#QR Code Mandate | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mionemymind · 1 year ago

Text

Blood Drive

Summary: While donating at a local blood drive, Y/n stumbles up the best nurse in town, Wanda Maximoff. Unable to get Wanda out of her mind, Y/n goes through a lengthy process just to ask her out.

Warnings: Fluff, Blood Donations, Passing Out, Needles, Happy Ending

A/n: Not gonna lie, I think it's somewhat getting easier to write kissing scenes but I still have to look at a tumblr post just to figure out the wording for it. Let me know what you think :)

Word Count: 4.0k

Masterlist

In an era of new politics, the Mayor of New York City declared that registered heroes of the city had to do mandated community service. This was a new mission to help build relationships between the regular folk of New York City and the heroes that harbor it. Because let’s be honest, having Hulk throw your new car at the enemy was not the best introduction for regular people.

Those who harbored powers relaying force or strength helped out in the trade industry. You’d often see super soldiers helping out in the demolition zone by crushing what was needed. Those with magic tried their best to help heal the homeless or aided at soup kitchens. Anywhere you can unconventionally help, the heroes did.

For Y/n, it was a lot of physically demanding tasks. Such as helping families move from apartment to apartment. Or helping police officers move accidents out of the way. Sometimes, she would even demonstrate how to safely carry a person through a burning building for the local firefighters.

Today, however, Y/n decided to do something different. Rather than focusing on the same physical tasks, she chose a simpler mundane task. “Hi there, are you here for the blood drive?” Y/n nodded in agreement to the receptionist upfront. “Just sign in for me right here. Have you filled out the online rapid pass?”

“Yes, I have the QR code screenshotted.” The receptionist smiled warmly. “Perfect. Someone will be with you soon. Please have a seat in our waiting area.”

Y/n walked towards the waiting room area. This was the fourth thing on her list of community service opportunities to try. She wasn’t quite sure if her blood was even allowed to be donated, having the super soldier serum in her surely could cause a reaction to a regular human.

After some tests back at the compound, the staff found everything to be okay. That’s how Y/n ended up in a place like this.

“Y/n Y/l/n.” Getting up from her seat, Y/n followed a nurse in red scrubs to a different area. “How are you today?”

“I’m good. I'm a little nervous. I’ve never done this before.” The nurse led them to a private part of a huge common room. Multiple stations were built throughout with various people donating blood. “It’s okay to be nervous, but the worst feeling you’ll get today is just a small prick.”

Y/n breathed out slightly in relief. “Let me first get your basic information.” The nurse had gone over Y/n’s personal information but was immediately flagged by the date of birth. “It says you were born on April 2, 1917. It must’ve been a typo.”

The nurse almost changed it to 1971. “Actually ma’am, that is the correct birth date.”

“So you mean to tell me you were born during World War I?” The nurse was unwilling to believe the joke that was being played. Y/n could immediately tell from the look she gave. “It was the Great War at the time, but yes ma’am I was born in 1917. I’m actually a super soldier.”

The nurse went back to her computer and typed in more information to store on Y/n’s file. “Ah - I see. I’m sorry about that. There’s already a note on your file. It looks like your director has already approved your donation today.”

Y/n sighed in relief, while she didn’t mind explaining to people her situation of being frozen for so long, it was strenuous trying to get them to understand it all. The rest of the consultation went along smoothly as she gathered the remaining information such as Y/n’s hemoglobin and her rapid pass.

“Alright dear, let’s get you to a bed.” The nurse led them back to the common area where all the beds were laid out. “Just sit right here for me, right now we currently have a special volunteer today that’s helping out with the drive. She’ll come over in a couple of seconds to help you out. But if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know.”

Y/n sat up on the reclined bed and looked at her phone. She scrolled through her messages to make sure nothing important was happening. The sound of someone clearing their throat gained her attention. “Y/n?” As Y/n looked up, she could physically feel the moment that time stopped again. Was it possible that she fell back into the ice again? Surely she would feel the same numbness as before. But it was all different. Because from just one look from this girl would be enough to melt all the ice away.

Y/n’s breath hitched as she locked eyes with her. “I- yes, that’s me.” Y/n cleared her throat, embarrassed at the lack of composure she had.

“Nice to meet you today. My name is Wanda Maximoff and I’ll be helping you with your blood donation today.” All Y/n could do was nod as she further realized that the woman in front of her was the Scarlet Witch.

Wanda looked through her notes on the clipboard. “It looks like it’s your first time donating, is that true?” Y/n’s eyes remained locked on Wanda. It was embarrassing how much she couldn’t look away. “Uh yes. It is.”

“Do you have a preference on which arm you would like to use today?” Y/n shook her head in disagreement. “No preference at all.”

Wanda wrote down more information when a note caught her eye. “S.H.I.E.L.D. approval - are you a member?” Wanda looked over at the young girl in front of her trying to see if she could remember the pretty face.

“I’m one of their new recruits. Only been active for three months.” And suddenly, Y/n seemed to never mind all the questions that Wanda could possibly ask. If it meant talking to her, Y/n would oblige.

“That’s great to hear. If you don’t mind me asking, do you have any powers that we should be aware of?”

“Well, I think you’re aware of my counterpart, Bucky Barnes. We both have a super soldier serum.” Wanda smiled at the mention of her old teammate/acquaintance.

“Interesting. How come I haven’t heard about you before?” Wanda couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow she had managed to miss this girl for three months.

Y/n scratched the back of her neck sheepishly. “You know how Steve was found in ice right?” Wanda nodded. “That’s basically the same situation I was in but rather than crashing into the arctic, I was in a freezer chamber. I’ve been awake for only ten months.” The shock on Wanda’s face was apparent.

“Sorry to keep asking,” Y/n never minded, “how has it been like adjusting back to the new life?” Y/n shrugged indifferently.

“A little rough. I do miss my friends back from my time, but Bucky has been trying his best to help me. However, he has been focused on helping the new Captain America, Sam?”

Wanda nodded, confirming that Y/n’s information was correct. “I do enjoy the fact that I’m no longer Hydra’s soldier though. More than anything, I’m just glad to have a second chance in life. Not a lot of people get that so I’m pretty thankful.”

Wanda digested Y/n’s words and was pretty enlightened at Y/n’s outlook on life. “Thank you for answering all my questions.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Now, let's get you set up to donate.” Wanda proceeded to bring out a couple of items from the nearby stand. On the table beside Y/n, Wanda placed various tubes and empty bags. Although it was nothing, the sight made Y/n feel slightly uncomfortable. It reminded her too much of Hydra’s labs but minus the dark atmosphere and torture that came with it.

As if sensing her discomfort, Wanda grabbed a disinfectant and started to disinfect Y/n’s left arm around the area inside her elbow. “Ya know, for being so nice and cooperative. How about you ask me a couple of questions? It makes the day go by faster.”

Bringing herself out of her internal thoughts, Y/n asked the first thing that came to mind. “You’re the Scarlet Witch, right?”

It was Wanda’s turn to blush. She hadn’t expected Y/n to recognize her so quickly, especially since she just got back to the real world. “I am.”

“I wasn’t aware that you could help with the American Red Cross as part of your community service.” Wanda grabbed a marker and a squeezable toy. She placed the toy in Y/n’s left hand stating, “Give me three big squeezes and hold on the last squeeze.”

While pressing around Y/n’s elbow, she continued with, “I had to do some training to get qualified. A lot of the people who use magic generally help in other areas.” Wanda marked a dot followed by a line. “You can stop squeezing now.”

“I’m gonna disinfect one more time and then I’ll have to poke you. Are you scared of needles?” Feeling more embarrassed, Y/n looked away as she said, “Yes.”

“All good. Just means I’ll have to give you a small distraction.” Wanting to distract herself even more, Y/n asked, “Why did you decide to do this rather than something in your wheelhouse?”

Wanda thought about it before replying with, “I like the normalcy of it. On the plus side, it feels more rewarding. Like I’m actually earning my community time rather than going the easy way of using my powers.” As Wanda finished disinfecting, she blew on Y/n’s elbow hoping it would dry fast.

“When I give you the go-ahead, I’ll have to ask you to give me three more squeezes and hold on to the last one, okay?” Y/n nodded and waited for the signal.

“And - go.” Y/n did as told, but as she did her last squeeze and held, red wispy magic flowed in front of her morphing into swirls in the air. “Woah.” She followed the magic with her eyes, not even noticing that Wanda had already poked her and started the transfusion.

“Should be about 10 minutes. Every couple of seconds give the toy a small squeeze to keep it going.” Y/n glanced away from the magic amazed with Wanda. “That didn’t even hurt.” For the first time in Y/n’s life, she didn’t scream when the needles came.

Wanda couldn’t help but keep the magic up for a little longer. The dopey look on Y/n’s face was something she didn’t want to go away.

“I told you I would distract you.” Y/n was at a loss of words. Her brain jumbled for anything but all she could focus on was that Wanda Maximoff successfully distracted her. She had a natural caring heart, something the media failed to show.

“Your magic is beautiful by the way.” Y/n savored the last few seconds of it before it completely disappeared.

Wanda’s magic has been called many things in life, powerful, destructive, and manipulative but none have ever said beautiful…till now. “Thank you Y/n.”

There was a small silence as Wanda stayed to make sure Y/n was okay. “I’ll be assisting other volunteers, but if you start to feel like you're fainting, just call me over, okay?”

“I will.” Would it have been wrong to immediately fake an injury just to get Wanda back? Possibly but Y/n weighed the consequences and none could compare to her. So as Wanda left, Y/n used her free hand to call Bucky. After a couple of rings, he picked up the phone. “Hey, Y/n.”

Getting straight to the point, “Is Wanda Maximoff single?”

“Uhh - I think so. She and this synthezoid, Vision, used to date but I believe they broke up a year ago. Why do you ask?” Y/n looked at Wanda who was across the room. Her radiant smile could be spotted from miles away. “Just wanting to gather intel. Thanks Bucky.”

Y/n hung up the phone, not caring about what Bucky had to say back. Her eyes lingered back to Wanda. No matter how much she distracted herself with her phone, her eyes always glanced back on Wanda Maximoff. Her hair was tied up in a high ponytail and all she wore was matching red scrubs. But everything about her looked and felt beautiful.

Little did Y/n know, Wanda was admiring her too.

The blood donation was soon over, quicker than Y/n anticipated. Wanda had already come over, stopped the machine, and disconnected the line from Y/n’s arm. She taped a cotton ball on top of the area she poked and proceeded to wrap a red bandage around Y/n’s elbow. “You keep this red bandage on for two hours and the cotton ball for four hours.”

Wanda grabbed a pamphlet that had Y/n’s personal information and gave it to her. “Don’t miss a single meal for the next eight weeks. Make sure to drink plenty of water as well. If you feel dizzy in the next couple of hours, be sure to call this number, okay?”

Y/n nodded. Her mind was elsewhere at the moment, trying to find ways to ask Wanda Maximoff out. “Do you have any questions for me though?”

Y/n opened her mouth, wanting to ask her, “Are you busy after this?” But nothing came out. And the more she tried to say words, the more silence that remained.

“Wanda!” The pair turned to the employee that shouted her name. “I have someone that needs your help after you're done with your current volunteer.”

“Understood.” Wanda looked back at Y/n. “We have snacks and shirts over there but I think you should be good now. Thank you for donating today.”

As Wanda walked off, Y/n couldn’t help but beat herself up for not asking. She took a couple snacks and juice boxes before walking out of the donation center.

Was Y/n in love? Not quite yet. Infatuated? Probably. It was the best explanation as to why she was back at the blood drive the very next day. The brown eyed girl paced around all night trying to think of ways to see Wanda again. And the very first realistic idea she thought of was to donate blood again.

The super soldier practically begged the compound to give her another approval to donate blood stating that her super serum allowed for faster recovery. When no one could argue with her logic, they allowed a special approval to donate so soon.

So when Y/n followed all the same directions, all the same questions, she was met with disappointment when she didn’t see the redhead that captured her mind. “Hi, my name is Lucy and I’ll be helping you today.”

As Lucy proceeded to set up, Y/n couldn’t help but ask, “Is Wanda Maximoff here today?”

The blonde shook her head with a small smile. “I’m sorry dear. She’s not going to be here today.” Y/n couldn’t hold back the frown that escaped. It was stupid to think that Wanda would come back the very next day, but she had hope.

And as much as Y/n wanted to ask when she’ll be back, she knew the blood center wouldn’t give out information like that. Regardless, Y/n was determined. She was going to see Wanda again.

It was a new month and a new day. Although Y/n was glad to help a good cause, her hope waned as each day passed with no Wanda. By now, everyone in the blood center knew Y/n by name. On the bright side, the other volunteers were not bad to talk to but none compared to her.

So as Y/n sat down once again, she scrolled on her phone, expecting much disappointment. Until the voice that captured her heart called her name. “Y/n?”

She looked up from her phone and saw that familiar smile that was ingrained in her head. “Wanda.” Y/n couldn’t hold her smile back as she finally saw the girl that she’s been begging to see.

“Looks like you’re here for you…18th donation? Look at you being a star citizen.” Y/n blushed knowing that those donations were mainly for something else. “I think by now you should know the drill. Are there any concerns you may have?”

Wanda looked back at Y/n, ready to disinfect her arm. “I-” Y/n’s brain short circuited at the feeling of Wanda’s hands on her arm. It was like everything that she wanted to say suddenly left her brain. But the feeling was just on the tip of her tongue.

“You know, they should give you a badge or something for donating so much. I didn’t even know that was possible. Didn’t you start donating like last month?” Again, not a single thought formulated in Y/n’s head when all she could focus on was how soft Wanda’s hands were. Because if Y/n was able to focus, she would be able to say that her donation was 17 days, 13 hours, and 5 minutes ago. But who was counting?

Wanda looked back at Y/n’s chart to confirm her suspicions. “Are you still scared of needles though?” And that’s when Y/n finally got back into the real world. For all the times she’s been back, she’s had to look away from the needle while using a nearby pillow to control her nerves.

“I think I might need your magic again.” Y/n blushed at the request but felt proud at the smug look that came from Wanda. “I might have to start charging you for the show.”

With sudden blind confidence, Y/n asked, “Let me take you out on a date in return.” Wanda almost missed the vein at Y/n’s sudden question. She had an inkling that the girl liked her but never expected her to actually pursue her thoughts.

“You didn’t even need it.” Y/n looked down and saw that Wanda had poked her without realizing it.

“Does that mean you won’t go?” Wanda looked at the time on the clock and smiled at Y/n.

“It actually means you have three hours till my shift is up.” Wanda patted Y/n’s arm, reminding her to squeeze the ball in her hand. “So pick me up then. How should I dress?”

“Something casual. I hadn’t really planned out what I was going to do after you said yes.” Wanda blushed at the idea of Y/n practicing this moment.

“How about this? You and I walk around New York. I don’t think the guys have given you much of a good tour. So I’ll tell you all about the new New York and you tell me about the old New York.”

“You have a deal.”

Wanda and Y/n were in the back seat of an uber. The small date was something Y/n never wanted to end but the lack of energy made it hard to keep up. So when Y/n asked if it could be an early night, she was relieved that Wanda wasn’t mad at her.

Right now, the uber was at a stoplight and the two hardly spoke as their shoulders touched.

“Can I hold your hand?” Y/n whispered as she lightly placed her hand above Wanda’s. The small smile was hard to miss on Wanda’s face. She could feel Y/n’s internal battle to ask her that. She leaned into Y/n’s ear and whispered, “You don’t even have to ask,” and pressed a small kiss on Y/n’s cheek as they interlaced hands.

A small blushed and a wide grin appeared on Y/n’s face. “I hope you had fun today.” Looking away, Y/n yawned into her hand.. “You tired dekta?”

Looking back at her, Y/n tilted her head in confusion. “Dekta? What does that mean?” Wanda blushed more. She hadn’t meant to call Y/n that, but it left her lips so easily. Like it was second nature.

“I’ll tell you later,” Wanda placed her left hand on Y/n’s bicep and gave it a small squeeze, “Aren’t you supposed to be a super soldier? It's barely past 10 pm and you’re already tired.” Y/n scratched the back of her neck, slightly embarrassed at how tired she was. But all Wanda could focus on was the feeling of Y/n’s muscles as she gave one more squeeze.

Y/n yawned again, unable to fight the sleep that took over her body. “It’s what happens when you donate blood every day to try and see a pretty girl.” They hadn’t even kissed but Wanda could’ve sworn she was in love. The dopey smile on Y/n’s face would make any girl’s heart melt. The red head mentally thanked that it was her that Y/n was looking at and nobody else.

“You did that for me?” Y/n could think of many things she would do for Wanda, rescue a billion people, punch a hole in the moon, even kidnap someone. Regardless of how unrealistic it was, Wanda Maximoff was worth changing the tides on Earth. So how could someone so wonderful could ever question that someone would do something for her attention?

“I wanted to see you again.” Y/n bit her inner cheek, trying her best to stay calm but all she could think about was how soft Wanda’s lips looked.

The red head hadn’t meant to hear that thought, but she was glad she did. She bit her lip wishing that Y/n would just kiss her already. But something about the way they stared into each other's eyes was already enough for her to feel alive. And for someone so sober, her body grew drunk at the touch of Y/n.

“So you donated blood to see me?” It was still all unbelievable to Wanda but Y/n would tell her a million times until she believed it.

Their eyes interlocked causing Wanda’s breathing to hitch. She swore she could look into those brown eyes forever. “18 pints and counting.” Y/n couldn’t hold back her grin as Wanda looked away, unable to hold back her wide smile.

Y/n gave a gentle squeeze in their interlaced hands as Wanda turned back to face Y/n. “You’re gonna get yourself sick if you keep donating.” Wanting to focus on something else, Y/n caressed Wanda’s cheek as she tucked a loose strand back.

Not wanting her touch to go away, Wanda placed her hand above Y/n’s. So many thoughts ran through both of their heads. Wanda could feel the weight inside Y/n’s mind but didn’t dare to peak.

“Tell me what you’re thinking…”

“...I think you’re really pretty,” Y/n admitted in secret.

“What else?” Y/n rubbed her thumb gently across Wanda’s cheek.

“I think I want to take you out on a second date.”

“Oh yeah?”

“And I…I think I want to kiss you.” Wanda swallowed all the nerves in her chest.

“...I’d really like that…” And as brown eyes looked at greens eyes one more time, Y/n slowly leaned in and kissed Wanda. There was no rush with each kiss, something Wanda never experienced before. All she could remember was the sloppy kisses and fast make outs. But something about kissing Y/n slowly drove heart mad because how dare she live this long without being kissed like this.

And as they kissed, their hands never broke apart, instead, they gave gentle squeezes with every kiss. And when slowly pulled apart, Wanda knew then she was love sick.

Bonus

“Let me get this straight,” Bucky rubbed his forehead, feeling the headache coming forth, “Y/n passed out from kissing you?”

“Well, the kissing didn’t help but she also donated 18 pints of blood in the last three weeks.” Wanda looked at Y/n’s sleeping figure. Her head rested comfortably on Wanda’s lap.

Bucky sighed. “Okay, I’ll meet you at her place.”

Taglist: @halobaby @arelyitsherec8 @blackxwidowsxwife @cristin-rjd @madamevirgo @trikruismybitch @paradiselost916 @mmmmokdok @morbid-gaymer @dailyavengering @itsnottilly @helloalycia @randomshyperson @tomy5girls @daenerys713 @ensorcellme @lezzzbehonesthere @imagine-reblog

@sighsam @olsensnpm @tquick99 @feolok @emilyprentisslittlewhore @mvddison99 @iamapotato @yuhloversxx @mjaudrey @upsidedowndanvers @somewhatgreatexpectations @wandavixen @magicallymaximoff @username23345 @coollemonsaresour @littlewinchester15 @aimezvousbrahms @afuckingshituniverse @am-just-a-cosmic-joke-to-me

@ohmygooddamnbisexualmood @diaryoflife @s7uts @newyork1432 @the-anxious-stargazer @hello-mtf @marvelousbelladonna @ima-gi–na-tion @obsessed-with-wandamaximoff @the-camilucha

@itsnottilly @171611 @kaitlynroseb @daisybri7 @drpepperobsessed @bemyvitamin @musicinourlips @marvelousbelladonna @gingerbreadcookieforlife @xastrydx @chasethemoon @naixia00 @lostandsearching @stupidsapphicsstuff @haechanana @the-camilucha @severepeanutartisanhands @owloftheshadows @somewhatgreatexpectations @ywuen @mixed-fandom-mess @loomontoia @ilovemarvelwomen @coxmicbabygirl @cyanide-mustard @mrs-avenger3000 @prentisshoe @andrea-stark @simpforwandanat @abimess @randomshyperson @yourtaletotell @magically-queer-stuff

@imapotatao @iliketozoneout @maximoffbrossupremacy@olsensnpm @psychadelichues @whitelotus00 @taliiiaasteria @tynix @autorasexy @xxxtwilightaxelxxx @hiiraya

#wanda maximoff x reader #wanda x reader #wanda maximoff #fluff #Blood Drive #mionemymind #wanda maximoff fluff

782 notes · View notes

sethshead · 3 months ago

Text

This EO has zero enforcement power, as elections are largely the purview of the states. Nonetheless, the goal delineated within it actually make election fraud on the part of the government much easier. Requiring proof-of-citizenship at registration is a red herring, as even states without voter ID still require that at registration or upon one's first time voting. Nonetheless, the requirement that said proof be in the full name of the holder has already proved a bar to voting in New Hampshire, where women who changed their names on marriage had to return home multiple times to collect the correct paperwork. That would certainly discourage voting among those who haven't the time to make repeated trips to their polling station, or who have misplaced some obscure documents. It could also be used to disenfranchise the transgendered. Eliminating bar- and QR- codes even from receipts would make the process of checking them against official results much harder. Don't forget, refusal to provide legally-mandated receipts was a central tactic in Nicolás Maduro's recent tainted election in Venezuela. Removing scannable codes from the ballots themselves would make the hand-counting process much more prone to error and manipulation. Requiring that mail-in ballots arrive by election day would make certain localities vulnerable to engineered Post Office delays - a real concern given DOGE's meddling with the agency.

In short, the Republican agenda is not to secure our elections, but to ease manipulation thereof by those aligned with the GOP. Far from safeguarding democracy, they are meant to erode it.

6 notes · View notes

nonhumanresources · 7 months ago

Text

Author Of Her Own Story

Lil late but hey, this was meant to come out in October so y'know. It hasn't snowed here yet so you get some autumn vibes now instead. Also, this is the first story I'm posting from the commissions I opened up a few months back. More to come! This one was commissioned by @champloon, he's a cool dude! Go check him out!

Summary: Ryan attends the 16th Annual Harvest Renaissance Fair after several year of attempts, clad in the armor of a tinfoil knight and ready to have an incredible time. A disagreement with a vendor leads to a truly unforgettable experience with the patron saint of the harvest.

What to expect: Dragon transformation, TG, apotheosis, macro, forced language change, and some good old fashioned jousting.

Length: 4.5k words.

If you'd prefer to read this story in an easier format, here's a Google Drive link!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ryan’s greaves crunched on gravel as he stepped out of his car, raising one hand to block the noonday sunlight. It gleamed off the vehicle and his armor alike, wreathing him as if in some holy mandate—one that included a Honda, at least. He checked his pockets—wallet, phone, keys—then set off on his knight’s divine journey, into the great unknown.

Of course, it was only about thirty yards from his parking spot to the ticket booth for the Sixteenth Annual Harvest Renaissance Fair, but it still felt like some kind of mythical journey. After four years of work, inopportune family trips, and a particularly bad cold, he’d finally made it to the premier local late-summer festivity. Ryan had spared no expense on his cosplay; of course, with amateurish skills at the craft, “sparing no expense” meant using four rolls of aluminum foil to construct the vague approximation of a knight’s armor, but it had still come out alright. The foil wrapped around his arms, legs, and torso in large segments, secured to dark clothing, with a wooden sword slung in a sheath on his back and a shield on one arm with a crest he’d copied from an internet search emblazoned across the front. He’d opted for no helmet, leaving his long, brown hair to flutter in the wind. A leather bag was slung over one shoulder, half tucked under armor, less fitting but a necessity for any convention. He’d seen better, but it was difficult to look at him and think anything other than ‘knight,’ so he considered that an accomplishment.

Click on the read more for the rest of the story, as usual. I love comments and questions so don't hesitate to let me know what you think!

Ryan joined the ticket queue behind a witch and some kind of troll, anxiously awaiting his turn. Now that the day was finally here, he could hardly wait. This costume had been half completed at least a year prior, but his failure to attend had killed any motivation. Now, he was determined to make the most of it. The ticket line wait was made even longer by the blazing sun overhead, though fortune was clearly smiling on him this particular day, and the foil armor actually reflected a shocking amount of the heat back out into the sky (and onto those unlucky enough to be standing next to him, not that he could notice).

“Next!” a voice called out. The witch and troll duo shuffled away, leaving Ryan at the front of the line. He rushed forward and pulled out his phone. He flashed a QR code ticket to the elf sitting within the small ticket booth, who flashed him a practiced, tired smile as soon as it went though, and she stamped the back of his hand with a small pumpkin decal.

“The King welcomes you to the Harvest Fair,” she declared, talking fast. “All the kingdom’s greatest performers are present today, and eagerly await your fawning approval.” The elf glanced behind Ryan and groaned slightly, then pulled out a pamphlet, pointing at different sections of it as she rushed. “Map’s on page one and two, lore is right after that, read through it or talk to an actor and you can get an explanation on this year’s quest to serve the Goddess of the Harvest and whatnot. Vendors and food are inside on the left, performances are at the stage, jousting tourney starts in—” she glanced at her watch, “hour and fifteen, and bathrooms are marked on the map. Knight photoshoot times are listed if you care. Good day and happy harvest. Next!”

Ryan blinked. That was… some kind of way to treat a guest. He opened his mouth to ask about the quest, but the elf attendant was already waving the people behind him forwards, and he had to shuffle sideways to avoid getting his toes stepped on by a dwarf.

Well. He wasn’t about to let one rude employee ruin his day. She’s probably just overwhelmed running the booth all by herself, he reasoned. Not an excuse, really, but she had at least given him most of the information he was wondering about. He could always find an actor inside to get the rest if need be. As he walked through the front gate and caught his first glimpse of the fair, his heart swelled again, and he couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Flutey, medieval music floated over crowds who bustled between small, erected wooden castles and shops, while an incredibly colorful crowd meandered through the fair, taking in the sights and smells. Ryan took a deep breath and dove in.

The swell of people enveloped him immediately. Ryan rubbed shoulders with all manner of mythical beasts, races, and t-shirt wearing regular folk. He had to stumble to the side in order to circumvent a witch pushing a stroller covered in a paper mâché cauldron, then immediately duck sideways to avoid getting cleaved by a large ax that was resting on a barbarian’s shoulders. The whole affair was an utter jumble, but there was something magical about it all. And it’s not just the fairies, Ryan thought to himself, grinning.

The flow of the crowd had naturally taken him away from the stage, off to the left, towards the smell and sound of sizzling food. Ryan’s eyes went wide seeing a man no more than four feet tall walking away from a small hut with a turkey leg that seemed nearly as tall as he was. He’d eaten before leaving, though, just in case he was tempted to buy overpriced festival food, so he cut sideways through the flowing sidewalks and ended up getting dumped out into the slower moving foot traffic of what seemed to be the vendors’ area. He took a breath and used the opportunity to pull out that small pamphlet he’d received back at the entrance. One side panel listed events, confirming the upcoming jousting match; opening it up to the proper page on the inside, he found a large, illustrated map. He was shocked to find he’d traveled nearly a third of the length of the fair in arriving where he had. Standing on his armored toes and peeking over the top of the crowd, he was able to confirm that the entrance was quite some distance away, now.

Must be moving faster than I realized, he thought. The vendors’ area, labeled as The Harvest Market, took up a massive chunk of real estate on this side of the festival, which made sense based on how much of a community-built event this was supposed to be.

Might as well start here. Ryan tucked the pamphlet away and turned, stepping up to the first vendor he saw.

Various period-agnostic pieces of armor and filed-down weapons sat across tables and custom-built wooden shelves, providing the air of a blacksmith, perched atop a tablecloth likely purchased at a HomeGoods. A basket full of whittled walking sticks sat off to one side. Behind the tables, in the shade provided by a canopy poorly disguised as a storefront, a somewhat mousey man sat and squinted out into the sunlight (not to mention the light reflecting off of Ryan’s armor), dressed in a brownish tunic and coarse pants to give a sort of peasant-y vibe. A small name tag affixed to the tunic read Phil. He stood as Ryan approached and gave a wan smile.

“Welcome, Sire Knight!” he called, loud enough to be heard over the din. “I’ve wares to sell, should they be of interest to ye of noble ilk. Or nay, is it a quest ye seek?”

Ryan opened his mouth, then closed it before responding. That was more in character than he’d expected; he had some decent practice with voicework, but being put on the spot with an unpracticed tone was still difficult. “Ah. I seek to… browse. Good sir Phil,” he added hastily.

Phil nodded. His smile seemed to be propped against the side of his jaw, as if it were leaning on a wall. “Certainly. Rianne’s blessings to you, then, Knight.”

Ryan let silence fall for a moment, examining a dagger with a leather wrapped hilt. “Uh.” He coughed awkwardly. “If one… were to be seeking a quest, what would that entail?”

Phil, who had been moving to sit back down in his fold-out camp chair, straightened. “Aha! As the gods will it, so it be done, a Knight hath been sent to help!”

“Yes,” Ryan said, shuffling from one foot to the other. “And that help is?”

Phil’s grand presentation deflated slightly. “Why, only the quest of a lifetime? Rianne’s request, an epic journey only the bravest could hope to complete?” When Ryan only gave an apologetic shrug, he let out a disgruntled sigh. “The one on page four of the festival pamphlet and on the website when you scan the QR code on your ticket? That quest?”

“I got stuck on the map,” Ryan joked half-heartedly.

Phil groaned and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Okay, well, doth the great knight feel inclined to consult page four of the festival pamphlet to receive his divine request from the goddess of the harvest, or would he prefer to browse some more?”

“Would you mind giving a condensed version?” Ryan asked, hopeful. That elf at the ticket booth had said to ask an actor, after all.

Phil threw a longsuffering sigh upwards (which, Ryan thought, seems kinda uncalled for, all things considered). “It really would be much easier if you just read it.”

“C’mon, I prefer acting anyway!”

“And I prefer when knights arrive ready to act,” Phil retorted.

Ryan folded his arms. “Aren’t renaissance fairs all about acting and improvisation?” He was feeling more and more put out by this being his first real interaction, after all the hype.

“First of all, it’s the Harvest Renaissance Fair,” Phil corrected, holding up a finger, “and second, I’ve had no less than sixteen tinfoil knights come through here with their dashing looks and ask me to read three paragraphs to them, and I’m getting real sick of it.”

At this point, Phil was looking quite worked up, and it seemed obvious there was no getting through to him. Ryan held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Okay, okay, listen, I—”

“No, you listen,” Phil growled, cutting Ryan off. “I’m clocking out. If you’re so interested in toying with precise narrative structure, then why don’t you try writing it yourself and see how much you like it? As the gods will it! Or god, in this case.” The man snapped his fingers and made a rude gesture in Ryan’s direction. It was his turn to grunt in frustration as Phil turned away after the frankly very confusing comment.

“Would you just wait one—” Ryan stopped himself and sighed. Whatever. It’s just one sourpuss. Don’t let it ruin the day. “Whatever. May your Harvest be merry, Sir Phil.”

Ryan furrowed his brow. “Excuse me. May the long nights bring light against fell dark.”

What. The hell. Something was wrong. He’d been trying to give Phil a few strong words, and perhaps an expletive or two, but the words came out… wrong. Obviously, that was not in fact what he’d said, twice. If it happened once he could chalk it up to distraction, but this was concerning. For his part, Phil just waved a dismissive hand from the back of his stall behind a large tote and said ‘bah!’

Ryan’s head felt… tight. Like his mind was pressing up against the inside of his skull, straining against the bone. He bent over, grabbing the edge of the table. With his head hanging low, he was able to watch as the sun flickered across his hands with an almost incandescent blue light, and with a series of small pops, claws erupted from each fingernail, poking into the fabric of the tablecloth.

Okay. Revision. Something isn’t wrong, something is seriously wrong. Ryan stumbled backwards, yanking his hands up to his face. Of course, embedded in the fabric as they were, the entire tablecloth came with them. With an enormous clatter, the weapons were unceremoniously tossed against each other and to the floor, crashing together all the way. Ryan couldn’t even attempt to help; the tablecloth was already tangling up his arms, hands balled up into the mass.

It must have just gotten caught on my sleeve. The claws had to have been some trick of the light off his armor. Tin foil was reflective, after all. Of course, he couldn’t actually check until this stupid fabric was taken care of. Unfortunately, each flex only swept more and more of it into the action, wrapping him up in layer after layer of fabric. He tossed one corner over a shoulder to keep track of it and somehow it managed to tangle up his whole arm. A series of knots almost cartoonish in their complexity were forming, and he seemed to be at their mercy. Several passersby were starting to stop and gawk, and Ryan could feel himself sweating as he struggled.

Finally, he hit a sweet spot and felt the fabric start to slide after tossing multiple layers of it over his shoulder. He took full advantage and yanked, the knots unraveling themselves like magic one after the other, hands finally, thankfully, sliding free. Ryan tossed his arms up into the air with a shout of triumph, not even bothering to check and discover that not only were they clawed, they were also blue. This was also the exact moment his chest decided to acquire a new look and promptly exploded outwards.

Ryan stared down in shock. He was used to being able to see his feet; this was distinctly not possible anymore. He found himself tipping forwards, and his arms pinwheeled wildly, trying to step forwards and catch himself. A numb tingling flashed across both legs, and they suddenly erupted into thick blue skin, pants straining. This did nothing to help steady him. He opened his mouth to yell, feeling like he was moving in slow motion, and it opened instead as a muzzle, pushed outwards and fused with his nose into one long snout, the yell emerging as a roar.

Just before he ate it, there was one final shhhRRRIP! from behind Ryan. He felt more than heard as his tailbone dropped the ‘bone’ suffix and became a full-on tail, the weight counterbalancing him. As if he was on a hinge, he swung back upwards. The tail impacted the ground with a dry smack, and Ryan was left standing stock straight, arms by his side, legs pointed inwards from their failed attempts to save him. With two belated flaps, a pair of wings unfolded from his back.

Around him, the crowd burst into applause.

This was so unexpected as to shock Ryan straight out of his stupor. His hands immediately flew to his face, finding a snout, horns poking out from his nose, his cheeks, his head, a pair of whiskers drooping down from either cheek. It only took a cursory glance to determine that the rest of him was similarly lizardlike. His entire knight’s armor had up and vanished; in its place was the tablecloth, tied across his shoulder and draped over his frame like a dress. A belt decorated with hanging jewels cinched it at the waist, and he was barefoot, though there were two large paws rather than actual feet, now. He was covered in vibrant blue scales from head to toe, but the ones across his neck and the front of his body were a hazy golden yellow instead, continuing on down the base of the tail that swayed behind him. He caught a glimpse in a polished shield and saw an unfamiliar reflection of a reptilian face that boasted yellow stripes across the snout, too.

Okay. Take stock. What can you actually do here? Ryan’s mind raced. She had to get out of there, find somewhere private to figure all this out. A change like this was bad enough; in public, it was one of her worst nightmares. The insane dragon body was the biggest factor, obviously. The new clothing was embarrassingly scant compared to a full suit of armor, but functional. She….

Oh. Wait. Okay, point three: Ryan was now most certainly a girl, and somehow the pronoun reference in her own head had already shifted. Disconcerting to think about directly, but it seemed fine to leave it alone, so she let that one slide for a bit. Not like she could pass as a man right now anyway.

Last thing: the crowd. She needed a way through. Ryan raised a hand, and the voices all died down to a murmur. She opened her mouth to politely yell at least one expletive and several panicked requests for people to please get out of the way now.

“Thank you! Thank you!” The raised hand became a wave as a feminine voice cut the silence from deep in her own throat. Ryan swallowed hard. Again. This time, she pictured the words before speaking them. Please get the HELL out of my way. Just eight words.

“Please, refrain from praising a humble goddess, citizens!” Wrong eight words. Ryan felt himself withering inside. This was out of control.

Someone stepped forward from the crowd, an elf with a badge that read ‘Nurse,’ looking concerned. “Are you sure you’re okay, Rianne?”

It’s Ryan, she tried to say. It didn’t work. “Your care lifts an immortal soul,” was what came out instead. “But Her Lady of the Harvest is well. ‘Twas naught but a minor altercation with a disagreeable sword!” Rianne—Ryan—let out a hearty laugh. Inside, she was yelling. She couldn’t stop herself from going along with this.

Maybe… maybe she had to play along. That made about as much sense as the rest of this. She chose her words carefully this time. “Though… if thou insists, take all pains to assuage your doubts as to my safety,” she said, holding out an arm. That was as far as she managed to push it towards Please give me an x-ray and tell me I’m just in some kind of nightmare bodysuit.

The elf reached out and grasped her arm confidently. The moment the nurse made contact, though, she froze. Her gaze connected with Ryan’s, and she could tell that the nurse knew that this wasn’t any kind of improv. That was real, bonafide dragon flesh. A strange haze passed over her eyes, and she stepped back before Ryan could do anything.

“Our Lady Rianne is perfectly healthy!” she declared to a flurry of applause. Ryan tried to reach for her, but she vanished into the crowd, whispering into the ear of some kind of half-demon fellow whose arm she grabbed along the way. There went that lifeline.

Rianne. That wasn’t a mispronunciation of her name; that was the name of the Goddess of the Harvest that Phil had mentioned. The one who was supposedly giving out quests and making requests of brave adherents, and who ruled over the entire festival, granting blessings of bountiful harvests and community bonding. That was…

Oh, gods, that was her. Ryan had somehow become Rianne, and now she couldn’t stop talking like a goddess. She couldn’t fathom the reasons behind it, but that must have been why she sounded like a bad reenactment of the legend of Saint George.

The worst part was, that almost certainly meant that she was stuck here. The goddess of the festival couldn’t very well leave. Even if she tried there was probably some kind of contrived method of keeping her put. She was well and truly screwed.

Although. Although. A thought surfaced that made her flush. This crowd… they were focused on her, yes, but it was positive attention. Clearly the goddess of the fair—one whom they all must assume she was some kind of mascot representing—would be popular, especially among those undertaking her quests. So, if she was so popular…

…what was keeping her from enjoying the fair like this, anyway?

Okay, listen up. “My dear merrymakers!” Okay, that one was better than her original thought. “Let not one accident cause you grief. It is a day of joy! Please, continue the festivities!” Her mind raced, trying to come up with something she could say that would get interpreted in a favorable way by her new rules. “Worship comes in many forms, and today that form is togetherness. So please, show Her Lady how you can bring this community together first-hand!”

A last round of cheers, and the crowd began to disperse—all but a loyal sect clamoring for attention. Rianne did a mental fist pump as one stepped forwards, pointing down the row of vendors, towards the stage. Maybe this would be fun after all.

~~~~~

Tessa the elven nurse dragged her friend, Anthony, through the crowd. Her vision was sharp, the colors bright. By the time she finally stopped, Anthony had gone from laughing and plucking at her grip to worried. He came to a halt and looked down at his shorter friend.

“What’s wrong?” Anthony asked, the demonic costume creating a humorous contrast to the caring question.

“Rianne,” Tessa hissed, pointing towards the dragon. What she’d thought was just an actor.

“Yeah, we get a goddess every year,” Anthony replied. “Is there something wrong? Did she actually get hurt?”

“No!” Tessa almost wanted to scream. “Dude. Look closer. She’s real.”

Anthony cocked an eyebrow. “Did you get hurt?”

“Anthony!”

“Okay, okay, fine, I’ll look!” He turned away from his friend, who raked a hand through her hair. She felt like her skin was on fire. This was… it was good, actually. Her blood was electric. At first she’d thought it was a fever; now she recognized it for what it was. She was filled with belief.

She watched Anthony’s face. Saw the skepticism melt into shock. “Hooooly shit,” he breathed.

“This is insane.”

“I know,” Anthony said, reaching for his phone. “I have got to tell the guys.”

~~~~~

Rianne had no way of knowing that as she was paraded through the festival grounds, word of her divinity was spreading through the fair, and it was spreading fast. The next hour went by in a blur. She blessed vendors, received offerings, gave a toast, she had officiated a real ass wedding. Her head swam. Her paws buzzed with power. Whatever Phil had been on about was nonsense; ‘writing the narrative’ felt intoxicating. What she really needed, though, was a break.

Sadly, breaks were not an option, as just then she found herself being introduced to the festival organizer, who was vigorously shaking her paw and bowing their head in supplication.

“Now, Rianne, could you watch over our most cherished tournament, the Fall Joust?” The organizer flashed a grin full of fake teeth to the crowd. Suck up, she scoffed. Rianne had plans, anyway. Definitely not.

“Nothing could please me more!” she crooned. Great. Her goddess side had other plans. So it was that she found herself sat on an actual, real-life throne in the center of the covered wooden platform that lined the side of the jousting arena, the organizer on her left, a recently-crowned King Of The Festival on her right, who had earned the title by winning a costume party. It felt small; her horns scratched the ceiling of the room. Had she grown taller? Her scales felt itchy, even in the shade. Something felt… off. A paw brushed the side of her buxom chest, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from making noise. Every part of her body was acting up all at once, and she was not keen on sitting through multiple jousting matches.

The viral spread of belief had, by this point, reached its tendrils throughout every part of the fair. It wasn’t quite dominant, not yet, but it was approaching a critical point—one strong enough that Rianne was able to detect it. There was a taste in the air that her godly form translated into the ambrosia of belief, and lots of it.

An announcer droned on from a box somewhere at the end of the field. Conversations continued on either side of her. Rianne heard none of it. She folded her arms over her stomach and tried to keep from hurling as she rubbed against her own sensitive skin.

“...for their contributions to the fair. And lastly, we have one last guest to thank.” A bit of the announcer’s tone crept through into Rianne’s ears. “The one to whom this festival is dedicated. Our… hm?” Feedback came through the mic as it was suddenly covered due to commotion in the announcer’s booth. When he spoke again, moments later, there was true reverence in his voice. “Our immortal goddess, Lady Rianne of the Harvest! Please, everyone, put your hands together for the first TRUE appearance of the Goddess herself!”

Oh, God.

Rianne’s body could no longer take it. She fell forwards from her chair, stumbling out into the jousting arena on all fours as she quite literally doubled in size, body stretching to a full fifteen feet long. As waves of shock and understanding rippled through the largest crowd the festival had to offer, the belief in Rianne grew stronger and stronger, and she grew right alongside it. Paws rubbed along scales uncontrollably as she erupted like a glorious, godly volcano, dwarfing first the attendees, then her own previous size, then the arena itself. It was only once she tried to stand, head now poking at least twenty feet above the roof of the covered seating, that she had the presence of mind to yank her (miraculously growing) dress down and snap her legs together to try to keep from flashing the crowd, face turning a brilliant shade of maroon in the process. She managed to only knock over a couple of wooden fence supports as she wobbled out of the arena, one paw tucked between her legs, the other held tight over her chest.

“B-blessed Harvest!” she cried out, trying to smile and failing to fully remove the flustered expression from her face. She needed out of there fast, and at this size, there was no one able to stop her. “Your grace is EXTREMELY well received! P-please calm your prayers, lest Her Lady expose… f-frighten you all with her godly form! And rest assured she will return, year after year, to ensure Her will be respected and celebrated!” As she spoke, some of the energy crackling across her form was sapped out, and she felt the words cement themselves into reality. She would be back. Rianne’s stomach dropped like a rock. This was going to happen again. Year after year, she’d be back here, transformed into a dragoness once again to celebrate the harvest. She snapped her jaw closed before she could damn herself any more.

The entire festival could see her, now, and they all erupted into raucous applause and cheers. Rianne choked out one final “Happy Harvest!” before turning tail and running, the glimpses of her rear through the slitted dress as purple as the cheeks up above, each softly embedded paw print in the landscape bigger than the last as she dashed off to find a couple buildings to hide herself behind. The only thing that the goddess could think of that embarrassed her more than accidentally flashing a festival of supplicants was that, deep down, she knew that she was excited for next year’s Harvest.

#writing wyrms #dawdling dragons #transformation #tf #dragon tf #dragon transformation #language change TF #apotheosis #god transformation #renaissance fair #tftg #mtf tg #my writing #my stuff #champloon

13 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 4 months ago

Text

Scan the online brochures of companies who sell workplace monitoring tech and you’d think the average American worker was a renegade poised to take their employer down at the next opportunity. “Nearly half of US employees admit to time theft!” “Biometric readers for enhanced accuracy!” “Offer staff benefits in a controlled way with Vending Machine Access!”

A new wave of return-to-office mandates has arrived since the New Year, including at JP Morgan Chase, leading advertising agency WPP, and Amazon—not to mention President Trump’s late January directive to the heads of federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person … on a full-time basis.” Five years on from the pandemic, when the world showed how effectively many roles could be performed remotely or flexibly, what’s caused the sudden change of heart?

“There’s two things happening,” says global industry analyst Josh Bersin, who is based in California. “The economy is actually slowing down, so companies are hiring less. So there is a trend toward productivity in general, and then AI has forced virtually every company to reallocate resources toward AI projects.

“The expectation amongst CEOs is that’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs. A lot of these back-to-work mandates are due to frustration that both of those initiatives are hard to measure or hard to do when we don’t know what people are doing at home.”

The question is, what exactly are we returning to?

Take any consumer tech buzzword of the 21st century and chances are it’s already being widely used across the US to monitor time, attendance and, in some cases, the productivity of workers, in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and fast food chains: RFID badges, GPS time clock apps, NFC apps, QR code clocking-in, Apple Watch badges, and palm, face, eye, voice, and finger scanners. Biometric scanners have long been sold to companies as a way to avoid hourly workers “buddy punching” for each other at the start and end of shifts—so-called “time theft.” A return-to-office mandate and its enforcement opens the door for similar scenarios for salaried staff.

Track and Trace

The latest, deluxe end point of these time and attendance tchotchkes and apps is something like Austin-headquartered HID’s OmniKey platform. Designed for factories, hospitals, universities and offices, this is essentially an all-encompassing RFID log-in and security system for employees, via smart cards, smartphone wallets, and wearables. These will not only monitor turnstile entrances, exits, and floor access by way of elevators but also parking, the use of meeting rooms, the cafeteria, printers, lockers, and yes, vending machine access.

These technologies, and more sophisticated worker location- and behavior-tracking systems, are expanding from blue-collar jobs to pink-collar industries and even white-collar office settings. Depending on the survey, approximately 70 to 80 percent of large US employers now use some form of employee monitoring, and the likes of PwC have explicitly told workers that managers will be tracking their location to enforce a three-day office week policy.

“Several of these earlier technologies, like RFID sensors and low-tech barcode scanners, have been used in manufacturing, in warehouses, or in other settings for some time,” says Wolfie Christl, a researcher of workplace surveillance for Cracked Labs, a nonprofit based in Vienna, Austria. “We’re moving toward the use of all kinds of sensor data, and this kind of technology is certainly now moving into the offices. However, I think for many of these, it’s questionable whether they really make sense there.”

What’s new, at least to the recent pandemic age of hybrid working, is the extent to which workers can now be tracked inside office buildings. Cracked Labs published a frankly terrifying 25-page case study report in November 2024 showing how systems of wireless networking, motion sensors, and Bluetooth beacons, whether intentionally or as a byproduct of their capabilities, can provide “behavioral monitoring and profiling” in office settings.

The project breaks the tech down into two categories: The first is technology that tracks desk presence and room occupancy, and the second monitors the indoor location, movement, and behavior of the people working inside the building.

To start with desk and room occupancy, Spacewell offers a mix of motion sensors installed under desks, in ceilings, and at doorways in “office spaces” and heat sensors and low-resolution visual sensors to show which desks and rooms are being used. Both real-time and trend data are available to managers via its “live data floorplan,” and the sensors also capture temperature, environmental, light intensity, and humidity data.

The Swiss-headquartered Locatee, meanwhile, uses existing badge and device data via Wi-Fi and LAN to continuously monitor clocking in and clocking out, time spent by workers at desks and on specific floors, and the number of hours and days spent by employees at the office per week. While the software displays aggregate rather than individual personal employee data to company executives, the Cracked Labs report points out that Locatee offers a segmented team analytics report which “reveals data on small groups.”

As more companies return to the office, the interest in this idea of “optimized” working spaces is growing fast. According to S&S Insider’s early 2025 analysis, the connected office was worth $43 billion in 2023 and will grow to $122.5 billion by 2032. Alongside this, IndustryARC predicts there will be a $4.5 billion employee-monitoring-technology market, mostly in North America, by 2026—the only issue being that the crossover between the two is blurry at best.

At the end of January, Logitech showed off its millimeter-wave radar Spot sensors, which are designed to allow employers to monitor whether rooms are being used and which rooms in the building are used the most. A Logitech rep told The Verge that the peel-and-stick devices, which also monitor VOCs, temperature, and humidity, could theoretically estimate the general placement of people in a meeting room.

As Christl explains, because of the functionality that these types of sensor-based systems offer, there is the very real possibility of a creep from legitimate applications, such as managing energy use, worker health and safety, and ensuring sufficient office resources into more intrusive purposes.

“For me, the main issue is that if companies use highly sensitive data like tracking the location of employees’ devices and smartphones indoors or even use motion detectors indoors,” he says, “then there must be totally reliable safeguards that this data is not being used for any other purposes.”

Big Brother Is Watching

This warning becomes even more pressing where workers’ indoor location, movement, and behavior are concerned. Cisco’s Spaces cloud platform has digitized 11 billion square feet of enterprise locations, producing 24.7 trillion location data points. The Spaces system is used by more than 8,800 businesses worldwide and is deployed by the likes of InterContinental Hotels Group, WeWork, the NHS Foundation, and San Jose State University, according to Cisco’s website.

While it has applications for retailers, restaurants, hotels, and event venues, many of its features are designed to function in office environments, including meeting room management and occupancy monitoring. Spaces is designed as a comprehensive, all-seeing eye into how employees (and customers and visitors, depending on the setting) and their connected devices, equipment, or “assets” move through physical spaces.

Cisco has achieved this by using its existing wireless infrastructure and combining data from Wi-Fi access points with Bluetooth tracking. Spaces offers employers both real-time views and historical data dashboards. The use cases? Everything from meeting-room scheduling and optimizing cleaning schedules to more invasive dashboards on employees’ entry and exit times, the duration of staff workdays, visit durations by floor, and other “behavior metrics.” This includes those related to performance, a feature pitched at manufacturing sites.

Some of these analytics use aggregate data, but Cracked Labs details how Spaces goes beyond this into personal data, with device usernames and identifiers that make it possible to single out individuals. While the ability to protect privacy by using MAC randomization is there, Cisco emphasizes that this makes indoor movement analytics “unreliable” and other applications impossible—leaving companies to make that decision themselves.

Management even has the ability to send employees nudge-style alerts based on their location in the building. An IBM application, based on Cisco’s underlying technology, offers to spot anomalies in occupancy patterns and send notifications to workers or their managers based on what it finds. Cisco’s Spaces can also incorporate video footage from Cisco security cameras and WebEx video conferencing hardware into the overall system of indoor movement monitoring; another example of function creep from security to employee tracking in the workplace.

“Cisco is simply everywhere. As soon as employers start to repurpose data that is being collected from networking or IT infrastructure, this quickly becomes very dangerous, from my perspective.” says Christl. “With this kind of indoor location tracking technology based on its Wi-Fi networks, I think that a vendor as major as Cisco has a responsibility to ensure it doesn’t suggest or market solutions that are really irresponsible to employers.

“I would consider any productivity and performance tracking very problematic when based on this kind of intrusive behavioral data.” WIRED approached Cisco for comment but didn’t receive a response before publication.

Cisco isn't alone in this, though. Similar to Spaces, Juniper’s Mist offers an indoor tracking system that uses both Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth beacons to locate people, connected devices, and Bluetooth tagged badges on a real-time map, with the option of up to 13 months of historical data on worker behavior.

Juniper’s offering, for workplaces including offices, hospitals, manufacturing sites, and retailers, is so precise that it is able to provide records of employees’ device names, together with the exact enter and exit times and duration of visits between “zones” in offices—including one labeled “break area/kitchen” in a demo. Yikes.

For each of these systems, a range of different applications is functionally possible, and some which raise labor-law concerns. “A worst-case scenario would be that management wants to fire someone and then starts looking into historical records trying to find some misconduct,” says Christl. "If it’s necessary to investigate employees, then there should be a procedure where, for example, a worker representative is looking into the fine-grained behavioral data together with management. This would be another safeguard to prevent misuse.”

Above and Beyond?

If warehouse-style tracking has the potential for management overkill in office settings, it makes even less sense in service and health care jobs, and American unions are now pushing for more access to data and quotas used in disciplinary action. Elizabeth Anderson, professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan and the author of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives, describes how black-box algorithm-driven management and monitoring affects not just the day-to-day of nursing staff but also their sense of work and value.

“Surveillance and this idea of time theft, it’s all connected to this idea of wasting time,” she explains. “Essentially all relational work is considered inefficient. In a memory care unit, for example, the system will say how long to give a patient breakfast, how many minutes to get them dressed, and so forth.

“Maybe an Alzheimer’s patient is frightened, so a nurse has to spend some time calming them down, or perhaps they have lost some ability overnight. That’s not one of the discrete physical tasks that can be measured. Most of the job is helping that person cope with declining faculties; it takes time for that, for people to read your emotions and respond appropriately. What you get is massive moral injury with this notion of efficiency.”

This kind of monitoring extends to service workers, including servers in restaurants and cleaning staff, according to a 2023 Cracked Labs’ report into retail and hospitality. Software developed by Oracle is used to, among other applications, rate and rank servers based on speed, sales, timekeeping around breaks, and how many tips they receive. Similar Oracle software that monitors mobile workers such as housekeepers and cleaners in hotels uses a timer for app-based micromanagement—for instance, “you have two minutes for this room, and there are four tasks.”

As Christl explains, this simply doesn’t work in practice. “People have to struggle to combine what they really do with this kind of rigid, digital system. And it’s not easy to standardize work like talking to patients and other kinds of affective work, like how friendly you are as a waiter. This is a major problem. These systems cannot represent the work that is being done accurately.”

But can knowledge work done in offices ever be effectively measured and assessed either? In an episode of his podcast in January, host Ezra Klein battled his own feelings about having many of his best creative ideas at a café down the street from where he lives rather than in The New York Times’ Manhattan offices. Anderson agrees that creativity often has to find its own path.

“Say there’s a webcam tracking your eyes to make sure you’re looking at the screen,” she says. “We know that daydreaming a little can actually help people come up with creative ideas. Just letting your mind wander is incredibly useful for productivity overall, but that requires some time looking around or out the window. The software connected to your camera is saying you’re off-duty—that you’re wasting time. Nobody’s mind can keep concentrated for the whole work day, but you don’t even want that from a productivity point of view.”

Even for roles where it might make more methodological sense to track discrete physical tasks, there can be negative consequences of nonstop monitoring. Anderson points to a scene in Erik Gandini’s 2023 documentary After Work that shows an Amazon delivery driver who is monitored, via camera, for their driving, delivery quotas, and even getting dinged for using Spotify in the van.

“It’s very tightly regulated and super, super intrusive, and it’s all based on distrust as the starting point,” she says. “What these tech bros don’t understand is that if you install surveillance technology, which is all about distrusting the workers, there is a deep feature of human psychology that is reciprocity. If you don’t trust me, I’m not going to trust you. You think an employee who doesn’t trust the boss is going to be working with the same enthusiasm? I don’t think so.”

Trust Issues

The fixes, then, might be in the leadership itself, not more data dashboards. “Our research shows that excessive monitoring in the workplace can damage trust, have a negative impact on morale, and cause stress and anxiety,” says Hayfa Mohdzaini, senior policy and practice adviser for technology at the CIPD, the UK’s professional body for HR, learning, and development. “Employers might achieve better productivity by investing in line manager training and ensuring employees feel supported with reasonable expectations around office attendance and manageable workloads.”

A 2023 Pew Research study found that 56 percent of US workers were opposed to the use of AI to keep track of when employees were at their desks, and 61 percent were against tracking employees’ movements while they work.

This dropped to just 51 percent of workers who were opposed to recording work done on company computers, through the use of a kind of corporate “spyware” often accepted by staff in the private sector. As Josh Bersin puts it, “Yes, the company can read your emails” with platforms such as Teramind, even including “sentiment analysis” of employee messages.

Snooping on files, emails, and digital chats takes on new significance when it comes to government workers, though. New reporting from WIRED, based on conversations with employees at 13 federal agencies, reveals the extent to Elon Musk’s DOGE team’s surveillance: software including Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, a Dynatrace extension, and security tool Splunk have been added to government computers in recent weeks, and some people have felt they can’t speak freely on recorded and transcribed Microsoft Teams calls. Various agencies already use Everfox software and Dtex’s Intercept system, which generates individual risk scores for workers based on websites and files accessed.

Alongside mass layoffs and furloughs over the past four weeks, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has also, according to CBS News and NPR reports, gone into multiple agencies in February with the theater and bombast of full X-ray security screenings replacing entry badges at Washington, DC, headquarters. That’s alongside managers telling staff that their logging in and out of devices, swiping in and out of workspaces, and all of their digital work chats will be “closely monitored” going forward.

“Maybe they’re trying to make a big deal out of it to scare people right now,” says Bersin. “The federal government is using back-to-work as an excuse to lay off a bunch of people.”

DOGE staff have reportedly even added keylogger software to government computers to track everything employees type, with staff concerned that anyone using keywords related to progressive thinking or "disloyalty” to Trump could be targeted—not to mention the security risks it introduces for those working on sensitive projects. As one worker told NPR, it feels “Soviet-style” and “Orwellian” with “nonstop monitoring.” Anderson describes the overall DOGE playbook as a series of “deeply intrusive invasions of privacy.”

Alternate Realities

But what protections are out there for employees? Certain states, such as New York and Illinois, do offer strong privacy protections against, for example, unnecessary biometric tracking in the private sector, and California’s Consumer Privacy Act covers workers as well as consumers. Overall, though, the lack of federal-level labor law in this area makes the US something of an alternate reality to what is legal in the UK and Europe.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the US allows employee monitoring for legitimate business reasons and with the worker’s consent. In Europe, Algorithm Watch has made country analyses for workplace surveillance in the UK, Italy, Sweden, and Poland. To take one high-profile example of the stark difference: In early 2024, Serco was ordered by the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), to stop using face recognition and fingerprint scanning systems, designed by Shopworks, to track the time and attendance of 2,000 staff across 38 leisure centers around the country. This new guidance led to more companies reviewing or cutting the technology altogether, including Virgin Active, which pulled similar biometric employee monitoring systems from 30-plus sites.

Despite a lack of comprehensive privacy rights in the US, though, worker protest, union organizing, and media coverage can provide a firewall against some office surveillance schemes. Unions such as the Service Employees International Union are pushing for laws to protect workers from black-box algorithms dictating the pace of output.

In December, Boeing scrapped a pilot of employee monitoring at offices in Missouri and Washington, which was based on a system of infrared motion sensors and VuSensor cameras installed in ceilings, made by Ohio-based Avuity. The U-turn came after a Boeing employee leaked an internal PowerPoint presentation on the occupancy- and headcount-tracking technology to The Seattle Times. In a matter of weeks, Boeing confirmed that managers would remove all the sensors that had been installed to date.

Under-desk sensors, in particular, have received high-profile backlash, perhaps because they are such an obvious piece of surveillance hardware rather than simply software designed to record work done on company machines. In the fall of 2022, students at Northeastern University hacked and removed under-desk sensors produced by EnOcean, offering “presence detection” and “people counting,” that had been installed in the school’s Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex. The university provost eventually informed students that the department had planned to use the sensors with the Spaceti platform to optimize desk usage.

OccupEye (now owned by FM: Systems), another type of under-desk heat and motion sensor, received a similar reaction from staff at Barclays Bank and The Telegraph newspaper in London, with employees protesting and, in some cases, physically removing the devices that tracked the time they spent away from their desks.

Despite the fallout, Barclays later faced a $1.1 billion fine from the ICO when it was found to have deployed Sapience’s employee monitoring software in its offices, with the ability to single out and track individual employees. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the current climate, that same software company now offers “lightweight device-level technology” to monitor return-to-office policy compliance, with a dashboard breaking employee location down by office versus remote for specific departments and teams.

According to Elizabeth Anderson’s latest book Hijacked, while workplace surveillance culture and the obsession with measuring employee efficiency might feel relatively new, it can actually be traced back to the invention of the “work ethic” by the Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“They thought you should be working super hard; you shouldn’t be idling around when you should be in work,” she says. “You can see some elements there that can be developed into a pretty hostile stance toward workers. The Puritans were obsessed with not wasting time. It was about gaining assurance of salvation through your behavior. With the Industrial Revolution, the ‘no wasting time’ became a profit-maximizing strategy. Now you’re at work 24/7 because they can get you on email.”

Some key components of the original work ethic, though, have been skewed or lost over time. The Puritans also had strict constraints on what duties employers had toward their workers: paying a living wage and providing safe and healthy working conditions.

“You couldn’t just rule them tyrannically, or so they said. You had to treat them as your fellow Christians, with dignity and respect. In many ways the original work ethic was an ethic which uplifted workers.”

6 notes · View notes

yourmandevine · 1 month ago

Text

Here's to shutting up

I talk too much and I write too long, and I always have. I don't know why, though people in my life have offered a number of different theories over the years.

I didn't like the one about how it's probably because I'm a narcissist who thinks everyone should be impressed by how smart he is. I really didn't like the one about how the word count is directly proportional to how insecure I am about something. Probably especially because every word I'd use to try to defend myself would just make me more wrong. Checkmate, Dan, you loudmouth.

I'm sure someone has offered a nicer explanation, and that I only remember the critical ones. Just kidding. I'm not sure anyone has ever offered a nicer explanation.

WHATEVER THE REASON, it's something I do, and for many years, it's been something I do professionally. I write thousands of words a day every day, and talk on podcasts and radio hits for multiple hours a week, and have been doing that for more than a decade now. And honestly, that's just an exhausting amount of me for anyone. Including — maybe especially? — me.

When I got to the barbershop this afternoon, I was pretty tapped out on me, and was sort of dreading needing to make small talk for a half-hour — the social contract between all people who sit in the chair and those in the power position, holding the sharp things. After I gave my very specific instructions ("just shorter and cleaned up, please"), I braced for the barber to strike up a conversation. And then, something beautiful happened:

She didn't.

Outside of some general questions specific to the task at hand, she just went about her business and let me sit there with my eyes closed and zone out ... and it was glorious.

The conversation to my left about the relative clutchness of Jayson Tatum and Mikal Bridges? I didn't have to participate! The one to my right about the best place in Bushwick to get a ribcage tattoo? None of my concern!

All I had to do was sit there with my mouth shut and breathe. No compulsion to make a Chicago pope joke to keep up with The Zeitgeist. No mandate to reheat the link to the last thing I wrote to try to get some more engagement so that the bosses can see that I'm working. No need to try to make one stranger (or, ideally, multiple strangers) in that room laugh so that they'd think (and, really, I'd think) I was valuable and worthy of love. I could just let my mind wander.

I thought about whether the barber was clocking what I am growing concerned is a bald spot and what she might recommend, nope, let's stop thinking about that, let's let the mind wander elsewhere. I thought about the song playing on the speaker in the shop, and when was the last time I listened to any new music rather than just either old stuff I already know or basketball/comedy/movie podcasts, and man, that's kind of sad, huh, I should do something about that.

I thought about that time I asked my dad how he was feeling on his 60th birthday, and he said, "Honestly? I'm feeling like I know of guys living to be 100, but never any living to be 120," which was probably a little too real for his son, but which was a pretty good line, you must admit. I thought about how he only made it to 68, and how I'm 42, and if I know of guys who made it to 84, and yeah, come on, you know some guys, man, you know some guys. (OK, maybe too much time in my head isn't the best thing for me.)

I thought about Uncle Baby Billy praying that his cocaine would give him the strength to attack a man, and about whether I should've tried to apply for that sports editor job at The Onion, and about trying to write something for myself rather than for work, and about checking to see if Pete Alonso had hit any new home runs recently, and then, before I knew it, she was done. Shorter and cleaned up.

I thanked her, told her it looked great and I appreciated how relaxing that was. She gave me prayer hands that may or may not have pointed toward the QR code that was the Venmo where I could tip her. No words necessary.

3 notes · View notes

joshinglis123 · 2 months ago

Text

How to Ensure Compliance with ZATCA Phase 2 Requirements

As Saudi Arabia pushes toward a more digitized and transparent tax system, the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) continues to roll out significant reforms. One of the most transformative changes has been the implementation of the electronic invoicing system. While Phase 1 marked the beginning of this journey, ZATCA Phase 2 brings a deeper level of integration and regulatory expectations.

If you’re a VAT-registered business in the Kingdom, this guide will help you understand exactly what’s required in Phase 2 and how to stay compliant without unnecessary complications. From understanding core mandates to implementing the right technology and training your staff, we’ll break down everything you need to know.

What Is ZATCA Phase 2?

ZATCA Phase 2 is the second stage of Saudi Arabia’s e-invoicing initiative. While Phase 1, which began in December 2021, focused on the generation of electronic invoices in a standard format, Phase 2 introduces integration with ZATCA’s system through its FATOORA platform.

Under Phase 2, businesses are expected to:

Generate invoices in a predefined XML format

Digitally sign them with a ZATCA-issued cryptographic stamp

Integrate their invoicing systems with ZATCA to transmit and validate invoices in real-time

The primary goal of Phase 2 is to enhance the transparency of commercial transactions, streamline tax enforcement, and reduce instances of fraud.

Who Must Comply?

Phase 2 requirements apply to all VAT-registered businesses operating in Saudi Arabia. However, the implementation is being rolled out in waves. Businesses are notified by ZATCA of their required compliance deadlines, typically with at least six months' notice.

Even if your business hasn't been selected for immediate implementation, it's crucial to prepare ahead of time. Early planning ensures a smoother transition and helps avoid last-minute issues.

Key Requirements for Compliance

Here’s a breakdown of the main technical and operational requirements under Phase 2.

1. Electronic Invoicing Format

Invoices must now be generated in XML format that adheres to ZATCA's technical specifications. These specifications cover:

Mandatory fields (buyer/seller details, invoice items, tax breakdown, etc.)

Invoice types (standard tax invoice for B2B, simplified for B2C)

Structure and tags required in the XML file

2. Digital Signature

Every invoice must be digitally signed using a cryptographic stamp. This stamp must be issued and registered through ZATCA’s portal. The digital signature ensures authenticity and protects against tampering.

3. Integration with ZATCA’s System

You must integrate your e-invoicing software with the FATOORA platform to submit invoices in real-time for validation and clearance. For standard invoices, clearance must be obtained before sharing them with your customers.

4. QR Code and UUID

Simplified invoices must include a QR code to facilitate easy validation, while all invoices should carry a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) to ensure traceability.

5. Data Archiving

You must retain and archive your e-invoices in a secure digital format for at least six years, in accordance with Saudi tax law. These records must be accessible for audits or verification by ZATCA.

Step-by-Step Guide to Compliance

Meeting the requirements of ZATCA Phase 2 doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Follow these steps to ensure your business stays on track:

Step 1: Assess Your Current System

Evaluate whether your current accounting or invoicing solution can support XML invoice generation, digital signatures, and API integration. If not, consider:

Upgrading your system

Partnering with a ZATCA-certified solution provider

Using cloud-based software with built-in compliance features

Step 2: Understand Your Implementation Timeline

Once ZATCA notifies your business of its compliance date, mark it down and create a preparation plan. Typically, businesses receive at least six months’ notice.

During this time, you’ll need to:

Complete cryptographic identity requests

Test your system integration

Step 3: Apply for Cryptographic Identity

To digitally sign your invoices, you'll need to register your system with ZATCA and obtain a cryptographic stamp identity. Your software provider or IT team should initiate this via ZATCA's portal.

Once registered, the digital certificate will allow your system to sign every outgoing invoice.

Step 4: Integrate with FATOORA

Using ZATCA’s provided API documentation, integrate your invoicing system with the FATOORA platform. This step enables real-time transmission and validation of e-invoices. Depending on your technical capacity, this may require support from a solution provider.

Make sure the system can:

Communicate securely over APIs

Handle rejected invoices

Log validation feedback

Step 5: Conduct Internal Testing

Use ZATCA’s sandbox environment to simulate invoice generation and transmission. This lets you identify and resolve:

Formatting issues

Signature errors

Connectivity problems

Testing ensures that when you go live, everything operates smoothly.

Step 6: Train Your Team

Compliance isn’t just about systems—it’s also about people. Train your finance, IT, and sales teams on how to:

Create compliant invoices

Troubleshoot validation errors

Understand QR codes and UUIDs

Respond to ZATCA notifications

Clear communication helps avoid user errors that could lead to non-compliance.

Step 7: Monitor and Improve

After implementation, continue to monitor your systems and processes. Track metrics like:

Invoice clearance success rates

Error logs

Feedback from ZATCA

This will help you make ongoing improvements and stay aligned with future regulatory updates.

Choosing the Right Solution Provider

If you don’t have in-house resources to build your own e-invoicing system, consider working with a ZATCA-approved provider. Look for partners that offer:

Pre-certified e-invoicing software

Full API integration with FATOORA

Support for cryptographic signatures

Real-time monitoring dashboards

Technical support and onboarding services

A reliable provider will save time, reduce costs, and minimize the risk of non-compliance.

Penalties for Non-Compliance

Failure to comply with ZATCA Phase 2 can result in financial penalties, legal action, or suspension of business activities. Penalties may include:

Fines for missing or incorrect invoice details

Penalties for not transmitting invoices in real-time

Legal scrutiny during audits

Being proactive is the best way to avoid these consequences.

Final Thoughts

As Saudi Arabia advances toward a fully digital economy, ZATCA Phase 2 is a significant milestone. It promotes tax fairness, increases transparency, and helps modernize the way businesses operate.

While the technical requirements may seem complex at first, a step-by-step approach—combined with the right technology and training—can make compliance straightforward. Whether you're preparing now or waiting for your official notification, don’t delay. Start planning early, choose a reliable system, and make sure your entire team is ready.

With proper preparation, compliance isn’t just possible—it’s an opportunity to modernize your business and build lasting trust with your customers and the government.

#zatca phase 2 #zatca e invoicing phase 2

2 notes · View notes

dreamgreenbean · 1 year ago

Text

collecting all my old-man-yells-at-cloud opinions here for reference, please feel free to contribute with your own

headlights! are too! bright! you cannot see pedestrians for shit, nor can i personally see other cars properly because all the SUV/truck/doomer tank lights shine directly thru the windshield of my NORMAL sized car. this is a genuine public safety issue and i will sign a petition abt it if i find one thx

you know those fast food menus? that switch between different pages and random ads for like, a single product? fuck those. let me read the menu

there's a new-ish thing where i'm currently living where a ton of tourist sites have paid parking that is exclusively available through QR code. meaning you're risking getting a ticket if: your phone is dead, you're out of data/don't have access to data, you're not particularly tech literate, or by choice/for financial reasons you don't have a smartphone on you 24/7

in general i do not want to be mandated by The System to have a smartphone on me 24/7. like, i'm a 90s baby and i Do have a smartphone on me 24/7. but i do not want 2-factor auth for everything, i will not download your app, i will not save my payment information to a networked device that i could easily leave unattended somewhere! thanks!!

in general i would like to retain the ability to pay cash for things, NOT activate GPS in my car, NOT have location services on my phone unless i am actually lost somewhere, generally be able to opt out of miscellaneous entities gathering data on me for a hot minute

this escalated quickly i actually started writing this to say videos are too long

i will maybe watch a 30 min video, i will absolutely not watch a 2+ hour youtube video

people spend months or years of loving heartfelt labour to make 2+ hour videos, called movies, and i still don't even want to watch most of those. this one might be a me problem. regardless

also, put headphone jacks back in phones

thanks for coming to my ted talk

#about once a week i start a conversation w my partner with 'ok this might be a boomer take BUT'#and u know what #i think criticism of technological determinism is actually essential to a democratic society #so COMPLAIN ON CURMUDGEONS #(i am the curmudgeon)#anyway #technology #society #old man yells at cloud #plz contribute #we shall call it democracy

3 notes · View notes

nathanielaaron · 2 years ago

Text

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

News Round-Up

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

By Eugyppius

I know that some of you are impatient with my posts about German politics, and particularly my repeated pieces on our retarded Health Minister. I get that this can seem like inside baseball, and that all of you suffer under the very similar idiocies of your own Covid politicians. But, I just can’t help myself. Lauterbach is a special case, a truly monumental idiot who in his boundless incompetence and stupidity vastly exceeds his peers. It is my aim to make him the international symbol of pandemic derangement. I want pictures of this human incarnation of everything that is wrong with masking children and force-vaccinating millions printed next to future dictionary entries on Covidianism. We have seen the enemy, and it is this sad, stupid, Smeagol-looking loser, who thinks Eric Feigl-Ding is an authority and that clip-on bowties are fashionable.

You must understand that Lauterbach is not only the dumbest federal politician Germany has ever had. He also ranks among the least competent, most bafflingly idiotic people ever to have attained prominence of any kind. He is a drunken tweeter who as Cabinet Minister once declared war on Russia. He is a dim salt-phobic eccentric whose own ex-wife declared him unfit for the responsibilities of a Cabinet position. He is a tireless advocate of mask mandates who in May 2021 was photographed totally maskless on a train to Hamburg.

He has written one of the saddest, most derivative and pointless Ph.D. dissertations I have ever read. He poses as an epidemiologist while routinely misinterpreting even the simplest scientific studies. His most memorable science fail was a tweet citing a “new American Mega [sic!] Study” showing that mask efficacy is “very great and uncontested”. His link led to a bizarre pre-print that was so bad, some concluded it had to be a hoax. When a serology study emerged showing that 95% of Germans had Covid antibodies, he denied the results meant the pandemic was over, inadvertently questioning the entire premise of mass vaccination. He spent much of early 2022 demanding that ever more people get fourth doses and even said he himself was quadruple vaccinated. Three months later he announced he had tested positive for Covid, declared his symptoms to be substantial, and then violated Berlin quarantine rules to attend a press conference, where he was stupid enough to flash his digital vaccine pass to the cameras. The QR code revealed that he had only ever received three jabs. His Ministry insisted he’d merely failed to register his second booster with the CoronaWarn app, but the next year he doubled down on his stupidity, allowing the press to photograph his physical vaccine records, showing only three doses were registered there as well.

At one point he proposed to exempt the recently vaccinated from indoor mask rules, saying that he hoped this would encourage further vaccine uptake. After polls showed that disturbingly large numbers of Germans were willing to accept quarterly vaccination for the privilege of mask exemptions, he said he’d withdraw the incentive if too many people took advantage of it. This summer, with the political relevance of Covid fading, he opened a new front against summer weather, announcing an initiative to call old people and remind them to drink water whenever temperatures get too high.

There has been such an unrelenting tidal wave of Lauterbachian moronicity that it has proven impossible to keep track of it all. He is an endless source of comedic content, a political lolcow who stumbles from embarrassing gaffe to embarrassing gaffe without ever seeming to notice. Last year, he appeared on national television and ranted bizarrely about the Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis and the Great Barrington Declaration. He seemed to be drunk, or perhaps under the influence of some medication, as he mashed his words about “certain scientists who are shared exponentially on social media”:

So there is exponential growth in viruses, and there is also an exponential growth in false information. You only need a few scientists for this… In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course. A Stanford scientist, Ioannidis, made a declaration, the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically said that the virus is not that dangerous, that it’s not killing people, that flu can be more dangerous and so on, a lot of things that just aren’t right. And this has been quoted incredibly often by these people, who are out there, and there are just far too many of them, who would like to hear the relieving message, “it’s not really that bad, we don’t have to do anything”.

The rant escaped notice at the time, but was recently unearthed by my Twitter friend @tomdabassman, who uploaded the clip with English subtitles. He tagged Stanford medical professor and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, who could hardly believe his eyes. Almost everything in Lauterbach’s rant was wrong, and he said so in a tweet that has now been viewed almost a million times:

Now, for better or worse, Germany looks up to America and prizes American academic culture. When a Stanford professor criticises the German Health Minister, the German press take notice.

First was a modest article in the Berlinzer Zeitung – ‘Harsh criticism from abroad: “Lauterbach seems not have any inkling”‘

Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya doesn’t see [Lauterbach’s statements] as a laughing matter. He wrote on Monday that he’s sorry the Germans had such an unqualified health minister during the Covid pandemic.

He countered Lauterbach’s statements with four points: firstly, Professor John Ioannidis is far from being an outmoded scholar and is one of the most frequently published and cited scientists on the subject of Covid. Secondly, he neither wrote nor signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Thirdly, even this declaration did not declare the virus to be harmless …. Fourthly, Bhattacharya says that “Lauterbach seems to have no idea of the damage his lockdown policy has done to the poor, children and the working class. Germany has worse Covid results than neighboring Sweden”.

The original tweet with the Lauterbach video has already been viewed 500,000 times; the tweeting Health Minister has not yet responded publicly to the Stanford professor’s message.

Then came Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany, with the headline ‘Stanford Professor has harsh criticism for Lauterbach‘:

In his Covid policy, Karl Lauterbach repeatedly talks about science, arguing with studies and articles. But, of all people, a renowned Covid scientist is now sharply criticising the German Health Minister!

Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya (50), an expert in health economics, has accused Lauterbach on X of being “incredibly misinformed about Covid science”.

The reason for the outrage: an RBB interview with Lauterbach from March 12th 2022.

In an interview excerpt shared by Bhattacharya, Lauterbach complained about an “exponential growth not only in viruses, but also in false reports. … In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course: a Stanford scientist, Ioannidis,” Lauterbach says. He is referring to John Ioannidis (58), Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University.

Statements that Bhattacharya won’t let stand!

“Professor John Ioannidis is not ‘worn out’ and is one of the most published/cited scientists on Covid,” he says… Furthermore, Ioannidis neither wrote nor signed the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’. And the Stanford professor clarifies in his counterattack on Lauterbach that the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ never claimed that the virus was “not dangerous.” … “Lauterbach seems to not have any inkling of the damage his lockdown policies did to the poor, to children, and to the working class,” says Bhattacharya. AND: The Stanford professor even calls Lauterbach “unqualified”.

Major blogs and online magazines like Reitschuster and Tichys Einblick have picked up the story, with headlines about how badly informed Bhattacharya finds Lauterbach to be. News.de calls Bhattacharya’s “public reprimand” a “bitter slap in the face” for the Health Minister; Der Westen says much the same, as does the television broadcaster ProSieben.

We desperately need more of this. I call upon Jay Bhattacharya to continue his attacks on the German Health Minister. He is a moronic pseudointellectual fraud and a menace, and the German people need to hear this from Stanford professors like him. Perhaps the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration could add their voices too. Surely John Ioannidis would also like to weigh in.

This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

COMMENTS

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

By Will Jones

What gives the relatives of Covid victims the sole right to the moral high ground, asks Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Lockdowns were devastating, and their victims were often far younger than those of Covid. Yet the Covid Inquiry puts the spotlight on the former while largely ignoring the latter. Here’s an excerpt.

I really must stop watching the Covid Inquiry, it’s bad for the blood pressure. Even the element of drama is lacking because we all know how this story ends: Lady Hallett, shaggy blonde bob shaking sorrowfully, will find that chaotic, ‘shopping-trolley’ Boris locked down too late (even though notably un-chaotic Germany only locked down two days earlier than us). Bad Boris also raised commonsense objections to lockdown and refused to keep the population masked and social distancing in perpetuity, as recommended by Susan ‘Stalin’s Nanny’ Michie of the SAGE scientific advisory group.

Given the choice between Boris’s hale-fellow magnanimity and Michie’s joyless authoritarianism, I know which I would choose, but that is very much not the preference of this appalling establishment sham.

Relatives of those who died from Covid are allowed to be present (holding up laminated photos of the deceased) which gives proceedings the feel of a tribunal in Revolutionary France hellbent on personal revenge rather than what they should be; a rational and honest assessment of whether shutting down the country was justified.

After the former Prime Minister apologised on Wednesday – “I understand the feelings of these victims and their families, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering,” said Boris – four protesters stood up, holding signs which said: “The dead can’t hear your apologies.”

What gives those people the right to sole occupancy of the moral high ground? Of course their losses are terribly sad, but the median age of death from Covid (about 83 years) was not that different to the normal life expectancy for men and women before the pandemic. What about younger people killed or traumatised by lockdown?

Where are the photos of the formerly happy girl who developed anorexia in 2020 and tragically took her own life (as recounted by the girl’s mother to a rightly upset Julia Hartley-Brewer on her Talk TV show)? How about the one million youngsters currently on a waiting list for mental-health services, a shocking queue that would stretch from London to Manchester?

Any portraits perchance at the Inquiry of the bereaved at funerals who were not allowed to console each other, not even when they lived in the same house for goodness sake? Or the pregnant women who went through miscarriages alone because, apparently, having the father with them was too much of a Covid risk?

How about the distraught, self-isolating spouses of confused and lonely care home residents who could not visit while staff trooped in gaily with their Tesco carrier bags? What about the grown men and women who still cry into their pillow at night fretting that their darling mum or dad died thinking they had abandoned them?

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

By Will Jones

When he appeared at the Covid Inquiry this week, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the issue and denounce lockdown as unnecessary and harmful. But he blew it, says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in UnHerd. Here’s an excerpt.

As a vocal Covid dissident and lockdown opponent throughout the pandemic, watching the U.K. Covid Inquiry these past few weeks has been a depressing experience. One gets the sense that both the people leading the inquiry and the vast majority of those questioned — the architects of the U.K.’s disastrously failed Covid policy — have learnt nothing.

At one point on Wednesday, Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the problem. The lead inquiry lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, asked the former Prime Minister whether the late March 2020 order to lock down the country was “absolutely necessary”. This was Johnson’s golden opportunity to confess the cardinal error of the U.K.’s pandemic strategy: that it imposed lockdown in the first place.

Instead, he averred that the U.K. had “no other tool” than lockdown available. Under questioning about his involvement in pandemic decision-making in January and February 2020, the ex-PM’s mea culpa centred on his regret that he had not “twigged” the seriousness of the Covid threat earlier.

One major problem with this reasoning is that by the time February 2020 rolled around, Covid was almost certainly more widespread than anyone realised because it had arrived earlier than anyone realised. In 2019, Chinese authorities delayed reporting the existence of the virus to the world. Studies of antibodies in stored blood and stored wastewater from across the globe — including Italy, the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere — found traces of Covid’s presence in autumn 2019, long before the world knew about it. Even a January 2020 lockdown would have been too late: our fate was sealed once the virus was abroad in the world.

“The inquiry has been marked by a studied lack of curiosity about the great control group of the pandemic: Sweden,” Dr. Bhattacharya continues. “But Sweden did better than nearly every other country on earth in protecting human life. It has among the world’s lowest cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. And it accomplished this feat without lockdown.”

Worth reading in full.

For the full story on early Covid spread, see here and here.

COMMENTS

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

By Will Jones

Bristol University has axed the National Anthem from its graduation ceremonies with some students claiming it is “old-fashioned” and “offensive to some”. The Mail has the story.

The anthem has not been played since last year’s ceremony with the university saying it regularly updates its graduation ceremonies.

God Save The King will now only be played when a member of the Royal Family is present.

Some students at the 147-year-old university have suggested the National Anthem was culled because it is “irrelevant”, “old-fashioned” or might even be “offensive to some”.

It comes just weeks after the university vowed to remove slave trader Edward Colston’s emblem from its logo, after his statue was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city in June 2020.

Layla Daynes, 21, told the Sun: “The monarchy isn’t really relevant to my generation, so it wouldn’t be missed.”

Free Speech Union director Toby Young asked: “Why are Britain’s most prestigious universities openly contemptuous of the country’s history and heritage?”

Worth reading in full.

If the point of multiculturalism – which many of the university bosses who make these decisions would swear by – is that we are supposed to be united as a nation despite sometimes massive differences in cultural outlook, how is axing the National Anthem – a prominent symbol of our nation as one people that transcends our differences – supposed to help with that? The suspicion must be that decisions like this are motivated primarily by hatred of country and its history than any honourable motive. Sidelining the National Anthem makes little sense even for the adherents of the multicultural creed – unless the point is just to do Britain down for its supposed ‘systemic racism’ and historic ‘colonialism’.

COMMENTS

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

By Will Jones

Tony Blair’s former Education Secretary Estelle Morris, who now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer, has backed Kemi Badenoch on trans rights by saying children should not be encouraged to change gender. The Telegraph has more.

Estelle Morris said pupils should be taught in biology lessons that there are only two sexes.

Speaking in a debate in the House of Lords, she warned that if teachers allowed children to “socially transition”, by referring to them by a different pronoun or name, it could cause them “psychological damage”.

She added that parents should always be informed if a child was struggling with their gender identity.

The comments go much further than the official Labour position, which so far has simply called on the Government to publish advice to schools on gender issues.

A group representing lesbian members of the Labour Party backed Equalities Minister Mrs Badenoch after she warned of an “epidemic” of gay children being told they were transgender.

The Lesbian Labour Group said: “How come a Tory minister can be right and Labour is so wrong?”

The Government has still not published long-awaited guidance for schools on how to deal with children who say they want to change gender, such as whether they should be allowed to take part in sports with children from the opposite biological sex.

I shudder to think what a Starmer-led Government will allow in our schools – it’s been bad enough under the Tories, whose ‘war on woke’ has often felt like little more than empty words from an administration powerless against the Blob.

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

By Will Jones

Scotland’s highest court has ruled the U.K. Government acted lawfully by vetoing Nicola Sturgeon’s self-ID gender laws in a humiliating defeat for First Minister Humza Yousaf. The Telegraph has more.

The

2 notes · View notes

ultramaga · 3 months ago

Text

Hang on - Downs is a terrible example. The brightest examples are about nine years old equivalents. There are many who legally can not make decisions. It's not like being blind or being in a wheelchair.

Now a dress is trivial. But the other decisions are not.

As for the wheelchair example, offices have dealt them for a century, that seems to be out of place.

Touchscreens replaced printed maps so being blind doesn't make you worse off than before.

If anything, the one blasting great example that should be used is the replacement of websites - which do accommodate disabilities - with apps and QR codes.

For example, the Australian government mandated the use of mobile phones. The trouble was, I have relatives who can't use them as the touchscreens don't detect their fingers.

Because the analogue network was removed, the crisis response relies on mobile phones, which will fail for many reasons in emergencies.

There are mobile phones that work with that disability BUT the Australian government decided that a weird variant of 5G was going to be mandatory, meaning it is a bitch to get many phones to work here.

Old and crippled people, as a result, are actually more vulnerable now thanks to the reliance on new technology.

There's a shotgun of bad examples here. I can not really address them all.

And yes, for the record, I'm disabled. Disability sucks. Expecting others to pay more to accommodate you is dubious, however.

I suspect a lot of business will just go broke trying to accommodate that dwarf, for example. Even working in an office for a call centre is quite difficult, as it also is if you are tall.

I was under six foot and still struggling, the taller men around me ended up leaving or getting back problems.

By the time I left, I think we had one standing desk, but essentially if you were disabled other than wheelchair, or just too tall, you were only working from home.

Wheelchairs were ok because, as I said, offices are pretty friendly for them.

I have to laugh because governments used to use websites with html to communicate information to the disabled. This worked very well.

Then they replaced them with PDFs, which are a nightmare in every way.

But they do it because everyone else does it, and they forget that the PDF was invented as a way to control and reduce the access to information, enforcing copyright, which is the exact opposite of what government websites should be doing.

It is done because it is done.

I used to try arguing with politicians about it. They could not grasp technology and just figured newer equals better.

just wanted to share the National Down Syndrome Society’s message for this year’s World Down Syndrome Day (21st March) 💛💙

#disability

82K notes · View notes

aartstroke · 3 days ago

Text

Health Supplements Labels Printing in Jaipur: Enhancing Brand Identity

In the rapidly growing health and wellness industry, health supplements have taken center stage, offering everything from vitamins and minerals to herbal extracts and protein powders. As the demand for these products continues to rise, the importance of professional health supplements labels printing in Jaipur becomes increasingly evident. High-quality labels not only provide essential information to consumers but also play a critical role in branding, marketing, and regulatory compliance.

The Growing Market for Health Supplements in Jaipur

Jaipur, known for its rich cultural heritage and emerging business landscape, is also witnessing significant growth in the health and wellness sector. With increasing awareness about personal health, fitness, and preventive healthcare, many businesses have ventured into the manufacturing and marketing of dietary supplements. In such a competitive market, the presentation of a product becomes crucial, making health supplements labels printing in Jaipur a vital service for local brands.

Why Labels Matter in Health Supplements

Labels are more than just decorative elements. They communicate crucial information such as:

Nutritional content

Dosage instructions

Ingredients

Allergen warnings

Manufacturing and expiry dates

Certifications (e.g., FSSAI, ISO, Organic)

A well-designed label helps establish trust with consumers by ensuring that the product is transparent and credible. Investing in professional health supplements labels printing in Jaipur ensures that all this information is clearly and attractively presented, giving a competitive edge to your product.

Key Features of Effective Supplement Labels

For a health supplement label to be effective, it must strike the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality. Here are some features that leading health supplements labels printing in Jaipur services focus on:

High Print Quality: Sharp, vibrant colors and clear fonts help your product stand out on shelves.

Durable Material: Labels should be resistant to moisture, UV exposure, and wear-and-tear, especially for products that may be stored for long periods.

Custom Shapes & Sizes: Tailored labels fit various bottle types and packaging styles.

Tamper-Proof Seals: Added security features enhance consumer trust.

Compliance Ready: Adherence to Indian and international labelling norms (like FSSAI and GMP).

Customization Options Available in Jaipur

Printing companies in Jaipur offer a wide range of customization options to help brands create unique, eye-catching designs. Whether you're aiming for a sleek, eco-conscious design or a vibrant, eye-catching label, local designers and printers can work with you to bring your vision to life.

Foil Stamping & Embossing: Adds a premium touch to labels.

Transparent & Matte Labels: Great for sleek, modern packaging.

Multi-Layer Labels: Ideal for products that require detailed instructions or multilingual information.

QR Codes & Barcodes: Enhances digital engagement and inventory tracking.

These advanced customization options offered through health supplements labels printing in Jaipur can significantly elevate your brand’s visibility and professionalism.

Regulatory Considerations

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) mandates specific labeling requirements for dietary supplements. This includes the display of nutritional facts, daily dosage, allergen information, and warning statements where applicable. Engaging a reliable service provider for health supplements labels printing in Jaipur ensures that your product meets all necessary legal requirements, thereby reducing the risk of recalls or penalties.

Local Advantages of Printing in Jaipur

Opting for local health supplements labels printing in Jaipur has several advantages:

Cost Efficiency: Local sourcing reduces transportation and logistics costs.

Faster Turnaround: Being geographically closer speeds up the design and delivery process.

Personalized Service: Face-to-face consultations with designers and print technicians ensure that your exact needs are met.

Support Local Economy: Partnering with Jaipur-based businesses promotes regional economic growth.

Finding the Right Printing Partner

When looking for a health supplements labels printing in Jaipur service, consider these factors:

Experience in Supplement Labeling: Choose a printer who understands the industry-specific needs.

Portfolio of Work: Review past projects to assess design and print quality.

Customer Reviews: Look for testimonials from other supplement brands.

Scalability: Make sure the provider can handle both small and large batch orders.

Conclusion

As the demand for health and dietary supplements continues to surge in India, standing out in the marketplace has never been more important. Professional health supplements labels printing in Jaipur offers an effective way to elevate your product’s visual appeal, build consumer trust, and ensure regulatory compliance. Whether you are a new startup or an established brand, investing in high-quality labels is an essential step towards long-term success in the health supplement industry.

By choosing local and experienced label printing services in Jaipur, you not only enhance your product’s credibility but also contribute to the vibrant business ecosystem of the Pink City.

#Health Supplements Labels Printing in Jaipur #Label Printing #custom sticker printing

0 notes

mysublimedestiny · 3 days ago

Text

Corrugated Fanfold Market: Key Growth Drivers Fueling Expansion in the Global Packaging Industry

Corrugated Fanfold Market Drivers

1. Boom in E-Commerce and Logistics

The rapid expansion of e-commerce remains the primary growth engine for the corrugated fanfold market. As consumers increasingly opt for online shopping—especially for electronics, perishable goods, and fragile items—companies demand reliable and efficient packaging that ensures safe, damage-free delivery. Corrugated fanfold fulfills this need with its cushioning and shock-absorbent properties.

In 2024, fanfold packaging captured approximately 43.3% share of the market, predominantly through the shipping, logistics, and e-commerce sectors. The global market valuation reached nearly US $9.56 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $13.9 billion by 2034, at a CAGR of around 3.8%.

Corrugated fanfold’s ability to integrate with automated packaging systems further fuels efficiency. Businesses save time and labor costs by feeding continuous fans of board into machinery—ideal for high-volume order fulfillment operations.

2. Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Packaging

Environmental concerns and regulatory pressures are strongly favoring recyclable and biodegradable materials. Corrugated fanfold, made from recycled paperboard, champions a sustainable alternative to plastic-based packaging.

Increased environmental awareness among consumers and corporations is driving demand for green solutions. As governments worldwide enact strict packaging regulations, companies are adopting fanfold to lower carbon footprints and meet eco-mandates.

Its easy recyclability and biodegradability help meet sustainability benchmarks, especially in Europe and North America, where legislation is encouraging circular economy practices.

3. Technological Advancements & Smart Packaging

Another crucial driver is the modernization of corrugated fanfold through technology integration—both in production and application.

Automated manufacturing through AI-powered cutting, folding, and printing systems enhances precision, reduces waste, and optimizes workflow. Smart supply chains using AI can anticipate demand and improve material usage.

Smart packaging features like RFID, QR codes, NFC, and temperature indicators boost functionality—enabling traceability, authentication, and consumer engagement.

Digital printing also offers brands elegant packaging with bespoke graphics, supporting customization and marketing goals. This creates a competitive edge and enhances brand identity.

4. Flexibility, Customization & Cost Efficiency

Corrugated fanfold offers significant adaptability across industries—food & beverage, personal care, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and industrial goods. Key attributes include:

Versatile design and customizable size options reduce material waste and ensure right-sized packaging.

Its continuous accordion format packs compactly and dispenses easily—optimizing warehouse space and minimizing handling time.

Cost savings accrue from reduced raw material use, labor optimization, and decreased shipping weight.

These attributes make it attractive for companies aiming to reduce packaging inventory while maintaining a scalable and efficient system.

5. Regional Growth & Emerging Markets

Growth dynamics vary regionally, with emerging economies expanding rapidly:

Asia-Pacific (notably India and China) leads in CAGR—India is projected at 5.8%, and China at 5.3% through 2034.

North America shows stable growth (2.2% CAGR in the U.S. and 4.2% in Canada), driven by sophisticated e-commerce infrastructure and a focus on sustainable packaging.

Globally, North America holds around 35%, Asia-Pacific 30%, and Europe 20% of the market share.

Urbanization, industrialization, and increasing consumer awareness in developing nations are spurring the uptake of cost-effective and sustainable fanfold solutions.

6. Competitive Landscape & Industry Consolidation

The fanfold sector is competitive and fragmented, characterized by strategic collaborations, innovation, and mergers & acquisitions:

Major players include International Paper, Smurfit Kappa, DS Smith, and WestRock, collectively holding approximately 38% market share.

Smaller firms and startups are innovating with on-demand packaging, eco-friendly cellulose blends, and digital print platforms.

Capacity expansions by key players in regions like Mexico, Poland, and Portugal are increasing production efficiencies and global reach.

These strategies help firms better serve local markets, reduce shipping costs, and comply with local regulations.

7. Challenges & Market Constraints

Despite strong growth drivers, the market faces several headwinds:

Raw material volatility: Fluctuations in kraft paper and pulp prices impact profitability and pricing strategies.

Competition from alternative packaging: Plastic and flexible packaging solutions remain cost-effective and moisture-resistant, posing a challenge to paper-based products.

Weight limitations: For certain heavy-duty applications, corrugated fanfold may not provide the necessary strength, leading firms to seek alternative packaging types.

Addressing these issues through R&D, new composites, and better material sourcing will be essential for sustained market performance.

8. Market Outlook & Opportunities

Looking ahead, several trends promise further expansion:

AI-driven production and customization will reduce waste and support tailored packaging.

Smart packaging innovations with embedded sensors and digital interactivity will redefine supply chain transparency and consumer experience.

Emerging markets with growing urban populations and increasing e-commerce penetration will continue fueling demand.

Sustainability initiatives led by corporations and government policies will further prioritize recyclable materials and circular economy models.

These factors combined make corrugated fanfold a resilient and future-ready packaging solution.

Conclusion

The corrugated fanfold market is propelled by a powerful synergy of factors: surging e-commerce, sustainability imperatives, automation and smart packaging innovation, and its inherent flexibility and cost efficiency. Though challenges like raw material fluctuations and alternative packaging exist, the market’s future remains promising. With global revenues expected to rise from $9.6 billion in 2024 to $13.9 billion by 2034, corrugated fanfold is set to play a transformative role in the next generation of packaging solutions.

#corrugated fanfold market #corrugated fanfold market drivers

0 notes

anviduby · 11 days ago

Text

Corrugated Sheets Market: Rising Adoption of Eco‑Friendly PP and PE Materials for Sustainable Packaging Solutions

1. 🌱 Market Overview & Growth Trajectory

The Corrugated Sheets Market—mostly made from polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE)—is gaining strong momentum. In 2021, PE corrugated packaging sales reached USD 2.5 billion and are projected to grow to about USD 4.0 billion by 2031 (CAGR ~4.8%).

Meanwhile, the global PP corrugated sheet market was valued at approximately USD 21.5 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly USD 31.0 billion by 2032 (CAGR ~3.3%) . Growth is fueled by lightweight, durable materials aligning with sustainability goals, especially in e-commerce, food & beverage, electronics, and construction sectors .

2. 🌍 Drivers: Sustainability & Functional Advantage

♻️ Environmental Regulation & Brand Image

Regulatory mandates—particularly in Europe—on recycling, single-use plastics, and plastic use incentives have encouraged a shift toward recyclable plastics like PP and PE . Companies increasingly seek materials with lower carbon footprints and better circularity, boosting demand for eco-friendly corrugated products. PP corrugated is recyclable and reusable, aligning with brand ESG goals .

📦 Durability & Reusability

Unlike single-use paperboard, plastic corrugated is water-, chemical-, and impact-resistant. It outperforms in heavy-duty, repeated-use applications and can be washed and reused hundreds of times—ideal for returnable packaging systems .

🛒 E‑Commerce & Industrial Needs

The surge in global e‑commerce demands packaging that is tough yet lightweight. Plastic corrugated is gaining ground in electronics, food, and pharma, offering anti-static, moisture-proof, and hygienic properties .

🌾 Construction & Agriculture Applications

Beyond packaging, PP and PE corrugated sheets are used in site protection, cladding, greenhouse panels, and agricultural structures. China’s market is growing with demand in these segments, expected to reach over USD 638 million by 2033 (CAGR ~7.9%) .

3. 🧩 Segment Focus: PP vs. PE

Polyethylene (PE) Corrugated

Market size: USD 2.5 billion (2021), projecting USD 4.0 billion by 2031 .

Main uses: food, pharma, e-commerce.

Properties: moisture resistance, chemical durability, and recyclability .

Polypropylene (PP) Corrugated

Market size: USD 21.5 billion (2023), reaching ~USD 31 billion by 2032 .

Poised for ~6% CAGR in Asia-Pacific and ~4.8% in North America .

Features: toughness, customizability, heat resistance.

Europe emphasizes returnable, recyclable PP mandating >30% recycled content .

4. ⚙️ Innovation & Market Advancements

Specialty Additives: Anti-static, flame-retardant, UV-resistant, dyeable corrosion-resistant grades emerging to meet industrial needs .

Smart Packaging: Integration of RFID tags, QR codes, and sensors for traceability, particularly for e‑commerce and cold chain .

Bio-based & Recycled Content: Movement toward post-consumer recycled PP (rPP), with regulatory pressure for 30% recycled content in Europe & NA .

Digital Printing Customization: Digital and UV printing on plastic corrugated enables branding and bespoke designs without compromising integrity .

5. 🛠 Challenges & Constraints

Raw Material Price Volatility: PP/PE prices fluctuate with crude oil markets; 25% swings over past years increase production cost .

Recycling Infrastructure Gaps: Only ~20–30% of plastic corrugated is recycled in some markets; many emerging nations lack proper facilities .

Regulatory Heterogeneity: Fragmented plastic regulations globally complicate material compliance and complicate supply chain for exporters.

Competition from Traditional Boards: Corrugated paper remains favored in consumer packaging for cost and compilerability despite lower durability .

6. 📈 Strategic Outlook & Forecast

PE corrugated packaging is expected to grow from USD 2.5B (2021) to USD 4B (2031) .

PP corrugated is forecast to reach USD 31B by 2032 .

China’s PP demand will rise rapidly (~CAGR 7.9%) to USD 638M by 2033 .

7. ✅ Recommendations for Stakeholders

Manufacturers

Scale up recycled-content and bio-based PP/PE production.

Invest in digital printing, and smart packaging features.

Develop specialized grades (anti-static, UV-stable, flame-retardant) to access industrial niches.

Brands & E‑tailers

Use durable, reusable packaging to lower total cost and waste.

Leverage custom printed corrugated to enhance branding and unboxing.

Incorporate materials with post-consumer content to strengthen ESG placement.

Policymakers

Establish recycling infrastructure and incentivize closed‑loop systems.

Set targets for minimum recycled-content in plastic corrugated.

Promote standard labeling to prevent greenwashing.

Investors

Invest in recycling and rPP manufacturing to fuel supply resiliency.

Support smart packaging and value-added corrugated innovations.

8. Final Thoughts: Joining Durability with Circularity

The rising adoption of eco-friendly PP and PE corrugated sheets showcases the intersection of sustainability, reuse, and industrial functionality. While cost and recycling logistics pose challenges, the market outlook remains bright supported by shifting consumer values, stronger regulations, e‑commerce and industrial growth.

By embracing recycled content, advanced manufacturing, smart-tech integration, and circular economy systems, industry players can meet environmental expectations while delivering durable, efficient packaging. This dual benefit—enhanced performance and sustainability—ushers in a future where packaging solutions are both smart and green.

0 notes