And alsoNomadland

But hey with those pesky unions gone, America is bringing back manufacturing.

It's gonna be great, again! What a wonderful future having given up on the dream of leading the information economy and all that stupid science stuff.

JeeeeeHad! Buckaroo!!

That's one way to look at it. On the other hand look at concepts like the 40 hour work week, weekends, bank holidays, the ability to take sick days and vacations, workplace safety, safe public transportation, job security, and so many things we take for granted due to collective bargaining.

And it's not just for the wellbeing of workers, but everyone. Look at the recent ban of ebikes on the London commuter rails over fire concerns. That wasn't brought on by forward thinking bosses or a campaign led by concerned citizens, no it was brought on by the rail transport union who understood the danger it posed and threatened to strike if the danger wasn't addressed.

Unions make life better for everyone. You can say but what about... Go ahead. Any human organisation is going to involve corruption, but the benefits and advances achieved through collective effort of unions shouldn't be discounted for individual failings.

Instead, that we can identify and call out the corrupt is something that would be impossible if everyone remained divided by business owners who aren't going to really go out of their way to treat workers decently if it might interfere with profits and the expectations of investors. The UK isn't like America where Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other anti-union billionaires buy politicians and manipulate elections. Okay, maybe FB manipulated the Brexit vote, and Musk has ambitions in Farage and Robinson, but they say they're just average blokes making the world a better place. How's that working out for you?

Yes, there are some forward thinking capitalists like Rowntree who suspected that looking out for the welfare of working people was actually more profitable. We're amazingly fortunate this rare genius of capitalism took the time to verify and document his suspicions through scientific observation which he published. His treatise on the working poor not only led to better candy, but inspired Churchill to propose the establishment of a welfare system. Unfortunately, for every Rowntree there's countless other capitalists who'd blindly resort to slavery, mass murder, and any depravity if they thought it might add a few bob to quarterly earnings.

And you don't have to look far to find corrupt business men or for that matter slave drivers even today. The UK is hugely reliant on slavery in the twenty first century. Even more than the 18th century before Clarkson and Sharp started the abolitionist movement.

The only difference is that most slaves in the UK today aren't "illegals" but British citizens and the even vaster networks of worldwide slavery is obscured in a subterfuge of shell corporations, subcontracting, and other tricks of the spreadsheet that enables us to not really consider where all the shiny neat stuff we identify as trophies of modern civilization really comes from.

So go ahead and slag unions and vote reform, but you might want to consider the devil you should know than the easy rare example demons your average one percenter want you to despise instead of seeing how unions and government oversight might benefit you.

I'm sure they'll tell you their wealth is meritocracy in action and they aren't doing evil. It's nothing personal, just business. You understand. Right?

The world is a complex place. Humans are easy to corrupt, but the systems we've developed tend to work. But everything good requires work. Honest work. That's the hard part, but it beats the alternative.

I'm hearing impaired and totally agree. I really hate the poor quality of American subtitling.

Even worse is YouTube. It's quite insulting that their AI speech to text ticks the ADA box for videotaped lectures.

Kind of a side topic, but one thing I have appreciated about Netflix subs options.

I've read a lot of tips on watching TV and movies in foreign languages while following among with English subtitles to be a good way to improve polyglotism. My experience has been a less successful and have come to suspect it's just an excuse to show movies in class.

I've also found that doing this with Netflix at home can be a good way to annoy friends who don't want to read a film.

What I have found to be a good compromise and even more powerful learning too is to watch in English with foreign subs. At least for me, I quickly start hearing the actors speaking in their voice but in the language I am reading and the synesthesia really mainlines the learning.

Yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind in regards to this cruelty you speak. It's a very naive and negative strategy: thinking that if your behaviour is strict, you don't need fun. But for most people, this is what power is about and requires.

Formally known in business as The Peter Princlple: being promoted to your highest level of incompetence. Being a star employee doesn't necessarily make one a good leader.

True leadership is about getting the most out of your team by keeping things positive and enabling them to work together. It's a very different skill in many ways than what people did to be promoted to management. Usually being promoted to management is achieved by being "driven" which is not easy to instill in others. Motivation is a rare skill quite underappreciated or understood in hierarchical structures that view career progress as a ladder.

Smart companies recognise this and do their best not to put employees in a position to fail. This should be a central strategy and when moving a star performer to management: smart companies send them to management training to enable the transition. Most companies don't.

They do have plausible deniability. Smug plausible deniability at that -- it wasn't me who caused the breach, but the software. Obviously the only solution is a return to office. Weird how bad logic begets bad logic.

Reality made real by MTV Reality star turned Transport on Secretary, Sean Duffy none the less!

Road Rules El Salvador!

For the free chatGPT and GROK for students to get them hooked early!

Don't forget brave cannon fodder. Only way to win a land war with China and help the Chinese Nationalist win their civil war that started back in the 1930's!

Is it just me, or are we also seeing an increase in catastrophic air disasters?

There have been initiatives to increase hunting with extended seasons and new licensing rules requiring hunters to take one or two does before they can legally take a buck. But it is too little too late.

It's not really making a dent when a conservative estimate puts half the deer in Southern Wisconsin infected. Particularly when hunters are flying in to Wisconsin with no prohibition to taking home infected carcasses to all 50 states each year. Hunting season is still more a spreader event than prophylactic that removes the healthiest deer rather than diseased.

This is primarily because there's been serious denial to the possibility of CWD infecting humans. Any scientific inquiry to the possibility is censored from discussion due to concerns of the tourism industry. Even basic measures to protect deer, such as outlawing the common practice of baiting deer through regular feeding at troughs in order to prevent spreading infectious saliva are not on the agenda in the deeply entrenched deer hunter culture.

With the first confirmed cases of hunters dying of CWD made public in 2022, the reality of the danger is slowly disseminating. Interest in hunting is seeing a drop as advisories advocating safer practices have become mainstream.

At this point, it would be very difficult for humans to stop CWD without killing entire herds. A huge and costly task. This is why, from a viewpoint based in modern science, the wolf is a fully optimized solution. They possess a visual, aural, and audio acuity we can hardly grasp beyond understanding it is essential to their complex role in the food chain as an apex hunter vital to the health of the ecosystem.

We now know with scientific certainty that long held facts about wolves were misinformed: wolves don't do trophy hunting and they aren't the sadistic monsters portrayed in cartoons and superstitions that we based our understanding a century ago. Instead, they are a guardian of the herd rather than marauder and an essential component of a healthy ecosystem.

In modern times, with the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, biologists have documented that the presence of wolves is an essential benefit and boon to the flora and fauna.

This is because evolution has hardwired the wolf to identify even the most subtle of eradic behaviour of the sick and feeble in order to enable them to take the shortest path to dinner. Wolves have also evolved a very simple and efficient gut that allows them to safely thrive on diseased meat. They are uniquely qualified to provide essential services. The species they eat mostly rodents and occasionally larger ungulets would otherwise over run the place leaving systems unbalanced. Without the wolf, elk have no motivation to leave the riverside allowing them to overgraze the banks and pollute the streams with erosion and excrement as they become fat, lazy, and as unhealthy as couch potatoes. The return of the wolf to Yellowstone was a kin to a whole new Springtime rebirth.

It's no coincidence that CWD emerged in Colorado back in the 1950's, less than a decade after wolves had been eradicated in the state through government programs demanded by ranchers before these scientific realities were understood.

It's also no coincidence that since CWD has sickened the herds, the wolf has returned on its own to clean up the mess caused by misguided wildlife management.

In the meantime, scientific advances in understanding of wolves and ecology in general have established the strategy of eradication was short sighted and unnecessary. There not only are ways agriculture and wilderness can coexist, but they must: we can't survive without a healthy ecosystem; the frontier myth of Man vs. Nature is a suicidal gambit.

That would be the highway commission. They salinate the water to melt it when it gets hard.

That's the bears! They love bees.