The regulators are the National Labor Relations Board, who brought the suit attempting to force Starbucks to re-hire them. The regulators are doing their jobs in this case. The courts, especially the Suprene Court, are the ones captured.
I mean that guy is being an idiot, but it's also not quite that simple. There is still more and less ethical consumption. A fairphone is more ethical than an iPhone, and pointing that out in good faith to someone complaining about Apple's behavior seems entirely fair.
It's not a complete fallacy to point out that someone is consuming something less ethical when they have a better option. Obviously it's impossible for anyone to do this with literally everything, but absolutely you can avoid Starbucks because of their treatment of unions, and frequent a local coffee shop instead.
Granted this is mostly assuming two people having a good faith discussion, which on the internet is infrequent lol.
A fairphone is more ethical than an iPhone, and pointing that out in good faith to someone complaining about Apple's behavior seems entirely fair.
True. However, a Fairphone isn't available to everyone. Every place that sells phones will offer you several kinds of iPhones with several payment plan options for those of us who don't have $1000 available immediately. Same with several brands of Android phones for those of us that aren't gullible enough to buy into the overpriced walled garden bullshit of Apple.
Fairphone, on the other hand, isn't available from your local provider, though. You have to buy them outright online. At least that's how it is here in Denmark.
Your example actually proves my point further: iPhones are universally available whether you can really afford one or not, whereas getting a Fairphone is much less straightforward in every way.
I'd love for my next phone to be a Fairphone but unless my financial situation changes significantly, that's not possible due to the universal favoring of less ethical brands.
It's not a complete fallacy to point out that someone is consuming something less ethical when they have a better option
Bolded the key words. The frequent lack of an ethical (or even less unethical) option is my point. The only way to ALWAYS have the ethical choice available you ironically have to be wealthier than is ethically achievable.
absolutely you can avoid Starbucks because of their treatment of unions, and frequent a local coffee shop instead.
Not always, no. Like Walmart with grocery stores, Starbucks have been forcing out competitors to the point that they have de facto monopolies on coffee shops in some areas. You can't choose a local shop if it doesn't exist.
Granted this is mostly assuming two people having a good faith discussion, which on the internet is infrequent lol.
Hey fuck face, I didn't ask to be born here, and there isn't really other things to buy in America. So fuck you and the anti-solidarity horse you rode in on.
Also, what a ridiculous leap of logic to make. "Stupid Americans, always," shuffles deck of ridiculous hypotheticals "celebrating union losses by buying iPhones.
You didn't ask to be born there, but you don't have to belong to the group of Americans that consume without any regard.
Also, how is knowingly buying products from anti-union companies a "leap of logic"? Do you even know what that means?
You don't need to buy Apple products to function in society, nor do you need Starbucks products, nor do you have to use Amazon. There are small local retailers you can support, as well as fair trade products, second hand goods you can purchase, and a lot more.
Having worked in an environment helping people who either didn't have either, or didn't know how to use them, and needed jobs...I discovered basically the answer is somewhere between "Wait outside at Home Depot" or "You don't."
Actually my wife worked for a company that used iPhones and provided her a phone. I suppose, at the point she was worried about job precarity and got a separate non-work phone, she could have gone android (the principle offerings of which are also FOXCONN made) but she was quite busy with an agenda from her company (to which she was loyal) to learn a new user interface and alternate between the two.
I, in the meantime, had no company phone, and was on a tight budget, so I went android and shopped around, not for a fair-trade phone but for one on opportunistic sale, as I can't afford a conscience.
Apple sucks. But really, so does Google. So does Sony. So does Samsung. So, evidently, does Asus, though I like their interface choices more.
In the end, we consumers end-users don't have the political power to influence the market when the government fails to be public serving. (Called government failure since that's Its alleged job.) It's why we erected a non-feudalist government in the first place.
Blaming iPhone users is like blaming car owners in the States, when the automotive and fossil fuel industries systematically dismantled mass transit nationwide.
Yes, blame everything on the system. Americans are just drones guided by the system by a deluge of ads, indoctrination by the media, school, and government. Taught to consume from the day they exit the womb, every American mindless follows the lifescript incapable of individual thought. A nation of puppets blabbering about freedom, being #1, and the American dream.
Felons should be able to vote, even while in prison. Otherwise you just have to make sure your political opponents are all charged with a felony and skew and keep skewing the results because those people can never vote to potentially make their crime no longer a crime.
Like, if they ever make it a crime to be gay, now they've basically also stopped gays from being able to vote on the issue. That's not good democracy.
Last week, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges in the hush-money case against him. Compared to before the verdict, the biggest changes we found in a post-conviction poll conducted between May 31 and June 2 are in Republicans' positions on felony, crime in general, and the presidency. They have shifted in a way that puts the verdict in a more favorable light and keeps Trump's candidacy viable. For example, fewer Republicans think it should be illegal to pay hush money for the purposes of influencing an election than did a year ago, and more now say felons should be allowed to become president than did a few months ago.
Adding to Anaya’s shock, the physician informed her that to stop the infection she needed immediate abortion care, but because of Texas laws, she would have to “keep getting sicker” until the doctor could “prove” to the hospital that her life was on the line.
Anaya’s story underscores the immense struggle Texas patients with high-risk pregnancies – who have lived under strict abortion bans longer than other US residents – have faced for more than two years.
Kate Cox, a Texas woman denied an emergency abortion for her non-viable pregnancy whose separate case attracted national attention, only reinforced the need for clarity.
Instead, we are being forced to continue to carry this huge burden of balancing our job to care for patients with complications against the threat of prosecution and life in jail – it’s an incredibly tough situation to put doctors in.”
However, the TMB’s proposal has disappointed reproductive rights advocates, including plaintiffs in the Zurawski case, who hoped the board would offer a specific list of conditions covered by the law.
In fact, many of the doctors, lawyers and experts who testified during the board’s May meeting worried that the new rules would actually create more obstacles to patient care, as they would force additional reporting requirements on physicians.
The original article contains 1,566 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I am also struck by what this movement says about the state of universities. It reveals a deep rift between students and administrations. The latter have grown hugely over the past decades and become massive bureaucracies, also generating their own corporate interests. The voices of students and faculty have been gradually marginalised in the process, making productive dialogue often difficult.
Yet we must also be vigilant about the academic culture: when we say that universities must be a “safe space”, this is not only true in terms of physical and emotional integrity (which are paramount) but also in terms of intellectual integrity: a university is a space in which one can be, and should be, safely challenged, rather than confirmed in their convictions.
I’ve been saying for a while that western civilisation, whether you’re a fan or not, has been dying in the universities and that this will leak out to the rest of the culture. The corporatisation, commodification and production-line-ification have been rampant from the educational to the research aspects of the institutions … all without dismantling the underlying feudal structures which are quite good at corrupting higher values in the name of succeeding at the KPI games of the commodification etc.
Unfortunately it’s a boiling frog situation and many academics idealise detatchment from the real world however problematic their institution is. That the for-profit journal system could be built entirely around academics’ labour simply by offering “prestige credits” is astonishing for an allegedly intelligent demographic but tells you all you need to know about how corrupted by libertarian values and behaviours a bunch of clever people trying to attain prestige by proving how clever they are … can get.
The academics I know are all pretty miserable these days. They can see that it's a corrupt, exploitative system and they feel powerless to change it. They spend their time writing grant applications and chasing money, then pumping out papers they know are fairly trivial, but they have to write them to keep the funding coming in. Some of the scientific disciplines are in a slow state of crisis due to a serious loss of confidence in the credibility or value of much of the research. And the younger ones know they'll never get tenure and are on a shit career track potentially forever. But even the ones with tenure seem pretty unhappy, working for these organizations that relentlessly seek money and superficial prestige.
This is so far from what academia ought to be about, and from the enthusiasms that brought these people into it in the first place. I got out 20 years ago because I found this stuff repellent then. It's worse now. it's sad that our society can't provide a place for smart and enthusiastic people to do honest research without all this corrupting quasi-commercial (or sometimes simply commercial) influence.
And it's why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics' noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we've not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it's gonna be hard to undo. I'm no lover of tech-bro "disruptions", but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.
One of those cases that really should unite literally everyone behind police reform, but will sadly be lost among the noise of all the other horrible shit going on.
theguardian.com
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