Strikes Keep Working

Content warning: This episode of Stuff Keeps Happening has mentions of animal abuse as well as police brutality. I do not go into graphic detail here, but a warning that the sources I have linked to expand on the details which some people may find disturbing or triggering.

Writers Strike Victories

On Monday, striking writers reached a tentative agreement with Hollywood executives after a months-long show of worker solidarity in the face of corporate greed. The union negotiators managed to get major wins in the space of royalties, protections from malicious cancellations by studios, and protections against the use of AI to replace creative workers.

Exact details are being finalized, and while the striking workers won big here, it's still worth noting how absolutely unnecessary all of this was. The workers asks were for a tiny portion of the immense profits that studios make, and executive could have, at any time, stood on the side of empowering the people who make the actual art that studios profit from. Instead, they tried to literally starve out their own workers, because they'd rather do that than give up even the slightest bit of their hoards of wealth.

Won't somebody think of the poor shareholders?

Having Your Car And Eating It Too

Ford is pausing work on a $3.5 Billion electric vehicle factory they are planning to build in Michigan, citing the United Auto Workers strike as making them scared.

Despite literally billions of dollars in publicly subsidized incentives to build the factory, Ford is hitting pause. In response, the state of Michigan is throwing more money at them, being like "okay but if we give you even more money maybe then you can still build it, UwU?"

Meanwhile, quoting ya boi Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers:

[This is] a shameful, barely-veiled threat by Ford to cut jobs…. We are simply asking for a just transition to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.

Big Cops Investigating Little Cops Doing Abuse

Last week, news broke about extensive torture and abuse from the Baton Rouge police department in Louisiana, who have been using an old warehouse to torture people they detain. They referred to the torture warehouse as the "Brave Cave."

The Baton Rouge police department is no stranger to scandals. Mostly because they do a ton of horrific bullshit, like, I dunno, bringing people to a warehouse and torturing them.

The FBI is launching a civil rights investigation into the department after the police chief claimed he was so concerned about the torture warehouse that he personally went to the FBI and was like "hey, check this out." According to him, and I quote, "There were some mistakes made."

Animal Abuse For No Fun, Just Profit

Elon Musk's Neuralink company wants to make a brain implant for humans, and has been experimenting on monkeys for several years now. During that time, it is understood that possibly thousands of animals have been killed by the company from testing, including monkeys who were put through excruciating pain before finally being euthanized.

Despite yet another attempt from Musk to totally fabricate a different reality, a report from Wired (Content warning: intense depictions of animal abuse) details the horrific scenarios that Neuralink created on otherwise healthy animals.

Musk directly claimed that they specifically only operated on monkeys that were "close to death already," which an employee has confirmed was a flat out lie. The SEC is now potentially investigating over the complete fabrications of the reality being sold to investors.

I will not detail the conditions here, as they are truly horrific. If you are interested, I recommend reading the original report. Please be warned that it is brutal, though, and if you're already upset by this, I encourage you to think about if you really need those explicit details.

On This day…

On this day in 1975, Spain used the death penalty for the (hopefully) last time. The state executed five people who were members of antifascist and separatist groups, sparking international criticism and an attempt at condemnation from the United Nations. I say "attempt," because while most countries were like "bro stop using the death penalty," the United States stepped in and was like "Well hold on now". Ultimately, a generalized statement about human rights was issued.

The United States remains in the vast minority of countries who still leverage the death penalty.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• Marking their 5th year anniversary, streaming video service Dropout will be finally killing off the vestige College Humor brand
• US Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has stated she would raise the age requirement for Social Security only for younger people. She previously said that "65 is way too low"
• An EU report found that Twitter has the highest ratio of false information and Russian propaganda of all the major social media platforms
• Game engine company Unity has reversed course on most of their new deeply disliked pricing plans, but the damage may already be done
• Reddit is planning to start payouts to users for posting content via Reddit Gold after losing a ton of site traffic during the recent user protests
• Amazon Prime Video will be showing ads soon, because of course it will
• A judge has ruled that Donald Trump committed billions of dollars worth of fraud with his real estate company, citing overwhelming evidence. The company may have to shut down entirely, but the true consequences will unfold over the next couple of weeks.