#workforce scaling

[trufynd01]

Explore TruFynd's tailored bulk hiring solutions that empower businesses to scale efficiently. Learn how our proven strategies streamline recruitment, reduce costs, and connect you with top-tier talent quickly.

[quarecresourcespvtltd]

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[upgradenterprise]

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[onlinemarketingcash4ublogspotcom]

Mastering Social Media Analytics: Insights from a Leading Agency ABOUT THE EPISODE: In this episode, we delve into the intricate world of social media analytics with insights from a leading agency that employs a dedicated team of 137 analytics experts. Discover how understanding the unique dynamics of each platform is crucial for success in the digital landscape. With 2,000 employees, this agency demonstrates the sheer scale and importance of tailoring strategies for platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

https://www.onlinemarketingcash4u.blogspot.com Learn why the thumbnail on Instagram needs specific attention, how certain actions on TikTok can impact performance, and why carousel ads are currently a must on Facebook. This episode uncovers the shift from traditional marketing practices to a merit-based system where the quality of creative content is paramount. Marketers are now challenged to think beyond amplification and focus on creating content that naturally reaches and engages audiences. Join us as we explore the evolution of marketing strategies and the importance of leveraging analytics to drive success in today's competitive digital environment. Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview… https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/mastering-social-media-analytics

[fozmeadows]

there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, "make sure he rapes the other girl." This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn't stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.

And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I've kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson's stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it's far from being the only one. Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively "vote" for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured. Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it's all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it's much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels. Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they'd be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.

When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no "vote" our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change. But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don't prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very. Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully "vote" with our dollars in a way that causes "good" businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we're not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we're trying to change. Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We're not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we're just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.

All of which is to say: while I'd prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It's the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it's just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did. It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn't stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?

[byjove]

Women throughout (American and English) history worked. The idea that in the past the sole responsibility of women was domestic labor and childrearing is largely inaccurate for the majority of women in these societies. Women were expected to do domestic labor like cooking and cleaning and raising children AND work to bring income to their family, this was true for the average woman, excluding the upper middle class/wealthy. If a woman’s husband owned a tavern or restaurant, she also cooked and kept bar and did the duties associated with the business. If a woman’s husband was a (small scale/subsistence/tenant) farmer, the woman did farm labor. Often a woman was expected to do labor related to her husband’s job.

Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.

My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.

This is why it makes me irate when women on the right say things like “feminism forced me to get a job instead of being allowed to stay home with my children” before feminism you would have had to tend house, raise your children and bring income to your husband. Now, at the very least, the money is hopefully your own. Women were always in the workforce, their work was not recognized.

[saywhat-politics]

Feb. 13, 2025, 4:05 PM MST

By Nnamdi Egwuonwu

A group of 14 states sued Elon Musk and President Donald Trump on Thursday, arguing that the authority the White House granted the tech billionaire and his advisory Department of Government Efficiency is unconstitutional.

The suit, filed by Democratic attorneys general from states like Arizona, Michigan and Rhode Island, takes aim at the magnitude and scale of Musk’s power, noting that DOGE has led the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce, dismantle entire agencies and access sensitive data.

“The founders of this country would be outraged that, 250 years after our nation overthrew a king, the people of this country—many of whom have fought and died to protect our freedoms—are now subject to the whims of a single unelected billionaire,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement.

The attorneys general argue that Trump violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution by creating DOGE — an unofficial government agency — without congressional approval and by granting Musk “sweeping powers” without seeking the advice and consent of the Senate through a confirmation hearing.

“President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities,” the lawsuit reads. “As a result, he has transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation and in violation of the separation of powers.”

The states are seeking a court order blocking Musk from making changes to government funding, canceling contracts, making personnel decisions and more.

[reasonsforhope]

On her fingers, Chicago’s Chief Sustainability Officer Angela Tovar counted the city buildings that will soon source all of their power from renewable energy: O’Hare International Airport, Midway International Airport, City Hall.

[Note: This is an even huger deal than it sounds like. Chicago O'Hare International Airport is, as of 2023, the 9th busiest airport in the world.]

Chicago’s real estate portfolio is massive. It includes 98 fire stations, 81 library locations, 25 police stations and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — in all, more than 400 municipal buildings.

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours per year to keep the wheels turning in the third largest city in the country. Beginning Jan. 1, every single one of them will come solely from clean, renewable energy, mostly sourced from Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the Windy City’s carbon footprint by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, the city said.

Chicago is one of several cities across the country that are not only shaking up their energy mix but also taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new clean energy development.

The city — and much of Illinois — already has one of the cleanest energy mixes in the country, with over 50% of the state’s electricity coming from nuclear power. But while nuclear energy is considered “clean,” carbon-free energy, it is not considered renewable.

Chicago’s move toward renewable energy has been years in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s energy purely from renewable sources was first established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot struck a deal with electricity supplier Constellation to purchase renewable energy from developer Swift Current Energy for the city, beginning in 2025.

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said deputy chief sustainability officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the built-in market will help encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale: “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.”

Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, Orlando, Florida, and more than 700 other U.S. cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from World Resources Institute, but none of their plans mandate nearly as much new renewable energy production as Chicago’s.

“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called additionality, bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin. “They were the largest municipal deal to do this.”

Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs.

The economic benefits extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to flow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life.

“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.” ...

Chicago will meet its goal of transitioning all its municipal buildings to renewable energy by 2025, the first step in a broader goal to source energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035 — making it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.

With the incoming Trump administration promising to decrease federal support for decarbonizing the economy, Dane says it will be increasingly important for cities, towns and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies and meet local climate goals. He says moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable.

“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is definitely still worth the squeeze.”

-via WBEZ, December 24, 2024

[kkoffin]

Stop hating your womb and making caricatures of your female anatomy being an angry or evil thing that only wants you to be pregnant or bring you pain and start hating:

• The medical industry for ignoring women’s pain and suffering for generations, not putting the same effort into researching the female body as it does male bodies, often acting as though women are simply small men

• Men in history who mass-slaughtered female medical practitioners and midwives, calling their research into women’s health witchcraft

• Capitalism and a male-orientated workforce and education system that fails to consider and factor women’s needs into it’s demand

• Patriarchal disgust for women’s bodies and their functions

• The sexualisation and shame of female bodies to the point where young women cannot seek help for their issues from caregivers/doctors/parents without fear and embarrassment

Yes, periods are inconvenient and often painful, but before you get frustrated with your body, demonising and blaming it, realise it would not be the way it is if not for a mass-scale medical and scientific negligence of women’s issues. Your body does not hate you- patriarchy does. Aim your energy and efforts there.

[trufynd01]

TruFynd’s bulk hiring solutions provide a strategic and efficient approach to recruit large-scale talent, helping businesses meet rapid growth demands with quality and speed.

[splatoonusna]

Memo from Grizzco: This Big Run, we're looking at total workforce productivity, not individual contributions. Employees worldwide will contribute to the tally--and if the numbers go up enough, everyone who helped gets scales. Think you can hit 700 million eggs? Well, try.

[probablyasocialecologist]

After nearly 15 years, Uber claims it’s finally turned an annual profit. Between 2014 and 2023, the company set over $31 billion on fire in its quest to drive taxi companies out of business and build a global monopoly. It failed on both fronts, but in the meantime it built an organization that can wield significant power over transportation — and that’s exactly how it got to last week’s milestone. Uber turned a net profit of nearly $1.9 billion in 2023, but what few of the headlines will tell you is that over $1.6 billion of it came from unrealized gains from its holdings in companies like Aurora and Didi. Basically, the value of those shares are up, so on paper it looks like Uber’s core business made a lot more money than it actually did. Whether the companies are really worth that much is another question entirely — but that doesn’t matter to Uber. At least it’s not using the much more deceptive “adjusted EBITDA” metric it spent years getting the media to treat as an accurate picture of its finances. Don’t be fooled into thinking the supposed innovation Uber was meant to deliver is finally bearing fruit. The profit it’s reporting is purely due to exploitative business practices where the worker and consumer are squeezed to serve investors — and technology is the tool to do it. This is the moment CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been working toward for years, and the plan he’s trying to implement to cement the company’s position should have us all concerned about the future of how we get around and how we work.

[...]

Uber didn’t become a global player in transportation because it wielded technology to more efficiently deliver services to the public. The tens of billions of dollars it lost over the past decade went into undercutting taxis on price and drawing drivers to its service — including some taxi drivers — by promising good wages, only to cut them once the competition posed by taxis had been eroded and consumers had gotten used to turning to the Uber app instead of calling or hailing a cab. As transport analyst Hubert Horan outlined, for-hire rides are not a service that can take advantage of economies of scale like a software or logistics company, meaning just because you deliver more rides doesn’t mean the per-ride cost gets significantly cheaper. Uber actually created a less cost-efficient model because it forces drivers to use their own vehicles and buy their own insurance instead of having a fleet of similar vehicles covered by fleet insurance. Plus, it has a ton of costs your average taxi company doesn’t: a high-paid tech workforce, expensive headquarters scattered around the world, and outrageously compensated executive management like Khosrowshahi, just to name a few. How did Uber cut costs then? By systematically going after the workers that deliver its service. More recently, it took advantage of the cost-of-living crisis to keep them on board in the same way it exploited workers left behind by the financial crisis in the years after its initial launch. Its only real innovation is finding new ways to exploit labor.

[upgradenterprise]

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[quaranmine]

Today Trump said that the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin plans to cut 65% of the EPA's workforce.

The White House just walked back the statement, saying that it was 65% of the budget, not staff. Although that's not better, and the recent OPM guidance to initiate large scale reductions in force that came out this morning backs up that a huge amount of EPA staff (and all federal staff) will be cut.

If anyone's wondering how it's going, I literally cried the entire way home from work today. I feel sick.

[fatehbaz]

Between 1970 and 1973, rent strikes erupted in towns and cities throughout the Republic of Ireland. These were organised by local tenants’ associations, most of which were affiliated to the National Association of Tenants Organisations [NAoTO] [...], an umbrella organisation for local associations established in 1967. [...] [O]rganisers claimed that at its peak almost half of all council tenants in the state, or approximately 50,000 households, were withholding their rents. These localised campaigns coalesced into a state-wide movement in late 1972 with [NAoTO] declaring a “national rent strike” which lasted until August 1973. At this point, the government conceded to [NAoTO]'s demands including revisions to the B scale differential rent system, a rent freeze for those on fixed (non-differential) rents, [and] better terms for tenant purchase [...]. [T]he long-term consequences are more ambiguous [...]. Nonetheless, it was described in an article in the Irish Times as “undoubtedly the most dramatic [...] victory ever achieved in this century by tenants versus landlords” [within Ireland]. [...]

Despite the scale and significance of these rent strikes, before this project started there was effectively no information available about them. The [Community Action Tenants Union Ireland] CATU rent strike history project aimed to address this situation, which we understood as an important gap in the collective memory [...]. The project set out to leverage the history of the rent strikes to engage people and involve them in the contemporary housing movement by providing an example of the power of collective action and building connections [...]. The project has been ongoing since late 2021 [...].

---

Gray (2018a, 2022) argues that, beginning in the 1960s, the urbanisation of capital created a new [...] working-class struggle in Italy, [...] characterised by divisions related to suburbanisation and geographical fragmentation. [...] Clare's (2020) analysis of [...] clandestine textile workshops in Buenos Aires highlights the importance of the spatial dimension [...] by describing how workshops are located according to a distinct socio-spatial strategy that divides the workforce and minimises outside interference, thus ensuring access to cheap, vulnerable labour. [...]

There are [...] connections between political decomposition and the loss of memory and knowledge of struggle, such as in the case of workplace restructuring after conflict to prevent the transmission of knowledge and experience between different generations of workers [...]. Responding to this situation, there has been a growing interest in recovering forgotten or suppressed histories of housing and urban struggles [...].

---

The background to the CATU rent strike history project is the so-called “housing crisis” in Ireland, which, contrary to the idea of a specific moment of crisis, has been a continuous feature of Irish society since at least the 19th century [...]. A persistent challenge faced by CATU and other similar movements is that of overcoming a pervasive sense of disempowerment and persuading people that it is worthwhile to engage in collective action [...]. [T]he [housing] crisis [is not necessarily] a unique moment of dysfunction in the housing system [but is] rather [...] a persistent feature of Irish, and increasingly international, capitalism [...]. [L]and and housing have been deeply interrelated with anti-colonial struggles including the Land War of the late 19th century, the civil rights movement, and anti-internment rent strikes in the 1960s [...].

---

27 oral history interviews were carried out with people who participated in the rent strikes in the 1970s [...] from various towns and cities across the Republic of Ireland [...]. Approximately 2,000 relevant articles published in local and national newspapers between 1966 and 1973 were identified and subject to close reading [...] Further data was gathered through a review of 161 articles about the rent strikes in radical newspapers [...]. Previous analyses have emphasised the atomisation of new suburban council estates and how these were part of a concerted effort to undermine working-class radicalism (McManus 2003). Beginning in the late 1950s, suburbanisation was further accelerated by the state's policy to attract [...] speculative investment in commercial office space and the displacement of working-class communities, in particular from inner-city Dublin [...]. However, [...] that fragmentation was countered in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the widespread, rapid formation of tenants’ associations organised around shared interests [...].

The interviews and newspapers produced by local tenants’ associations demonstrated the organisational density and array of community organisations [...] that fought to improve the conditions of everyday life [...]. Some of the forms of organisation that existed across many areas included collectively built and managed community centres, women's and youth committees, sports clubs, social activities for elderly people, and food cooperatives, amongst others. Illustrating the scale of community organising, in August 1973 the [NAoTO] newspaper reported that the West Finglas Tenants Association was running regular outings to the seaside that were attended on average by 2,000 people transported in 20 double-decker buses. [...] As described by [P.], a rent strike organizer in Ballyfermot:

"Street committees didn't just run the rent strike, they also ran summer programmes. If there was old people to come around at Christmas, we'd arrange for someone to cook an extra bit of dinner. It was more a living thing. It wasn't just a single issue. [...]"

---

All text above by: Fiadh Tubridy. "Militant Research in the Housing Movement: The Community Action Tenants Union Rent Strike History Project". Antipode Online Volume 56, Issue 3, pages 1027-1046. May 2024. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Los Angeles Firestorm - II

January 10, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

My family and I remain safe in Los Angeles, although the apocalyptic feel is growing. New fires continue to erupt in the foothills with alarming regularity. Air quality is unhealthy everywhere. Billowing plumes blot the sun. Though the winds have slowed, the scale and number of the existing fires have stretched emergency services to the breaking point. Schools are closed, so traffic is eerily light. New evacuation orders are issued hourly. Power outages have stretched into their third day.

Although the winds are abating, the storm of disinformation is growing—fanned by the President-elect and his billionaire handler. For those dealing with the loss of homes, injuries, dislocation, and fear, disinformation adds insult to injury. Sadly, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and a recent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, have contributed to the wave of disinformation.

Firefighters are having success in knocking down new fires, but three established fires (Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst) remain largely uncontained. Although the winds have moderated, even moderate winds can spread existing fires with surprising speed. Embers can land a mile ahead of an existing fire, creating new emergencies every minute.

President Biden held a cabinet-level meeting on live television to discuss the federal response to the fire. Biden refuted the silly and ignorant claim by the Trump-Musk axis of disinformation that Los Angeles has “run out of water.” False. Although firefighters are experiencing low or no pressure in some hydrants, that situation is caused by power outages that have disabled pumps that help create pressure in pipes (by filling elevated water storage tanks).

It is also false that Los Angeles cut the budget for its fire department last year. That falsehood was given flight by Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer, who recently ran for mayor of Los Angeles. During a Fox News interview, Caruso apparently referred to a preliminary budget that did not include all funds that were anticipated to be allocated to the fire department. That misinformation was repeated by the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

Caruso, who runs pristine and wildly successful shopping developments in the City of Angels, likened his hometown to a “third-world country.” It is fortunate that Los Angelenos did not elect Rick Caruso as their mayor, given his willingness to trash the city at the first opportunity.

The truth is that the final budget increased the LA Fire Department budget by $50 million (to approximately $870 million). See MSN, Widespread Online Claims Proven False as Report Shows LA Fire Department Budget Actually Increased by $50 Million Last Year. Online sources that claim otherwise are ignoring the increase in firefighter salaries granted in a separate union contract—funds that were not included in the proposed “budget” but are included in the actual allocation of funds to the fire department.

Trump, Musk, and their followers continue to claim that efforts to diversify LA’s almost exclusively male fire department are to blame for the catastrophic losses. LAFD met its racial diversity goals two decades ago; the current diversity efforts relate to increasing the number of women on the force.

In 2022, women accounted for only 4% of LAFD’s workforce, and former Mayor Eric Garcetti started an initiative to increase that percentage. So, when Trump and Musk complain about “diversity,” they are describing efforts to include more women in a workforce that is 96% male. See HuffPo, Trump Calls On Newsom To Resign; Republicans Blame DEI For Inability To Contain Wildfires.

Personal anecdotes are rarely helpful in settling disputes over policy, history, or contested facts. But as a native Angeleno, I can say that after 68 years in Los Angeles, the windstorm on January 7 and 8 was the first time in my life that I was worried by the force of the winds. It felt like a hurricane and sounded like an earthquake as the winds thrummed our rooftop. Imagine trying to control a brushfire in the face of such winds. The notion that attempting to expand the number of women employed by the LAFD is responsible for the losses is insulting to women, to firefighters, and to all Angelenos.

For a brief period on Thursday, the historic observatory atop Mount Wilson was threatened by the flames—which advanced to the boundaries of the facility. But the 100-inch Hooker Telescope was spared. That is the telescope used by Edwin Hubble to determine that the universe extends beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy and that the universe is expanding. See photo below of the 100” Hooker Telescope.

Los Angeles has many tough and heartbreaking days ahead. I continue to hear from readers and friends who have lost their homes or have family members who have lost their homes. Many readers have asked for advice about contributing to recovery efforts. I suggest waiting a few days. Los Angeles is still trying to control the fires, and relief efforts have not begun in earnest. Please exercise caution to ensure that any organization you recommend to others is legitimate and will deliver the donations to those who need them.

Stay safe and take care of friends, family, and complete strangers!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

Below is a picture of the Hooker 100-inch Telescope, used by Edwin Hubble to determine that the universe expands beyond the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding. The Hooker Telescope sits atop Mount Wilson and was briefly threatened by the Eaton Fire on Thursday.