#Workforce

[political-us]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Two Alberta-based companies are appealing Ontario labour ministry decisions that say they charged temporary foreign workers tens of thousands of dollars to be placed in retail jobs at a Canadian Tire. The companies were ordered to repay almost $165,000. Some of the workers were originally from the Philippines but ended up at a Canadian Tire in Etobicoke, Ont. Though they said they each paid up to $7,900 US to an Alberta company to get the position, once they got the jobs, they say they were underpaid and poorly treated. Many of the workers quit and found jobs in Atlantic Canada and other provinces around the country.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland @abpoli

[onlytiktoks]

[ratisangy]

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-cut-access-to-overtime-pay/

[sailoreuterpe]

Going Postal

Guess who gets to throw your mail instead of burgers now??

[batty4her]

What is it with working food service and expecting you to be robotic and grey-rock your way through an entire 8+ hour shift? I also don’t understand why your job is at risk if you don’t.

No, I’m not going to continue being kind to you if you are continuously rude to me.

No, I’m not going to sit there and let you berate and verbally abuse me over food - you can buy and cook yourself - without saying sum back.

No, I’m not going to exhaust myself after doing 17.5 different things in the span of under 2 minutes because we are being timed by saying hello and goodbye to every single person that comes to my window — I’m in the middle of taking back to back orders, please for the love of god stop taking it personal.

No, I’m not going to kill myself running an entire station (or 3) by myself only to lick and kiss the top and bottom of your shoes bc you feel you’re entitled to free food and labor bc your fries weren’t fresh enough to your liking.

I’m tired AF of working for a public that will never respect me bc they have literally been taught since grade school to disrespect me. Im tired AF of that being the normal.

It’s 2024. Tip your fucking waitress. Be kind to your fast food cashier, who probably never gets to leave the window, and doesn’t touch your food on most occasions. Stop bitching bc you think you’re owed something by being there. Stop bitching bc you’ve been programmed to consume and think you’re correct in doing so. Stop bitching bc you got your food in five minutes when you should have got it in one - cook at home.

I’m sick of serving rude ass entitled ass people who think they know sum because they think my job is easy and they think they are too good to work it.

Literally if you’re rude and malicious to service workers for any reason outside of they were rude or malicious to you first, you can actually go fuck yourself, disrespectfully. You don’t deserve the convenience of our job, and you and your parent/guardian should be ashamed of yourselves.

[sshbpodcast]

I’ll Spock the world and meld with you, Pt 2

By Ames

Last week, we probed our minds to recall all the times we saw mind melds in The Original Series, and we’re pretty sure we left our katras lying around somewhere. So the A Star to Steer Her By hosts are back this week to touch more temples, to make lots of O faces, and to see how the mind meld scenes from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager compare to Spock’s original concepts.

It’s going to be a much shorter list than last week since two of these shows didn’t have a resident Vulcan on the roster, and Tuvok in Voyager didn’t get his touch on nearly as often as the OC Vulcan. So prepare your mind as we get ready to play detective at least as well as Tuvok so frequently does. Follow along with the list below and listen to our telepathic banter on this week’s episode of the podcast (jump to timestamp 49:12). Fascinating.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

“Sarek” TNG makes use of mind meld scenes a couple of times when Vulcans are visiting the crew, and it’s always methodically used and poignant. Perhaps the best example comes in “Sarek” when the titular character needs to meld with Picard in order to stabilize his Bendii syndrome–laden brain and do his ambassadorial job. And the scene gives us some of the best acting we’ve seen on the show to date. Using the linking of minds to really explore what it means to be a Vulcan, suppressing emotion but experiencing it nonetheless, is powerful stuff.

“Unification II” Later, we get kind of a culmination of that meld between Sarek and Picard when Spock also melds with the Enterprise-D captain. He knows Jean-Luc holds the memories and insights of his just-passed father, and this is a truly sweet way for our favorite Vulcan-Human hybrid to perceive how his dad really felt about him. Sarek is a terrible dad, we’ve established this many times, but somewhere under his Vulcan demeanor, he does care about his son, and the pleased look on Picard’s face when he shares this with Spock says it all.

“The Maquis, Part II” Just the one mind meld scene in Deep Space Nine, and that’s when that Maquis member Sakonna attempts to forcibly pry information from Dukat. We established last week when Spock mind melded with Valeris that the mind meld can be weaponized, which is fairly horrifying. These Vulcans are way too overpowered. But Dukat has prepared for just this scenario and his mental fortitude is no match for this Vulcan interrogator. Even if Gul Dukat is a bad man, you’ve got to find some triumph in him fighting off a nonconsensual meld.

“Ex Post Facto” The rest of these are all going to be Tuvok moments from Voyager, but we promise the list is barely half as long as all the Spock moments from last week. Interestingly, Tuvok uses melds a ton when he’s in his role as ship detective, I mean, security chief. Melding is the perfect tool for determining the truth in a situation, and Tuvok does just that when he melds with Paris as part of his murder investigation. He gets Tom off the hook and saves him from the Baneans’ weird disciplinary action and their little dog too!

“Meld” If you’ve been following this space for a little while now, you’ll know that Lon Suder is among my favorite minor characters. The mind of a psychopath is just so interesting; why else would there be so many podcasts about them? Tuvok also finds Suder’s mind compelling and can’t help himself when he wants to determine his real motives for murdering Darwin. The rest of the episode, we’re treated to some extraordinary Tuvok acting as his logical mind can’t handle the chaos in the thoughts of a madman. What a ride.

“Flashback” Is it a little weird that Tuvok melds with Janeway of all people in order to plumb his mind when he starts experiencing unsettling visions? Yeah, a little. Some could argue that maybe he should have melded with Kes or with another Vulcan on the ship (this was before we knew anything about Vorik, mind you) instead of putting the captain in danger of losing her mind as well. But their relationship is nice and the scenes of them putting together the pieces of what happened back on the Excelsior make for a cute little riddle.

“Warlord” If we were lamenting not seeing Tuvok mind meld with Kes in “Flashback,” then we can feel appeased that we see them meld in “Warlord.” Kes is being possessed by that tyrant Tieran, and Tuvok sneaks in his consciousness long enough to see that the Ocampan is still in there, fighting back as hard as she can. It’s a nice moment between the two since we already know that they have bonded over their telepathic powers and Tuvok has taken her under his wing as her mentor.

“The Gift” All that makes the final appearance of Kes (we’re not counting “Fury”) that much more tragic. In “The Gift,” Kes’s mental powers are spinning out of control and it’s only a matter of time before she blows. There’s a quick moment when Kes is phasing wildly in and out of corporeality and Tuvok fights through with a mind meld to stabilize her just long enough to get to the end of the episode. Vulcans don’t show it a lot, but it’s clear that Kes means a lot to Tuvok and he grieves in his own way when she leaves the ship/show.

“Random Thoughts” Detective Tuvok is best Tuvok. Like he did with Tom in “Ex Post Facto,” he melds with Torres to understand what really happened when she spread her violent thoughts in “Random Thoughts.” He learns enough from her experience to distrust that guy Guill, who was bogarting her feelings of rage for his own disgusting use. But Tuvok is on the case!

So when our Vulcan investigator weasels his way into Guill’s company and learns he’s dealing in disturbing memories on the black market, it’s the perfect time to whip out the mind meld! This jerk Guill is really asking for it, so Tuvok shares so many disturbing memories with the guy that the Mari merchant will be lucky if he’s not catatonic for the rest of his life. It’s one of the more squicky uses of a mind meld, like the ones from The Undiscovered Country and DS9’s “The Maquis,” and they couldn’t have picked a more deserving victim.

“Infinite Regress” Arguably, Tuvok mind melds with the most beings at once when he melds with Seven in “Infinite Regress.” It’s like melding with dozens (if not hundreds? Thousands?) of personalities at once because Seven is inhabited by all the individuals whom she’s assimilated into the Borg. And what a trippy LSD trip of a scene. We do admit: it does go on for way too long. The camera trickery and lighting makes it look like Tuvok wandering through a claustrophobic rave to find Seven amidst the masses, something only a skilled Vulcan can stomach.

“Gravity” Okay, this one’s really sweet. When Noss falls in love with a reluctant Tuvok, all he can really do is tell her he’s not interested, and he’s got a wife to get home to, and why can’t you fall for Tom like everyone else? But this hardened Vulcan is quite the softy on the inside. At the end of the episode, he mind melds with her so that she can see in his mind how he thinks about her. There’s some real vulnerability and openness about the experience, and you can tell that he cherishes their time together in his own Tuvoky way.

“Unimatrix Zero” Most of the Tuvok mind melds have used the Vulcan superpower as a way to get to the insight needed in a scene for the episode to progress. Its lie-detector capability is long established, after all. So it feels like we’re getting back to the campy roots of the thing in “Unimatrix Zero” when we get yet another magical element layered on top of it. Tuvok essentially sets up a mental conference call between Seven and Janeway so they both can enter the Borg paradise. But not Tuvok for some reason? It’s hilariously inconsistent here.

“Repression” One final use of Detective Tuvok on this list, but in this instance it’s not that Tuvok is using his meld to investigate some kind of crime. The meld was the crime in the first place! It turns out Tuvok is investigating himself! The poor guy is being mind controlled by some Bajoran whacko a whole quadrant away, and he ends up forcibly mind melding a bunch of former Maquis members into comas. That’s right, it’s mind-meld-as-a-weapon time yet again, and this one is truly bizarre.

“Workforce” Finally, we make it to Quarra, our final use of the Vulcan mind meld in Voyager. The whole crew has been brainwashed into happily working 9-to-5 jobs, but Tuvok, being a Vulcan, comes out of his brain fog more quickly than anyone else. He comes to understand the situation enough to know that an even better superpower than mind melds is Borg nanotechnology, so he mind melds with the brainwashed Seven so that she can eventually save the day.

—

So what conclusions can we draw between Spock and Tuvok’s uses of the mind meld? Well, the Vulcan technique is still definitely so overpowered as to be laughable when it can get you out of nearly every problem, but Tuvok’s melds mostly seem to be in service to his role as Security Chief, so they seem remarkably more consistent. How about next week then, when we have more mind melds to compare? Keep following us here to detect our thoughts, catch up on the podcast over on SoundCloud (or wherever you podcast), touch our minds over on Facebook and BlueSky, and don’t mind meld within two hours of eating.

[nando161mando]

great timing

[smashing-yng-man]

[sebeth]

Acrophobia?!? That's Ridiculous!

[covenofvenus]

Yves Saint Laurent Fall/Winter Runway 1995

Yves Saint Laurent is widely credited with popularizing the women’s suit, specifically through his revolutionary design of Le Smoking tuxedo in 1966. While women had worn tailored suits before (notably designed by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and other designers), Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking was the first to elevate the woman's suit to high fashion and position it as a symbol of empowerment, sophistication, and rebellion against gender norms.

Saint Laurent believed clothing could be a tool for liberation. He wanted to redefine women's fashion by blurring gender norms, giving women the freedom to embody strength traditionally associated with men's attire while retaining their femininity.

Yves Saint Laurent was also a trailblazer in advocating for diversity in fashion and was instrumental in elevating Black models on the global stage. He was one of the first major designers to prominently feature Black women in his runway shows and campaigns, challenging the Eurocentric standards of beauty that dominated the fashion industry.

“Yves Saint Laurent was the first person to put me in French Vogue. I will always be grateful to him for supporting me when no one else would.” — Naomi Campbell

[transport-methodology-101]

1956 CHEVROLET Task-Force TRUCKS.

[inkobsessedfreak]

I wonder if the lack of people who get jobs in their field is actually because companies don't want to pay someone what they should for years of schooling and training so they instead offer lower pay rates but on site training which encourages the idea degrees are useless and keep everyone at the wages they're at and makes working for them seem more valuable and keeps college more expensive since less people are going

I dunno man it's like four am I'm eepy and existential