Sit-stand desks have gone from curiosity to legitimate ergonomic boon, and smart desk startup Stir is back with a new, cleverer and more affordable take on the standing desk. After surprising us with a touchscreen-controlled, high-end desk back in late 2013, the new Stir Kinetic Desk M1 takes the lessons of that $4k behemoth and translates them into something faster … Continue reading
A group of former McDonald’s workers from Virginia are suing their stores for racial discrimination and sexual harassment — and they’re taking the rare step of naming the world’s foremost fast-food company as a defendant in the suit.
The 10 plaintiffs — nine of whom are African-American, and one of whom is Hispanic — say they were wrongfully fired last year and replaced with mostly white workers because their managers believed there had been “too many black people [working] in the store.” The lawsuit (viewable here) alleges that women were harassed and groped and that minorities were subjected to racist taunts. It also claims that managers referred to one restaurant as “the ghetto store.”
Although it’s usually just franchisees that are sued under discrimination claims, in this case the plaintiffs are arguing that McDonald’s itself should be held responsible for the actions inside a franchised store. They say the fast-food giant should have to pay damages because it sets companywide policies and has the power to enforce them.
“In order to maximize its profit, McDonald’s Corporate has control over nearly every aspect of its restaurants’ operations,” the lawsuit asserts. “Though nominally independent, franchised McDonald’s restaurants are predominantly controlled by McDonald’s.”
The plaintiffs in the suit have received legal assistance from the NAACP and the group Fight for $15, which advocates on behalf of fast-food workers. According to the suit, the plaintiffs had a combined 50 years working at McDonald’s restaurants, 25 of them accrued by a 53-year-old shift manager who lost her job in July. The rest of the workers lost their jobs in a mass termination in May.
As the South Boston (Virginia) News & Record reported at the time, a total of 17 workers were abruptly fired from three McDonald’s restaurants in the area. All three locations were run by Michael Simon, owner of Soweva, the company that franchised the stores. At the time, workers told the paper they were informed they “didn’t fit the profile” that the company was looking for in its restaurants.
“Most, though not all, of the terminated employees are African-American,” the paper noted. “Most of the workers who remain on the job at the local McDonald’s also are black. So, too, is [Soweva owner] Simon.”
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs say that their white supervisors wanted to drop black workers from the payrolls because the stores were “too dark,” in a phrase attributed to one manager.
“I had no idea what they meant by the right profile until I saw everyone else that they fired as well,” Willie Betts, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement Thursday. “They took away the only source of income I have to support my family.”
Simon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement at the time of the firings, Simon denied that race was a factor, saying his company “has a strict policy of prohibiting any form of discrimination or harassment in hiring, termination or any other aspect of employment.”
In the lawsuit, the workers allege that when they brought their concerns to McDonald’s corporate, the company “took no actions to remedy” the firings. The workers are now seeking damages from the chain under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or sex.
“We asked McDonald’s corporate to help us get our jobs back, but the company told us to take our concerns to the franchisee — the same franchisee that just fired us,” Pamela Marable, another plaintiff, said in a statement this week.
“We have not seen the lawsuit, and cannot comment on its allegations, but will review the matter carefully,” McDonald’s said in a statement Thursday.
“McDonald’s has a long-standing history of embracing the diversity of employees, independent Franchisees, customers and suppliers, and discrimination is completely inconsistent with our values,” the company’s statement continued. “McDonald’s and our independent owner-operators share a commitment to the well-being and fair treatment of all people who work in McDonald’s restaurants.”
The lawsuit in Virginia is just the latest salvo in a broader fight against the franchise model. McDonald’s franchises roughly 90 percent of its stores, leaving the day-to-day operations to individual franchisees like Soweva. Since the franchisees run the stores, they’re the ones that tend to get sued when labor law is broken. That’s a major upside of the franchise model for companies like McDonald’s.
But unions and worker groups have been arguing in court and before agencies like the National Labor Relations Board that big chains such as McDonald’s should be held accountable for the working conditions inside the stores that bear their names.
Until now, that generally hasn’t been the case. But that could be changing on some fronts. The NLRB’s general counsel, for instance, has named McDonald’s as a “joint employer” alongside several of its franchisees accused of violating labor law during the fast-food strikes. If the agency were to view the workers as employed under one big umbrella — rather than by hundreds or thousands of individual franchisees — it would be much easier for the workers to unionize en masse. As it is, the fact that McDonald’s workers are technically employed by different franchisees means they would have to be unionized store by individual store.
Several lawsuits currently seek to hold McDonald’s responsible for wage theft allegedly committed by its franchisees. As with the discrimination complaint in Virginia, the plaintiffs in those suits argue that McDonald’s ultimately exerts control over the operations inside individual stores, and that it should be held accountable when the law is broken.
If you’re souring on winter, here’s something to sweeten your mood: Carrots taste better in January.
In a new video from Fig. 1, a University of California web series that takes a closer look at new research surrounding science, technology, arts and humanities, UCLA’s Liz Roth-Johnson explains why some vegetables, like carrots, have more sugar when the temperature drops.
“In order to defend itself against the cold, [carrots have] developed all these amazing physiological responses, including increasing the sugar content,” she says. “Increasing the sugar content helps defend against ice crystal formation, which can do all kinds of terrible things to cells like dehydrate them, crush them, rupture them. Along with many other responses, this increase in sugar content helps defend the carrot against frost and cold.”
One large carrot only has about 3.4 grams of sugar to begin with, according to Livestrong.com, so munching on carrots until spring could be a great alternative to the many sugary foods out there (a cup of yogurt, for example, can have up to 34 grams).
If carrots aren’t your thing, Boulder, Colorado’s Red Wagon Organic Farm points to other vegetables that bring on what they call “cold sweetening” in the wintertime. Veggies like cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and brussels sprouts all increase their sugar content in the winter, too, so get munching!
It’s not that the CEO of BlackBerry, John Chen, doesn’t know what Net Neutrality means. It’s just that he – and the rest of the company – want it to mean something that also happens to be extremely beneficial to them. Chen suggests that Net Neutrality should include apps and services, and that this means that Apple should be lawfully … Continue reading
Neanderthals generally get a bad rap.
If history is written by the winners, they are the world’s very first losers. After all, Neanderthals came out on the wrong end of the great evolutionary battle with our Homo Sapiens ancestors. Ever since, they have been portrayed as big, stupid, artless, lumbering brutes. Our smarter forebears wiped out the last trace of the creatures from Europe about 28,000 years ago in what might well have been history’s first genocide.
But this history is now being rewritten. Neanderthals, it turns out, were not stupid or artless. And they didn’t likely die out in an apocalyptic firefight with our ancestors. When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, it revealed an entirely different story.
And that story has some interesting implications for foreign policy as well.
Kissing Cousins
Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are cousins, having branched off from a common ancestor around 350,000 to 400,000 years ago. Neanderthals never seemed to have lived in Africa, for no sign of them has ever been found there. But they ranged widely across Eurasia and parts of the modern-day Middle East. And that’s where they encountered our ancestors spreading out from their African birthplace.
Readers of Jean Auel’s 1980 bestselling novel The Clan of the Cave Bear are well aware of the thesis that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon humans (an early modern version of Homo Sapiens) overlapped. The two lived side-by-side for as many as 17,000 years in Europe.
From the existing fossil record, the first modern humans made it to Europe as early as 45,000 years ago, while the last Neanderthals disappeared from Gibraltar about 28,000 years ago. But Europe was not exactly crisscrossed with high-speed trains in those days, so those Gibraltar holdouts probably never encountered any modern humans. It’s not clear whether the paths of the two species — and the evidence is accumulating that they were two separate species — ever crossed in Europe.
In the warmer regions of the Middle East, however, the two cousins may have cohabitated foras long as 60,000 years. That’s an astonishingly long time. Recorded history as we understand it has only lasted about 5,500 years. During that time, empires have risen and fallen, wars have raged, and entire peoples have disappeared. Only the Aboriginal culture in Australia has maintained any kind of cultural continuity over such vast stretches of time.
In 2010, when researchers sequenced the Neanderthal genome, they discovered some surprising results. Neanderthal DNA is in our genetic makeup – on average about 1-2 percent, with as much as 4 percent in some.
There are two theories about how this happened. The less interesting one is that we share DNA because of a shared ancestor. But that doesn’t explain why people in Africa today, where no evidence of Neanderthals has been found, lack any genetic link to them. According to the Neanderthal Genome Project, meanwhile, genetic mixing took place about 60,000 years ago in the Middle East.
Which brings us to theory two: sex. It is more than likely that some serious prehistoric hooking up went on not only between our precursors and Neanderthals, but also with otherNeanderthal-like cousins in Africa and Asia.
The new DNA evidence coincides with other discoveries that Neanderthals were not all that different from us. They created art. They had the capacity for speech. They created tools. They hunted. They cooked. Interbreeding between two similar cousin species is, literally, not inconceivable. Especially if they were in close proximity to one another for much longer than all of recorded history.
War and Peace, Neanderthal-style
All of this is interesting from the point of view of evolution. But it also has some interesting implications for foreign policy in three realms: war and peace, inter-social relations, and climate change.
The old narrative of two irreconcilable species fighting until one disappears from the fossil record has been challenged by a new narrative of amor vincit omnia: love conquers all.
Of course, to project our notions of love 50,000 years into the past is absurd. There could have been any number of circumstances in which Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens mated, not all of them so palatable by today’s standards. But given the percentage of shared DNA and the sheer amount of time that these cousins lived in the same place, the interbreeding was not likely to be accidental or only occasional. And this genetic sharing served the larger purpose of helping us — the latecomer to Eurasia — to adapt to the new environment. Whether Neanderthals ever offered a helping hand or not to the new arrivals, they certainly ended up offering a helping gene or two.
In our current narratives about two or more peoples struggling over common land — in Palestine, Ukraine, Bosnia — we focus on the economic motives, the cultural clashes, and the geopolitical considerations. Occasionally, a journalist looking for a feature story or a filmmaker eager to zero in on the “human element” will seize on the story of love across boundaries. In Bosnia, it was the story of the “Romeo and Juliet” couple — she Muslim and he Serbian — who tried to flee Sarajevo only to be shot by snipers as they attempted to cross the Vrbanja bridge. In the short film West Bank Story, an Israeli soldier falls in love with a Palestinian cashier in the midst of a conflict between the two families’ falafel stands.
These are the small anecdotes that storytellers use to illustrate the larger conflict. But perhaps these are really the most important stories. The war, the territory gained or lost, the political points scored: all of these pale in comparison to what matters in the long run. The “selfishness” of our genes — the evolutionary imperative to survive — impels us to acts of love and charity, as Richard Dawkins argued nearly 40 years ago.
It’s commonplace for those locked in social conflict to dehumanize the perceived adversary, to claim that that the Islamist or the Christian infidel is barbaric and not worthy of existence, that Ukrainians are “Europeans like us” while Russians are beyond the pale, that Koreans in the north are brainwashed automata while those in the South are mindful consumers.
But it’s useful to be reminded that even when modern humans encountered a genuine “other” in the form of Neanderthals and other cousins, we didn’t dehumanize them. We got as close as humanly possible.
Listening to Our Inner Neanderthal
It’s still not entirely clear why Neanderthals died out. They might have been simply absorbed through interbreeding. They might not have had sufficient numbers to compete for scarce resources. Or perhaps it had something to do with climate.
The extinction of the last Neanderthals coincided with Last Glacial Maximum, the peak of the last Ice Age. Europe was covered in ice and permafrost. It was not a particularly hospitable environment. According to the record of their tools, Neanderthals had to travel much further afield to find food as the climate cooled.
Or, if most Neanderthals died out even earlier, it could have been a single catastrophic event— the massive eruption of a volcano in Italy 39,000 years ago — that lowered the temperature and produced a die-off in most of Europe.
In either case, the Neanderthals couldn’t adapt quickly enough to survive. Of course, they couldn’t do anything to change the climate. The climate was changing of its own accord. And Neanderthals did whatever they could to adapt to the changing circumstances.
We big-brained modern humans, on the other hand, are largely responsible for our own current climate change. And we are responding with no particular urgency. At best, we’re only doing what the Neanderthals did, moving away from places that climate change has made inhospitable.
The Neanderthals had an option we don’t have. They could pass on their genetic inheritance by breeding with Homo Sapiens. But we are all there is at the moment. Yet with all our tool-making ingenuity, our social skills, and our ability to reflect on all the lessons of history and pre-history, we are ending up doing no better than the caveman.
Crossposted with Foreign Policy In Focus
Public finance for the beyond-the-grid solar sector is important, as tools like loan guarantees de-risk investment and enable private investment to flow into the market. U.S. government agencies like USAID, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) are among the agencies that support clean energy projects overseas. Recent developments in their support for the beyond-the-grid sector — and the emergence of new products in the field — show that the sector is maturing and continuing to attract investment.
In a recent press release, the USTDA and OPIC announced that the U.S.-Africa Clean Energy Finance (ACEF) initiative has achieved commitment of 100 percent of the initial project funds to be administered through the initiative. This is an exciting milestone for ACEF, which was launched by former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 and is an indication that funding continues to flow to clean energy access.
We’ve long been supportive of ACEF, which provides early-stage funding for clean energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa and plays a catalytic role in attracting private sector investment. So far, the initiative has committed funds to 30 clean energy projects in 10 countries, ranging from centralized grid-connected projects to small-scale projects in rural, off-grid areas.
ACEF’s support for off-grid companies like M-KOPA, Off-Grid Electric, d.light, and KMRI has made OPIC a leader among among U.S. agencies in terms of financing beyond-the-grid energy access, which has the power to change lives.
It is for this reason that we have been supportive of a clean Congressional reauthorization of OPIC and supportive of the U.S. government’s “Beyond the Grid” sub-initiative of the Power Africa initiative.
Outside of the investments from OPIC, there are also other investments by the U.S. government which show that the beyond-the-grid sector of clean energy continues to grow. For example, USAID’s Development Innovative Ventures (DIV) initiative invested $100,000 in Angaza Design in June 2013, a for-profit social enterprise which provides hardware and software for pay-as-you-go systems of financing pico-solar devices.
Companies like Angaza Design show that the off-grid solar sector is becoming a mature industry. While some companies are vertically integrated and try to handle all aspects of producing, managing, and distributing solar products, Angaza Design has focused exclusively on the Pay-As-You-Go segment of the supply chain, leading to a powerful ability to compile big data. This means that customers may have the opportunity to build credit profiles for the first time.
In an exciting development, Greenlight Planet has announced its launch of the Sun King Eco Easy Buy solar lamp which integrates Angaza Design’s Pay-As-You-Go platform. To date, Greenlight Planet has sold solar products to more than three million off-grid households in India and sub-Saharan Africa. The new product combines an existing solar lamp (Sun King Eco) with Angaza Design’s PAYG-specific sub-circuit, making this the first commercial demonstration of Angaza Design’s licensing business model.
The integrated product allows the lamp to “talk” to the cloud and react according to payment status, which is manually entered by distributors. This means that the product is “locked” if a payment has not been received. If customers later decide to upgrade to a higher wattage Greenlight Planet product, they can maintain their existing data record on the Angaza system and continue to develop their “credit” score. This system combines affordability for customers with reduced costs for companies that want to extend credit by allowing customers to remotely ensure that payments are being made.
These recent developments — public finance from OPIC’s ACEF initiative and an exciting new product from Greenlight Planet and Angaza Design — are an indication that investment continues to flow into the beyond-the-grid sector, that the industry is maturing, and that the tremendous need for energy access worldwide continues to drive innovation that is transforming how energy is delivered.
On Monday, Pope Francis may have made his most provocative statement yet. On a flight from Manila to Rome, he said that Catholics should not think they have to breed “like rabbits” in order to be good Catholics.
Even from a Pope who continues to surprise, this comment was startling. But while the casual listener may have gotten the sense Pope Francis was suddenly sanctioning modern contraception, he was only referring to “God given” church-approved methods, calling on couples to use the infamous rhythm method and abstain from sex on a woman’s most fertile days.
Unfortunately, there are no signs that the Catholic Church is changing its policy of denouncing modern contraceptive methods–whether the pill or the condom–even though these methods are much more effective than “natural” ones. In a recent poll, 78 percent of Catholics across all countries surveyed said they support the use of modern contraception, and the percentage is even higher in European and Latin American countries.
When the Pope made these comments he was returning from the Philippines, where after many years of struggle, the national Congress passed a law in late 2012 permitting the public health system to offer free contraceptives. Public opinion has clearly shifted in this majority Catholic country, where there is widespread interest and need for reproductive health services. Yet the Church stridently opposed this new law until the very end, and even challenged it (unsuccessfully) in court last year.
Even though the Church’s position on contraception is not widely held, its influence remains significant. In September 2015, the UN General Assembly will adopt a global set of Sustainable Development Goals to address climate change and eradicate poverty. The International Women’s Health Coalition and other women’s groups are advocating with governments at the UN to ensure that women’s human rights are a key part of these new goals. Although it is often in the minority in its views on sexual and reproductive health, the Holy See, the diplomatic arm of the Catholic Church at the UN, has consistently tried to disrupt progress in this area. In the past few months, the Holy See made common cause with the likes of Saudi Arabia and Iran in an attempt to thwart agreements on reproductive rights, sexual and reproductive health, and gender equality.
Pope Francis’s championing of anti-poverty measures is encouraging and much needed. Yet it is hard to see how without improving access to family planning and reproductive health services, women can realize their aspirations for a better life. As the global community sets the next development agenda, it’s critical that sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the human rights of women and girls more broadly, are an integral part of the plan. That will be the only way to lift the most vulnerable, whom Pope Francis is dedicated to helping, out of poverty.
Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities, said it’s going to take “integrated solutions” to help address the 21st century challenges many cities face.
“If you design a more walkable, more bikeable city, you both drop your carbon footprint but you also make your population healthier,” Berkowitz told HuffPost Live at Davos.
100 Resilient Cities is a $100 million commitment by The Rockefeller Foundation to build urban resilience worldwide. The effort aims to help cities that have experienced “acute shocks” like hurricanes, tornados or terrorism, and also cities that have “chronic stresses” like food, water and energy shortages.
Berkowitz said cities often recover after natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy in an inefficient way, and 100 Resilient Cities hopes to develop solutions that offer a better place to live while maintaining the natural environment.
“The instinct is to build back as it was, and really, Resilient’s thinking leads you to build back better and build back smarter,” Berkowitz said.
Below, more updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
The term emergent gameplay or emergent narrative refers to occurrences in games that arise out of the interactions of their mechanics. Some are intentionally induced by game designers, as with the open-ended gameplay of sandbox games or the multiple solutions offered by Scribblenauts. I’m not sure if that’s the case in this hilarious scene from Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
YouTuber gw0001 had just started the game when he witnessed a computer-on-computer crime. You can skip to the 0:20 mark if you want:
Nothing to see here. Move along Snake.
[via Reddit]
A new start-up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is offering a rather surprising service that women are really getting excited about. Graphic Stallions is an alternative to the standard bachelorette party, divorce celebration, or even birthday parties. Instead of the standard male strippers, full bar, and insane ogling, this option is a little more genteel. This is a life drawing party with a bit of bubbly and nude male models.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
