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Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

1/

 But all that may be about to change: 6000 warehouse workers in #BHM1, the massive Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, will vote next month on a push to unionize under the @RWDSU.

https://t.co/6EyBzl2Cih

2/
Amazon, like other tech giants, is absolutely reliant on building and maintaining a competitive advantage by exploiting technology to drive wages ever downward while ducking responsibility for harming workers.

3/
Big Tech is pants-wettingly afraid of unionization, and that goes double for any solidarity between high-paid tech workers and misclassified/outsourced warehouse workers and other "unskilled" laborers.

4/
Amazon has gone so far as to hire the Pinkertons, renowned as some of history's most violent anti-worker terrorists, to bust unionization drives in its shops:

https://t.co/lxzBcOHGRr

5/
But while the Pinkertons are engaging in covert surveillance, infiltration, and retaliation, Amazon is also running a soft-power op called #DoItWithoutDues, grounded in the idiotic lie that unions cost workers more than they gain:

https://t.co/4kWNLGg49b

6/
The @techworkersco has fired back with a debunking site, #DoItWithRealPower, that copies the layout from Amazon's astroturf site and rebuts it, point by point:

https://t.co/JsqzWcTvuB

7/
This would be a super-fun, gnarly copyright/fair use case (law school profs, take note), but the substance is even more fascinating: you won't pay dues until your union gets a contract, which will get you higher pay.

8/
Not just pay, but also an effective grievance procedure to address Amazon warehouses' manifestly unsafe working conditions.

https://t.co/jd07tuLGqn

9/
"On average, unionized workers earn 19% more than non-unionized workers so, if you make the average $31k a year, a union could win you an increase in YOUR PAYCHECK of $5,900 annually. That’s a whole lot more dinners, school supplies, gifts, and dignity."

10/
The site ends with a link to the @BAmazonUnion drive:

https://t.co/PP30se1ZcN

eof/
ETA: if you'd like to read this as a surveillance-free, tracking-free, ad-free blog post, here's a permalink: https://t.co/695sJGdxBz

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: ADT insider threat; Billionaires think VR stops guillotines; Privacy Without Monopoly; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/nu1HbReiEX

#Pluralistic

1/


This Wednesday, I'm giving a talk called "Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future" for the Purdue University CERIAS Program:

https://t.co/po5IivZyr4

2/


ADT insider threat: If you build it they will spy.

https://t.co/kJrmtu8L3S

3/


Billionaires think VR stops guillotines: TARP with tasps.

https://t.co/MIKwvsICkr

4/


Privacy Without Monopoly: Podcasting a reading of the latest EFF whitepaper.

https://t.co/R2sl75y4rb

5/
TWITTER
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
TECH
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/


If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/
ECON

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Mario Gabriele \U0001f98a
Mario Gabriele 🦊...
@mariodgabriele
Red Bull is a weird and fascinating company.

- $7.4 billion in 2020 revenue
- 43% energy drink market
- Makes nothing

Nope, not even the drinks they sell. Instead, they focus 100% on marketing.

Here's what's going on

1/

Before Red Bull there was Krating Daeng (KD).

Founded by pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Chaleo Yoovidhya, KD was created to serve Thailand's country's working class.

Yoovidhya chose the gaur, a member of the bovine family from the region, as the brand's symbol.


2/

Dietrich Mateschitz was a toothpaste marketer. On a business trip to Thailand he discovered KD and fell in love with the drink.

With Yoovidhya, he decided to bring it to Europe. He made changes:

- Name became "Red Bull"
- Added bubbles
- Used a thin can
- Targeted elites


3/

The deal Mateschitz and Yoovidhya struck outsourced production of the drink to the Thai entrepreneur's pharmaceutical company.

That fundamental structure has remained in place today: Red Bull outsources production and focuses on distribution (marketing).


4/

Mateschitz noticed the rise of extreme sports starting in the 1990s. He thought Red Bull should be a part of it.

The years since have seen the company amass an insane empire across sports, media, and apparel.
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Didi Kuo
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@didikuo1
The American business community is speaking with a unified voice - NAM called to invoke the 25th Amendment; the Business Roundtable and Chambers of Commerce urge a peaceful transition of power; all have denounced last week's violence. What might this mean? A few implications:
1/

This isn't just PR - bad politics is bad for business. Here, the Harvard Business Review makes the business case for democracy (leading essay by

Historically, business has been a crucial ally for democracy. Mark Mizruchi shows how business helped secure democracy after WII, through organizations like the Committee for Economic Development (see also his @NiskanenCenter paper: https://t.co/xoqUUN1nCD)

3/

My book examines how business groups formed to lobby against patronage and corruption, and in favor of institutional reform, in the 19th c. (https://t.co/FnNhZUupBG)

For a summary of business’s role in American democracy over the 20th century, see

Today, corporations are cutting off PAC $$ — Wall St banks (JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup), big tech (Microsoft, Facebook). Many more corps have suspended donations to members of Congress who contested the certification of election results last week
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Mario \u201cI have a model for that\u201d Platt
Mario “I have a model ...
@madplatt
Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

🧵

Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures
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Rohun
Rohun
@RohunJauhar
If you make more than $100k per year you should have a Virtual Assistant.

If you don't, you're wasting your time on stuff that doesn't matter.

Here's the process I've created to find, interview, and manage great VA's after doing this for 5 years:

There's a lot of tasks you work on that are well below your intellectual capability.

Booking haircut appointments, ordering groceries, and finding flights is a waste of time.

First, you want to find out what tasks can you delegate.

Here's how:

Track everything you do every 15 minutes in a spreadsheet. Create 3 columns w/ the below questions

1. Do I like doing this?
2. Is it repeatable?
3. Can it be delegated?

If the answers are No, Yes, Yes -- you've found tasks to delegate!

We'll jump back into these tasks later.

Before we learn how to find them, let's understand the types of VA's:

1. Individual Freelancers (Low cost & High cost)
2. Agency VA's (High cost)

My experience has been with low-cost VA's (under $6/hour). I've gotten the same level of quality that I would with most US VA's.

Now, here's how we craft the right job post to attract the best ones: Be as specific as possible with what you expect. Here’s an example:

Also ask for a screenshot of their computer specs & internet speed results and a 2 min video of their background & why they want the job.
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Irina Tsukerman
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Thread:
An explosive new criminal complaint against Martin Inacker, the former CEO of @wpmeurocom in #Germany shows Inacker potentially double crossing his #Saudi clients by colluding with #Qatar to cover up Doha's #Hezbullah's sponsorship in exchange for hush money.


According to the complaint, Inacker had kept the terms of his initial agreement with the #Saudi Ministry of Information (following his work with the Saudi Embassy in Berlin) secret from @wmpeurocom 's Board of Directors.

He had used unethical methods to promote a hyperbolized, if not outright mendacious, brochure that was supposed to improve the image of #KSA and the royal family. He had promised a list of high level political and business context to the Saudis as part of his business.

A strategy paper developed by Inacker was leaked to the papers showing unethical, and possibly illegal pressure on ten journalists to switch their "tone" on #KSA as a result of Inacker's lobbying efforts.

However, despite throwing these journalists under the bus, by his own admission Inacker did not appear to have succeeded in pressuring them to "switch their tone". This shows Inacker's duplicity: 1) he lied to his Saudi clients about his alleged success.
BUSINESS

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THREAD: What is Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle and how it impacts India?

Golden Crescent region of South Asia - comprises of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan - which is a principal global site for opium production and distribution.


Golden Triangle is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers. The Golden Triangle is called so because of the triangular shape formed by the locations of New Delhi, Agra and Rajasthan on a map.


India is wedged bw world’s 2 largest areas of illicit opium production, Golden Crescent & Golden Triangle, that has made Indian borders vulnerable to drug trafficking. It flows from 2 fronts, NW & NE, that possesses dual concern - violation of border & threat to national security

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A #story from #Thiruvilayadal puranam-one of divine leelas of Bhagwan Shiva

#threadseries #Madurai

Story 16- it is about how Bhagwan Shiva explained the meaning of Vedas to the Rishis.

வேதத்துக்குப் பொருள் அருளிச் செய்த படலம்


Once there was a great deluge,everything in the world was destroyed.All lifeforms that existed got perished.Afterwards ,due to Bhagwan Shiva creation started.Then from Bhagwan Shiv ji's mouth-birth of 🕉 OM- Pranavam happened.From Pranavam,4 vedas appeared. Rishis learned them.

Many Rishis in Naimisharanya learned Vedas&recited them but they didn't understand the meaning&essence of Vedas. They were worried as they couldn't find any guru who can teach them the meaning of Vedas.That time,Rishi Arabhatar visited them.Rishis told him about need their worry.

Rishi Arabhatar told them that Bhagwan Shiva has given Vedas &he would be grateful enough to teach the meaning as well.But for that rishis have to rigorous penance at a sacred place.Also told them to go to Sundareswarar temple in Madurai to do tapas in front of Dakshinamurthy.

Assured them that Dakshinamurthy himself will come & teach them.Rishis proceeded to Madurai & started their tapas in front of Dakshinamurthy sannidhi for almost a year starting from Karthigai month pournami to next year Karthigai month pournami following all rituals..annadan
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Varahi Amman, Madurai, Tamilnadu

Vaarahi is one of the Saivite Shakti deities with the group of goddesses known as SAPTAMATAS.
They are: Brahmi, Maheshwari, Kaumari, Vaishnavi, Vaarahi, Mahendri and Chamundi. 1/n


They are the Shakti (female) equivalents of their male counterparts. Vaarahi is the Shakti of Bhairavar who is one of the Amsam of Bhairavar.Created from the boar avatara of Vishnu, Vaarahi is often associated with Goddess Kamala (one of the Mahavidyas). 2/n


She is also called Dandini (Lady Commander of the forces of the Mother-Goddess, symbolizing the might of SriVidya). As Vaarahi ("hog-faced" or "the great consumer") she destroys evil forces that obstructs the devotees' progress, paralyses the enemies 3/n


and led the devotees ultimately to SriVidyas. She is also called Panchami). With Kurukalla, she is accorded the parental status to Sri-Chakra (Lalita Tripura-Sundari). While Kurukalla represents the full moon, Vaarahi represents the new-moon. 4/4

Jai Maa Varahi 🙏


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Bharadwaj
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Today is Jayanti of Ahilyabai Holkar

She was a widow who became Malwa's greatest queen. Defended our country & personally led armies into battle.Never plundered anyone. Developed Malwa into a prosperous kingdom. Rebuilt temples destroyed by Mughals. Built Dharmashalas at Tirthas


Unfortunately, her memory has been blemished by inaccurate representations in modern popular media.

The serial "Punyashlok Ahilyabai" depicts her as ultra secularist feminazi icon who questions Hindu rituals & Pandits while patronising Sufis.

This is far from historical truth!


Ahilyabai was born on May 31 1725 to Patil Mankoji Shinde.

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Malhar Rao was a Subedar of territory comprising 30 Parganas yielding a revenue of at least 7 Lakh


In 1741, when Ahilyabai was newly married, her father -in-law Malhar Rao Built Indore palace & ordered the kanungo to populate the settlement with a promise of protection to traders.

This began rise of Indore from its background as modest trading town Indrapuri to a great city
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