Totally Not Labor Violations

Starbucks nopes out of Ithaca

Despite the literal investigations into their anti-labor practices, Starbucks is continuing their anti-labor practices. Not happy with the fact that workers in their stores are asking to be treated fairly, Starbucks is opting to simply close all existing locations in Ithaca, where store employees worked together to unionize.

According to their actions, it is simply not worth trying to do right by their employees and instead much easier to just not do business there at all. When workers asked to move to another store, they were told there are no others store to move to. Just… gone.

Although it is actual bullshit that these workers are just left high and dry for daring to ask for better conditions from one of the leading companies in the country, we can at least rest easy knowing that the average quality of coffee will increase in Ithaca moving forward.

Elon learns that dumb bigots are dumb and bigoted even after you align with them

Elon Mush has announced that he will be stepping down as CEO at Twitter, and will instead be taking on the role of CTO and overseeing product development and whatnot. In his place, he will be appointing Linda Yaccarino, an advertising executive and, notably, a woman. This has deeply upset Elon stans, as she both is a woman and has ties to the World Economic Forum, which is largely seen as a front for "the globalist agenda" (read: "Jews who control the world").

It does not take long to find a tweet in reply to Elon's announcement that just flat out says woman cannot be leaders, or that Jews are taking away our free speech, or whatever combination of wild-ass bigoted bullshit you want to find. They're also deeply upset with Elon, citing that this is the end of free speech on the web, apparently.

Right after making the mistake of appointing a woman CEO, Elon then decided to punch himself in the dick again by caving to requests from the Turkish government to censor tweets in Turkey right before election day. While a lot of critics may point to this as "omg he's messing with free elections," I really don't think that's the headline here.

Instead, this just shows that Elon's "free speech" support ends the moment that a government threatens to block Twitter. He claims it was either a bit of censorship or no Twitter at all, which is a very nice way to totally sidestep the fact that he just censored his users for political footing, which is exactly what infringement on free speech is.

Free speech, turns out, is not "freedom to access the Twitter.com servers" as Elon stans may suggest.

Southwest pilots would prefer the skies to be friendlier to their compensation packages

Just about all Southwest pilots have voted in favor of a potential strike in the coming months as negotiations for better working conditions are stalled. Weird how that keeps happening, y'know, the whole "workers having to show force to be respected by their employers" thing?

A strike is unlikely to happen immediately, and this wasn't a vote to go on strike right now, but is mostly a show of solidarity. There's apparently some federal intermediary that would have to approve the strike? That gives me "school-approved senior prank" vibes.

Anyway, yay striking pilots. They're specifically interested in a better scheduling system, among other things. I personally prefer when the people flying the giant aircraft I am in are happy with their compensation and work environment.

Google's Bard AI is nowhere to be found in EU/Canada

Google's competitor to ChatGPT / Bing's new AI thing is called Bard, and they are boasting how it is available in "180 countries and territories," which is a fun marketing-friendly way to skirt around the fact that it is flat out unavailable in Canada and Europe due to failure to meet any kind of local regulations around user data privacy.

Another way to put it would be "our AI is available in places that lack laws preventing us from exploiting your data."

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