#latestagecapitalism

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/getFANDOM/status/1179811656798556160

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[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/pizzahut/status/1183429032060182528

[Joe Molotov]

Dan’s angling to get a Pizza Hut divorce.

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/jadande/status/1183480314292822017

On Friday, the company announced that another subsidiary, the for-profit private school WeGrow, would close next year. The school, which opened in 2018 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is led by Rebekah Neumann, Mr. Neumann’s wife.

Like its corporate siblings, WeGrow vowed to revolutionize its industry — elementary school — and pledged to be “elevating the collective consciousness of the world by expanding happiness and unleashing every human’s superpowers.” The class day includes traditional academic subjects as well as yoga instruction, and offers lunches made in a meat-free cafeteria.

Tuition this year at WeGrow, which has about 100 students, started at $36,000 for 3-year-olds.

Whew.

[OnlyRegret]

(Image removed from quote.)

to be fair, this one can go either way
-miserable place of tears
-a place where someone feels comfortable enough to share personal issues/grief

[brawndolicious]

I've only seen tears when either management is abusive or someone fucked up something basic and wants to gain sympathy.

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https://twitter.com/RzstProgramming/status/1183970702975787010

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https://www.cbs17.com/news/high-levels-of-arsenic-found-in-bottled-water-sold-at-walmart-target-whole-foods/

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https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1138067701899890689

[Cerveza mas fina]

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1182093408946532352

Time to sue Heineken

[Nintex]

https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1184858279643504640

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https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1184446491928223744

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https://twitter.com/tnahardy15/status/1184972106783698945

[Akala]

https://twitter.com/getFANDOM/status/1179811656798556160

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https://twitter.com/pablonav1/status/1185292564372611072

[Crash Dummy]

https://twitter.com/jonbernhardt/status/1185290570534739968

[Rman]

We're definitely in the death throes of capitalism.  I do wonder if we can overcome all the mechanisms that enforce the controls, including apathy, endless amusement and entertainment, and so on.

[team filler]

make a thread and like my posts for the answer 

[Joe Molotov]

We're definitely in the death throes of capitalism.  I do wonder if we can overcome all the mechanisms that enforce the controls, including apathy, endless amusement and entertainment, and so on.

[Great Rumbler]

https://twitter.com/turing_police/status/1185683491041640448

LOOK AT ME

I AM THE CAPTAIN NOW

[Joe Molotov]

We're going to hell. ALL THE WAY

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half the facebook ads that show up in my feed seem like farce:

[OnlyRegret]

Can you blame anyone? Advertising to you seems like a minefield

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/JaniceForBART/status/1185209025148751873

NIMBYism probably isn't late stage capitalism, admittedly.

[Rman]

https://twitter.com/JaniceForBART/status/1185209025148751873

NIMBYism probably isn't late stage capitalism, admittedly.

In a sense yes, since the class struggle was something that Marx discussed thoroughly, which includes the breakdown of class solidarity. I highly doubt most NIMBYs are dominated by the traditional elites, as elites are way more secluded in their gated communities and cul de sacs.  But the same strategy by the elites of creating clear divisions, knowing real change would only happen with stronger class solidarity.

The professional class is pacified with mortgages, retirement and college savings, leisure, and real estate valuations.

Check out this great article on a formerly diverse neighborhood in NYC. Diverse not just in race but also in class. It's also a great example of how the elites have affected the urban environments, which were long-time bedrocks of the working class.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/10/09/what-happened-to-the-west-village/

The rich don't participate in the community. They order their lives around convenience technology, Amazon, Uber, DoorDash. Everything is "their property". You can't sit on brownstone stoops. There's no social cohesion.   A breakdown of social ties beyond the family. This is the end game of corporate capitalism, where everyone is a consumer.

Ironically, opponents of socialism believed that it would breakdown the family.  And you saw that with Leninism. However, corporate capitalism has been way more ruthless in dismantling all social ties.

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https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/1185930313182134272

[Rman]

Amazon has some draconian stuff when it comes to monitoring their warehouse workers, but they can't tell when collapses? I call BS.

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https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1185570285212389376

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https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/1185930313182134272

https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1179162066432606208

 

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/GarbageApe/status/1184198791018287105

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/CraigRowin/status/1184485114593472517

[Coax]

Check out this great article on a formerly diverse neighborhood in NYC. Diverse not just in race but also in class. It's also a great example of how the elites have affected the urban environments, which were long-time bedrocks of the working class.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/10/09/what-happened-to-the-west-village/

Enjoyed this piece. Readable, interesting and with well-shot accompanying photographs.

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https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1186075946417344512

[BisMarckie]

Who needs savings when you have two kids you can send to the coal mines?

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https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1186487339385872387

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https://twitter.com/ZakNguyen/status/1186505579587686400

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damn you! damn you all to hell! 

[OnlyRegret]

Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a city country to burn

[Joe Molotov]

10/19 never forget

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https://twitter.com/GillianTan/status/1186640209292746752

[tiesto]

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1186487339385872387

Sounds like an SMT plot waiting to happen...

[Joe Molotov]

Time to raid Heaven, boys. Let's see them angels.

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[Akala]

filtration aint free 

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https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1186786508247883776

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https://twitter.com/KieranMahon1/status/1186681963735928833

[bluemax]

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1186813578784858112

1. Found company based on tenuous legal loopholes and established concepts.
2. Claim you're better because TECH.
3. Raise tons of VC.
4. Get ready to IPO
5. Tank your company because you're an egocentric shit head.
6.
7. Profit!

Edit: Derp beaten

[headwalk]

https://twitter.com/tmorello/status/1185941049677508609

[EchoRin]

 

[Joe Molotov]

stolen valor?

[benjipwns]

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php

No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists

On March 20, Nancy Cooper, the editor in chief of Newsweek, sent an email to her editorial staff. The subject was “What is a Newsweek story?”—an odd question at an eighty-six-year-old newsmagazine once considered one of the “big three,” alongside Time and the US News & World Report. The email contained four requirements for any story published on Newsweek.com. One, it must contain original reporting. Two, it must provide a unique angle or new information. Three, the reader must care about it. And four, the news must be news.

These should have been reasonable requests, if not bare-minimum standards, for any journalist anywhere. But Cooper allowed her staff no time to meet these goals. A few months earlier she’d told reporters they’d have to write a minimum of four stories per day, and now they felt she was asking for more while giving less.

“We don’t want fewer stories or slower stories,” Cooper said in her email, “just to make every story we do better.”

Their first story is supposed to be filed by 9am, and before it can be written, the story must be pitched to an editor over Slack in the form of a headline. In theory, these headlines appeal both to a reader and to Google’s algorithms, but in practice the algorithm takes precedence. Editors sometimes suggest more viral headlines, or pitch headlines themselves using Google Trends or Chartbeat. (Lack of knowledge on a topic doesn’t stop them from assigning stories, which has led to Newsweek wrongly declaring that Japanese citizens want to go to war with North Korea and incorrectly reporting that the girlfriend of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock was a polygamist.)

Newsweek, of course, isn’t alone in crafting its headlines for a search engine; not even the New York Times is above writing “Who Is William Barr” or recapping talk show monologues. But at Newsweek, the headline can dictate the news, instead of the other way around.

“The approach we were taking to headlines was something a lot of writers objected to on an ongoing basis. They were a point of tension,” says Kastalia Medrano, who wrote for Newsweek’s science desk until February 2018.

Cooper’s push for original reporting is in part about writing for Google News, which promotes original reporting higher than aggregated pieces in search results. For the same reason, Newsweek reporters are instructed that a story must be a minimum of four hundred words; to hit this number, one reporter says, he would pad an article about a movie by listing the cast members or summarizing an actor’s previous film credits.

Another strategy to satisfy editors who demand new stories in as little as an hour: if two reporters are covering different angles on the same topic, the two stories might comprise largely the same summary, with only the lede containing new information.

“You’re chancing it half the time,” says a current Newsweek writer. “You’re being asked to write a story in two hours, and your editors are being asked to edit it in twenty minutes, and we’re all supposed to be experts on whatever it is the story’s about, even if we’re covering the entire world. It’s just not possible.”

Newsweek has tended to hire young reporters, many of them fresh from college papers or internships. In the course of my reporting for this piece, at least ten senior staffers left or were let go, their salaries freed up while Newsweek continued to look for “News Fellows,” contract employees working forty-hour weeks for $15 per hour, the minimum wage in New York City. (Job postings for Fellows have since closed.) Three former Fellows confirmed that they were expected to do the same amount of work as salaried reporters—a minimum of four stories a day, with no overtime—with the promise of being hired full-time after four months.

Until recently, a reporter could earn an extra $2,000 per month for stories that attracted six hundred thousand unique page views. Numerous current and former reporters told me that when interviewing for a job at Newsweek, editors told them not to worry about salaries between $35,000 and $45,000—about $10,000 less than the average entry-level reporter position in New York City—because their bonuses would earn them an additional $24,000 per year.

But the reality is that if you aren’t writing clickbait, the bonuses can be hard to get. And failing to get a traffic bonus, some said, puts a target on your back.

“The way the bonus was presented during my job interview was as a goal. It’s called a ‘bonus,’ after all. But as soon as I started, it became very clear that it was a minimum,” says Pereira.

A truer objective, I’m told, is a million uniques per month. Current and former reporters said that they felt less secure in their jobs when monthly averages fell below this figure. This summer, Newsweek’s publisher, Dayan Candappa, told reporters that he and management were considering raising the starting point for the bonus from six hundred thousand uniques to a million, alongside a base salary raise, noting that management wouldn’t allow raises without a concurrent change in the bonus scheme. Candappa noted at the time that he didn’t think a raise was in reporters’ best interest, since the updated bonus would be detrimental to their total compensation.

Then, in late August, new bonus payouts were indeed introduced. While the starting point for the monthly bonus stayed the same, at six hundred thousand unique page views, the payout was lowered from $2,000 to $400. Additionally, where before a difference of thirty thousand page views was the equivalent of an extra $100 in a reporter’s pocket, it now takes an extra hundred and fifty thousand page views to make that amount. As Candappa promised, the scheme was changed alongside a yearly base salary raise of about $10,000. Reporters who bring in a large amount of traffic can opt out of the change entirely, though their work will be held to higher quality standards that have yet to be defined. Offending stories won’t be included in the traffic count.

In an all-staff email sent September 9 announcing the change, Cooper explained, “The quality of our journalism is the essential consideration—whether on a substantial investigative report, a straightforward service offering or an entertaining lifestyle brief.” That same week, Google announced that its search rater guidelines will increasingly promote “original, in-depth, and investigative reporting” that “provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it.”

Last year, in response to complaints from reporters, Newsweek added group bonuses, meaning a news desk’s traffic-per-reporter was averaged and everyone could receive a small payout if certain goals were reached. The intent was for less popular but important beats, like climate change, to be balanced out by more popular stories in the same section. When the individual bonus system changed, these group bonuses were eliminated entirely, though editors can now nominate writers for bonuses based on journalistic excellence, regardless of readership.

Reporters at Newsweek are also ranked against one another on a shared Google spreadsheet that’s updated daily. The combination of the traffic reports and bonuses, along with Cooper and Candappa telling the newsroom that the company is broke, creates an environment where reporters feel as though their work isn’t valued except as interchangeable parts of a content machine. Most of the reporters I spoke to said they try to ignore the reports, but many former and current staffers say that the rankings are treated like a competition by those at the top, and that this is by design. Leadership spends significant time during staff meetings discussing who and what stories sit atop the spreadsheet.

This July, Candappa said during a staff meeting that story output can’t dip when reporters go on vacation, meaning that those in the office would have to write five or more pieces per day to cover for their absent colleagues. When New York bureau chief Jason Le Miere, who’d been at IBT, then Newsweek, for more than seven years, and Jen Glennon, deputy editor of entertainment and gaming, tried to defend their reporters, Candappa called them lazy. Le Miere and Glennon both resigned the following Monday.

Newsweek’s ownership has a history of finding unethical ways to avoid paying salaries. These allegedly include: illegally using foreign students for full-time work, subcontracting reporting for IBT’s Australian edition to writers in the Philippines, and paying its reporters once a month instead of biweekly, which is against the law. Last year, BuzzFeed News uncovered that IBT was running an ad fraud scheme. Fellows are tacitly made to work overtime, though their contracts say they won’t be paid for it, which is a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

These financial troubles are acutely felt in New York. Reporters have told me that they’ve come to work to find the phones disconnected, the Getty Images subscription suspended, and been told that Gmail would be locked. Computers run on Windows 8 and Newsweek uses a free version of Slack.

All of this is happening alongside an ongoing money-laundering case against Etienne Uzac, IBT’s founder and Newsweek’s former CEO, and seven alleged co-conspirators including Olivet University, an American college tied to The Community, a church once accused of being a cult. Uzac and other IBT Media leaders, who are members of the church, invented an accountant named Karen Smith to overvalue Newsweek in order to obtain $35 million in business loans. The money was supposed to be used to purchase computer servers, but was instead allegedly laundered through a fake equipment dealer and sent to Olivet. In order to pay off the original loans, more loans were taken out and the scheme was repeated in reverse, with money moving from Olivet to Newsweek and IBT Media.

Through all this, Newsweek has been publishing its print magazine.

The space freelancers once occupied has been partially taken up by new, inflammatory opinion writers like Ben Shapiro, Nigel Farage, and Newt Gingrich, who wrote the magazine’s May 10 cover story about China. These writers, I’m told, do get paid. Other recent Newsweek writers have included Charlie Kirk, discredited provocateur Andy Ngo, and former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, who wrote a thinly veiled advertisement for his new TV show about UFOs.

[benjipwns]

What's unfortunate about that VICE piece is that it focuses entirely on FACEBOOK. And treats it as some kind of special thing, when that's incredibly common. One of our favorite companies, Disney has been admonished multiple times by state officials for not making clear that their security forces do not have police powers despite being listed as employees of Reedy Creek which is wholly owned by Disney.

Almost any company with a footprint the size of Facebook has this kind of agreement. Although generally not the full control that Facebook seems to be using.

Hell, any university does. University police are often not granted complete police powers yet operate as if they have them. Even off-campus.

Sorry, not to defend it, just that was a long article so I kept scrolling hoping they'd mention it. But instead it was just more Facebook garbage.

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[Rman]

Is Branson Jewish?

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/leslieguttman/status/1187450626072088576

[bluemax]

half the facebook ads that show up in my feed seem like farce:

(Image removed from quote.)

I didn't cap it, but I had one today for a company with the following description: "Check out our new client Zin, a Craigslist casual encounter and Kik combined replacement app."

Like what.

I mean yes I know where I failed in life to get that as an ad, but still!

What's unfortunate about that VICE piece is that it focuses entirely on FACEBOOK. And treats it as some kind of special thing, when that's incredibly common. One of our favorite companies, Disney has been admonished multiple times by state officials for not making clear that their security forces do not have police powers despite being listed as employees of Reedy Creek which is wholly owned by Disney.

Almost any company with a footprint the size of Facebook has this kind of agreement. Although generally not the full control that Facebook seems to be using.

Hell, any university does. University police are often not granted complete police powers yet operate as if they have them. Even off-campus.

Sorry, not to defend it, just that was a long article so I kept scrolling hoping they'd mention it. But instead it was just more Facebook garbage.

I feel like I read a piece about how Snapchat did this when they came to Venice 5+ years ago! Probably also on Vice. Or Motherjones.

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