#products including managed

[brechtian]

It’s just like. Not to sound pretentious but the most obvious sign that someone isn’t actually deeply invested in theatre as an artform is the dismissal or lack of acknowledgement of theatre as a live medium defined by the real time exchange of audience and actors (and performers to one another!). it is living and breathing and above all about human connection. THAT is the most important thing about theatre and what sets it apart

[longagoitwastuesday]

undefined

Troisième acte scène XIV, Cyrano de Bergerac (Théâtre 14, mise-en-scène d'Henri Lazarini)

[torchickentacos]

[complexedandfruity]

entering my "applying for jobs that i think i am wildly underqualified for but in reality could probably have a shot at getting" era

[icewindandboringhorror]

Daily Log 5

Trying out (probably just temporarily) making short daily-ish notes about things, in an attempt to see if it helps me be more reflective or productive lol.

Activities: Not much, I had to run errands most of the day and also felt incredibly tired, probably because the cats woke me up like 4 times last night begging for food and things. Overly warm and headachey a lot.

I planted a few new flowers, and pressed more flowers and clovers in my Large Sturdy Flower Pressing Book as well.

Actually worked on translating the text for the previously mentioned tapestry/painting thing. I think I've decided that it doesn't really matter very much, because nobody else even knows anything about this conlang except for me, so they won't know if it's wrong lol.. It is not entirely completed after all (complete enough to translate most simple sentences into consistently, but also there are a few spots here and there where I haven't fully worked out the way some part of speech actually functions or etc., or I wrote down one thing that later contradicts something else, so occasionally I reach a sentence that I'm not sure exactly which rule to follow to translate, and I need to do a larger comprehensive organization of the document to work out all the kinks and declare officially like 'THIS is the ONE way this is done' etc. etc.) - so because of that, I think I'll just kind of 'do my best' and if the rules now end up changing in the future as I further work on the language, then, that's fine, because nobody can read it anyway lol. Kind of like that song on my side music youtube that's sung in genuine Avirrekava lyrics but also I wrote them years ago and some of the sentences have now become outdated/invalid.

Washed and cleaned some kale so it will be dry for me to maybe make silly kale chips tomorrow.

Final proofreading + posting of the poll adventure thing.

eughh,, literally nothing else.. I hate running errands because it always makes me feel drained and sick after, plus I get nothing else done all day except for just going places. I know checking my p.o. box and picking up cat food and stuff is technically still a productive action, but it just feels like.. i should be getting all of my long term projects done instead lol.. what about the videos?? or worldbuilding?? what does grocery shopping have to do with elves??!?! >:V (aside from pretending to be a group of fantasy creatures evaluating produce having an imaginary conversation with yourself at the store ghghj,, but that is not productive either lol)

Notable sights: Found 13 four leaf clovers, and 2 five leaf clovers, though one of them is almost a 6 leaf (like one of the leaves is nearly split all the way into a sort of heart shape, just not entirely). Also two of the clovers are HUGE, probably the biggest 4 leaf clovers I've ever collected, like 2 inches across maybe. The sky was very pretty a lot with big fluffy white clouds. Not a 'sight' really, but I got to sit in air conditioning for a little while today and it was very nice. I love the cold crisp kind of stale air smell, like walking into a freezer or something (which I used to do when I was a kid, I would sneak into a walk-in freezer at a school cafeteria and just sit there for a while lol), it's comforting to me.

Goals moving forward: Consistent sleep schedule. Focus on social activities, finding new friends in the places I want to move, communicating with ones I have. Physical therapy exercises. Plant nasturtiums. Finish and upload videos, edit costume pictures & etc. Do the new costumes I've planned. MAKE SCULPTURES at some point, I miss them.

Notable foods: Had a bit of smoked gouda and green onions in my Mandated Completely Plain Flavorless Grits For Breakfast this morning, as a littol treat lol.. Tried a 'biscoff' ice cream bar, which is generally a flavor profile I like, but I think I would usually rather be eating a cookie than having ice cream. Also an Ensure nutritional drink, which I know most people consider gross but I genuinely like them.. maybe it's like a source of comfort when my stomach is too sick to eat, like 'oh well at least I can have this cold smooth textured chalky chocolate thing' lol.

Sort of like how I have positive conditioning to feel safe/comfortable in bathrooms (due to it usually being one of the only places you can safely retreat from a social situation or get out of crowds in public areas, etc.), even though rationally I have no particular reason to like bathrooms much, and most people dislike public bathrooms especially. Fellow public bathroom and ensure nutritional shake lovers unite! (3 of us in the entire world)

[raiiny-bay]

officially over 13k words :-)

[thelightintheattic]

I need to re-compartmentalize myself

[sapphia]

USA please listen to me: the price of “teaching them a lesson” is too high. take it from New Zealand, who voted our Labour government out in the last election because they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted and got facism instead.

Trans rights are being attacked, public transport has been defunded, tax cuts issued for the wealthy, they've mass-defunded public services, cut and attacked the disability funding model, cut benefits, diverted transport funding to roads, cut all recent public transport subsidies, cancelled massive important infrastructure projects like damns and ferries (we are three ISLANDS), fast tracked mining, oil, and other massive environmentally detrimental projects and gave the power the to approve these projects singularly to three ministers who have been wined and dined by lobbyists of the companies that have put the bids in to approve them while one of the main minister infers he will not prioritise the protection of endangered species like the archeys frog over mining projects that do massive environmental harm. They have attacked indigenous rights in an attempt to negate the Treaty of Waitangi by “redefining it”; as a backup, they are also trying to remove all mentions of the treaty from legislation starting with our Child Protection laws no longer requiring social workers to consider the importance of Maori children’s culture when placing those children; when the Waitangi Tribunal who oversees indigenous matters sought to enquire about this, the Minister for Children blocked their enquiry in a breach of comity that was condemned in a ruling — too late to do anything — by our Supreme Court. They have repealed labour protections around pay and 90 day trials, reversed our smoking ban, cancelled our EV subsidy, cancelled our water infrastructure scheme that would have given Maori iwi a say in water asset management, cancelled our biggest city’s fuel tax, made our treasury and inland revenue departments less accountable, dispensed of our Productivity Commission, begun work on charter schools and military boot camps in an obvious push towards privatisation, cancelled grants for first home buyers, reduced access to emergency housing, allowed no cause evictions, cancelled our Maori health system that would have given Maori control over their own public medical care and funding, cut funding of services like budgeting advice and food banks, cancelled the consumer advocacy council, cancelled our medicine regulations, repealed free prescriptions, deferred multiple hospital builds, failed to deliver on pre-election medical promises, reversed a gun ban created in response to the mosque shootings, brought back three strikes = life sentence policy, increased minimum wage by half the recommended amount, cancelled fair pay for disabled workers, reduced wheelchair services, reversed our oil and gas exploration ban, cancelled our climate emergency fund, cut science research funding including climate research, removed limits on killing sea lions, cut funding for the climate change commission, weakened our methane targets, cancelled Significant National Areas protections, have begun reversing our ban on live exports. Much of this was passed under urgency.

It’s been six months.

[define-fluorescent]

Sigh. I just took my ADHD pills and now want to go out and take pictures of some bugs but I cannot,,, because of personal responsibilities,,, that I take the ADHD meds to perform

[gaast]

I got distracted for 15 minutes because my work computer says I need to make a 10-20-character PIN for BitLocker encryption. I already have like 4 different passwords I need to remember at this company and now I need a 5th. Die.

[fairuzfan]

Update: North Gaza Aid!

As part of his promise, Hussam sent 20% of your HelpGazaChildren donations ($4000) to Mahmoud AbuSalama for the 5th time now, including the earlier North Gaza Campaign (as location on our notion site) to buy food and necessary products for families still surviving the dire situation in North Gaza. The food package contains, as you see in the picture below: flour, lentils, canned food, formula, diapers, and women pads!

Please continue donating and spreading the word — every penny means so much! Feel free to share our campaign link to other platforms as well!

Donate to our GoFundMe which goes directly to Hussam, who manages camps in Rafah, with NO middleman in between!

HelpGazaChildren Notion Site || #helpgazachildren tag

GoFundMe Link

[Quick ID: The video is of Mahmoud speaking in front of bags of flour and a tumblr sign. There are captions to the video in english. The image below is of groups of packages of items in front of a tumblr sign.]

[ganesh85465]

WP Engine is a well-known managed WordPress hosting provider.

It offers a range of features and services tailored specifically for WordPress websites, making it a popular choice among businesses, bloggers, and developers who seek reliable, high-performance hosting solutions.

[foldingfittedsheets]

The mattress company I worked for the first time no longer exists. It was long ago eaten and assimilated by a bigger company. But when I started it was an incredibly intense five weeks of training. I was told I was extremely lucky to be selected, and I was. From a pool of a hundred applicants only fifteen of us made the cut to entering the training program.

The course covered how to talk to customers, how to ask open ended questions, how to close a sale, and product knowledge. I learned a lot, and truthfully my greatest takeaway was a lot of social scripts that I could use in other areas of my life.

We also had a midterm exam and a final. Both included a roleplay element with a trainer and a written portion. They told us when we started that the course was challenging but it was still a shock to come in after the midterm and realize half the class had failed.

I was named valedictorian of training- a dubious honor as it meant I’d done the best in the class, but popular lore had it that valedictorians struggled the most on the sales floor. Lo, I struggled.

Not because I wasn’t good. I was. But because my manager set out to systematically destroy my self esteem. Every sale, every interaction I had was scrutinized and criticized.

If I sold a bed with protectors, moveable base, and pillows he’d ask why I hadn’t managed to sell pillow protectors too. His first trainee had thrived on being challenged and he’d never bothered to learn a different way to coach.

It was wretched. My performance started strong but nosedived after a few weeks with him. My trainer, a man I loathed for stonewalling me in my interview, came in to inform me I was on new hire probation. If I couldn’t get my sales numbers up I’d be let go.

His actual phrasing was, “When you have a bandaid do you like to rip it off or pull it slowly?”

Since it was eminently obvious why he was visiting and because I thought it was condescending I sweetly informed him that I liked to soak my bandaids in hot water so they come off on their own.

He was briefly startled at this derailing but then got on with the bad news. I signed some forms stating that I understood my job was in peril.

I went home furious. I thought long and hard about why I wasn’t succeeding and how frustrated I was with my manager. I came in the next day and my anger had crystallized into a cold sharp edge.

My manager opened his mouth to address the probation and I snapped, “Just leave me alone. Go in the back if I have a sale. If you must address a serious issue then you will give me praise on two things I did right and present it as a compliment sandwich. Otherwise just say good job and shut up. Your constant nitpicking just makes me anxious and I do worse. Back off.” Belated and begrudging I added, “Please.”

He raised his eyebrows in dim surprise but I’d gauged him well. He backed off. Dutifully he’d meander into the back when I had a sale and praised me when I closed it. I resented knowing it was only because I’d demanded complimented but they still boosted me up. My numbers skyrocketed, I landed my first split king sale, and I exited probation with flying colors.

The trainer came back in to congratulate my manager for turning things around. To my gratification he gave me credit for setting him straight and said I’d taught him a different way to lead. My manager would often genuinely praise that moment when I’d stood up to him, impressed with my stubborn refusal to fail and my insight into what would help.

My biggest takeaway from the whole thing was just that people need positive reinforcement to succeed. Praise people for doing a good job. If you’re ever in a position where you need to criticize someone put it in a compliment sandwich instead of just saying the negative.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[arsenenicholas]

https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/nhs-cyp-guidance/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaadkVMoRUHpcFptnjlifnc1xJ0i7YGVi78tfv2vEXVaVIQDPTEp1-ozNcY_aem_AfqNP9xEERFn6GRCZCIP7B2RriLi8ZN7pVAFzmNwdvqIXW0nmc1mTe5Hq0UV3xC6VPWdYe1x64wHk7O6-HPOhIdf

Please share, tag someone who could bring this to a lot of people, and post to other platforms. Not originally mine, idk who is the source of the screenshots.

Image ID under cut

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In thick white text on black background-> NHS ENGLAND ARE PLANNING A HONEYPOT WHERE THEY SEND ALL KIDS ON GIDS WAITLIST TO CAHMS TO HAVE THEM BE ASKED IF THEY ARE TAKING BLOCKERS/HRT VIA PRIVATE OR DIY ROUTES

Text is broken and in the middle is an excerpt from a leaked nhs document-> a) For medication sourced directly (e.g via the internet), explain the increased risks of harm due to the unregulated nature of these medicines/products. These may include the use of counterfeit chemicals, unsafe/unknown ancilliary ingredients or variability of potency etc. More information can be found here (link to nhs website). // b) Do not initiate or continue prescribing puberty surpressing hormones or gender affirming hormones. The General Medical Council's guidance to medical professionals on 'bridging prescriptions (a course of endocrine intervention managed by a healthcare professional outside of the specialised gender service while an individual is waiting to be seen) does not apply to care offered to young people under 18 years of age. // c) If the child/young person or their carer disregards your advice and you consider that this puts the child/young person at increased risk, then a safeguarding referral might also be appropriate in line with standard safeguarding approaches. Discuss with your line manager and your organization's safeguarding team.

Thick white text on black background continues-> ANY WHO SAYS YES AND DO NOT DESIST FROM DOING SO WILL BE THREATENED WITH SAFEGUARDING REFERRAL (TAKEN INTO STATE CARE)

Next image ID:

In black text on white background, from the news article linked above-> It seems to us - and to those inside the NHS who have leaked the document to us - that what purports to be an "assessment" in fact an exercise in bringing very significant pressure to bear on trans youth and their families to cease private treatment, backed up with a threat of a safeguarding referral to social services if they do not. // We are concerned about what appears to be a misleading exercise in gathering data on which trans youth are obtaining private treatment from abroad, for the purposes of seeking to cause or compel them to stop treatment.

In the same thick white text on black background as previous image-> So an internal NHS document has been leaked basically asking trans kids on excruciatingly ling waiting lists to come to a 'mental health assessment' where the NHS will harvest their personal information & threaten their families with a social services referral if they're found to be on private blockers/hormones & refuse to come off them. // This country is for dogs i swear.