Sasha Akhavi @sakhavi@qoto.org

Exactly 14 years ago today—on July 24, 2009—the minimum wage was set at $7.25 while top 1% were worth $5T. Today, billionaire wealth is $45T+, meanwhile the min wage is still $7.25.

This is what generational wage theft looks like. Pay workers. Tax billionaires. #RaiseTheWage

I keep coming back to this quote from Thomas Paine in the Age of Reason as the perfect encapsulation of today's politics, "It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." Once you break with good-faith it's game over. :/

New X/Twitter logo found.

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

#startup #business #tech #technology @technology

Nurses went on strike.

Then graduate students.

Then school teachers.

Now it’s hotel employees, writers, and actors.

UPS drivers and auto workers may be next.

Many strikes, similar story:

Workers are sick and tired of billionaires and corporations hoarding wealth and power.

Unemployment rates are at a ten year low, there’s increased disparity between executive pay & worker pay and workers are awakening to how companies treat them with little regard especially highlighted by COVID.

These are perfect conditions for workers from Hollywood actors & writers to Teamsters to reclaim some power back from corporations. Fiat

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/summer-of-strikes-american-firms-face-650-000-worker-walkouts#

ICYMI, yesterday I wrote about a truly disturbing opinion column by Kathleen Parker for the Washington Post which was far more transphobic than I've seen previously in a mainstream US paper.

Parker suggests that the mere existence of trans people is a danger to children, echoing the eliminationist strain of rhetoric that has been normalized in the Republican party. #trans #journalism #media

https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/kathleen-parker-normalizes-extremism-in-the-washington-post