Amazon is the fucking evil megacorporation from every near-future cyberpunk story they have warehouses full of wage slaves that can’t even take a piss or fall behind their ridiculous expectations without getting fired on the spot while their CEO is nearing trillionare status day by day while quite literally making local governments pay them to determine which city they install their next slave warehouse in and now their wiretap HAL 9000 bots that are in millions of houses all over the country are doing evil laughs and reading off names of cemeteries and funeral homes completely unprompted I know anger at amazon in general is very outrage-of-the-day basic entry level american leftist reaction but Jesus fucking Christ people
Another thing that just fucking rankles me about amazon is they offer 2 day shipping, then hand the job off to the United States postal service to complete the delivery, overloading their work force and underpaying the carriers to boot.
USPS gets paid per package delivered fee, which is flat, and Amazon does not have to submit to a weight limit for packages, unlike every other shipper.
USPS gets the raw end of the deal and bozo is a billionaire
? I mean I hate Amazon but I use Priority Mail flat rate boxes to ship my heavy Etsy items for a reason. If it fits, it ships, regardless of weight or destination, domestic, in 2 days. They don’t have weight limits.
I’m assuming you mean Amazon gets a different set of rates for that but I can’t find it. My Google skills must be lacking tonight.
amazon gives USPS a flat rate per package, regardless of size, or weight of said package. while USPS flat rate boxes only come in set sizes.
Thank you! I couldn’t find it via Google and I appreciate you explaining it to me.
And yeah, I knew about the Sunday deliveries.
yeah the way that usps has decided to handle this is a nightmare, in my area at least they’re hiring a TON of non-union workers, which means
1: paid less
2: worse hours (often more than 8 hours a day, and when i went to the interview one of the postmasters- thinking he was bragging about his best assistant carrier- said something like “one of my guys just did 29 days in a row without a day off”)
3: no/minimal vacation- NO work flexibility, like the impression i got at the interview was “dont ask for a day off because you might get fired”
4: its one of those jobs where you think you’re going home at 530 and then at 515 they ask you to do one more route and all of a sudden you’re there until 8
5: on call just in case a union carrier has to take a day off or cannot complete a route (due mostly to being too old to do that job but unable to retire yet)
6: the carrier assistants are also the ones who get to work sundays because, i quote, “we cant do that to the union guys”
7: if i remember right you get laid off after a year and have to reapply??? its something like that. and then on your second year THEN you can pay for your own healthcare through the company.
anyway the biggest thing i took away from my time on the dock at USPS and my application to be a carrier is that the non-union USPS workers and the amazon warehouse workers should ABSOLUTELY go on strike together and not return to work until workers at both companies are treated well.
Why the UK can, and should, make space for our indigenous minority languages.
The ten languages indigenous to the British Isles and still spoken today are English, Scots, British Sign Language, Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Angloromani and Shelta.
Signal boost for this! It’s the same in France. Most of french people don’t even know that their country is originally – and still is – a multilingual country.
Yes, Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Gallo, Flamand, Picard, Basque etc are still spoken. But France refuses to sign the European charter for minority languages. Good job destroying the cultural patrimony that we are so proud of.
“To say there is no worth in learning a language that isn’t economically
useful is like saying there’s no point in being friends with somebody
unless they’re going to help you get a better job. It’s a spectacular,
cynical miss of the point. It’s also inaccurate.”
On this day in 1869 Dmitrii Mendeleev sketched his first draft of the periodic table. While Mendeleev’s version remains the most common, alternative arrangements include circular, cylindrical, pyramidal, spiral, and triangular layouts. Indeed, Edward Mazurs chronicled over 140 types in his seminal work, Graphic Representations of the Periodic System over 100 Years! Which one gets your vote?
Vortex rings may look relatively calm, but they are concentrated regions of intensely spinning flow, as this poor jellyfish demonstrates. The rings form when a high-speed fluid gets pushed suddenly (and briefly) into a slower fluid. In the case of this bubble ring, a burst of air is pushed by a diver into relatively still water. The vorticity caused by the two areas of fluid trying to move past one another forms the ring. Like a spinning ice skater who pulls his arms inward, the narrow core of the vortex spins fast due to the conservation of angular momentum. Meanwhile, the bubble ring moves upward due to its buoyancy, pulling nearby water in as it goes. This catches the hapless jellyfish (who relies on vortex rings itself) and gives it quite a spin. But. don’t worry, the photographer confirmed that the jelly was okay after its ride. (Video credit: V. de Valles; via Ashlyn N.)
Between Oscar Isaac yelling “VIVA LATINOAMÉRICA, COCO!!!”, two of the producers being LGBT and thanking their spouses, the speech “With Coco, we tried to take a step forward toward a world where all children can grow up seeing characters in movies that look and talk and live like they do. Marginalized people deserve to feel like they belong. REPRESENTATION MATTERS.”……..the Coco win has been the best part of the Oscars so far
Today I learned that the university of Coimbra in Portugal has
a great 18th-century library, the Biblioteca Joanina, that maintains a colony of bats to effectively control the population of paper-eating insects called
papirófagos.
These bats are less than an inch long. They roost during the day behind the bookcases and come out at night. There doesn’t seem to be any English word for
papirófago, a cursory search turns up no details about what sort of insect they are, and ngl I am slightly concerned about them as a phenomenon. But I think my overarching point here is clear:
This library keeps tiny bats that look after the books.
A Middleground 