Celestial Showdown

An eclipse is on the way! Check it out, but wear eclipse glasses. Also, a new Meta AI is generating some interesting stickers, Kaiser Permanente workers are on strike, the Biden Administration is facilitating more border wall construction, and a little known app was founded in 2010.

Endeavorance

Oct 6, 2023 — 3 min read

Watch The Sky

…but wear proper safety gear.

BECAUSE: For folks in North / Central / South America, you may be able to catch an Annular Solar Eclipse on October 14th around mid-day.

I'm writing about this now so you can run out and grab yourself some eclipse glasses, which you should ABSOLUTELY wear if you intend to look at the sun. For real: just because it is an eclipse doesn't mean you wont burn out eyes out by looking at the sun. Its the sun. Wear protective eclipse glasses.

The linked website will let you dial in some details to see how much of the eclipse will be visible in your area at what time. The best places to see it will be stretching from the Pacific Northwest down to Texas.

Wear. Eclipse. Glasses. And enjoy!

So Anyway, Here's Mickey Mouse with a Gun

Meta is rolling out a bunch of more AI stuff because we gotta be doing that everywhere. Now, they've rolled out a messaging feature where you can use an AI image generator to make custom stickers to send in chat. They can be anything you want! How about Mickey Mouse with a gun? Elmo with a knife? Pregnant, gender-bent Shrek? You got it!

While obviously anyone with artistic capability could just make these stickers, the issue is largely that this is a feature from a major company, capable of churning out copyright infringement at the tap of a keyboard.

Mostly, this is just hilarious. But hopefully, this lands Meta in a bunch of legal trouble. Hopefully.

Kaiser Strike Begins

Over 75,000 workers from Kaiser Permanente have begun a strike, marking the largest healthcare worker strike in US history.

The strike is due to contract negotiations as the current worker contract expired October 1st. The striking workers are seeking pay raises and fixes to chronic understaffing, while Kaiser has raked in record profits. A story that seems to be repeating itself in virtually every industry.

The strike is temporary, lasting 3 days. It is ongoing at time of writing.

Biden's Border Wall

The Biden Administration has waived dozens of regulations to speed up the continued construction of the border wall project from the Trump administration.

Waived regulations include environmental evaluations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act. Environmental groups note that the proposed wall will be built directly in the habitat and migration spaces of already-endangered species.

According to the Biden admin, their hands are tied because the money that has been set aside for the border wall must be used for the border wall. They maintain they are against the border wall, which does not go very far to explain why they waived dozens of regulations to facilitate the building of 20 more miles of border wall.

Arguably, the waiving of the regulations could be seen as a "we don't want to make it take longer or cost more than it needs to," to which I would argue that "I'm against it, but I'll facilitate it happening and specifically facilitate it happening faster" is not a great way to prove to me that you're against it, especially when the thing you're doing to "speed it up" is ignoring environmental impact while also trying to position yourself as a progressive president.

Oh, the Biden admin is also resuming deportation for Venezuelan migrants. Y'know, deporting them from the country built specifically by migrants seeking a better life. But those migrants had something different about them, of course.

On This day…

On this day in 2010, Instagram was founded. It was intended to be a check-in app like Foursquare was at the time, but the creators of the app decided to pivot more towards photo sharing.

After only a few years of operation, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 Billion, in a move criticized as anti-competitive, despite regulators giving it the green light.

At time of writing, it is estimated that there will be about 2.5 billion monthly active Instagram users by the end of 2023. There are 7.8 billion people on Earth.