alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 880 Posts
  • 453 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • this is good, and its outcome will have significant implications for the NLRB (and agencies like it generally):

    The outcome of this legal battle has significant implications beyond the NLRB. It raises concerns about the broader threat to independent regulatory agencies and the precedent it could set for future administrations. While partisan shifts in agency leadership are normal, removing a duly confirmed Board Member in direct violation of the law is unprecedented and jeopardizes the stability of the NLRB’s mission to uphold workers’ rights.




















  • the tendency to just post bills that have been introduced without context is frustrating; actual reporting on the subject makes it clear this is not going to pass and even other Republican lawmakers are deeply skeptical of its legality and constitutionality (because it’s neither):

    House Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, vice chairman of the Judiciary B committee (one of two House committees that the bill has been referred to), expressed deep skepticism about Keen’s bill.

    “I’m concerned about the constitutionality of some of those provisions,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 24.

    The Republican lawmaker explained that he had not personally reviewed the bill, but he stressed that determining the legality of immigrants was above the jurisdiction of the state to begin with.

    “That’s within the purview of the federal government,” he said, adding he supports local law enforcement referring detainees to federal immigration services. But “the state doesn’t need to get in the business of enforcing federal immigration law,” he concluded.

    this is to say nothing of bounty hunters, who would actually enforce the law and have not been consulted on this bill because it’s not serious. the primary value of the bill is earned media stochastic terrorism, which is aided by posting it without this context. (this is an issue with trans-related bills too and has been for years.) please don’t aid in that–contextualizing this stuff is especially important now that organizations and people might need to triage their battles.




  • it should be noted this is almost entirely motivated by unions helping to kill several Republican referendum efforts in Utah last year. see here for more information on that:

    First, there was Amendment D, their attempt to grab more power over citizen-led initiatives. It was a classic overreach, and it flopped spectacularly when lawmakers forgot to follow some very basic constitutional procedures—like publishing it in newspapers statewide. Oops. (We wrote a whole substack about it here)

    Then came Amendment A, their big plan to strip a 100-year-old constitutional earmark protecting public education funding. Same deal as Amendent D, Utah Education Association (UEA) sued, pointing out that lawmakers, once again, failed to follow the rules. Instead of admitting their mistake, lawmakers doubled down, deciding that the real villains here were… teachers.

    So, what did lawmakers do after these double face plants? They could’ve taken a moment of self-reflection, maybe a little “live, laugh, learn” energy. Instead, they decided the real problem wasn’t their incompetence—it was the people who caught them. Enter HB267, their petty revenge plot against public sector unions, because when you can’t follow the rules, the next best thing is punishing the teachers who can.





  • Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

    Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.


  • Kind of annoying to have to click the damned link if the text can just be in the body of the post. What, do you work for PC gamer?

    no offense but why are you on a link aggregator (and a clone of Reddit in particular) if you’re averse to clicking links? that’s literally the point of this form of social media: emphasis on sharing interesting links from other places, with the expectation that you’ll follow them.

    in any case we strongly discourage the practice of copying the entire article because it’s technically copyright infringement, we generally expect people to actually engage with what’s posted instead of drive-by commenting, and it’s just generally bad form to rob writers of attention and click-throughs for their work.




  • Now, we have actual data about the impact of the law. The Shift Project took a comprehensive look at the impact that the new law had on California’s fast food industry between April 2024, when the law went into effect, and June 2024. The Shift Project specializes in surveying hourly workers working for large firms. As a result, it has “large samples of covered fast food workers in California as well as comparison workers in other states and in similar industries; and of having detailed measurement of wages, hours, staffing, and other channels of adjustment.”

    Despite the dire warnings from the restaurant industry and some media reports, the Shift Project’s study did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”