Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
Making Restaurant Workers Pay for Anti-Minimum Wage Lobbyists
What if I told you the mandatory food safety training that many cooks, servers, and bartenders are required to take before starting their jobs also provided some of the funding for the lobbyists that work to kill minimum wage increases?
I wish that were the script of a scary—but darkly humorous—cultural satire, but as the New York Times’ David A. Fahrenthold and Talmon Joseph Smith report, “…in taking the class, the workers — largely unbeknown to them — are also helping to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.
The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fund-raising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters.”
Given that California is by far the most populous state in the nation, I’m unsurprised to learn that California is among the states where workers take the “vast majority” of ServSafe classes. Perhaps California can take a look at how to stop this practice. And let’s add this to the long list of reasons we should be as generous as possible when we tip people in the service industry.
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A Major Victory for Maternity Pay
Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir is one of the world’s top women’s soccer players. She’s the captain of the Iceland Women’s National Team, and earlier this year, she joined Juventus, one of the significant Italian Serie A clubs.
Earlier this week Gunnarsdóttir—and the football players union FIFPRO—won a victory against her previous club, France’s Olympique Lyonnais making it clear that teams need to pay their players in full while they are on maternity leave.
The Guardian reports: “The Iceland captain Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir has won her maternity claim against Lyon after she was not paid her full salary during pregnancy and has hailed the ruling as a “wake-up call for clubs.”
The 32-year-old turned to players’ union Fifpro to lodge her complaint with Fifa and football’s global body ruled in August last year that the club must pay the full amount owed to Gunnarsdóttir – €82,094.82 (£72,139) – within 45 days of notification of the decision. Fifa said the French club would face a transfer ban if they failed to pay in full.
Fifpro posted on Twitter: “Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir’s landmark ruling against former club Olympique Lyonnais sends a clear message to clubs and footballers worldwide. The strict application of maternity rights is enforceable.”
Lyon is an important club in women’s sports. It is the most-decorated club in women’s soccer, having won eight European Champions League titles and 15 of the last 16 championships in France’s top league, Division 1 Féminine. Gunnarsdóttir explains how this history was one of the reasons she chose to play there in The Players Tribune.
It shouldn’t have taken a ruling from the world’s governing body—and Gunnarsdóttir should not have had to fight—for Lyon to provide what FIFA’s Maternity Regulations require. I hope this is clear to all teams now.
Websites Selling Abortion Pills Sharing Customer Data
One would think that companies selling abortion pills would understand how extreme forced-birth politicians and prosecutors in this post-Dobbs world could weaponize the personal data of the people using their services.
This ProPublica investigation, however, shows how much these companies are failing to protect the people who come to them for this essential service. Jennifer Gollan reports: “Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.
Using a tool created by the Markup, a nonprofit tech-journalism newsroom, ProPublica ran checks on 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to reveal the web tracking technology they use. Late last year and in early January, ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy and Online Abortion Pill Rx.
These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone. This information helps websites function and helps tech companies personalize ads.
But the nine sites are also sending data to Google that can potentially identify users, ProPublica’s analysis found, including a random number that is unique to a user’s browser, which can then be linked to other collected data.”
There are things more important than website analytics. These companies need to fix this immediately because a prosecutor in a forced-birth state is going to target a woman for seeking this public health service.
When QAnon Isn’t Extreme Enough
Bellingcat’s Annique Mossou and Gabriel Geiger report on the new conspiracy theory that seems to be replacing QAnon in Europe, and may be headed our way.
The conspiracy theory, GESARA/NESARA, is actually one that dates back to the 1990s but has been updated for the cryptocurrency era.
Mossou and Geiger explain: “Imagine you’re a jaded stalwart of the QAnon conspiracy. The latest batch of ‘drops’ – the cryptic posts into which you’ve read so much – aren’t quite as enticing, and you’re not even sure that Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office.
But you’re not ready to reassess your belief system. Luckily for you, there are other doomsday prophecies to keep you engaged. That’s how you ended up with billions of Zimbabwean dollars. Or Iraqi Dinars.
Whatever the currency, this scenario doesn’t seem so rare in those corners of the internet that are populated by Europe’s conspiracy theorists. New data shows that QAnon’s hold on the continent’s conspiracy discourse has begun to loosen at the same time that some of its European followers flock to a decades-old financial conspiracy.
That decades-old conspiracy is GESARA, which heralds a financial reset that will see billions of secret funds distributed to people across the globe and the erasure of all debts.”
Don’t threaten me with such a good time.
Researchers have connected QAnon, and former President Donald Trump’s embrace of it, to political violence. Seriously, these conspiracy theories are dangerous. I wish our law enforcement agencies would take them more seriously. But I haven’t had much confidence in the Department of Homeland Security in these matters since conservative activists got the Obama Administration to retract a study on right-wing extremism in 2009.
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Stop Treating Mass Layoffs as Normal
We see the numbers in the news. Ten thousand laid off here. Fifteen thousand tech workers getting pink slips there. Elon Musk culling the Twitter workforce ruthlessly because of his ongoing wealth-destroying midlife crisis.
But as Labor Institute Executive Director Les Leopold reminds us in this Los Angeles Times oped, mass layoffs aren’t only about a company’s bottom line. They are devasting and traumatic for the workers involved.
Leopold writes, “And the harm is always considerable, as described by a recent report in the Harvard Business Review.
Medical studies have shown that the trauma of unemployment causes disease. One study found that being laid off ranked seventh among the most stressful life experiences — more stressful than divorce, a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or vision, or the death of a close friend.
Experts say that it takes, on average, two years to recover from the psychological trauma of losing a job.
For healthy employees without preexisting health conditions, the odds of developing a new health condition rise by 83% in the first 15 to 18 months after a layoff, with the most common problems being cardiovascular conditions, including hypertension and heart disease, and arthritis. The psychological and financial pressure of being laid off can increase the risk of suicide by 1.3 to 3 times.”
Later in the op-ed, Leopold asks a vital question: “Do we really have to inflict such pain and suffering on millions of working people to build a prosperous society?”
988 Is Making the Suicide and Crisis Hotline Easier to Access
Early reports about the new 988 national number to access the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline indicate that more people are using the service and getting connected to the help they need.
NPR’s Rhitu Chatterjee reports: “The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline received over 1.7 million calls, texts and chats in its first five months. That’s nearly half a million more than the old 10-digit Suicide Prevention Lifeline fielded during the same period the year before.
…
Not only are more people reaching out, more are being connected to help.
Federal data shows that the Lifeline responded to 154,585 more contacts – including calls, text messages and chats – in November 2022 than the same month the year before. The number of abandoned calls fell from 18% in November 2021 to 12% last November.
The average wait time to speak to a counselor also fell – from close to 3 minutes in November 2021, to 36 seconds last November.”
Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Here are some stories that she highlights:
- A report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found “that mothers who live in states with abortion bans were three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, and that babies in those states were 30% more likely to die within their first month of life.”
- YouTube influencers are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control.
- What authorities have learned about the recent arson at an Illinois Planned Parenthood.
- Utah Legislative Republicans advance legislation to bypass the state’s Supreme Court injunction blocking the state’s abortion ban.
- Montana Republicans are working to redefine the state constitution’s right of privacy so it doesn’t include abortion.
Art Experts and AI
AI-generated images have gone viral in recent months. Several image generators—including Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion—have enabled people to create images based on user-generated prompts. For example, I asked Dall-E to generate the image at the top of this newsletter by asking it to make an “impressionist oil painting of a restaurant worker.”
How good are these AI bots? The Guardian’s Jo Lawson-Tancred decided to see if AI could fool the experts, “To find out, we set a challenge for three art experts: Bendor Grosvenor, art historian and presenter of the BBC’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces; JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor of ArtReview; and Pilar Ordovas, founder of the Mayfair gallery Ordovas. Each was invited to look at pairs of artworks of a similar style and period over Zoom to see if they could tell which was generated by a machine. All three admitted to finding it tougher than expected.”
Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
The Ringer’s Alan Siegel gets Conan O’Brien to reflect on one of the masterpieces of his comedy career: the Marge vs. the Monorail episode of The Simpsons. This episode is one of my favorites of all time, and it first aired 30 years ago this month.
O’Brien explains how he came up with combining one of his favorite musicals with the tension found in popular disaster films like The Towering Inferno.
“Somehow, all those things are swimming around in my head,” O’Brien says. It just took a space-age train to bring them together. “It unfolds really naturally because once you have the idea of a Music Man selling you a monorail, you know Homer’s for it, the town’s for it. … Well, who’s going to be against it? It’s either Marge or Lisa, because they’re sensible. For me, it was Marge. She’ll be the voice of reason who senses this isn’t wise. The first part is Music Man. The second act is an Irwin Allen disaster movie.”
And this is the best song ever written about how to waste the proceeds from a nuclear waste dumping fine.
This advice is the best.
Hey, kids! It’s your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don’t want you to read.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) 4:05 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2023
And a thing I learned yesterday.
The Northernmost part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the Southernmost part of Brazil
— Amazing Maps (@amazingmap) 1:41 PM ∙ Jan 17, 2023
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