UAW Targets Toyota and Tesla for Unionization.

UAW Targets Toyota and Tesla for Unionization.

UAW says they want to unionize Toyota and Tesla.

Elon Musk is infamously anti-labor. His cars are almost the shoddiest shit that you can find on the road today. Many were built in tents sometimes and are known for a lot of duds that have the bumpers fall off them when you drive off the showroom lot.

By the time a Tesla in Illinois is three years old, the underside is more rusted than a battleship from World War II that’s been at the bottom of the sea.

Teslas are so junky that by the time they’re 4 years old, you have to use the emergency door latch release because the motor is shot.

They’re not built to good standards and the company itself is in deep shit. It’s being destroyed due to selling these shoddy cars at a loss. They were already sold at a loss even before the US economy was in the toilet, and after all this price cutting I can’t imagine they’ve gotten better.

Of course, this is all what you’d expect for a con man who fired off a rocket that exploded because he didn’t want them to install flame diverters.

My dad, an electrical engineer (and a couple of other degrees that he got to amuse himself since he’s a dinosaur leftover from when the US had careers with benefits, like two vacations a year, good health insurance, and a company tuition match), has unfortunately gotten aboard the Elon Musk cult.

I don’t know if it’s just old age getting to him but if he didn’t have a terminal case of Boomeritis before Musk, he sure does now.

Teslas are consistently one of the least reliable brands you can buy.

Out of all the car companies in America, only BMW and Fiat scored worse than Tesla on reliability. Almost all BMWs are on a 3 or 4 year lease because everyone that has tried to “own one” knows what happens when they’re 5. They get repair bills that are more over the next 4 years than starting over on another lease.

Toyota, however, is a good target for unionization. They sell at a premium because most of them still run 20 or even 30 years later, with basic repairs and upkeep, by a company that makes a profit.

Toyota has commented that they think it should be up to the workers to decide if they want a union. The UAW should strike while the iron is hot, because in a little over a year, Trump might be back, turning the NLRB into a weapon against the workers again.

There’s the issue that most foreign car companies have settled in the US South, which still has a “slavery era” attitude towards work, and has passed laws making it difficult to organize and get better pay and benefits. Not impossible, just as difficult as possible within the Taft-Hartley Act.

The UAW should have gone after Toyota full force years ago but it’s good that they realize that this may be their last opportunity for a while.

Personally, I think Joe Biden should float the idea of some tariffs against Japanese car companies if Toyota tries to resist unionization.

The Japanese government has been incredibly uncooperative with American companies that try to sell anything in Japan even though there are officially no tariffs.

Since the US doesn’t export much to Japan and GM only sells about 700 new cars in the entire country per year anyway, there’s not much the Japanese could do in response.

“Mainstream” media, such as CNN and BBC, mention Mastodon as Elon Musk drives users (and advertisers) away in droves. Bonus: Facebook was also a fever dream that traded as a valuable stock.

The “mainstream” media is mentioning Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter.

CNN notes today that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Elon Musk officially took over Twitter. For a total of 655,000 active users. BBC also mentions it.

CNN failed to mention that while Twitter has more “users”, many millions of them are just spammers, bots, advertising accounts, and dormant accounts, some of which haven’t been logged into in years.

I also saw an account that monitors Mastodon activity which, as of around 1 AM last night was showing about 6 million total accounts, with approximately 6,000 new accounts being created per _hour_ in the past day, but now I’m having trouble locating that to link to.

At any rate, it’s impossible to deny that the Fediverse is growing and that Elon Musk is the reason why.

When Andrew Lee took over and ruined Freenode, he ultimately chased out 91% of the users, and dealt with the problem of people abandoning their channels and saying the new room was on OFTC or Libera.Chat by taking over and resetting channels.

So far, many Twitter users are saying their last post will be to advise people where to follow them on Mastodon. How long until Musk has someone detect this and ban the account for talking about leaving and where they’re going?

Musk has been furious at the pace at which Twitter’s largest advertisers have been bailing on him. He “threatened” a “Thermonuclear Name and Shame” if “it doesn’t stop”, so apparently “freedom of speech” means being extorted by Musk into propping up his company which loses “$5 million a day” and rising, “or else” he’ll put your company on a “boycott list” for his followers.

Musk is not a very smart man. Like most rich people, he was born into generational wealth.

Worse, the generational wealth in the Musk family was generated by slave labor in South African emerald mines.

When people are rich they can buy media coverage and cover up for the fact that they’re not smart, they just “have people” for everything.

TED Talks are a joke. When they have people like Musk, they don’t ask him hard questions. They ask softball questions, and he even has to flub his way through these.

Like saying that the biggest threat to humanity is “malignant AI”. Like, he almost recalls watching The Terminator or something. In reality, we have nothing close to “AI” at the present time.

We unfortunately have “voice assistants”, which are different. They “fake” AI by having a wide range of pre-programmed responses, and if it very nearly does sound like someone is sitting in your phone answering your questions, it’s because of this and the fact that a voice actor sat down for hours on end recording speech samples so that “Siri” could have a voice.

But it’s not AI. Not even close. It’s unfortunate that they can fake it well enough to have lonely and depressed people form emotional attachments to a phone, but it’s not AI.

“Siri” is a product of marketing scum and psychiatrists knowing how you’re wired and creating a product to exploit you.

(These voice assistants are “always on” spyware that can be a wiretap.)

Elon Musk is a clown. He gets away with faking “intelligence” because nobody ever forces him into a corner and asks him anything hard. He’s just really rich and he’s an attention whore with personality traits that are very much not unlike Donald Trump.

When Musk wants attention, he shows up in a bad cowboy costume smoking dope and saying “something something Mars” and people listen to him.

Back to Musk’s empty threats….Boycott lists almost never work. They just don’t.

People might say they’re mad at Coca-Cola and GM, but they all keep buying Coke and Chevy trucks, so what difference does it make?

Fox News is portraying this as-if Musk has the upper hand by making these absurd threats, and he doesn’t.

There’s better deals for advertisers out there. Even FM radio, because people still listen in their cars.

He’s also busy pissing off people with millions of followers who made Twitter popular as an advertising platform by claiming he’s going to get them to pay him $20 or maybe $8, depending on what mood he’s in, for a blue check-mark.

Stephen King said he’d leave if he had to pay Musk anything for a blue check-mark, and King has a lot of money. He’s offended by the idea he should pay Musk to make Musk’s platform more popular for advertisers.

What’s driving away all of the advertisers and users is Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Literally the second day he owned the company, he tweeted a bizarre anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Pelosi’s husband, and then deleted it.

Then he’s allowed hate speech to swell by over 500% without doing any sort of content moderation. Why would brands want to be associated with this? Twitter is becoming the official platform of right-wing cranks and Klansmen.

He defended laying off 3,750 people, in the middle of the night in some cases, by claiming the company is losing too much money to let them remain employed, without mentioning that his bid of $54.20 per share, a weed joke, was probably an over-payment of at least $4.20 per share, and would have allowed him to spare everyone who got laid off.

Not that he wanted to spare the people he let go. His first targets were the ethics team and the people who police misinformation, voting scams, and hate speech.

Put it all together, and not only is Twitter basically finished, but Musk has put on full display that he’s so incompetent that it didn’t even take him half a month to make it unsalvageable.

Proprietary “social media” with advertising, Russian (and other) troll farms, and government back doors are finally on the way out.

On top of Musk ruining Twitter (such that it was anywhere close to acceptable before) and leaving people scrambling to adopt Mastodon, Facebook has been losing advertising revenue while burning all of its cash on “Metaverse”, which is turning into a bigger joke every day, with investors more or less powerless to oust Mark Zuckerberg or stop him from burning cash.

(He controls 90% of the B Shares, which have 10 votes for each publicly traded A share.)

“Meta” (Facebook) stock is currently worth about a fifth of what it was just last year, and most analysts see a Long Term Negative outlook.

I notice whenever I do look at who is using Facebook these days, that it’s old people. People like my dad and Aunt (dad’s sister) who re-share their own posts because they don’t know how posts work, or make 8-9 accounts because they keep getting taken over by spammers.

Facebook hasn’t had anyone interesting on it for years, but the “mainstream” media says it’s “growing”.

It has every reason to want to be in denial. Billionaires and the governments (not just “your” government) have put a lot of money into these platforms.

They have back doors set up. If they fail, then the government is less effective at spying on you. They also let these companies into the major stock markets using fake valuations.

Facebook being in the S&P 500 in the first place was like the stock market version of allowing Greece into the European Union and Eurozone, and now the price tag is beginning to become known.

The losses won’t stop piling up at _only_ ~80% of what the company was said to be worth last year.

The people holding Twitter stock were lucky that a billionaire idiot came along to rescue them, because it wasn’t worth 10% of what he paid.

Had Twitter actually been worth anything like what he had paid on its own, there’s no way that the people running it would have sued him to force him to buy it, knowing they would all be fired. They got a good deal for their investors and themselves (as their shares vested upon being fired at the price Musk paid for them), and got out quickly.

Now Musk is furious because he’s such a narcissist that he thought he’d come in and fix everything because he knows everything, of course, and it’s just another failing Musk cash furnace. Already losing money, and now losing their advertisers and the people who would have been seeing the ads had the advertisers stayed.

Musk thinks he’ll charge people $7.99 a month for Twitter in the middle of the worst recession in global history.

If they don’t pay it, I think they’ll see “fewer” ads anyway until it’s down to the point the company is disbanded.

Now, Musk apparently thinks that he can _also_ turn Twitter into a YouTube competitor.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t even use YouTube that much anymore. The drive to monetize everything has led to a lot of non-genuine content that you can only sort of roll your eyes at.

When Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips deliberately broke Pop_OS! to get “likes” and “views”, he knew what he was doing. No actual user is stupid enough that, when presented with a warning from a package manager that something’s not right and proceeding will most likely break the operating system, there’s no way they would type “Yes, do as I say.” and hit ENTER. But it generated a lot of attention, and attention (for advertisers) is all most people uploading YouTube videos are after.

So Musk says he’ll make Twitter an even more fake/synthetic form of “social” network than it is now, to drive “engagement”.

But Facebook is finding out that you can’t engage like this, even with “algorithms” except to a very stupid part of the population, and they’ve lost 4/5ths of their stock price to get to where they are today.

Similarly, YouTube (Google), responded to negative reactions to fake/synthetic “content” by neutering the Dislike button so you couldn’t look at it and see what real people thought.

It’s a way of gaslighting. You can still see “Likes”, but are they even people that are “Liking” the video? Who is clicking on this crap? Bots?

I don’t think there’s a future in the fake Social Network business.

Was it all just a meme that went on for a couple decades only to crash because they got too greedy and started squeezing too hard? It certainly appears that way to me.

I believe, and hope, that we’re witnessing the people swiftly rejecting this madness and forming actual communities, using open standards.

Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi.

As of Sunday, October 30th, 2022, Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi. (NewsWaffle proxy of Original.)

It also doesn’t appear that Mr. Garrett has made any tweets that acknowledge what’s going on in there.

I’ve reached out to Mr. Garrett on Techrights IRC to see if he has anything to say about why he’s still on a platform that is now 100% owned by a homophobe who is blaming gay people for the attack on Paul Pelosi (Quite an odd accusation, but when have conspiracy theories made sense lately?), which will now do pretty much nothing about far-right cranks.

I will note any reply I receive.

Musk later simply deleted the tweet, by which time it had over 24,000 shares and 89,000 likes.

Elon Musk/Tesla goes from firing people to “own the libs” and because “we grew too fast” to because they’ll have to file bankruptcy soon.

Elon Musk/Tesla goes from firing people to “own the libs” and because “we grew too fast” to because they’ll have to file bankruptcy soon.

Elon Musk, just days/a few weeks ago said they would trim “about 10%” of the managerial staff at Tesla because “we grew too fast” and “now we have to get headcount down” to operate more efficiently.

Then he said he was firing the “Diversity and Inclusion Team” to own the libs.

Then he declared in the past week that if Tesla keeps operating the way it is, with their factories being “gigantic money furnaces”, they’ll be in bankruptcy court very soon.

And now they announce a hiring freeze and are laying off based on seniority.

Everyone who bought one of these things, proprietary software, patented parts, and zero repair manuals, will most likely end up with a very expensive car in the driveway that is malfunctioning and can’t be serviced by anybody pretty soon.

On top of the mass layoffs, Musk violated the federal WARN Act by not notifying anyone of the layoffs, and is now being sued. He probably knew he would be, but like most laws, they fail to punish rich people enough that they care about the consequences.

I always say “A crime that’s punishable only by a fine means doing it is legal for a fee.”.

Musk is a parasite that will run Tesla into a liquidation sale, however he has no reason to care because he managed to siphon off enough money while the scam played out and the government will allow him to keep it.

People should be highly skeptical of buying one of these things because there will be nowhere to service it soon and they’ll end up with a total loss when the car won’t work.

The cars are already very nasty. As most things that run on proprietary software with an Internet connection do to you, they have backdoors in them. Tesla has used this for market segmentation, such as selling additional range without putting a different battery in the car, which is because the range on the cheaper model is just a software limit on the same battery.

When hurricanes approach Florida and Texas, Tesla gets into your car via the backdoor and increases the range another 60 or 70 miles, temporarily, so you don’t get caught in the hurricane and sue them, and then they go back to sabotaging it unless you pay them to remove the restriction.

Microsoft has had this business model with Windows for years.

Everyone gets the same OS with the same binaries, compiled exactly the same way, but you get limitations that are enforced by “Software Licensing Service” depending on how much you paid them, so they can cripple or enable the software by any amount any time, and then you need to get a new serial number and activate it again and suddenly it does more.

Of course this is nonsense. Everyone who downloads a GNU/Linux distribution gets the same binaries and can use it however they want.

The desktop binaries have the same capabilities as the server binaries. They both cost no money. You just decide which role you want to deploy, and you can add capabilities by adding new software packages whenever you like. Thus, the only reason to separate the roles is to conserve resources and reduce security footprint based upon the needs of the user.

But with Tesla behaving like Microsoft with licensing and backdoors, doesn’t it make you wonder what else is in these cars that is waiting to fail if Tesla isn’t there to tell “your” car what to do, even if you can find someone to service it mechanically somehow? I guess if you bought one, you’ll find out.

Walmart has made sure that the people who suffer from the chicken shortage are the people who need to “save money and live better”.

Walmart has made sure that the people who suffer from the chicken shortage are the people who need to “save money and live better”.

Going along with my previous post about egg prices, Walmart seems to have told their suppliers to stop giving them the chicken they normally sell for $2.69 and $2.99 a pound (thighs and breasts) and start only packaging the expensive national brands that cost $7-9 a pound instead.

So if you get your chicken at Walmart, the implication is that it’s going to be a major drag on your grocery bill.

That’s why when I got my deep freezer this year, I hurried up and included well over 200 pounds of chicken that I bought in those enormous family packs (on sale) from Jewel Osco before the 5% quarter on grocery stores expired on my Discover card for the year.

It’s a good thing too, because Walmart’s chicken section has been pretty wiped out for months now, and unless you want the expensive national brand, you’re probably all out of luck unless you go in there every day and toss a pack or two of store brand, if you can even find it.

Meanwhile, WGN posted a bullshit AP blurb that “consumer spending props up the economy” which repeats the 3.6% unemployment lie, while the stocks are down 30-40% and every major company is either freezing their hiring or laying off, and even the bullshit “news” article had to backstop their nonsense with a “but for how much longer” segment admitting that the personal savings rate in the US has dropped from 16% to 6% in only a year.

In another article that I read somewhere, US households took on another $60 billion in debt in April (not counting what the units of government take on without asking them, and then throw away on corruption, fraud, waste, and vote buying).

Unfortunately WGN sticks out the middle finger to EU and UK readers because they don’t want to comply with the GDPR, so I have to use this archived link if you want to read this nonsense.

Mad props for being very relatable.

Their highlight to show shit is, in fact, getting real is a tuba player who had to cancel his Netflix account.

But it gave me a great idea. We should start a fundraising campaign to get a guy with a tuba to walk around playing it while Elon Musk is speaking.

That way we can get some entertainment and drown out his whinging about the American work ethic and praise for the Chinese Communists.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

I got a $397 check for my spouse last week and a $397 check for myself this week.

Facebook had been tagging us in our pictures and storing our facial patterns in their facial recognition programs. That turned out to be a big problem for them that cost them nearly $700 million in the resulting class action settlement.

Scumbag corporations have been losing big time due to the BIPA, and they want it repealed. There’s pending lawsuits against at least a dozen major companies, and lots of settlements too.

The only thing corporations understand is losing money. Facebook has already had a lot of fake stock value erased this year.

Facebook blamed the loss mostly on Apple’s alleged new “privacy” functions on the iPhone, even though Facebook already has patents pending on how to avoid those features and track people with iPhones anyway. As long as their apps are even on your phone, you’ve lost already whether you use an Android or an iPhone.

I use a Free and Open Source app called Frost from F-Droid that gives Facebook no significant access to my phone. It’s basically a blinged out webview that tricks Messenger into working. So it’s very likely that Facebook has less access to my Pixel 6 than anything Apple has done to box them in on an iPhone, where all you can use is Facebook’s apps.

Facebook’s financial problems have more to do with laws like the California and Illinois privacy statutes.

The only safe way to operate is to assume that anyone you track could be in Illinois or California, which is why although BIPA is an Illinois law, and Illinois is a state of 12.8 million people, Facebook disabled their tagging and facial recognition everywhere in the world after losing $700 million dollars.

Another source of Zuckerberg’s heartburn is the state of the economy in general. Major stocks of companies with real products are down 30 even 40%, and not even Walmart was spared.

Most of the ads I’ve seen go by on Facebook are from lawyers suing app companies.

Since the economy is so bad right now (Maybe call it the “Don’t Say Recession Recession”?), consumers have to tighten their wallets, and while that may or may not eventually break the hyperinflation (since most of this is due to Biden and Congress throwing around trillions of dollars we don’t have, that came at the expense of your bank account), it means the value of advertising is collapsing.

This is what set off the DotCom Bubble Collapse in the early 2000s.

Eventually, investors get sick of losing money, the hysteria wears off, and reality sets in.

Usually in an environment where the Fed loses its appetite for entertaining that round of mania.

Like what’s starting to unfold now.

The reason why Elon Musk wants Twitter isn’t because he has a plan to turn a profit. His Tesla company is down 41% YTD, you know.

It’s because he wants to be able to say whatever he wants without any censorship, and invite Trump back to scream and yell, but there will still be “content moderation” and spyware tracking the people foolish enough to have accounts there.

I’ve never really understood how a company that lets you post 140 characters from the toilet that disappear into the void quickly has managed to stay in business. Pretty much the only thing on Twitter are influencers, “brands”, and politicians. The 1% can say whatever they want unfiltered.

Do you even want to be on this thing?

I barely even have a presence on Facebook anymore. It’s not generally worth using. You hope other people will hate like your vacation or something and there’s a lot of stress to be fake popular on it.

I tried to tell Roy Schestowitz that he’d be a lot happier and lose nothing if he got off Twitter years ago, but the only reason he left was because they shoved him out the door for criticizing Bill Gates.

Merely criticizing the rich and powerful is enough to get you thrown out.

It is dangerous to have “social media” replace the Web, because then they can throw you out when they don’t like what you say, even if it’s not illegal to say that. And that’s why corporations and the governments want the Web to die. They can spy and censor better that way. It was much harder to do this in bulk when everyone who wanted a blog just got their own Web site.

Google even crawls my blog and I get readers. When you post to Facebook and Twitter, your thoughts just die immediately. It gives the illusion of having spoken, even though nobody is really listening.

I wonder if Elon Musk will let him back in. He is a “free speech absolutist”, or so he says. 😉