In which the pond keeps celebrating its freedumb and roams wild-eyed and free ...

 

 

The pond isn't sure how long this wild-eyed sense of freedumb will last, but as the song goes, it still felt like freedumb, it felt like breakin' those chains, it felt like never never looking back again, granddady used to say some things never change, I think he must've been right ...

A quick check on the reptiles, and there was Dame Groan whining about pesky furriners, Luke of Tasmania apparently not a Groan reader and celebrating our profound tolerance, Lloydie of the Amazon blathering about the Great Barrier Reef, and Henry the hole in the bucket man still on about Australia day, though it now seems like an eternity ago ... and as a bonus there was the lizard editorialist suggesting it was a time for a diplomatic reset with China, though the pond thought we were about to go to war over a WeChat account by Easter ...

Strangely, the pond didn't experience even a twinge of withdrawal symptoms. 

For an extended joke about that WeChat account, the pond instead turned to Zichen Wang, and The We-Chat blog named Scott Morrison ...

So what actually happened?
Someone likely surnamed Ji registered a WeChat blog and named it Scott Morrison. Then Ji migrated/transferred the WeChat blog to Fuzhou 985 Information Technology Ltd and the new name of the WeChat blog is now Australian Chinese New Life.

And so on. It's vastly amusing, and it certainly helps being able to translate Chinese, and for a nanosecond the pond thought it might be able to offload this blog on SloMo ...

As for the GBR, the Graudian had a story about it here which was replete with all the ironies the pond could stand ...

A re-elected Coalition would pour $1bn into Great Barrier Reef conservation projects over the next decade, the government says, just months after campaigning to prevent the reef being listed as “in danger” by the world heritage committee.
The announcement, to be made by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, in north Queensland on Friday, comes a fortnight after Labor pledged $163m to protect the natural wonder. It highlights the reef as a key election fight in the Cairns electorate of Leichhardt.
The funding pledge arrives just days before Australia is due to send a report to Unesco about the state of the reef and its plans to protect it, before a critical meeting of the world heritage committee scheduled for July in Russia...

 No need for Lloydie of the Amazon when you've got the hose-holding man dropping a lazy billion to fix a problem that allegedly didn't need to be fixed ...

And so on, with assorted loons sticking their fingers in the dyke to keep it plugged, while swearing to the heavens that everything has been, is, and will be okay ...

And just those two links reminds the pond of how constrained and corseted life had become under the reptiles, and how sweet freedumb tastes ...

In its natural habitat, the pond likes to roam wild-eyed and free, because it's a big world and there are many loons out there ...

There are ancient sites such as Crooks and Liars dedicated to US loonery of a righ wing kind, - you know Gaetzgate and sex with minors and such like - but of late the pond has developed a taste for the Daily Beast's cheat sheet, which is short, and speedy, and unlike the lizard Oz, provides links ...

In fact, its life blood depends on leaching content from others ... such as this story about Amazon ...

 

 

Having been trained by the reptiles, the pond immediately knew the right word: Orwellian.

It turns out that quick summary came from a Financial Times story, and if you liked, you could follow the link and get the original.

The pond had thought that the FT had a paywall, and indeed it does, but not to keep on hammering the point about the reptiles now living in lonely isolation in the attic at the top of the tower in a castle surrounded by a moat, with the drawbridge firmly up,  it's a little softer and more porous, so the pond could read ...

Amazon has abandoned its much-maligned campaign of paying employees to share positive messages on social media, scrubbing online messages that were meant to improve the tech giant’s image to potential workers it needs to achieve continued growth. The company set up its fulfilment centre ambassador scheme in 2018 as an effort to defend the $1.47tn company against growing hostility over safety and conditions at its warehouses. Amazon quietly shut down and removed all traces of the influence campaign at the end of last year, people with direct knowledge of the decision told the Financial Times. Senior Amazon executives, these people said, were unhappy with the scheme’s poor reach. The campaign also backfired when a number of spoof accounts gave the false impression some Amazon workers had gone rogue. Amazon declined to comment on the programme’s closure. Improving perception of Amazon’s workplace among policymakers and the public has become of paramount concern as the company battles global regulators and tries to expand its workforce to maintain delivery speeds. It has added more than 700,000 workers worldwide since the start of the pandemic and is the second biggest employer in the US, behind Walmart. But the cost of attracting new applicants, and labour-related losses in productivity, added an additional $2bn to its operating costs in its most recently reported quarter. According to a document obtained and published by The Intercept last year, fulfilment centre ambassadors received training on how to leave “no lie unchallenged”, with responses such as: “No, that’s not right. I worked in an Amazon FC for over four years and never saw anyone urinate in a bottle”. Handpicked workers were told to reply in a “blunt” but “polite” manner to what the company considered untruths posted by politicians, labour rights activists and indeed any other critics, although they were told not to target journalists. One typical tweet read: “I feel proud to work for Amazon — they’ve taken good care of me. Much better than some of my previous employers.” Others took aim at the suggestion Amazon workers did not have adequate time to take toilet breaks. Emphasis has now shifted to promoting live virtual tours of facilities and other forms of more traditional publicity.

It doesn't take much to trigger the pond and that yarn managed it.

It also reminded the pond of a movie it despised, Nomadland ... not just for the way it paraded Amazon, but apparently thought it neat to be given access and toe the line ...

Again it was only a quick jump and the pond was back in that turf, thanks to Vulture. Again they have a paywall, but it's soft, and allows brief sorties so the pond could read ...

 When journalist Jessica Bruder began reporting her 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the foreclosures and vaporized investments of the Great Recession were pushing many seniors to hit the road. She met elderly Americans across the country who were living out of vehicles to save their meager Social Security benefits and performing grueling physical labor to survive — people like then-64-year-old Linda May. A seasonal worker at CamperForce, Amazon’s jobs program for van-dwelling retirees, she experienced dizziness during her shifts at the Amazon warehouse that landed her in the emergency room and got a repetitive motion injury from using her scanner gun. Another CamperForce worker, 71-year-old Chuck Stout was knocked flat by a box that flew off the conveyor belt at Amazon, his head hitting the concrete floor with a thud; moments later, in-house medics had him back on his feet, declared he didn’t have a concussion, and sent him back to work.
The nomads didn’t get hurt only at Amazon. While working as a campground host in California, Linda May broke a rib while bear-proofing a dumpster; Charlene Swankie, 72, cracked three ribs while campground-hosting in the Rockies. While staffing an amusement park, Steve Booher, 68, fell from a loading platform and onto a conveyor belt, fracturing his skull. He died.
Bruder describes the nomads as “plug-and-play labor, the epitome of convenience for employers in search of seasonal staffing. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes … They aren’t around long enough to unionize. On jobs that are physically difficult, many are too tired even to socialize after their shifts.” As one 77-year-old worker told her: “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor.”
Reading Bruder, we understand that these “accidents” are the logical outcomes of an economic system that takes advantage of the country’s most vulnerable. So when 60-something protagonist Fern (Frances McDormand) rolls up in an old white van to work at a real Amazon warehouse in the first three minutes of Nomadland, director Chloé Zhao’s fictional film adaptation of Bruder’s book, we are tensed for class conflict. But Zhao’s adaptation, which follows Fern as she drives through majestic landscapes in the American west picking up temporary employment, is only superficially the same narrative...

Well yes, even blind Freddy could realise that there were obvious comparisons to make, though the film didn't make them  ...

 

 

 

That last one wasn't from Orson Welles' version of The Trial, it was from Billy Wilder's The Apartment, but you might need Jack Lemon in the foreground to spot it ...

 

 

 

 

 

Nomadland told a conventional, convenient lie ... but why should the pond bother when it has the Vulture analysis?

...What kind of film would Nomadland have been if the real nomads’ perspectives had been front and center? Amazon warehouse workers have reported walking up to twenty miles a day on concrete, carrying goods across massive warehouses while trying to beat a digital-countdown timer, with no benefits for CamperForce recruits besides a stipend to help cover campground fees. Near the end of Bruder’s book, Linda May offers a blistering take on Amazon, with a clarity that’s completely omitted from her performance in Zhao’s film: “I hate this fucking job,” she says, calling the company “probably the biggest slave owner in the world.” Another elderly CamperForce worker, Patty DiPino, confesses to Bruder that she tells her friends not to buy on Amazon. “I mean, the rich are getting richer while we’re sitting here getting poorer.” Bruder informs us that DiPino eventually dies of cancer. On DiPino’s Facebook page, a friend posts a memorial: “You are finally debt free and living in your forever home! No more freezing in the desert or in Kansas! No more cramped spaces … I will miss you dearly.”
These stories are blatantly absent from the film adaptation. By skipping over the mistreatment that circumscribes so many nomads’ final years, the filmmakers end up provincializing their experiences and diminishing them. It plays into platform capitalists’ favorite talking point: that temporary gig work, shorn of all rights and benefits, is what the workers want, because freedom! because flexibility! It portrays gig work as a refuge during hard times, when the truth is temporary jobs are often harder to find during crises like the pandemic — and only exacerbate workers’ uncertainty. By telling half the story, the film misses the core insight that made Bruder’s book so heart-wrenching: that there is no escape from the American economic system, and it preys upon the nomads continuously. Not only by leaving them houseless, but by then exploiting their precarity to work them straight into the ground.
Over the last year, the inhumanity Bruder described has been made plain. Amazon bosses have gained astonishing wealth while throwing their workers into the path of a virus that has left nearly half a million Americans dead. As I write this, Amazon workers in Alabama are voting on a historic unionization effort. They are protesting unsafe working conditions on the pandemic’s front lines; they want to be able to eat lunch and take bathroom breaks without fear of getting fired. The company’s all-out efforts to quash the movement speak volumes.
Not every story about the present needs to be explicitly political. But why cast actual survivors in a drama about their struggle, then invent a new, less vulnerable character just to water it down? It feels like a missed opportunity, as if the filmmakers squeezed real life into a narrative they hoped would resonate more broadly — but left out precisely what made it so urgent. For too many people, there’s no driving into the sunset. There’s just the edge of breaking down, again and again.

 

Each Sunday as the pond heads off early to do its supermarket shopping it spots some poor mug waiting to do a Deliveroo or an Uber, and deliver a coffee to some nearby hipster too lazy to get up, yet willing to fork over a couple of bucks to help perpetuate a modern form of penury and slavery ...

 

So the pond doesn't Amazon or Uber or Deliveroo or do all the other hipster things ...

 

Hipster, you ask? Isn't the pond being a little old-fashioned? Haven't the hipsters gone? 

 

Well no, because last night Colbert assured the pond that hipsters had returned, just ten years after their peak, and you can see it because it's not behind a hard paywall, it's on YouTube ... just as the pond was thinking of going KidCore or maybe Indie Sleaze ...

 

Well that fills in the time just as well as a wretched reptile click bait video, desperate to support a flailing, failing business model ...

 

And that's why the pond doesn't miss the reptiles, not for a nanosecond. Take another example ...

 

 

 

 

 

That one led the pond to the Tampa Bay Times ...

 

The pond knows little about Tampa Bay and even less about Florida, but it does understand that it once featured a footballer who did funny things with his balls, at least until this season, when his balls prematurely deflated ... and as for Ron and his picks, what that says about a Harvard education boggles the mind ...

 

 

 Thank you Tampa Bay Times ...

 

Where the pond would studiously cut out reptile links, it could happily leave that one in, because if someone wants to discover it they can ...

 

Whether it's Sarah Palin spreading Covid or Musking Truckers yearning to die from the bug, or a court action involving the bug, there's a link that will take the pond there, and it refreshes daily ... and as the pond has slagged off Amazon, it should surely do the same for Elon ...

 

 

That story was hoisted from Protocol ... and this excellent piece of nonsense was lifted from Raw Story ...

 

And that reminded the pond it had wasted precious seconds last night on a survivalist explaining how to survive an EMP event (electromagnetic pulse, for those without a bug out), just because it was there ... so much loonery, so little time ...

 

So does the pond miss the reptiles? Not in the slightest ...

 

Perhaps a final irony? Well if you want a Daily Beast story that they've hidden behind their paywall, try googling the header and likely enough, you'll end up on that other aggregator of others content, Yahoo News ... the US version, not the local one ... and be reading the content to your heart's content ...

 

Poor reptiles, now trapped in their Nomadland cages ...

 

All the pond needs is a cartoon to remind the pond of the driveling oscillating fan, pompous fuckwit that he is, and the pond is happy to have escaped the  reptiles' nest ...

 

 

 

 

And now as JM has asked, once the pond had lost its nominal Catholic religion, this became the pond's temple, its field of Tamworthian dreams of a Hollywood kind...

All gone, and in later times there was a tyre (tire if you will) store on the left that left the area smelling of rubber, but it was a grand old thing for small people ...

The pond could only find one blurry snap to evoke the interior, but it's the reason the pond still thinks fondly of callow, vulgar youffs rolling Jaffas down the aisle, and sending the chief Germanic usher into a Hitlerian frenzy ... (he actually had a German name of the Schultz kind) ...