Radio Blue Heart is on the air!

thunderboltsortofapenny:

stand-up-gifs:

stand-up-gifs:

heatherleee:

stand-up-gifs:

bartfargo:

stand-up-gifs:

Lol John Deere executives think they can break the worker’s strike by having Terry from HR build an engine. 

Anyone else have the “Shake Hands With Danger” song playing in their heads?

For those unaware of this masterpierce, it’s from a 1980′s industrial safety training video, and it’s main character is named ‘Three Finger Joe.’

I’m just imagining some farmer trying to fix his combine in 2023, saying “I don’t know why it won’t work, it’s only 2 years old,” and then they open up the engine and the dusty hand bones of a middle manager fall out. 

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Things are going great over there!

It’s day 1 and salary workers are joking about forming their own union, this is great stuff. 

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November 3 2021

The strike is still going. After the accident in the factory went viral, Deere is no longer releasing any information on accidents or near misses and cites it as confidential information. One striker was killed on the picket line when a car hit him at an intersection with blown out streetlights that the town, county and state all say was not their problem. He was 56 years old. As of this afternoon, Deere walked away from the table after UAW voted down their second offer. Part of the offer was a $8,500 sign on bonus. Deere is projected to make 5.6-5.8 billion dollars in profit this year. Strikers are getting egged by passing cars. Deere operates on a standard as need supply plan, which means there are effectively no replacement parts for tractors. If a combine goes down, a farmer likely can’t fix it and crops are lost. This will further disrupt food production and distribution as we go into 2022. Deere does this because it’s expensive to house a stockpile of equipment parts.


GoFundMe for Richard Rich memorial fund

GoFundMe for the UAW strikers fund

allthecanadianpolitics:

Faculty at Manitoba’s largest university are on the verge of a strike after their union says it has reached an “impasse” in its contract negotiations, one day before a strike deadline.

Mediation had “failed to produce an agreement that prioritized faculty recruitment and retention,” the University of Manitoba Faculty Association said in a news release on Monday.

Last month, union members voted to authorize strike action, with a deadline set for Nov. 2.

“The University of Manitoba administration has chosen not to invest in the future of our faculty and our university, leaving us no choice except to strike,” Orvie Dingwall, UMFA President, wrote in the release.

The union represents 1,200 professors, instructors, archivists and librarians at the university.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

cromulentenough:

this is nuts. Zvi’s summary of the situation:

  1. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
  2. There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
  3. This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
  4. This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
  5. If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
  6. In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
  7. Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
  8. Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
  9. Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
  10. The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
  11. Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
  12. This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
  13. This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely happening elsewhere.
  14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
  15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away

until this guy comes along and tweets about it and action gets taken within 8 hours!

originalgravity:

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Bob Gleason’s original acrylic painting for HALLOWEEN, 1978.

ozu-teapot:

Alice, Sweet Alice | Alfred Sole | 1976

antoine-roquentin:

Noises linked to mysterious injuries among US diplomats in Cuba were most likely caused by crickets — not microwave weapons — according to a declassified scientific review commissioned by the US State Department and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The State Department report was written by the JASON advisory group, an elite scientific board that has reviewed US national security concerns since the Cold War. It was completed in November of 2018, two years after dozens of US diplomats in Cuba and their families reported hearing buzzing noises and then experiencing puzzling neurological injuries, including pain, vertigo, and difficulty concentrating.

The report, obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act request, was originally classified as “secret.” It concluded that the sounds accompanying at least eight of the original 21 Havana syndrome incidents were “most likely” caused by insects. That same scientific review also judged it “highly unlikely” that microwaves or ultrasound beams — now widely proposed by US government officials to explain the injuries — were involved in the incidents. And though the report didn’t definitively conclude what caused the injuries themselves, it found that “psychogenic” mass psychology effects may have played a role.

weepingwidar:

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Julie Curtiss (French, 1982) - Limule (2021)