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machinetranslation · 2 years ago

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Business Strategy During the Recession: Leverage Automation to Do More With Less

Heading into Q4 of 2022, layoff announcements hit our news feeds daily. As of September 2022, more than 52,000 workers in the tech industry alone have faced job cuts, certainly itself a "business strategy during a recession". Those who remain after the layoffs face another challenge: Facilitate growth in a world where “inflation” and “recession” are buzzwords in every conversation.

Regardless of experts debating whether or not “recession” is the correct term, the state of the world right now is clear: Businesses are bracing for cost-cutting measures. According to a recent survey by PwC, approximately 50% of businesses expect to cut their workforce in the next six months to a year.

We won’t see budget increases or clearance to hire new team members any time soon. Instead, we have to learn to do more with less. In this article, you’ll learn about business strategy during the recession and how to leverage technology to reduce costs and fuel growth.

How Businesses Are Bracing for the Recession

Weirdly enough, companies known for embracing and promoting change have mainly used traditional cost-cutting strategies in 2022 and into 2023.

Job Cuts

After a banner year for tech, layoffs are here. Job cuts have increased exponentially. Tech companies as colossal as Netflix and Meta have taken part in the trend, as well as Robinhood, Glossier, Better, Stripe, Lyft, and more. Some organizations blame the COVID-19 pandemic for drastic layoffs, while others attribute them to over hiring during periods of rapid growth.

Even eCommerce giant Amazon is engaging in belt-tightening, shutting down projects, and freezing corporate hiring.

Innovation Emerges from the Darkness

During a year that featured mass layoffs, crashing stock prices and extensive crypto scandals, ChatGPT emerged as a major step forward in AI innovation. The application, which quickly surpassed one million users, can carry multiple conversations at once, write software code and answer questions – signaling a new phase in natural language processing using AI.

In fact, according to tech industry data firm Pitchbook, early-stage investors and software developers have moved from crypto based to generative AI projects across the board. Many have even cited ChatGPT as a search disruptor, potentially putting Google’s iron grip on the search market at risk. Whatever the future holds, ChatGPT shows that even as economic conditions get tough, innovation is sometimes unstoppable, even without major investment costs.

Shifting Business Strategy

Companies that previously thrived in the brick-and-mortar space have had to shift their focus to online operations to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not just retail-focused businesses that were directly affected; many companies have had to adjust their concentration from in-person sales and interaction to online and digital marketing.

Which Under-Adopted Cost-Savings Measure to Embrace

While the above methods are commonly implemented and can be effective, under-adopted cost-saving strategies may be the key to coming out on top amid rough economic times.

One of the most prevalent and effective solutions is automation or embracing advanced technology over the hard cost of labor.

Moving into an AI-Driven World

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman recently offered advice to business leaders about the prevalence of AI in our modern world. Hoffman said, “You are sacrificing the future if you opt-out of AI completely.”

While AI may not have a place in every department in your organization, doing your homework and knowing when to use it is critical to business strategy during a recession.

In the world of language translation, machine translation solutions combining AI with MT technology are changing the game for organizations around the globe.

Rather than paying numerous salaries of in-house translators to keep up with the demand for translation within your organization, you can invest in advanced technology to do the work for you—and at a greater volume and faster speed than even the best translation teams can produce.

SYSTRAN’s neural machine translation software is a highly sophisticated example of a cost-saving system that can accurately translate your business’s documents, communication, and other critical components.

Solving Language Translation Issues Across Multiple Departments

All too often, several teams in a single organization have the same problem—but siloed communication and geographic separation prevent them from identifying their shared headaches.

Case in point: translation needs for teams as varied as legal, marketing, customer support, finance, research and development, and IT.

The cost-effective solution to this problem will never be giving each team a separate translation budget, with each team choosing their preferred resources. Rather, a single robust MT engine accessible by every team universally solves the problem while providing the side perks of drastic cost reduction and increased productivity.

How SYSTRAN Helps Companies Cut Costs with Advanced Technology

Take SYSTRAN’s case study with Ariel Corporation, for example. Ariel Corporation is a quintessential American entrepreneurial company that’s the largest manufacturer of separable reciprocating gas compressors worldwide.

Ariel partnered with SYSTRAN to elevate their workflow, increase machine translation output, and minimize costs. Before they implemented SYSTRAN, 17% of Ariel’s overall translation efforts came from machine translation. Afterward, SYSTRAN was able to help the company reduce human translation efforts by a staggering 31% and improve the quality of machine translation by 100%.

By improving the MT translation process, SYSTRAN provided Ariel’s translators with an additional, trustworthy reference source to use while translating new segments. It’s hard to quantify this benefit, but it reduces post-editing time dramatically.

Use NMT from SYSTRAN as a Cost-Saving Opportunity

Constructing a solid business strategy during the recession requires using tactics that your competitors aren’t adopting. Technology provides us with resources to reduce costs and fuel growth in an economic downturn.

For many enterprises, neural machine translation software can be the pathway toward achieving more with less. Nothing illustrates this more effectively than SYSTRAN’s ROI Calculator, demonstrating how NMT creates massive cost savings for companies with international communication needs.

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You can test the power of SYSTRAN’s NMT software for free today. It only takes a few seconds. Come and see what all the excitement is about.

#Youtube

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askagamedev · 3 years ago

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Is gaming industry having a brain drain? It looks like all the industry veterans left the industry altogether and all we have left is incompetent people who don't know how to design a game, lead a project, etc. Some reviews about big companies on glassdoor make this seem more apparent. What's your explanation on badly designed, unfinished games when people expect better products with technology we have in 2021?

All of the industry veterans, huh?

Some companies are bad actors, yes. I have been very candid in the past about how there is significant evidence that [CD Projekt RED is a sweatshop studio], especially on sites like Glassdoor. However, this does not necessarily support your point - most players absolutely adored CDPR's Witcher games, which were all built with the same sweatshop labor practices as before. But I would hesitate to paint the entire industry, from the smallest solo indie game developer to the multi-studio mass collaboration of hundreds of developers across the world, from mobile games in China to VR games on the Metaverse, from play-to-earn NFT games to whatever Star Citizen is to the annualized big budget Call of Duty or FIFA game, all with the same brush like you did. I would especially hesitate to say so when we continue to see highly decorated and greatly enjoyed games across the spectrum every year including this one - Deathloop, Monster Hunter Rise, Guilty Gear Strive, Forza Horizon 5, It Takes Two, etc. are all pretty great games.

I don't think your premise holds true. I don't think that the game industry is experiencing a universal brain drain. I actually think the opposite is true - the fact that games have shifted towards continued development of lifestyle games paid for by microtransactions has actually provided the industry a lot more sustainability than before, which helps retain talent and reduce overall churn. It isn't ideal - we still see examples of bad working environments, layoffs, and studio closures after all - but I am hopeful that things are moving in the right direction because I see workers organizing and collectively acting to demand better working conditions and results.

As for how I feel about badly designed or unfinished games, I don't necessarily like them but I can also see that even games with badly designed parts and/or games that feel unfinished can still contain significant elements that have merit and value. The kind of problems we devs need to solve and the solutions that these game devs ship warrant examination and investigation. I think that it is worth it for me to look them over and appreciate what they did right as well as what they did wrong, how I might approach a similar problem, and consider what kind of constraints they were under. I think everybody would stand to take this more nuanced approach and find things in games to appreciate. I think it would certainly contribute to healthier overall discourse than the hate parade that dominates the youtube algorithm.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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#working in the game industry #game development myths #warts and all #personal soapbox

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

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Podcasting "Self Publishing"

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, “Self-Publishing,” an essay about the structural shifts in the publishing industry over the past half-century and how and why that has driven people to try self-publishing.

https://doctorow.medium.com/self-publishing-41800468bcfe

The tale starts with the rise of Big Box stores, after Reagan’s deregulation got Sam Walton to take Walmart national. This concentrated the “mass market” — the huge, variegated world of pharmacy and grocery and cornerstore spinner racks that were the cradle of genre fiction.

The big boxes demanded a single national distribution system, and hundreds of local distributors — whose unionized Teamsters stocked the spinner racks based on long territorial experience — collapsed to a handful of database-driven decision-makers.

The number of titles for sale fell off a cliff. Writers who had a single underperforming book were no longer welcome in the big boxes and thus no longer economically viable (remember all those established writers who switched to pen-names? They were trying to beat this).

Monopoly begets monopoly. The predatory discounting of the big box stores put the squeeze on chain bookstores and indies. The chains merged and merged into a duopoly, while the indies underwent a mass die-off.

Publishers were caught in this squeeze: the two national bookstore chains and the big box stores demanded extra co-op payments, preferential discounts, and more generous credit and return policies. The publishers merged and merged, down to six (now four).

This also happened with trade distributors (who sold to bookstores, not the mass market) — the industry collapsed into a duopoly (today, it’s a monopoly, run by Ingram).

This is a familiar pattern across all monopolized industries.

As David Dayen described in MONOPOLIZED, this neatly parallels the monopolization of health care: pharma monopolized and gouged hospitals, who monopolized in self-defense and gouged insurers, who monopolized in self-defense.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Both monopolistic trends had the same end-point: after all the companies had finished monopolizing, the disorganized group of suppliers and workers were the only ones that the monopolies could strong-arm. In the case of hospitals, that’s health-workers and patients.

In publishing, it’s workers and writers. If you work in publishing and your resume is rejected by four companies, it has been rejected by every major publisher. If you’re a writer whose book is rejected by four publishers, then you’ve been rejected by every major house.

That’s why writers are now expected to give up graphic novel, audio, world English, and other valuable rights for the same advances — with fewer companies bidding on books, the likelihood that one will pay more or demand less goes down.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, some writers hoped that they’d be able to sidestep publishing by allying themselves with a different monopolized industry, locking themselves to Amazon’s platform. But as competition from publishers dwindled, so too did Amazon’s largesse.

The authors who shackled themselves to Amazon now face tens of millions of dollars in wage-theft. The solution to unfair treatment at the hands of giants isn’t to ally yourself with an even bigger giant and hope for its ongoing generosity.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx

A more promising sign is in the wave of mid-sized houses that have snapped up the workers shed by Big Publishing during mergers as well as the promising new publishing workers who are surplus to the Big Four’s needs.

These presses punch way above their weight, thanks in part to the number of great books that just don’t fit into the publishing needs of four giant houses. But as great as this is, it’s intrinsically precarious.

These mid-sized houses can’t stand up to the might of one distributor, one national bookseller, four big box stores, and one giant ecommerce monopoly. Earlier mass die-offs in indie publishing (like the American Marketing Services horror story) show how fragile this is.

Which brings us to self-publishing. There have never been more sophisticated tools for making polished, professional books on your own — Lulu.com, Smashwords, Bookbaby — and (thanks to layoffs) it’s never been easier to find publishing pros to help with that process.

But that’s not “publishing.” As Patrick Nielsen Hayden once told me (paraphrasing), “Publishing is identifying a work and an audience and doing whatever it takes bring the two together.” In other words, how do you convince people to give a shit about your book?

This is an incredibly hard problem. It’s the hard problem of advertising, religion and politics. There’s no established method for it because the attention wars are a race against adaptation — what worked yesterday won’t work today.

https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/

If you want to self-publish, you need to observe books like yours, identify how they are discovered by their audiences, formulate a plan to do the same, execute the plan, measure your results, and change the plan and do it again, and again, and again.

Publishers don’t just have systems and experts — they also have multiple data-points, a stream of books where they get to try different things, refine their successful tactics, and try again. You have a data-set with one point in it: you.

It follows that if you’re not prepared to work as hard (and well) at marketing, sales and promotion as you did at writing, you probably shouldn’t self-publish. Doing those things won’t guarantee your success, but without them, failure is all but assured.

That said, the one area where self-publishers can sometimes outdo publishers is accessing (parts of) the mass-market. The vast majority people aren’t “readers” (in the sense of being people who regularly buy books, go to bookstores, etc).

Every mega-bestseller is just a book that succeeded with a tiny sliver of nonreaders. And you might know more about a community of nonreaders — a faith group, fandom, subculture or political movement — than anyone in publishing.

If that’s the case, and if you are both diligent and lucky, you might be able to successfully market you book to that group and even leverage that success into a publishing deal that brings your book to “readers” — whom a publisher knows more about than you ever will.

I published by first book in 2000. Since then, I’ve published a couple dozen more, everything from novels for adults to YA novels to a middle-grades graphic novel to a picture book to essay and short story collections to book-length nonfiction.

I’ve published many books, including multiple bestsellers, with one of the Big Four publishers, and I’ve also published with several mid-sized boutique presses (some of which have merged with bigger publishers since).

I’ve successfully self-published, including a $267,000, record-smashing Kickstarter campaign. I’m a recovering bookseller and I’m unhealthily drawn to great bookstores, which are doing surprisingly well (thanks partly to Libro.fm and Bookshop.org).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

Despite all this, I’m keenly aware that runaway consolidation makes my position as a worker in this system intrinsically precarious. The wonderful people in big publishing love books and treat me very well, but they can’t fix the system.

I’ve met sincere, talented people at Amazon doing their best to support publishing, but they can’t fix the system either. Neither can James Daunt, a true hero of bookselling who has come to America to transform Barnes and Noble.

Monopoly begets monopoly. If any part of the supply chain is allowed to monopolize, the rest will follow in self-defense, and it will always be the workers — the writers and staff — who struggle to push back.

That’s why the current resurgence of both trade-unionism and antitrust are so important. In a world whose outcomes are more determined by power relationship than by good intentions, the only way to secure workers’ futures is to make them stronger and make business weaker.

The essay is here:

https://doctorow.medium.com/self-publishing-41800468bcfe

The podcast episode is here:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/07/05/self-publishing/

The MP3 is here (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive, they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_396/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_396_-_Self_Publishing.mp3

And here’s my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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newstfionline · 5 years ago

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Headlines

Historic blast of polar vortex sets scores of records, scatters rare May snow in Eastern U.S. (Washington Post) A blast of Arctic air marched south across the eastern Lower 48 to start the weekend, bringing winterlike temperatures to millions of people and even a confetti of snowflakes. Records fell like dominoes as the icy air mass spilled south, first lapping at the Midwest before surging all the way east to the Atlantic. It’s one of the most prolific late-season cold outbreaks on record, thanks to a piece of the low-altitude polar vortex breaking off and meandering uncharacteristically far south. From Texas to Maine, record lows for May 9 fell in every state in the eastern half of the Lower 48 north of Florida. Several locations also registered their lowest May temperatures ever recorded and coldest weather this late in the season. Lows dipped into the 20s in 20 states.

A distinct possibility: ‘Temporary’ layoffs may be permanent (AP) In late March, Britney Ruby Miller, co-owner of a small chain of steakhouse restaurants, confidently proclaimed that once the viral outbreak had subsided, her company planned to recall all its laid-off workers. Now? Miller would be thrilled to eventually restore three-quarters of the roughly 600 workers her company had to let go. “I’m being realistic,” she said. “Bringing back 75% of our staff would be incredible.” Call it realism or pessimism, but more employers are coming to a reluctant conclusion: Many of the employees they’ve had to lay off in the face of the pandemic might not be returning to their old jobs anytime soon. Some large companies won’t have enough customers to justify it. And some small businesses won’t likely survive at all despite aid provided by the federal government.

One-Third of All U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Nursing Home Residents or Workers (NYT) At least 27,600 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database. The virus so far has infected more than 150,000 at some 7,700 facilities. Nursing home populations are at a high risk of being infected by—and dying from—the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is known to be particularly lethal to older adults with underlying health conditions, and can spread more easily through congregate facilities, where many people live in a confined environment and workers move from room to room. While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry (Washington Post) During the bone-dry days of Prohibition, Americans slipped over the border to guzzle beer in Mexico. A century later, Mexican towns are the ones going dry. The government has largely shut down beer production, saying that it is not essential during the country’s coronavirus outbreak. The last bottles of Tecate, Corona, Modelo Especial and Dos Equis for Mexican consumption rolled off the lines in early April. “Many people are desperately searching for beer,” said Raúl Funes, the head of a craft-brew association in Tijuana, just south of San Diego. “It’s like toilet paper.”

The red flags of Colombia (Washington Post) When the food supply at the community shelter had dwindled to a single package of Swiss chard, Robinson Álvarez Monroy stepped outside and hung a red scarf. Across Colombia, the red flag—or scarf, or towel, or T-shirt—has come to symbolize an urgent need for assistance. It’s a cry for help. In some places, the scarf, towel, or T-shirt has been waving for more than a month. Colombia had reported more than 10,000 cases of the coronavirus and 420 deaths as of Friday night, far fewer than South American neighbors Peru, Ecuador and Brazil. But lockdowns have devastated the region’s fragile economy, and the informal laborers who must work to eat. People in the slums say help comes from those who see the flags and stop to give them food.

Pandemic shows contrasts between US, European safety nets (AP) The coronavirus pandemic is straining social safety nets across the globe—and underlining sharp differences in approach between wealthy societies such as the United States and Europe. In Europe, the collapse in business activity is triggering wage support programs that are keeping millions on the job, for now. In contrast, in the United States more than 33.5 million people have applied for jobless benefits and the unemployment rate has soared to 14.7%. Congress has passed $2 trillion in emergency support, boosting jobless benefits and writing stimulus checks of up to $1,200 per taxpayer. That is a pattern seen in earlier economic downturns, particularly the global financial crisis and the Great Recession. Europe depends on existing programs kicking in that pump money into people’s pockets. The U.S., on the other hand, relies on Congress taking action by passing emergency stimulus programs. Economist Andre Sapir, a senior fellow at the Bruegel research institute in Brussels, said budget policy in the U.S. plays partly the role that Europe’s welfare system plays because the American welfare system is less generous and a recession can be much harsher on workers.

French parents anguish over sending children back to school (AP) As France prepares to start letting public life resume after eight weeks under a coronavirus lockdown, many parents are deeply torn over a question without a clear or correct answer: Should I send my child back to school? Due to the slow startup, as well as ongoing fears about COVID-19 in hard-hit France, school attendance will not be compulsory right away. Parents and guardians may keep children at home and teachers will provide lessons like they have during the nationwide lockdown. Returning students will find their classrooms running differently. Teachers will wear masks and remind children to social distance from each other and to wash their hands several times a day.

Italy has long been Europe’s wild card. The coronavirus has upped the risk. (Washington Post) After two months of ambulance sirens, mourning and isolation, this is the damage report from Italy: The novel coronavirus death toll has surpassed 30,000. The country is hurtling into its steepest recession in modern times. Tourism has gone bust. Many restaurants and shops lack the cash to ever reopen. The government’s brittle finances are becoming ever more stretched. All the while, many Italians feel embittered and alienated. They are disappointed in the continent’s early response to the pandemic and its fallout. Anti-European sentiment has spiked. So has the uncertainty about what might happen next in Italy’s topsy-turvy politics. Even before it was hit by one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, Italy was seen as the wild card of Western Europe—flirting on-and-off with populism, sometimes seeming to be only one mismanaged crisis away from becoming the continent’s next Brexit or Greek-style debt disaster. Now that crisis has arrived, and what hangs in the balance is not just Italy’s stability but that of Europe, as well.

In Japan, pandemic brings outbreaks of bullying, ostracism (AP) The coronavirus in Japan has brought not just an epidemic of infections, but also an onslaught of bullying and discrimination against the sick, their families and health workers. A government campaign to raise awareness seems to be helping, at least for medical workers. But it’s made only limited headway in countering the harassment and shunning that may be discouraging people from seeking testing and care and hindering the battle against the pandemic. Apart from fear of infection, experts say the prejudice against those even indirectly associated with the illness also stems from deeply rooted ideas about purity and cleanliness in a culture that rejects anything deemed to be alien, unclean or troublesome. Medical workers risking their lives to care for patients are a main target, but people working at grocery stores, delivering parcels and carrying out other essential jobs also are facing harassment. So are their family members.

Infections rise in Asia (AP) China and South Korea reported new spikes Sunday in coronavirus cases, setting off fresh concerns in countries where outbreaks had been in dramatic decline, and new protests against pandemic restrictions erupted in Germany despite the easing of many lockdowns in Europe. Worldwide, health officials are anxiously watching to see just how much infection rates rise in a second wave as nations and states emerge from varying degrees of lockdown. Later Sunday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to take a different tack, keeping most restrictions in place as he reveals a ‘road map’ for the future of the country that has the most official virus deaths in Europe at over 31,600.

Virus Forces Persian Gulf States to Reckon With Migrant Labor (NYT) The Kuwaiti talk show panelists were holding forth on an issue that the coronavirus has pushed to the forefront of national debate: whether their tiny, oil-rich monarchy should rely as heavily as it does on foreign laborers, who have suffered most of the country’s infections and borne much of the cost of its lockdown. “Go to malls in Kuwait—would you ever see a Kuwaiti working there?” said one guest, Ahmad Baqer. “No. They’re all different nationalities.” Not long after, a South Asian man slipped into the camera frame, serving tea to each panelist from a tray. He appeared three times during the program, his presence unacknowledged except by one panelist who waved away a fresh cup. In the Middle East’s wealthiest societies, the machinery of daily life depends on migrant laborers from Asia, Africa and poorer Arab countries—millions of “tea boys,” housemaids, doctors, construction workers, deliverymen, chefs, garbagemen, guards, hairdressers, hoteliers and more, who often outnumber the native population. They support families back home by doing the jobs citizens cannot or will not take. But as oil revenues plummet, migrant labor camps become coronavirus hot spots and citizens demand that their governments protect them first, the pandemic has prompted a reckoning with the status quo. “The two things that Gulf countries depend on the most, oil prices and foreign workers, these two have been hard hit with the coronavirus,” said Eman Alhussein, a fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “The coronavirus has unleashed all these issues that have been put on the back burner for a long time.”

South Africa’s alcohol ban during lockdown reveals its deadly drinking habits (Washington Post) South Africa has taken some of the most drastic measures in the world to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus, but one has generated fierce debate like no other: a ban on the sale, and even transport, of alcohol. On one side: drinkers who say their rights are being impinged on and bottle shop owners and liquor companies that are going broke. On the other: a public health system that is unburdened by thousands of monthly hospitalizations resulting from accidents and violence attributed to drunkenness. More than 5,000 fewer admissions to trauma units per week can be attributed to the alcohol ban, according to Charles Parry, director of alcohol research at the South African Medical Research Council. The council’s data also shows a decrease in excess deaths in South Africa, suggesting that the lockdown, with its alcohol ban and decrease in vehicle use, may have saved the lives of more South Africans than the 186 that the coronavirus is confirmed to have killed so far. “Instead of patching people up with stabbing wounds, nurses can focus on training how to handle covid cases,” Parry said, referencing covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. “Based on our model, at least 15 people who would have otherwise died from alcohol-related traumas are being saved every single day.”

#headlines #news

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fromkenari · 1 year ago

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Then you're not the target audience of the comic (most of us have been reading since its beginnings, and they are often vague on purpose so that a general audience will get entirely different meanings out of a comic because they do believe it's that simple and sometimes it is that simple) because the target audience of this comic would never see a funnel labeled "data" and assume all of it is good data, and you must be somehow ignorant to the drama happening across industries because of the misunderstanding and misuse of AI that is happening every day, right now, and includes everything from mass layoffs of engineers and creators to plagiarism to art theft to even being sued and possibly disbarred because an AI answer wasn't vetted in a legal brief.

Also, this comic is from years ago. It has a caption at the source about data becoming "mushy" and therefore "recurrent" (i.e., a recurrent neural network) that makes the data and linear algebra seem even more like a magical compost pile in that you put data in, something happens, data comes out, and you then adjust the mix until it looks more correct, which is why I linked the comic's page on the original post.

The entire point of this post and use of the xkcd comic was to give a shorter and easier explanation to the question "Why is AI a programmer's nightmare?" that was posed by someone in another post about AI and after giving them 6 comments full of reasons why and knowing I could keep going, I went to find this comic, which has stuck with me for a long time and why I used it here.

For the person who asked why AI is a nightmare for programmers...

#out of credits

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crimethinc · 5 years ago

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Storming the Gates: The New Wave of Frontal Attacks on Prisons, Jails, and Detention Centers

In response to a viral video prisoners released detailing moldy conditions inside of the Dekalb County Jail, fifty people flooded the jail in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12, 2019, clashing with correctional officers and setting off smoke bombs inside the jail and fireworks outside it. The following month, a group twice as large marched to the jail, facing down over 100 police officers. Prisoners smashed the windows in their cells in order to communicate directly with the protesters outside. Smaller actions at the jail and outreach to the families and friends of inmates are ongoing, exerting pressure on the administrators, who have stopped commenting to the news, and contributing to a growing tide of anger against the facility. This is just the latest flare-up in a nationwide wave of struggles against jails, prisons, and other detention facilities from outside as well as within. In the following text, we review some of the highlights of these struggles, address why they are so pressing today, and discuss the necessity of an emancipatory politics that opposes both traditional means of incarceration and the alternative forms of control that are emerging from the restructuring of prisons, jails, and borders.

The Dekalb County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia.

Timeline of Resistance

Let’s start by reviewing recent rebellions against carceral infrastructure from outside the walls. When we understand the following events as a constellation, it appears that a new strategic perception is developing across the United States. This list leaves out the countless beautiful and dignified acts of rebellion taken by prisoners or detainees directly—from individual subversion to coordinated nationwide strikes—in jails, migrant detention centers, prisons, juvenile holding facilities, and involuntary in-patient medical institutions; it also does not include individual acts of sabotage. You can find more information on such actions here.

July 21, 2017 - St. Louis: When the air conditioning was cut off in the St. Louis County Workhouse, temperatures rose to 108 degrees. Prisoners reached out for help; some could be heard desperately shouting from their windows. When protesters arrived, including anarchists and others close to those who were incarcerated inside the facility, some people in the crowd attempted to tear down the outside fencing of the jail, pulling one section entirely out of the ground.

June 17, 2018 - Portland: When Stephen Miller’s family-separation policy for undocumented migrants became a public scandal, a small number of anarchists initiated an encampment in the doorway of the Oregon headquarters of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in Portland. Later, more people arrived and blocked ICE employees from exiting for a full night. Eventually, hundreds joined the encampment, facing down repeated police attacks despite promises from the Mayor that they would be permitted to protest there.

July 2018 - Nationwide: Occupy ICE blockades, encampments, and protests spread to facilities in Tacoma, Olympia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Louisville, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Tampa, Sacramento, New York, and elsewhere nationwide. In Lincoln, Nebraska, courageous individuals smashed windows out of the Republican Party headquarters and painted “Abolish ICE” outside of it. At some encampments, clashes broke out between protesters and police; elsewhere, fascists attacked the demonstrators. The encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia drew massive support, including widespread participation by the homeless. In multiple cities, liberal mayors paid lip service to the demands of the movement. Even celebrity politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes adopted its slogans, albeit watering them down. In some cases, city contracts with ICE were nullified completely.

Nebraska: A smashed window at the Republican Party headquarters, with “Abolish ICE” spray-painted on the sidewalk.

February 3, 2019 - Brooklyn: The electricity at Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York was partially shut off, disabling the heat. Inside the facility, temperatures plunged to 49 degrees. In response, a determined crowd forced its way into the atrium of the facility and clashed with police. The following day, lines of anti-riot police surrounded the MDC to keep protesters and journalists out. Electricity and heat were soon returned to the entire facility.

Demonstrators at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

April 12, 2019 - Atlanta: After inmates released a viral video decrying moldy food at the Dekalb County Jail, inside the perimeter of Atlanta, 50 protesters forced their way into the atrium of the jail, many of them masked, and clashed with police outside, throwing firecrackers, smoke bombs, and traffic cones while spray-painting the outer veneer. Police made multiple arrests, but demonstrators surrounded their vehicles, temporarily preventing them from conveying arrestees through the hostile crowd.

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May 15, 2019 - Atlanta: Following the melee in April, a larger crowd blocked Memorial Drive, a major east-west artery outside the Dekalb County Jail. Inmates smashed over a dozen windows in three different buildings and shouted out of their windows to protesters below, who were able to communicate with them via megaphone. Around 100 police officers from multiple jurisdictions formed cordons, also blocking on-ramps to the highway next to the jail. Police attacked protesters, who defended themselves, resulting in only three arrests.

May 16, 2019 - Atlanta: A 40-person march with an armed escort marched to the jail again, forcing the police to mobilize 100 officers once more. Inmates banged loudly on the windows. Because of the previous day’s actions, inmates were able to call local prison abolitionist groups who had left their information on the sidewalks in chalk. The facility later blocked the phone number, but a new one was circulated among prisoners via word of mouth. A week later, the jail administration blocked all of the exterior windows of the facility, while prisoners continued to report abuses to local abolitionists outside. During the May 16 protest, the mother of Damien Christopher Boyd spoke on the news about the death of her son in Dekalb County Jail in 2018. Via telephone, prisoners detailed other unreported deaths in the facility.

Tearing down the fence outside the Workhouse in St. Louis, Missouri.

Confronting the Carceral Future

Culling the laboring classes in ritualized cycles of warfare and internal violence is one of the original mainstays of statecraft. Prison and deportation also serve as ways to control the population of those the market deems expendable—what some economists call the “surplus population.” Historically, the incarceration and deportation of a particular demographic have died down whenever a role opened up for it in the market—for example, the Chinese immigrants who built railroads across the US in the 19th century—and escalated as soon as that market niche contracted.

In the period of urban de-industrialization that started in the 1970s, black workers were laid off from factories and firms across the rust-belt via “last hired, first fired” policies. Automation and global outsourcing emptied urban centers and rural resource extraction zones of their working populace. At the same time, the “War on Drugs” served as an excuse to imprison millions just as they were losing their jobs and, in some cases, resorting to illegal forms of commerce to make ends meet.

Since the 1970s, workers have poured into clerical and service-sector industries as manufacturing, logistics, and other heavy industries have automated, replacing large segments of the workforce with machines. Now, those service and clerical jobs are being restructured, as firms such as Amazon and Uber develop cost-cutting logistics and artificial intelligence to reduce their reliance on human labor. If the role of prisons is to facilitate the management of unemployed and “undesirable” populations—including the racialized, neurologically atypical, and otherwise criminalized—then we can be sure that mass automation, austerity measures, and layoffs will dramatically increase the number of prisoners.

Prisoners call out to demonstrators from within the Workhouse in St. Louis, Missouri.

At the same time, thanks to the introduction of various “smart” devices, more and more of our activities are becoming unwaged work, yielding considerable profits for the techno-capitalists while enabling unprecedented surveillance. Just as unwaged labor has profilerated, the disciplinary logic of the factory is penetrating our “leisure time” as well. In the future, it will be less and less necessary to pay us for the labor that keeps the system running, and each of us will be more and more expendable in the eyes of the market.

This is why everyone has a stake in opposing the development of carceral technologies and infrastructure. A system of government dedicated to securing wealth and power for a few, regardless of the consequences for the vast majority of human beings and other life forms, requires the constant pre-emptive militarization of space, the suppression of all forms of participatory resistance, and the balkanization of the population into rival groups in segregated zones, each with its own localized system of control. If we wish to be free—or simply to survive—we need to normalize resistance to this on every level. We have to fight the logic, the technology, and the physical infrastructure and facilities of incarceration.

Today, Trump’s racist call to “build the wall” is the latest discourse to legitimize the continued militarization of police around the country and expanded coordination with foreign law enforcement. In cities and along the borders, the military technologies first deployed throughout the Middle East and North Africa are appearing in “peacekeeping operations” against the poor and desperate. Technology firms are developing facial recognition infrastructures, predictive analytics, tracking service, and drone surveillance tools that will be used—not coincidentally—to facilitate both commerce and repression. In the same way that weapons designed for warfare are being used in a time of “peace,” technologies designed for trade are proving useful to carceral contractors.

Migrants in a US detention facility. What is done to the least of us today will be done to the rest of us tomorrow.

Occupy ICE in Portland.

“Just as it has been necessary to deploy troops around the world to secure the raw materials that keep the economy afloat, it is becoming necessary to deploy troops in the US to preserve the unequal distribution of resources at home. Just as the austerity measures pioneered by the IMF in Africa, Asia, and South America are appearing in the wealthiest nations of the first world, the techniques of threat management and counter-insurgency that were debuted against Palestinians, Afghanis, and Iraqis are now being turned against the populations of the countries that invaded them. Private military contactors who operated in Peshawar are now working in Ferguson, alongside tanks that rolled through Baghdad. For the time being, this is limited to the poorest, blackest neighborhoods; but what seems exceptional in Ferguson today will be commonplace around the country tomorrow.”

-The Thin Blue Line is a Burning Fuse

From the burning hills of Los Angeles and the hurricane-ravaged cities of the Gulf to the flooded neighborhoods of Jakarta, the disasters wrought by climate change will continue to trigger mass human migration at an unprecedented scale. In the decades to come, some nations may collapse as a consequence of mass migratory flight and nativist violence. Elsewhere, technology firms, xenophobic militias, and police forces will work together in hopes of facilitating the swift transfer of refugees through the country, containing them in sophisticated carceral environments, and transforming all urban space into a highly repressive terrain—and sometimes slaughtering them en masse. New markets will emerge in weapons and remediation as corporations cash in on disasters. The overwhelming majority of those industries will require very few workers; they will rely largely on robotics, forced prison labor, information gathering, and artificial intelligence.

A billboard in Louisville, Kentucky.

Occupy ICE, San Francisco.

We can already see signs of this future today. As the overall population of federal prisoners begins to wane, the number of people locked in county jails and migrant detention facilities is increasing, as is the number of people subject to punitive forms of supervision such as probation, pre-trial diversion, house arrest, and drug court. Technology firms such as Securus and Global TelLink are already making profiles and permanent accounts not only for inmates who use their services to call family and lawyers, but also for those on the outside who receive the calls—logging and storing audio files, card information, and phone numbers.

Soon, we will have to expand bail funds to cover arrest and probation fees. Noise demonstrations outside of jails and prisons may be replaced by vigils outside of the homes of those who are trapped inside them as a cost-cutting practice by the state, so the government will no longer be responsible for housing, feeding, or providing healthcare to those caught in the system?

A reworked quotation from Thomas Hobbes on a banner at a demonstration against the Dekalb County jail in Atlanta. Hobbes imagined life was hard in the stateless conditions of wild nature, but we know it to be hard indeed in the era of the police state.

When I saw the video from inside the Dekalb jail, I knew we would have to respond. I myself have been imprisoned in this jail, with its wet walls and moldy food, and so had many of my friends. In my case, I was in a car stopped on account of an automated license plate scanner affixed to the back of a police cruiser; they took me in for a “failure to appear” for a traffic citation. I wasn’t even the driver of the car.

Around me, our small crowd had donned masks and were preparing to storm into the facility by any means necessary. This time, the Correctional Officers were the ones backing up in confusion, taken by surprise by the growing rage against them and the suffering they administer. We entered the building. A trash can crashed through the metal detector; drums reverberated off of the walls around me. The element of surprise is exactly what all of their tools and technologies are designed to prevent. There weren’t many of us, only a few dozen, but we were determined. At that moment, we had gained the upper hand. We knew we could not keep it for long, but we were going to make the most of the time we had.

An Emerging Strategy: Frontal Attack, Complete Refusal

Since 2010, a prisoner-led movement has spread throughout the United States. In December 2010, thousands of prisoners throughout Georgia used smuggled cell phones to coordinate work stoppages and hunger strikes with almost no outside support. The Pelican Bay hunger strike of 2011 drew the support of anti-prison groups throughout the Bay, especially anarchists. Over the following years, smaller strikes and protests occurred in North Carolina, in Florida, in Indiana, and elsewhere.

After the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, prisoner struggles became more militant around the country. In Alabama, at the Holman Correctional Facility, C-block prisoners have repeatedly ambushed and overpowered guards and engaged in mass actions and strikes. In 2016, a nationwide prison strike grabbed national headlines as prisoners across the country refused forced labor. During the strike, rebellion, rioting, and arson broke out in multiple facilities around the South. Strikes and other acts of resistance have become normal at facilities across the US; another nationwide strike took place in 2018.

The determination to resist debasing conditions in jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers, and migrant holding facilities is growing across the country, as is outside support for those activities. It is especially inspiring to see combative outside actions accompanying prisoner rebellions. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the cartographer of the gulags, wrote in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago that such outside actions would have made all the difference for prisoners struggling against the total repression that prevailed under Stalin’s regime.

At the dawn of a new carceral century, this couldn’t come too soon.

Demonstrators confront uniformed mercenaries outside the Workhouse in St. Louis. Missouri.

If we don’t succeed in changing the course of history, tomorrow’s freedom will look like the probation of today. From the ways that our smartphones track our movements to the new round of anti-abortion laws threatening reproductive autonomy in the Southern US, the matrix of repression is penetrating ever deeper into our lives.

Some well-meaning prison reformers will unwittingly play into carceral discourse by demanding early-release programs and the like. If these are granted, it will be on the condition of increased surveillance at home, the suspension of the Fourth Amendment rights, reduced freedom of movement, exile, anti-association clauses, ankle monitor tracking, fees and fines. Our opponents will not hesitate to import repressive tools and techniques from loss-prevention firms, from fraud-detection alert systems, from anti-graffiti legislature, from any area, army, country, government, or firm they can find—nor will arms manufacturers or firms that produce censorship technology turn down new markets.

The weapons that are used against those who are lower on the social hierarchy today will eventually be turned against nearly everyone. This is why we must not prioritize the freedom of some over the freedom of others, by defining some as “innocent” or “nonviolent offenders.”

Alongside the immediate physical destruction of all carceral facilities, we should advocate and fight only for unconditional early release, the reduction of sentences, earlier termination of probation, and guaranteed access to parole. We must oppose the proliferation of tracking devices and coercive technological identification on every front, while normalizing and defending practices that preserve anonymity.

Above all, we have to completely discredit the discourse that legitimizes punishment and control of any form, so that struggles against existing jails and prisons do not simply provide cover for the authorities to extend new oppressive measures into the so-called free world in the guise of humanitarian and economical pragmatism. To this end, we should also be experimenting with transformative methods of conflict resolution that leave no space for coercive institutions of any kind.

As we were marching up, a traffic jam piling up behind our banners, police already forming lines to confront us, inmates in the jail began to smash their windows up above us. We could see the glass crack and shatter—first in one building, then another, then another. We held our position, blocking the street below as police grabbed and shoved the people in our front line, slamming them to the ground. A few bottles flew over my head, but mostly we just held on to one another tightly. I knew they could not arrest all of us, however hard they tried. The solidarity of our crowd was too great; I was being embraced by people on every side, just as I held them in turn. In refusing to unblock the streets, we had preserved the publicity of our action: a line of commuters was watching from their cars, filming the police, and occasionally expressing solidarity with us.

Inmates were yelling down to us for help, shouting that they were being pepper-sprayed. Rarely have our struggles intersected so viscerally. Imagine if the walls themselves were smashed, instead of simply the windows?

Demonstrators outside the Workhouse in St. Louis. Missouri.

Against All Authority—Against All Confinement

The time is ripe for mass struggles against confinement. Already, protests against ICE have drawn popular support. Even Republican Senators acknowledge that prisons are overcrowded, if only to justify increased funding. In terms of both carrying capacity and perceived legitimacy, the carceral system is nearing a breaking point. Carceral reformists hope to use this opportunity to introduce adjustments that will stabilize the regimes of confinement and control for another century. But at this juncture, inspiring actions could catalyze a confrontational movement that pushes for abolition rather than reform.

Many contemporary struggles take on ideological opponents, such as fascists and other white supremacists, or political leaders and legislation. These limited points of intervention rarely facilitate the emergence of long-lasting and uncompromising movements. But the struggle against incarceration is no single-issue campaign. It offers a point of departure for a movement that could span from resisting borders and migrant detention facilities to opposing juvenile holding facilities, police weaponry manufacturers, city jails, forced work arrangements, companies that profit on incarceration, and the police and courts themselves.

In a world that is continuously rearranged to foreclose the possibility of unforeseen developments and unanticipated encounters, the struggle against incarceration is also a struggle against the contemporary organization of our lives. This particular element of governance is absolutely necessary to the functioning of the system, yet large sections of the populace hate it.

It remains only to demonstrate that together, we can do something about it.

Chants could be heard from inside the prison: “Help, help!”—“Unclean Water!”—“Let us out!”—“Shut It Down!” Inmates put their arms through the grates and twirled towels, spreading a banner between two windows reading “HELP!” At one point, we could hear the inmates singing. The words were indecipherable; we could only make out a beautiful, low, melancholy harmony.

Three hundred hundred strong, we advanced, creating a cacophony with pots, pans, air horns, and bells, the front line of the march attacking the fence itself, shaking the outer ring and removing the clasps that adhered it to the poles. Several people took advantage of the gap under the fence to crawl underneath it, scale the second fence, and shout to inmates, before climbing down and scurrying back under to avoid arrest.

The police begin to form lines between the workhouse and us. They know that we won’t stop at ripping down the fence, that when we get the opportunity, we’ll rip the whole place apart, brick by brick.

Sooner or later, all walls fall.

Further Reading and Viewing

Taking a Global View of Repression

A Crime Called Freedom, Os Cangaceiros

Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang

Locked Up, Alfredo Bonanno

Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire

Inside-Out—Sub.Media

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rhiannonroot · 5 years ago

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BOOK REVIEW: ‘A Prince on Paper’ by Alyssa Cole

Content warning: Emotional abuse

I’m a little conflicted about Alyssa Cole’s “A Prince on Paper.” On the one hand, Cole does a lot of ambitious and interesting things in this book that I really enjoyed and admired. On the other, there are some issues that I can’t ignore.

Let’s begin, shall we? Nya Jerami is a shy, sweet young woman who is into video games and virtual dating apps. She’s the cousin of the previous heroine Ledi Smith (“A Princess in Theory”) and she’s returned home to celebrate the wedding.

Too bad the groom’s bestie Johan von Braustein is also in attendance. Dude is the prince of Liechtienbourg and a total tabloid darling. He’s a bad boy and pretty much the opposite of Nya. (I’m convinced that Johan is loosely based on Prince Harry of England. His late mother has a Princess Diana-like legacy.)

ANYWAY.

Nya accidentally bumps into him on the plane ride home. And then the two get thrown together in some wedding-themed traditions, tensions rise and Johan has a few moments of sweetness. (Nya unexpectedly gets her period, it’s visible and he makes sure she knows and no one sees, because blood stains are embarrassing.)

Meanwhile Nya plays an app called One True Prince and one of the last levels she has to complete is Johan-themed. Which is kinda hilarious. It does play into the plot a bit.

And then through wacky romance novel circumstances, Nya and Johan fake an engagement. Liechtienbourg is having a referendum on the monarchy and there’s a good chance that the royal family might not be in power anymore, so having a love story plays well in the polls. Nya wants some freedom and a little excitement. (And maybe to piss off her awful, controlling, abusive father.)

As you can imagine, the forced proximity and fake relationship sparks a lot of feelings between the two! And it’s a lot of fun.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this book. Cole pretty fearlessly and sensitively tackles some big issues, particularly emotional abuse by a parent and gender identity. We also see how two very different families work and don’t work – this will tug on your heartstrings. Arguably we also see how a found family works with the friendships among our heroines.

I liked Nya a lot as a heroine. She’s kind and sweet in a world that seems to want to crush it out of her. She’s also repeatedly underestimated, even though she proves herself over and over again. And best of all, she’s perceptive and incredibly savvy. In a lot of ways, Nya reminded me of Lara Jean from the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” series.

We come to find out that Johan’s “carefree playboy” image is just an act. He’s a sensitive and caring dude. He makes himself into tabloid fodder because his younger half-brother is getting attention in the press and Johan wants to distract them. It kinda works? The logic isn’t super sound, but sure, dude. Johan also struggles with the loss of his mother and the relationships he has with his step-father king and crown prince brother.

For the most part, I liked their relationship, though there were multiple moments of “Could you two just fucking talk about the things that are bothering you?!”

“A Prince on Paper” is a pretty darn good book, all in all. However, like I said, I’m a little conflicted about a few things.

First and foremost, I have an issue with how Cole talks about media and journalism. Only tabloid journalists are ever mentioned or represented, which is incredibly frustrating. Look, I get that this is an element of the world, but ughhhhhhhhh, this isn’t OK. This is an issue because basic media literacy is a language many people don’t speak. So, if you didn’t know any better you’d think every journalist is part of an indistinguishable mob and that we’re all just a bunch of monsters who don’t have any sense of boundaries and only care about celebrities and their shenanigans.

This is an especially bad move because we’re coming upon the first anniversary of the killings at The Capital News-Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Pair this with the ongoing crisis of community newspapers folding, news deserts and mass layoffs in the industry and you have a huge fucking problems.

I’m sorry to single out Cole here, she’s not the only one who does this, but I can’t ignore it either. THIS IS NOT OK. Please, authors, please stop doing this.

Rant over. Other issues: The weird mashup of French and German doesn’t quite work. It reads weird. With the exception of Lukas, the secondary characters fall flat in this book. And the pacing is off. The ending is tied up too neatly and we never get the full emotional fallout we should have. There was also a thread that I was confused about and I don’t think ever got resolved. (The early diplomatic mission where Nya’s friend is married to a man who comes across jerk-like.)

All in all, this wasn’t my favorite of the series, but I enjoyed Cole’s prose and a lot of the risks she took. I look forward to reading more from her.

#reluctant royals #a prince on paper #alyssa cole #book reviews #romance novels

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pixey-el-blog · 6 years ago

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(Natural News) Liberal cities across America are collapsing into Third World status. It’s not just the fact that San Francisco’s streets are now littered with drug needles and human feces, either. Seattle is also collapsing into rampant homelessness and drug addiction, creating an entire class of impoverished, homeless residents who are breeding grounds for HIV and other infectious diseases.

Yet Seattle’s liberal city leaders — like all “progressives” — are unwilling to take any action to resolve the problems in the first place. Instead, they enact new policies that make the problems worse while calling it “progress.”

Local reporter Eric Johnson recently released a documentary called Seattle is Dying which dared to document the city’s collapse into Third World status. (See video below.) But instead of working to resolve the root of the problem (i.e. brain dead liberal economic policies that always lead to destitution and collapse), the city’s elite have launched a P.R. campaign to brainwash local citizens with engineered happy messages that are dutifully broadcast by local news networks.

As Seattle’s City Journal reports:

Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.

This propaganda campaign, of course, is exactly what the vaccine industry does on a daily basis all across America. Monsanto and the GMO industry has been pursuing the same dishonest tactics for years. First, they fabricate industry lies and pay off doctors and health experts to sign their names to industry-funded junk science. Then they issue propaganda directives to the corporate-run media which dutifully broadcasts all their propaganda. From there, the tech giants shadowban and de-platform anyone who opposes the “official narrative.”

So now, Seattle’s wealthy elite are trying to brainwash the population into rejecting the evidence right in front of their own eyes. Seattle is rapidly turning into a s##thole liberal city, because liberals destroy everything they control.

As Charles Hugh Smith writes in his article, “America’s Forced Financial Flight: Fleeing Unaffordable and Dysfunctional Cities“:

Although it’s verboten to mention this in the we’re-so-fabulous local media, many of these high-cost urban regions are hopelessly dysfunctional. Taxpayers have ponied up billions of dollars in new taxes, fees and bond measures, and yet none of the problems that make daily life miserable ever get better.

The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors and suddenly the hipster bistro that was always jammed is empty, and then shuttered. To replaced the taxes lost to layoffs and closed businesses, the political class will have no choice but to launch a frenzy of higher taxes, fees and surcharges on those left behind.

Every liberal city headed toward a Venezuela-style collapse

This story is about much more than just Seattle. What every American needs to understand is that liberals are right now in the process of economically gutting every major U.S. city that’s under their control.

Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Houston, Miami, Denver, Portland and other liberal cities are all headed toward total economic and humanitarian disaster. Leftist policies always breed homelessness, drug addiction, disease and starvation. In cities like Seattle, the government even pays for needles and drugs to continue supporting the substance abuse habits of local citizens. If liberals regain the White House in the future, they will do the same thing to America that they’re right now doing to Seattle.

Instead of solving problems, liberals would much rather portray those who suffer from the problems as “victims” of oppression. Yet it’s the liberal / Democrat policies that are creating these nightmare conditions to begin with, driving people out of jobs with mandatory minimum wage hikes, for example, that also cause business owners to flee the cities and states run by liberals.

Remember: Left-wing societies are characterized by authoritarian, wealthy elitists who rule over the impoverished masses while destroying the middle class. That’s exactly what’s happening across the West Coast liberal cities today.

And get out of the liberal cities while you still can. Sooner or later, they are going to start confiscating pensions and private property to fund their insane spending sprees in a desperate effort to keep buying votes from the very same people they have trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

There will come a day when you can no longer sell your home in Chicago, for example, because the government’s confiscatory taxes on all real estate sales will make it nearly pointless to engage in real estate transactions at all.

It’s all going to hit the fan in the coming years, and liberal cities will collapse much like Venezuela. Get out while you can still sell your property for something close to its actual value. Buy a place in the country and practice self-reliance.

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amelumineux · 3 years ago

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So as a game dev student whose been watching how pokemon developement has been going for a while, this is probably a little less worrying than it first seems but there is definitely also bad things happening here so yeah, long post with my analysis BDSP and all of the side games each has their own different developer (the last pokemon side game gamefreak made was Pokemon Quest in 2018), none of them have been made by gamefreak, the pokemon company (Nintendo basically controls, with gamefreak and a few others having some minor amount of ownership) publishes all the games which means they mostly provide money, marketing, and maybe some project management, the role of game publishers are similar to that of the producers for movies Excluding some localization and cross console ports of games that actually released in 2019, in the last 2 years Legends Arceus is the only game that Gamefreak has thus far released. (Though if you go back 3 years 2019 Gamefreak released a lot, SHSW, Little Town Hero, and console ports of Giga Wrecker) but the active work across all of the different games is actually being distributed across many different devs at many different studios However the point of the devs not getting any sort of break between projects is definitely happening here, acutally worse, while I haven't played legends Arceus I did watch the trailers and you can see the improvements between each and based on that, I'm almost certain that the development of the new Scarlet and Violet games had to have started before Legends Arceus was even finished. I imagine as they started moving away from core mechanics and onto polish they started moving more and more devs over to the new games which probably put extra stress on both teams As far as I can tell from the limited information we have, the new games are using the same engine as Legends Arcues, the process will likely be far more similar to developing a same generation game than jumping a generation for the developers. Those same generation jumps have historically been 1 year (like XY to ORAS) and Gamefreak has been expanding recently and the developers will have learned from hickups in the legends arcues developement which'll make it much easier for them to make the new games, the end of this year is a stretch and I am worried for the developement team in that timeframe (which I suspect may be being pushed by the pokemon company to get in before christmas), but feburary or march 2023 would probably be realistic, though longer is always better esspically if they are redoing a bunch of the art yet again from Legends Arceus, something they historically haven't done often even between generations and I would very much like for the sake of the developers to see these games delayed atleast a few months so yeah, I am not super concerned about the number of games, again excluding some localization and ports of games that actually released in late 2019 gamefreak didn't actually release anything in either 2020 or 2021 and can carry a lot over from legends arceus to make the new games faster and with less stress but I don't see any way got any sort of break which is definitely deserved and the 7 or 8 months they've given themselves is worrying, and I sincerely hope for the sake of the developers that it is delayed to atleast 12 or 13 months, preferably longer finally regardless of everything else I've said here, these are absolutely the kind of things you should be questioning about literally every game and especially triple A games and I am very glad this conversation is being had about these games, the game development industry in every corner of the world is harsh, companies overwork, and abuse developers every day, and mass layoffs at or near the end of projects are also exceedingly common and all of the help advocating for a better games industry in every way and form is greatly appreciated

i am so torn right now. as the hardcore pokemon fan i am i really want to be excited but the implications of them already thrusting out a new generation not even a month after legends arceus’ release are. concerning to say the least. like they really could’ve just settled on giving us like, i don’t know – dlc for legends arceus or even bdsp, a new spin-off title, something to hold us down until at least next year…… at least next year…… but now i’m fully convinced that these poor developers aren’t sleeping

#Ame speaks #Ame talks game dev #pokemon #important #I'm sure there's overworking happening here and I sincerely hope they delay these new games as long as possible but this is no more #overworking than damn near every other AAA game studio that exists #it's sad but companies with good work ethic are rare and in this case gamefreak and other pokemon developers haven't asked players to #boycott their games

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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‘It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing:’ How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe

Just before 5 a.m. on August 2, 2017, Alice Murray was fast asleep when her entire house shook, almost as if a freight train had crashed into the block, she told the Cumberland Times-News.

That's exactly what happened.

About 30 yards away, just off Cleveland Street in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, 33 cars in a 178-car freight train belonging to CSX Corporation derailed. The train crashed into one house and damaged two others. The entire town had to be evacuated. Miraculously, no one was killed.

As scary as the derailment in Hyndman was, it could have been much worse. Of the 178 cars on that train, 70 contained hazardous material, including 15 of the derailed cars, according to a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation. Luckily, just three of them—which contained molten asphalt, molten sulfur, and propane—either leaked or lit on fire.

The town was evacuated because molten asphalt, if released, can create vapors that, according to the NTSB, are an "explosive mixture with air." Some of the other derailed cars contained liquified petroleum gas, and one car that did not derail contained Sodium Chlorate, which is potentially poisonous to inhale.

Derailment in Hyndman, PA. Photo: NTSB

Like plane crashes, freight train derailments are rarely the result of a single failure. Many different things have to go wrong. Also like air travel, freight trains are a highly regulated form of transportation because of the potential for catastrophe.

And yet, freight train derailments are surprisingly common. In 2019, railroads reported 341 derailments on main line track, meaning the parts of the rail system not in yards or other work areas. Of those 341 derailments, 24 were freight trains carrying 159 cars of hazardous material, according to data the railroads voluntarily submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration. Even local news reports provide an alarming window into how frequent derailments are that people actually notice. While reporting this article, freight trains derailed on February 15 in Illinois, February 23 in Pennsylvania, March 3 in California, March 7 in Alabama, and March 11 in both Wisconsin and Minnesota.

None of these derailments resulted in any reported injuries. But according to Greg Regan, President of the Transportation Trades Department, a labor organization consisting of 33 transportation unions, these are red flags.

"If you have increases in the less significant or catastrophic derailments," Regan said, "it reflects a degrading safety culture, and certainly leads to oversights and an environment that could lead to the more disastrous types of derailment that again grab the headlines."

To be sure, even on well-run freight railways or rigorously regulated airlines, accidents still happen. And at first glance, the derailment in Hyndman appeared to be just another accident. NTSB investigators found the train derailed largely because of a combination of improper braking procedures and the empty cars being in the front of the train. Long trains have an accordion effect where they expand and contract as they brake and accelerate. Empty cars brake faster than heavy ones, and if the empty cars are in front, the full ones will push against them, possibly forcing the empty cars up and off the tracks.

This is not a new problem. How to properly and safely space empty rail cars amid long freight trains and how to brake so as to minimize derailments are some of the oldest and most basic safety protocols in rail operation. And those protocols, along with other rules and practices meant to ensure as safe a rail network as possible, are now being ignored for the sake of profit.

According to interviews with current and former rail workers, union officials, and independent experts, the Hyndman derailment and others like it are the all-too-predictable result of nearly all the major freight rail companies adopting a business approach called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Proponents of PSR say it is about leveraging modern technology to improve efficiency. But those who work on the railroads every day say it is little more than a euphemism for draconian cost-cutting in order to achieve an arbitrary metric that pleases shareholders. That metric, called an "operating ratio," must get below 60 percent, which means only 60 percent of every dollar earned goes towards actually running the railroads. The rest can go towards executive pay and shareholder dividends. All but one of the seven so-called "Class I" railroad companies, which account for 94 percent of the freight rail industry's revenue, have explicitly adopted some form of PSR.

How freight railroads are being run, and for whose benefit, is not just a railroad industry issue. It is a problem that has ramifications across the American economy. Freight rail moves 57 tons of goods per American per year. It is often the most economical, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to move things over long distances. It is also widely recognized as the safest way to move vast quantities of hazardous materials that, for better or worse, currently undergird our comfortable living standards and economic productivity.

Have changes in the freight rail industry affected you? Do you work in the freight rail industry? Do you ship goods regularly via freight rail? Do you live in a small town regularly impacted by long trains? We'd love to hear from you. Email Aaron Gordon at [email protected].

But, as the Hyndman derailment demonstrated, moving those hazardous materials is a potential life-and-death question for communities all along the industry's 140,000 miles of rail. And unlike our roads, bridges, tunnels, and public transportation systems, the entire Class I freight rail system is privately operated and maintained. In other words, the railroad companies themselves get to decide how much to invest in repair, maintenance and other safety measures, and how much to keep as profit.

Increasingly, railroads are choosing to boost profits and pay shareholders rather than invest in safety. In interviews with Motherboard, workers said that since their respective companies adopted PSR, they barely recognize the work that they do. All of their priorities have changed. What used to be about safety is now about cutting costs. Among the changes:

Workers now have to inspect many multiples more rail cars in a fraction of the time, barely giving them enough time to walk the entire train

Trains are longer than they used to be and assembled haphazardly, with little thought as to where the heavy and empty cars should go to avoid derailments because it would keep the train in the yard longer

Shops and yards that used to perform inspections along routes have been closed, meaning there are fewer inspection points

Routes have been changed so cars stop for inspection less frequently

Maintenance is deferred as long as possible

Knowledgeable and safety-conscious supervisors have often been replaced by businessmen who cultivate a culture of fear and intimidation around reporting unsafe equipment; doing so would keep the train in the yard longer, hurting the metrics on which supervisors are graded

While there are strict federal rules governing how often the people running the trains must rest so as to minimize accidents, the workers performing safety-critical inspections have been pushed to compensate for mass layoffs by working 16 hours per shift or more, discouraged from taking lunch breaks, and sometimes required to work overtime or risk losing their jobs

One 40-year veteran railroad worker told Motherboard he has never seen anything like it. "They're just cutting everywhere, on both ends of everything." (Motherboard agreed to not name several railroad workers quoted in this article because they feared being fired for speaking out about sensitive safety issues.)

In statements to Motherboard, neither Norfolk Southern nor CSX directly addressed any of these points. Instead, they issued broad defenses of their safety practices, pointing to aggregate safety metrics reported to regulators.

"Norfolk Southern is firmly committed at all levels to operating safely, protecting our employees and the communities that we serve," said Norfolk Southern's spokesman Jeff DeGraff. "Our comprehensive approach mirrors that of the freight railroad industry, including significant private investment, employee training efforts, technology implementation, regular inspections, and community outreach, which has led to dramatic safety improvements over the past two decades with respect to train accidents and employee injuries."

Cindy Schild, director of media relations at CSX, said in a statement to Motherboard, "Safety is a core value at CSX, and while we will always strive to be better, we are proud that after implementing our new operating model in 2017 and 2018, CSX significantly improved our safety performance as evidenced by the metrics reported to our Federal regulator, the FRA [Federal Railroad Administration]."

The impact of PSR on freight rail safety appears to be one of the worst kept secrets in the industry. Workers are afraid to speak out publicly because, several told Motherboard, it would put a target on their backs at a time when one out of every four freight rail workers has lost their jobs in the last five years alone. But there is a bubbling desperation to get someone, anyone, to do something before it's too late.

To a person, the more than a dozen workers and union officials Motherboard spoke to warned that railroads are courting disaster. Unless something is done to hinder these dangerous practices, they cautioned, derailments like Hyndman will look trivial in comparison to "the big one," a disaster so bad it will plaster the news and snap Congress and regulators into action.

"Railroads haul the most dangerous gases in the world," one veteran worker told Motherboard. "I do think it's a matter of time. There's going to be a freight car that hasn't been inspected in 90,000 miles that comes off the track, as it goes off the track and slams into other cars, into a tank car, and either explodes or leaks poisonous gas out. It's going to take something like that, and a lot of deaths, and then all of a sudden everybody's going to care."

This is not a mere theoretical possibility. This exact set of circumstances happened not long ago just a few miles across the U.S. border. On July 6, 2013, a Montreal, Maine and Atlantic (MMA) Railway train carrying two million gallons of liquid petroleum in 72 tank cars crashed into the downtown area of Lac-Megantic, Quebec. 47 people died, 2,000 people were evacuated, 40 buildings were destroyed, and millions of gallons of oil seeped into the soil and nearby river. Among the causes of this tragedy, according to Canada's Transportation Safety Board's then-chairperson Wendy Tadros, was "a shortline railway running its operations at the margins" and cutting corners on maintenance and training. Three lower-level employees, including the train's engineer, were charged with criminal negligence but ultimately acquitted.

This is just some of the damage caused by the Lac Megantic derailment. Credit: Lucas Oleniuk via Getty

Many of the towns' residents sought accountability at a higher level. Jean Paradis, who lost three friends in the disaster, told Canada's Global News, "Transport Canada has let those cheap companies run railroads for less money, for making more money instead of acting for security for people."

Now, those familiar with the rail industry stateside say the same is happening here. "It's only a matter of time before fatigued workers, unrealistic inspection policies, and unqualified inspections result in a major incident in someone's neighborhood," said Jason Cox of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen in a video posted to Youtube in early February. "I implore anyone who might be watching who has the authority to act to please act now." As of this writing, the video has nine views.

SMART-TD union president Jeremy Ferguson, who has been involved in the freight rail industry since 1997, offered a grim warning. He compared what is occurring in the freight industry to a high-profile transportation disaster from not too long ago in which 346 people died and from an industry that, in a lot of ways, has a lot in common with freight rail.

"It's going to end up," he said, "like Boeing."

"Safety Fourth"

Norfolk Southern (NS) used to be one of the safest railroads in the country. It won an industry award for safest Class I railroad 20 years in a row until the award was discontinued in 2012. Safety was always the highest priority, workers told Motherboard, but that started to change when NS implemented PSR.

In early February 2019, NS announced it would implement its own version of PSR. Although its workforce had already been declining, in order to lower its operating ratio by about five percent in two years, the railroad planned to reduce its workforce by 3,000 people.

Motherboard spoke to four NS workers who asked to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation from the company for speaking to the press. They all said these cuts have resulted in a dramatic personnel shortage, and since none of the company's efficiency metrics measure safety, supervisors and workers are placed in the thankless position of either sacrificing safety in order to hit the numbers or do the responsible thing and risk getting punished.

Across the different crafts, workers highlighted the same general problem: in the push for efficiency, fewer workers are being tasked with more, rushed through safety-critical inspections and repairs, and are pressured not to report defects or potential safety issues that will take cars out of service and require manpower to fix.

As an example, several workers told Motherboard about car inspections. When a freight train comes into a yard, Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) regulations require the cars be inspected, with dozens of different inspection points per car to make sure the freight was up for another punishing run on the rails. When these workers first started years or even decades ago, there was no set rule about how long these inspections should take because cars are different lengths and designs vary with some having more inspection points than others. But, as a rule of thumb, carmen generally estimated it would take three minutes per car. About five years ago, NS management mandated inspections take no more than two and a half minutes per car. Some of the workers Motherboard spoke to thought this was reasonable enough.

But in the past two years, management started mandating workers spend no more than two minutes per car. Then 1.8. Then 1.5. Now, it's 1.4, barely giving workers any time to stop and look at the car they're supposedly inspecting, which can be up to 100 feet in length. Thanks to the staff cuts, rail yard closures and operation consolidation, workers that used to inspect perhaps 300 cars a day are now inspecting three or four times that. Company notices and presentations that used to highlight the importance of safety now talk about efficiency. In one bulletin board material, a worker said, safety was listed as the fourth most important thing, behind measures like reducing car dwell time and getting trains back on the rails. The workers have a joke around the shop floor now: "Safety Fourth."

This forces workers into an impossible situation that can only be solved one of two ways. The first way is, as one worker told Motherboard, to lie on the inspection sheet about how much time it took per car. "Basically, our bosses now, they basically told us, just lie," one worker told Motherboard. "Please just lie on that inspection sheet. Just lie, write bogus times, to satisfy 'em."

The second way is to not really do the inspections, at least not properly. Management doesn't explicitly tell workers to do this but "you're just made to feel you're an idiot," another worker said, like "you're the only one in the world who would care about this stuff, now you're holding up the train and pushing everything back." And it is made clear to them that if they keep holding trains back, their yard will be shut down and they'll lose their jobs.

As a result, "normal maintenance is getting neglected severely," that worker said. A different NS worker concurred, telling Motherboard that recently a train came into his yard with some freight cars that hadn't received a basic walk-around inspection in 90,000 miles. Per FRA regulations, trains are not supposed to travel 3,500 miles without an inspection. He estimated about 13 out of the 60 cars had "major defects."

The consequences of these policies are deadly. In the early evening of October 4, 2018, a Union Pacific train collided into another in Granite Canyon, Wyoming. The moving train was speeding down a hill at 50 miles per hour unable to stop due to problems with the air brakes. Both the engineer and conductor were killed. NTSB investigators determined six of the 10 cars added to the train at the previous stop were overdue for air brake testing by a period of a few weeks to two years. The NTSB concluded that, had the cars been tested per federal safety regulations, the air brake problems would almost certainly have been detected.

Granite Canyon derailment. Photo: NTSB

In a statement, Union Pacific spokesperson Kristen South told Motherboard, "Union Pacific has recognized many operational efficiencies in the past few years that have reduced the amount of equipment and resources on our network."

Echoing many PSR proponents over the years, South asserted these PSR-esque initiatives actually improve safety. "The ability to operate trains with more rail cars results in fewer trains, reducing the potential for employee injuries and derailments. Additionally, we successfully utilized Distributed Power locomotive technology and improved train consist parameters to enhance braking ability and train handling capabilities. This technology allows for new train lengths without compromising our high safety expectations."

South disputed claims their equipment is not properly inspected, saying it undergoes "detailed inspections, meeting federal requirements, before departing and after arriving at destinations" and leverages various technologies to supplement inspections.

The Moneyball of Railroading

Precision Schedule Railroading is the brainchild of Hunter Harrison, who by most accounts is the single most important figure in North American railroading of the last 50 years. And even he understood the dire consequences of his innovations.

In October 2017, just two months after the CSX derailment in Hyndman, Harrison appeared before the Surface Transportation Board to hear complaints from shippers about how his cost-cutting at CSX tanked service. Harrison had been receiving oxygen for some months to treat his emphysema and would die two months later.

"I got blood all over my hands," Harrison said in a somewhat bizarre non sequitur. "From injuries in this industry that should have been avoidable. And I think these issues of safety never fall to the wayside with us. And they always will be."

Harrison started his railroading career in 1963 as an oiler on the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, which, like many misleading railroad names, ran in the south and nowhere near San Francisco. The "Frisco," as it was nicknamed, was acquired by Burlington Northern (the "BN" in BNSF, a Class I railroad) in 1980. Harrison worked his way up the management ladder. He left BN in 1989 to take an executive job at Illinois Central, a railroad that mostly ran down the midwest from Chicago to Alabama and had recently been purchased by an investment group. It was here that Harrison first implemented PSR.

PSR is the Moneyball of railroading. In an industry that at the time did not run on set schedules, struggled to be profitable, and didn't bother to measure or track many key performance indicators, Harrison brought a rigorous, data-driven approach to railroad scheduling and asset management that made them run more efficiently. Rather than run hub-and-spoke networks with inefficient branch lines, Harrison sold off unprofitable parts of the business, ran longer, heavier trains at faster speeds on set schedules and eliminated as many intermediate stops to change cargo as possible. Howard Green, Harrison's biographer, wrote that few things bothered Harrison more than "underutilised assets." Harrison himself wrote "If an asset isn't used, it's a liability" because, he believed, railroads only make money when cars are moving.

These are all solid enough management principles, but like any cost-cutting or efficiency obsessions, they have their limits. At some point, all the fat has been trimmed, all the underutilized assets sold off, and all that's left is muscle and bone. The remainder of Harrison's railroading career was premised on rejecting this idea, on assuring shareholders that there was always more fat to trim.

In 1999, Illinois Central was absorbed by Canadian National Railway (CN), a Class I railroad. Harrison became CEO in 2002, doing the PSR thing there, too. He left in 2009 having made CN the most efficient Class I in North America and a celebrated railroadman in industry circles.

Three years later, an activist investor from Pershing Square Capital Management named William Ackman installed Harrison as CEO at CN's rival, Canadian Pacific Railway (CP). Harrison did a kind of PSR-Plus at CP, stepping up the cost-cutting measures, leaving CP's operating ratio on par with CN's.

In 2017, yet another activist investor at Mantle Ridge replicated the process at CSX Corporation, another Class I railroad, where Harrison implemented a mega-PSR. He got rid of 900 locomotives, 26,000 wagons, and aimed to slash the 31,000-person workforce by a third. Before he could do so, Harrison died in December 2017.

According to Harrison's biographer, shareholders of the railroads Harrison ran benefited to the tune of approximately $50 billion in increased stock value. Meanwhile, as CSX's competitors saw the writing on the wall and implemented their own versions of PSR, according to Surface Transportation Board data, the Class I railroad workforce has been cut by 25 percent since 2016.

Harrison (right) and Ackman (left) promised to "shake up the board" of Canadian Pacific Credit: David Cooper via Getty

Harrison ushered in a generation of freight railroading with many advocates. But it also has many skeptics who argue, whatever its merits may have been back when railroads were less efficient and struggling for profitability, PSR is now little more than cover for a mass corporate looting of North American freight rail.

"PSR appears to have definite advantages to some parties," independent railway economist Jim Blaze told Rail Journal in 2019. "However, the focused cost cutting is done with a slash-and-burn zest rarely seen before by previous cost-cutters.”

In fact, one has to go back to the Gilded Age to find a similar period in railroad history. Richard White, a Stanford historian and author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America told Motherboard that, while the analogy is not exact, PSR reminds him a lot of the "Fast Freight Lines" of the late 19th Century, "whose goal was to keep freight in motion by moving directly between points of origin and destination and avoiding the long delays when cars were switched at division points." There are differences between then and now; for example, that was a period where railroading was stupendously competitive and technology has advanced to the point where coordinating a continent-spanning freight network is actually feasible. Plus, the workforce now is almost entirely unionized providing protections 19th Century workers fought bitter and often deadly battles to win.

But, some of the overarching lessons from the Fast Freight era still apply. While accounting was far more primitive—and often done with cooked books—more than a century ago, the end result was surprisingly similar. As White described it, "Insiders took over Fast Freight lines and siphoned off the profits." And that, he added, "meant less for maintenance and safer technologies."

Just as workers a century ago were a driving force in making railroads safer for everyone, so too do workers today want reforms before disasters. The workers Motherboard spoke to said they agreed to talk because they considered it their duty to make the railroad as safe as possible. Their jobs, both before and since PSR, are to report any defects they see.

Now, things have gotten to the point where the defects are not limited to the freight cars. To them, the entire corporate philosophy is defective. And they're worried more people will get hurt. As one put it, "if I don't shop it and it gets a conductor hurt or a train derails, that's on me."

One worker framed the issue slightly differently. In much the same way workers accept responsibility if a car they inspect ends up having a defect that isn't fixed and hurts someone, the executives making the decisions that make these types of accidents inevitable need to be held accountable as well.

Harkening back to the Boeing comparison, another worker said he thinks it's important to speak out so executives cannot claim after the fact that they had no knowledge of what they were doing, that whatever catastrophe may occur is not "just another accident." In case a railroad executive is ever, say, hauled before Congress to account for his actions, he wants it on the record before the fact that everyone working on the railroads knows a catastrophic derailment is "totally foreseeable."

‘It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing:’ How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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christopherscorner-blog1 · 6 years ago

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What I’ve learned throughout 70 organizations across 4 continents, 18 countries...

...and nearly every U.S. continental State, with experience spanning virtually every industry (Military, Construction, Healthcare, Property Management, Transportation, Telecommunications, E-commerce, Food Service, Entertainment, more) to include dozens of Churches, and more than three years volunteering between 5 nonprofits/causes, even experimenting for around a year as homeless literally living the veteran struggle while sleeping the streets and beaches from SoCal to Miami and a dozen homeless/transitional shelters in between.

First, I want to share one of my most interesting and profound observations throughout my life’s journey in yet another obvious and concrete testament to the power and reality of God concerning the amazingly stark contrast between the Church and secular world. Between the several dozen Churches I’ve had the privilege of experiencing across half a dozen States, I can honestly testify to witnessing a very happy, healthy, successful, purpose filled/driven, and inspired people across the board, with unemployment, homelessness, and suicide virtually non-existent. It’s true, you won’t find one homeless or unemployed person who is part of a Church (for long), because there are plenty of successful homeowners and business owners in (nearly) every Church who are happy and able to help. These observations have also led me to the realization of how bad the homeless situation would actually be if it were not for God’s Church. Between Jacksonville Florida and Miami alone there are more than several dozen Church organizations providing temporary shelter, meals, and other services for the homeless, and they are all taxed to the max. How ironic, yet amazingly odd, how tens of thousands literally depend on our God while rejecting Him… Think about how much worse the situation would be if these Churches disappeared! Which brings me to another observation.

Having lived and worked amongst the secular world much of my life, I can tell you from experience that the picture for the majority of those who reject our Creator is absolutely miserable and depressing. Sadly, it has been my painful observation that most secularists are living meaningless enslaved tortuous lives, almost completely void of love, creativity, or inspiration, under crushingly overwhelming and seemingly hopeless (without God) problems. A look at every facet of our society also reveals this truth to be dreadfully obvious. Take modern art, music, entertainment, and architecture, for example. If you haven’t noticed, our entire culture is now almost completely void of creativity, inspiration, or beauty. Stats don’t lie either. Health and mental problems (40% of Americans are obese –literally destroying body and mind, 1/6 take psych meds./1/33 born defective), addiction (20+ million -200+ die every day from drug overdose), and suicide (120+ daily suicides) are at epidemic levels, with rampant poverty (13.5% = 43+ million Americans), homelessness (600k Americans), unemployment (real unemployment = 20’ish%), parasitic infestations (25+/-% among poor black communities), diseases (1/4 w/STD), viruses (33 die daily from AIDS), and cancer (1/3 will get cancer). It’s too bad no one has been separating these stats by religion, or you would know my observation to be true. Granted, any stat would be muddled by a majority of fake proclaiming Christians, particularly Catholics. However, there is more definitive evidence to support my observation, which brings me to my next related observation –weather.

Consider the increasing natural disasters which devastated numerous U.S cities and entire states last year costing our country 300+ billion last year alone. Yet in another display of Divine Protection, out of the 31 Billion plus-dollar natural disasters which struck all over the country the last 2 years, amazingly, America’s ‘Bible-Belt’ was barely been touched. Is it any coincidence that our modern Sodom and Gomorrah cities (L.A. & Vegas) are desert wastelands literally on fire and in severe drought, with California on the verge of bankruptcy as people and businesses leave in mass, while the ‘Bible Belt’ flourishes with both green and industry? Nope. These areas are great examples both of God’s blessing and judgment. Which is why no one should be surprised if California is hit with the ‘Big One’ and slides off into the ocean, or is struck with drought and famine devastating the economy. Still skeptical? Consider Israel and her surroundings, another stark contrast of economies demonstrating both God’s blessing and judgment. While the Middle East is a desert wasteland plagued with conflict, stagnant growth, poverty, and famine, dominated by the evil enslavement of Islam’s death cult factions, Israel, a baby country, flourishes in every way, literally turning their desert into a blossoming garden while leading the world in growth and technology and as a beacon of freedom, prosperity, and hope -and all this despite the fact that Israel is literally surrounded by vicious and merciless enemies who are hell bent on her destruction, even winning battle after battle against the odds.

Secondly, considering my extensive experience both as a homeless veteran and across America’s Work-Force, with a 99% hire rate and 12+ resume repertoire, I believe it’s safe to refer to myself not only as an American Work-Force and Employment Expert, but an expert on the veteran struggle. Based on my experience and observations across America’s work-force, it’s no wonder to me why most Americans are so absolutely miserable, or even suicidal. Without God I certainly would have ended my life several times by now: 1.) after giving up on a military career facing a stale economy with no money, and 3.) as a transitioning veteran-civilian experiencing mostly failure, disappointment, and misery for nearly eight years now. Praise God He has pulled me through. There’s no other reason for my hope and positivity. Maybe it’s to eventually help others experiencing the same difficulties, but I digress. Tragically, I’m here to report that employment conditions are absolutely horrendous across the board, almost unrecognizable from slavery, and the system is broke and in dire need of fixing. (If this does not describe your experience, consider yourself blessed!) First off, there’s something seriously wrong with a system when those who do all the work live in poverty working like slaves just to eat and sleep in a bed, with many now not even able to afford housing with a full-time job, while those who do virtually nothing reap all the rewards living in luxury. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and it’s wrong. However, this is the evil reality of Capitalism and things will never change until we identify & accept this. Secondly, work conditions are just terrible throughout virtually every industry. From mandatory 70+ hours, to criminally pathetic pay, to weekly mandatory unpaid detentions/days/hours, to mandatory weekends, to virtually ZERO holidays, to mandatory cancer-inducing sperm-killing cell phones without reimbursement, to mandatory transportation without reimbursement, to dangerous or unhealthy conditions (sitting down 8-10+ hours driving or staring at a computer screen daily), stuck doing the same painfully mind-numbing monotonous tasks day-in & day-out, to mandatory requirements eliminating both industry newcomers and those without money, to random/political firings, to lazy firings ( too unintelligent or impatient to train), to entire industry/chain layoffs as technology takes over, or mass lay-offs from criminal activity/criminal negligence/incompetence, to turnover rates of around 100% (trucking), to sub-human treatment (pissing on demand/verbal abuse), to thefts of last paychecks (I’ve personally been robbed of thousands of dollars by nearly half a dozen companies), to a vast majority of businesses being ran by someone who has NO BUSINESS running one (likely why 80% fail), the situation is not only just absolutely atrocious, but very, very bleak. I’ve seen entire industries comprised of desperate workers literally destroying their health just to earn a buck. Virtually zero industries have any program to help integrate the poor and/or uneducated, let alone military veterans, so virtually everyone is stuck where there at, even if it’s nowhere because they couldn’t afford schooling and have no money. The rare few organizations who do have something of a housing/training/employment program are not expanding or expandable as they are restricted by a poor and very narrow business model. Virtually every corporation cares more about making a buck than they do this country, which is why many jobs have been outsourced. And every buck we do make is ripped off by Uncle Sam who literally throws it down the drain towards interest which shouldn’t exist in the first place (debt = new age slavery), or other ridiculous expenditures, including a military which should NOT be a full-time thing -destroy evil and let soldiers get back to normal lives! It’s quite amazing what people are willing to put up with. Worst of all, somehow most everyone seems to think all the above is normal, ‘just the way things are,’ and there’s something wrong with those of us who choose not to accept this atrocious ridiculousness. None of this should be normal! Life is what we choose to make of it! I, for one, refuse to accept this status-quo. All of which brings me to the most important revelation of my experiences; there is a God who cares about me (us individually), and He is good!

Almost unbelievably, the crazy and amazing reality for me is that much of my experience (between 34 companies/organization) was acquired after randomly relocating thousands of miles away, several times (from Ohio to California to Florida), into a strange city, not knowing anyone, with no money, no phone, and no transportation, just a backpack, my Bible, and God in my heart, literally throwing myself into deep holes which only God could have pulled me out of. And pull me out wonderfully God did so that in each case, in no time at all, I was working multiple jobs (7 at one time in California), with owned beautiful transportation, rent-free living, and the love of a beautiful and sweet woman. However, the journey has been anything but easy, and due to a recently evolved spiritual and intellectual maturity, I’m now forced to carve my own seemingly impossible way.

God knows I have tried to fit into a ‘normal,’ or any, job. How many can boast employment opportunities with 70 companies/organizations? How many could have picked themselves up half as many times? 70 just happens to be the number I finally decided it’s time to figure something else out. I’m just not a corporate sheep-drone, and I value freedom, health, and life more than paper/materialism. To be clear, I’ve NEVER been fired for performance. My work ethic never lets anyone outwork me, and I’m always there, first in last out. There’s a reason I was filling an E-5 slot as an Army team-leader in record time. Most opportunities ended for me either due to relocations or because I walked away. The ‘issue’ has been that I refuse to tolerate verbal abuse, I refuse to be miserable, and I refuse to destroy my body or health for little green paper. Life should not revolve around work! I would rather be poor, healthy, and happy, than have money while miserably destroying my health. How many have dedicated their lives towards companies or cities only to be eventually screwed over either right before retirement because the company went bankrupt or laid you off for one reason or another, or after retirement because the company/city went bankrupt (my neighbor is one victim) due to criminal negligence or technological developments? How many more near retirement are likely to be laid off due to technology taking over entire industries? Transportation, Cashiers, and Banks are all soon to be automated, and these industries employ tens of millions in America.

My recent evolution of mind leaves me in an even worse pickle now because I now also refuse to A.) pee on demand, B.) pay for a cancer-inducer (cell phones) strapped to my hip at some strangers beckon call, and C.) pay for transportation, which is always a money-hog, just so I can work, just so I can afford the transportation, while paying half a dozen unconstitutional taxes just to exercise my God given freedom to travel, in my property along public roads no less –which, even worse, is also patrolled by Nazi-thugs who are likely to randomly harass, steal, kidnap, and even kill me for no reason at all (it happens!). To submit myself to this slavery would be insanity.

Is not my God King? It would certainly appear so. Despite the overwhelming odds against me, while many in the same boat commit suicide by the dozens DAILY, not only am I still here, but I’m living better than most, so much so that I don’t even have to work. Not to brag, but I eat like a King, I have zero bills or expenses, I’m averaging 45+ days of paid vacations annually, including paid trips to Europe and elsewhere, and most would envy my women, rides, and current home. Not that I deserve any of it, I absolutely do not. This isn’t about pointing a finger at me, it’s about pointing a finger at God. I'm living proof that ‘with God, all things are possible.’ The fact that God has given me, not one, but two, potentially multi-million dollar books about to launch is also a great consolation prize.

#Christianity God Godisnotdead veteranstruggle

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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Oracle billionaire battles COVID on island he purchased

Larry Ellison controls just about every part of Lanai, a Hawaiian island that for months was shielded from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.

As Covid-19 swept across the US mainland in the spring and summer, Lanai didn't have a single case. Its 3,000 residents avoided mass layoffs while tourism plunged, protected by the billionaire who owns 98% of the island.

Now, the gorgeous paradise, about 2,500 miles southwest of Los Angeles, is confronting a tough reality.

Ellison's two Four Seasons resorts, which employ nearly a quarter of the island's residents, laid off or furloughed almost all workers in August. Some employees returned last month for a reopening to tourists - which was then followed by a wave of virus infections. More than 100 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the last two weeks of October. Four have been helicoptered off because Lanai's lone hospital isn't equipped with a critical care unit.

“They're going through what we went through in March and April,” said Michael Shea, chief medical officer of Maui Memorial Medical Center, who visited Lanai on Nov. 2 with two employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "They can see it in the news, but actually experiencing it was a little different."

The pandemic is roiling an area almost entirely reliant on Ellison, the world's 12th-richest person and a lavish spender on luxury real estate. Over the years, the Oracle Corp. co-founder has amassed multiple Malibu homes, a Southern California golf course and a handful of historic mansions in Rhode Island, not to mention several superyachts. But his 2012 purchase of Lanai stands apart because it's not just a private property or business, but home to thousands of people who have little say in many aspects of the island.

Ellison 76, owns Lanai's two hotels, a luxury wellness resort and is the main employer of almost all of the working residents. The 140-square-mile island, with only one school and no stoplights, is sustained by tourism to his swank properties. That means viral outbreaks both there and on the mainland risk longer-term economic pain for its inhabitants.

Representatives for Ellison at Oracle and Pulama Lanai, which oversees much of the island, didn't respond to several emails and phone calls requesting comment. A spokesperson for the Four Seasons Lanai declined to comment.

Quick Response

The upside to having billionaire ownership is that the response to Lanai's coronavirus outbreak has been uniform and well supplied. Ellison has donated testing supplies and invested in the hospital, while leaders at his company have directed the response in tandem with local government.

More than 4,000 tests have been conducted on the island - exceeding the number of residents - largely thanks to the kits donated by Ellison, said Maui Mayor Michael Victorino, who also oversees Lanai. He last week eased lockdown measures after new infections started to slow.

Still, residents are nervous, Shea said. While the Four Seasons is set to open again Friday to those who can produce a negative Covid test, new outbreaks are possible. If hotels close again, it's unclear if Ellison will keep employees on the payroll. Unlike in most US towns where frustrated residents can hold local officials accountable, there is little transparency about plans for the island, which is largely run by Pulama Lanai. (In Hawaiian, Pulama means to treasure or cherish.)

"The people who are laid off, they're terminated and it's harder for them to go to other jobs because there are no other jobs on the island," said Alberta de Jetley, a longtime resident who founded Lanai Today, a monthly newspaper that she sold to Pulama Lanai in 2019.

The May cover of Lanai Today gives a sense of the loyalty some locals feel toward the billionaire. The headline “A Grateful Community” is laid on top of a photo of four residents holding up a homemade sign that reads “Thank you, Mr. Ellison! ” At that point, nearly two months into the state lockdown, Ellison told the roughly 1,200 employees of his three companies there - Pulama Lanai, Sensei and Four Seasons Lanai - that he'd pay them through May. He ended up doing so through July.

Ellison has gained residents' favor by investing in the island, said Gabe Johnson, a farmer who was recently elected as Lanai's member of the Maui County Council. Prior owner David Murdock - who took control of the former pineapple plantation through his purchase of Castle & Cooke, once part of what is now Dole Food Co. - put little money into the island, Johnson said. Calls to Dole requesting comment from Murdock, who is on the board, weren't returned.

“The town would be a little bit dilapidated or things would start running down,” Johnson said. "When Ellison bought, it was kind of a nice refreshing change."

'No brainer'

Since purchasing Lanai, Ellison has remodeled the hotel and opened his wellness retreat alongside a hydroponic farming venture, Sensei Farms. He also owns the island's main grocery store, Richard's Market, as well as much of the housing stock. That means keeping Lanaians financially secure is in his best interest.

“I rent an apartment from the company, I used to work for the company, I used to shop from the company's store,” said Johnson. While his farm is one of Ellison's rare competitors, he appreciates that Sensei is providing employment outside of the tourism industry. For him and other residents, the pandemic has brought home Lanai's need to diversify its economy.

“It's kind of a no brainer,” said Butch Gima, a longtime resident and social worker on the island. "When they shut down the hotels, there was no work, no people coming in here and no people coming up to the city and patronizing the businesses."

The problem with shifting the economy is that it requires the buy-in of Lanai's billionaire owner. Gima said several years ago the island tried to create an economic charrette, or master plan, but it ultimately halted the process because Pulama Lanai didn't want to participate. He is hopeful that residents can find remote work for companies like Google or Amazon, which wouldn't necessarily require Ellison's cooperation.

“If you're going to have brick-and-mortar businesses, then yeah, Pulama will be involved because they own all 98% of the land,” Gima said. "But if you're going to do web-based, internet-based types of businesses, then you don't necessarily need brick-and-mortar establishments and you can work out of your home."

For now, Lanai is tentatively getting employees back to work. Victorino, the mayor, said he's grateful to Ellison for all he's done, including paying full wages to the Four Seasons's employees for months. Maui County has one of the country's highest unemployment rates, but Lanai has largely been shielded from that pain.

“We welcome help from the outside,” Victorino said. "They're there to make our working class better off for what we have to go through being so isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

After the initial outbreak, Lanai has had no new coronavirus cases since Nov. 5. The island will be the test site of a new application called AlohaSafe that will alert people if someone they've been in contact with tested positive for Covid-19. If it works there, it will be launched state-wide, Victorino said.

The island was chosen as a pilot site, he said, after a request from an important entity: Pulama Lanai.

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