have lawyers who are advising you on these rules. This is why you see labels like "imported," which means the item was made abroad. Or "made in the US from imported materials" when they can't meet the MiUSA standard.

But it's incredibly common for companies to violate FTC rules. In 2022, the FTC fined the pro-Trump brand Lions Not Sheep $211k for labeling their t-shirts "made in USA" when the shirts were actually imported from China and other countries.

The company was basically importing blanks from China, ripping out the "made in China" label, screen printing the shirt in the US, and then applying a new screen-printed "made in US" label. CEO Sean Whalen claimed he was being persecuted for his pro-Trump views.

But the whole thing started bc Whalen made a video about how his customers are price sensitive, so he imports blanks from China. That's what kicked off the FTC investigation. So while this mislabeling is common, it's hard to get caught unless you make a video about your crimes.

The truth is that making a t-shirt in the USA according to FTC standards will result in a relatively expensive garment. Heddels and Velva Sheen both produce shirts in the US from US grown cotton. The first is $26; second is $90 for a two-pack.

Once you add things such as screenprinting—or if you want a more unique cut and not just basic blanks—the costs go up. This is why Bikers for Trump sourced their merch from Haiti. They knew their customers would not pay an extra $8 for true made-in-USA production.

Today, there are countless companies that make merch for other organizations. They source their t-shirts from a variety of places—some made in the US, most not—and then screenprint a design and fulfill orders. This way, the other org doesn't have to do any work but marketing.

When you see a screenprinted t-shirt for $20, ask yourself: Where was the material grown? Where were the yarns spun? Where was the cutting, sewing, and finishing performed? Where was the screenprinted done? What were the wages and labor conditions along these steps?

I'm not a nationalist, so I don't prioritize American jobs over foreign ones. But I do care about fair wages and labor protections. Just because something was made abroad doesn't mean it was made in a sweatshop. Just because it was made in the US doesn't mean fair wages.

Paying more for a garment is also no guarantee of ethical manufacturing. But when the price of a garment is so low, you leave little on the table for workers. Just because you see a $20 t-shirt that says "made in USA" doesn't mean it was made fairly.

Please don't harass the person who posted that original tweet. My intention is not to cause harm or stress for anyone. Only to help shed light on what goes into garment manufacturing, fair labor, and labeling. Hopefully, you will consider these issues when shopping.

For the inevitable question: "How do I make sure my clothes were made ethically?" This is very difficult to answer in a thread. My simplest answer is that we should elect pro-worker politicians, fight for pro-labor laws, and empower unions so workers can advocate for themselves.

--------------------End----------------------

TL; DR: Doesn't matter if it's the US, if it's not union it's probably a sweatshop. And not all merch is priced high because of fair labour conditions (looking at Taylor Swift and Beyoncé). Look for supply chain transparency.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

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/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[13leaguestories]

I feel so dumb for asking but in Superstition, is Lucia the witch from the For the Crown realm the same person as Lucia the witch from the real world?

No, and I wouldn't have even realized that I used the two names if you didn't say anything. But damn that would've been a cool little world blend huh, the witch managed to like divide or something. I don't know, lol.

[totallynotcensorship]

tags update: US politics is 5th on trending. with supreme court, scotus, and kosa trending under it. also "kids online safety act" is trending

edit: non of them are front page anymore... still trending tho

reason? kosa has been introduced in the house of representatives, a closer step towards becoming constitutional

Tl;dr on kosa(go read eff or watch sog for more details)

the "kids online safety act" is a bill in the US senate by senators richard bulmenthal and marsha blackburn originally introduced in feb 2022 with the goal of "protecting kids from dangerous or harmful content online", enabling local state attorney generals the power to enforce it. except the "duty to care" which is handled by the federal trade commission as of feb 2024

the bill is, at core, an act of censorship forced through even more invasive spyware. the vague language used in the bill enables wide scale censorship up to the wimps of state attorney generals and the FTC. subjects that are potentially under rest of censorship include suicide, eating disorders, self harm, substance abuse, bullying, violence, sexuality, sex ed, mental health, ect.

censorship of such subjects doesn't solve those issues

they only limit accessibility to useful resources for people suffering from mental illness, experiencing suicidal thoughts, addicts, people looking for info on sex-ed(that their school should have provided), transgender people struggling with gender diaspora, lgbt people, people belonging to minority groups trying to look up or spread awareness of their history and prosecution, online activists and educators trying to do their job(you know.. the kind of thing we are trying to do here concerning an on going ethnic cleansing). the "it is for the kids" excuse is bullshit

this is bad even to non americans?

sense most of the big social media sites we uses, like tumblr for example, are US based they will be affected by the bill. and if this bill is based it could work as an example for other countries to introduce similar bills. if you want to help go to stopkosa or badinternetbills. and send a complaint through them

DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT INJUSTICE