I’m on a two week trip to London and Ireland (yes, there will be UK graves and no, grave donations did not pay for them, not sure that the $20 a month I’m getting these days quite sent me here….) and so am getting more European labor news than usually. In the U.S., the quality of union leadership is a mixed bag. I suppose that’s inevitable in a sense, but you’d like it to be better. But the truth of the matter is that anytime money and power are involved, humans are likely to be tempted by corruption. That can lead to outright indifference to your own workers. And thus, here’s a really not great story from the UK labor movement.

One of the world’s best-paid trade union officials has been challenged over union-busting allegations as his workforce face losing their jobs.

In June, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) announced a cost-saving restructure which involves getting rid of 25% of its staff, putting around 50 roles at risk of redundancy. Every single rep for the ITF’s Unite branch is at risk. The ITF denies targeting union reps.

The ITF is a federation of hundreds of unions and represents 16.5 million workers around the world. Major British unions such as the RMT, Unite, ASLEF, GMB, PCS and TSSA are affiliated to the ITF. A French trade union has threatened to pull out of the federation if any cases of union busting are proven.

In July, workers from the ITF’s Unite branch lodged a complaint to Stephen Cotton, ITF general secretary. Workers wrote: “A hugely disproportionate impact of the proposed cuts falls on current or former union representatives, so much so as to amount to potential trade union victimisation.

“Our review of management’s proposed changes indicates that 100% of current or former union representatives in scope of the restructure have been placed at risk of redundancy … Ordinary members of the union who have been especially vocal – for example by posing challenging questions to leadership during recent all-staff meetings – have also been put at genuine risk of redundancy.”

Workers voted to strike over the proposed redundancies in July, but postponed the strikes as negotiations started.

Cotton is paid over £300,000 a year, likely making him one of the best-paid union general secretaries in the world. Often seen wearing a Rolex watch, Cotton has washed his hands of the redundancies. These are instead being handled by assistant general secretary Rob Johnston, who was caught up in a ballot-fixing scandal in 2002 when he worked at the Amicus union, which was Labour’s biggest donor at the time.

The Rolex is a great touch. At least Jimmy Hoffa had the class to not be personally corrupt and in fact lived in modest circumstances.

The post American Unions Not the Only Unions with Bad Leadership appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books, and like savages kiss their pages, although they cannot read a single letter.”  

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”

The historian David Bell explores (gift link) some of the parallels between the claims of 18th century enlightenment thinkers, and contemporary proponents of AI. He concludes that in the end the parallels break down in an ominous way:

It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.

By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.

What Bell is talking about is related to the broader problem of turning education into a consumer-driven for-profit (or quasi-profit because of our tax code) activity. If the central axiom of consumer capitalism is that the customer is always right, the whole basis of pedagogy might be said to be the opposite: the customer is always wrong, or at least often wrong, in ways that are not flattering to their self-esteem.

In a society in which money is basically God, how do we decouple the need for enlightenment and edification from a phony discourse in which students are told constantly that they are asking great questions, because it’s profitable to lie to them? That’s a great question.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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In this video entitled Rush Hour, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists have been edited together to produce dozens of heart-stopping near misses.

Reminds me of the world’s craziest intersection, traffic organized by color, intersections in the age of driverless cars, and the dangerous dance of NYC intersections. (via colossal)

[This is a vintage post originally from Sep 2014.]

Tags: Fernando Livschitz · timeless posts · traffic · video

While some billionaires are dumping their fortunes into space travel, it's nice to see others are still working to solve problems on Earth—namely, the production of food. Bill Gates has invested billions of dollars in agricultural development in Africa and South Asia, seeking more efficient means of feeding the needy. Now Dyson Farming, James Dyson's agricultural venture, is also making hi-tech strides in the sustainable production of food.

Dyson Farming has turned the company's brainiacs towards the challenge of sustainable, regenerative food production. They've developed a massive 26-acre facility in Carrington, Lincolnshire, designed specifically to satisfy Britain's appetite for strawberries, which are typically imported to the island nation. By growing them at scale and close to market, transportation emissions are reduced significantly.

But this is about more than strawberries, and will eventually have a significant impact on feeding people worldwide. The Lincolnshire facility is the testbed whose learnings will eventually be distributed. While Dyson Farming is profitable—they made £5.2 million (USD $7.1 million) last year—Dyson has invested some £500 million into the company. In other words, no one's chasing a 1% profit margin just so Brits can eat strawberries out-of-season. The larger mission is to harness technology in the name of sustainable agriculture.

To that end, Dyson Farming has developed a complicated but circular system. The company operates large-scale conventional farms that grow wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beet, onions and peas at scale, as well as sheep and cattle. In order to maintain soil health, the company rotates in maize, rye and barley between their main crop cycles. These latter three are "energy crops;" rather than being consumed, they are used as feedstock for the massive anaerobic digestion plant the company has designed and built.

This digestion plant takes those energy crops, as well as manure from the livestock, and uses microorganisms to convert it into biogas. The resultant gas—enough to power 10,000 British homes—is then used to power their giant strawberry glasshouse. Heat recovered from the digestion plant is also used to heat the glasshouse, while captured CO2 from the plant is pumped into the glasshouse to enhance plant growth.

The digestion plant's leftover material, called digestate, is nutrient-rich. It is harvested and used as fertilizer on the fields.

The result is a facility that produces 1,250 tons of strawberries a year, all using renewable electricity and heat, close to market. And the water used to water the plants is rainwater captured from the glasshouse's roof, stored in a purpose-built lagoon.

That's a lot of words, and I didn't even get into the massive rotating horizontal carousel Dyson's engineers built to expose the plants to maximum light. Check it out in the video below:

Quality rant from Drew Magary:

Last month, the New York Times conducted a survey that found that nearly half of the respondents who approved of President Donald Trump “had not heard much” about anything Trump has done over his first 100 days back in office. The government-sanctioned kidnapping and false imprisonment of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil? Nope. Trump allowing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to gut vital departments such as the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration? No idea. Tariff-fueled stock market losses? That was news to these people.  . . .

But with people like Jake Tapper around, news isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Tapper, the face of an entire news organization, would like you to believe that Biden’s downfall is still news in June 2025. In fact, he’s carrying on as if it were the only news story that matters, even as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are kidnapping people in plain sight. Even as Trump and his ghouls attempt to pass a bill that will annihilate Medicaid. Even as Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services secretary cancels vaccine research contracts that could save tens of millions of lives. While all of that wanton destruction is going on, CNN’s top anchor is busy telling the world that the “cover-up” surrounding Biden’s health is “worse than Watergate.”

That’s a laughable assertion given not just Trump’s current offenses but all of the offenses he committed the LAST time he was in office. These were scandals so grievous that they have their own names: Charlottesville, the first impeachment, the second impeachment, the insurrection. How many worse-than-Watergates did you and I witness Trump commit those first four years? How many are taking place right now, as I write this? Trump currently has the cognitive abilities of a tadpole and is letting his party burn the f—king house down. So I’m just a touch more concerned about all of that than about example No. 7,856 of Democrats being eternally clueless. . . .

When you remember all of that, it makes perfect sense that this monstrously self-absorbed dips—t wants you to believe that Joe Biden, currently dying of aggressive prostate cancer, is the biggest threat America is facing right now. In 2025. Jake Tapper clearly gives much more of a s—t about his book sales than he does the fate of our national education system. And he wears his cravenness in the guise of a Serious Newsman, which makes it all the more insulting.

I’m told that right now Fox News is pretty much The Joe Biden Coverup all the time. This is the alternative reality, with its alternative facts, that so many of those precious swing voters live in, either directly or at least impressionistically and atmospherically.

BTW one thing that isn’t appreciated nearly enough is that the Democrats handled an absolutely horrible situation last July basically flawlessly under the terrible circumstances. It wasn’t enough because we are a nation of incurious morons, in no small part because Jake Tapper et al find it profitable for themselves personally that it should be so.

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