if anyone's wondering what this is about, a woman died from an allergic reaction at a restaurant in a Disney park after repeatedly confirming that the food was allergen-free, and Disney is claiming that because her husband signed up for a free trial of Disney+ a few years ago, he waived all rights to sue them for any reason. i wish i was joking.
yikes. this reinforces my choice to never go to disneyland, or sign up for any free trials of anything ever.
That's what always happens in capitalist societies. They say that if you don't want to be poor, there's a certain thing you have to do. But then everyone does it, so it's no longer effective. The system depends on making sure that there's always a supply of poor people to exploit.
can confirm, the switch from "just get a degree, any degree, it'll show employers that you can commit longterm and follow through, and most skills are transferable" to "lolol dumbass millennials got underwater basket weaving degrees as if they'd ever help you get a job and now they're paying off student loans with their Starbucks jobs and it's all their own dumbass fault, idiots!" was instantaneous
See also: 1960s through 2000s: "Overpopulation will kill us all stop procreating you idiots."
2024: "You didn't have enough children and now it's your fault the entire world economy will collapse in 10 years."
You should also go back to when student loans were introduced, and how higher education was free before that. Oh yes, the name reagan will be mentioned.
yep, what i was going to say. you didn't need gargantuan loans in the 1970s because there was public money going into public colleges in the first place. guess which party has been privatizing the commons for decades.
I don't see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to "eliminate the risk of theft" (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.
The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.
The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.
This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation-- every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about--every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.
111th anniversary
They were discouraged from breaks because they were actively trying to unionize, and bosses felt that keeping them from unsupervised contact would prevent them from joining the garment workers' union.
This is why unions are important. This is why today, right now, the biggest companies in America are trying to squash unionization of their laborers and why those workers are fighting so hard to unionize.
@tikkunolamorgtfo did a great write-up a few years ago about the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and I highly recommend reading it (and anything else you can about the fire). It is painfully relevant still and it's incredibly important women's, Jewish, immigrants', and workers' history.
Following previous installments on the thorny intersections of money and fanfiction, Episode 218, “The Money Question 3: Books???” tackles the recent debacle around people illegally selling bound copies of others’ fic, which has mostly centered on mega-popular Dramione works. Jumping off from Elizabeth’s WIRED article on the subject—which ties the practice to the current pull-to-publish wave as well as the Twilight fan-run presses of the early 2010s—Elizabeth and Flourish discuss the context collapse when a fic “breaches containment,” double standards in attitudes towards money and various fan practices, and, for likely the 1,000th time on this podcast, what exactly “fair use” means.
You knew we were gonna discuss it—and of course this one ran super long lol. It was so helpful to talk this through with @flourish, who has a ton of historical knowledge in this realm (threatened by Warner Bros. as a pre-teen!) and, in their previous life working in Hollywood, has been in the room with the rights holders who are looking at monetized fanworks and taking...a variety of stances.
Launching my first art blogs with a small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin!
“I think the struggle that we’re on is real, I think it’s valid. It is not one that is being made out of greed, but it is one that is being made against greed. I think the individual people who work at the corporations, many of them I have great relationships with, but corporations are not people, the people who make up corporations are not the corporation. We are fighting against a system that basically was both put together and also which was empowered by circumstance to be really horrible, and frankly I think all labor should be looking at this strike and saying, ‘When do we get our cut?’ Otherwise, you know, we’re gonna be living in a gig economy hellscape and I promise you you don’t want—that’s like Ready Player One shit, you’re gonna be in like an Airstream trailer on a scaffold someplace, you know, with your headset. You don’t want that.”
— Javier Grillo-Marxuach on the WGA strike in Episode 198: “Strikesplaining.” Click through to listen or read a full transcript!
In Episode 198, “Strikesplaining,” Elizabeth and Flourish are joined by screenwriter, executive producer, and longtime friend of the podcast Javier Grillo-Marxuach to talk about the Writers Guild of America strike. Javi breaks down how television writing, production, and compensation have changed drastically in his three decades in the industry, and how this action is connected to broader labor struggles facing workers today. They also talk about the specific ways this strike touches fandom, including how streamers’ exploitative practices affect everyone from the people making the shows to the people who want to watch them.
In Episode 184, Flourish and Elizabeth talk to Justin Bolger, who previously ran Star Wars’ social media and is currently the senior brand manager for “Star Trek Fleet Command.” Topics discussed include using pop culture as social capital while moving around a lot as a child, parlaying fannish interests into a career in the entertainment industry, how the gap between knowledge and wisdom shapes fandom discussions, and what exactly it was like to helm Star Wars social during the release of The Last Jedi.
I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.
The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.
Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”
We stan an icon.
This is one of the scenes in the pbs special about her that i streamed a few nights ago. The whole program was great, glad i got to watch it. She also talked about a writer not handing over completed answers, but opening a door/window for the reader to look or go through.
