An Amazon union avoidance officer has reportedly told workers at the company’s JFK8 warehouse that there’s a possibility they could get lower pay than what they’re currently getting if they unionize. Motherboard has obtained an audio recording of a mandatory anti-union meeting that happened on Wednesday, wherein the officer could be heard describing the collective bargaining process. “The negotiation phase of the process is called collective bargaining, and in the negotiation, there are no guarantees. You can end up with better, the same, or worse than you already have,” the officer said.
An employee then cuts in and asks what they mean that workers could end up with worse, and the officer responds that there are no guarantees what would happen: “We can’t promise what’s going to happen. Amazon can’t promise you that they’re going to walk into negotiations and that the negotiations will start from the same [pay and benefits workers have already]. They could start from minimum wage for instance. I don’t think that will happen, but it’s a possibility.”
“So you’re saying that Amazon’s gonna say…” the worker said, to which the officer responded: “I just said I’m not saying that.” When the worker asked “So why put that out there?,” the officer completely changed the topic. In addition, the officer also talked about how workers will be liable to pay union dues if they unionize and that there’s no limit to how much they could be charged in New York. The election will have “significant and binding consequences not just for yourselves but for future associates, your coworkers, and potentially for your family,” they warned.
Frank Kearl, the lawyer representing workers at JFK8, told Motherboard:
“The [union avoidance consultant] makes the threat and tries to walk it back but once you’ve poisoned the well you can’t take it back. Even though she realized she made a mistake in making the threat, it doesn’t mean the threat wasn’t made and heard by all the workers who were forced to sit in on that session. It’s against the law and an unfair labor practice to make a threat of reprisal.”
The National Labor Relations Board had previously accused Amazon of threatening, surveilling and interrogating workers at its JFK8 warehouse to discourage them from unionizing. A union avoidance consultant reportedly told them back then that organizing at the warehouse would fail anyway, because the organizers were “thugs.” Amazon denied the allegations.
The Amazon Labor Union, which is an independent group seeking to represent workers in the company, successfully collected enough signatures at JFK8 in its second attempt to unionize. Amazon and the ALU have reached an agreement to hold an in-person union vote at the facility between March 25th and March 30th.
A recent batch of SpaceX’s Starlink internet-beaming cubesats met with tragedy on February 3rd when a 49-member cohort of the newly-launched satellites encountered a strong geomagnetic storm in orbit.
“These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches,” SpaceX wrote in a blog update last Wednesday. “The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag.” Unfortunately, 40 of the satellites never came out of safe mode and, as of Wednesday’s announcement, are expected to, if they haven’t already, fall to their doom in Earth’s atmosphere.
The NOAA defines geomagnetic storms as “a major disturbance of Earth’s magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.” Solar winds, composed of plasma and high-energy particles, are ejected from the Sun’s outermost coronal layers and carry the same charge as the sun’s magnetic field, oriented either North or South.
When that charged solar wind hits Earth’s magnetosphere — moreso if it is especially energetic or carries a southern polarization — it can cause magnetic reconnection of the dayside magnetopause. This, in turn, accelerates plasma in that region down the atmosphere’s magnetic field lines towards the planet’s poles where the added energy excites nitrogen and oxygen atoms to generate the Northern Lights aurora effect. That extra energy also causes the magnetosphere itself to oscillate, creating electrical currents which further disrupt the region’s magnetic fields — all of which make up magnetic storms.
“Storms also result in intense currents in the magnetosphere, changes in the radiation belts, and changes in the ionosphere, including heating the ionosphere and upper atmosphere region called the thermosphere,” notes the NOAA. “In space, a ring of westward current around Earth produces magnetic disturbances on the ground.”
Basically, when the Sun belches out a massive blast of solar wind, it travels through space and smacks into the Earth’s magnetic shell where all that energy infuses into the planet’s magnetic field, causing electrical chaos while making a bunch of atoms in the upper reaches of the atmosphere jiggle in just the right way to create a light show. Behold, the majesty of our cosmos, the celestial equivalent of waving away a wet burp from the slob next to you at the bar.
Solar flares occur with varying frequency depending on where the Sun is in its 11-year solar cycle with fewer than one happening each week during solar minimums to multiple flares daily during the maximal period. Their intensities oscillate similarly, though if the electromagnetic storm of 1859 — the largest such event on record, dubbed the Carrington Event — were to occur today, its damage to Earth’s satellite and telecom systems is estimated to run in the trillions of US dollars, requiring months if not years of repairs to undo. The event pushed the Northern aurora borealis as far south as the Caribbean and energized telegraph lines to the point of combustion. A similar storm in March of 1989 was only as third as powerful as Carrington but it still managed to straight up melt an electrical transformer in New Jersey as well as knock out Quebec’s power grid in a matter of seconds, stranding 6 million customers in the dark for nine hours until the system’s equipment could be sequentially checked and reset.
“A worst-case solar storm could have an economic impact similar to a category 5 hurricane or a tsunami,” Dr. Sten Odenwald of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in 2017. “There are more than 900 working satellites with an estimated replacement value of $170 billion to $230 billion, supporting a $90 billion-per-year industry. One scenario showed a ‘superstorm’ costing as much as $70 billion due to a combination of lost satellites, service loss, and profit loss.”
Most importantly to SpaceX, solar storms can increase the amount of drag the upper edges of the atmosphere exert upon passing spacecraft. There isn’t much atmosphere in low Earth orbit where the ISS and a majority of satellites reside but there is enough to cause a noticeable amount of drag on passing objects. This drag increases during daylight hours as the Sun’s energy excites atoms in lower regions of the atmosphere pushing them higher into LEO and creating a higher-density layer that satellites have to push through. Geomagnetic storms can exacerbate this effect by producing large short-term increases in the upper atmosphere’s temperature and density.
NOAA
“There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire US,” University of Michigan researcher, Gabor Toth, said in a press statement last August. “One is a pandemic. And the other is an extreme space weather event.”
“We have all these technological assets that are at risk,” he continued. “If an extreme event like the one in 1859 happened again, it would completely destroy the power grid and satellite and communications systems — the stakes are much higher.”
Austin Brenner, University of Michigan
In order to extend the time between a solar eruption and its resulting winds slamming into our magnetosphere, Toth and his team have worked to develop the Geospace Model version 2.0 (which is what the NOAA currently employs) using state-of-the-art computer learning systems and statistical analysis schemes. With it, astronomers and power grid operators are afforded a scant 30 minutes of advanced warning before solar winds reach the planet — just enough time to put vital electrical systems into standby mode or otherwise mitigate the storm’s impact.
Toth’s team relies on X-ray and UV data “from a satellite measuring plasma parameters one million miles away from the Earth,” he explained, in order to spot coronal mass ejections as they happen. “From that point, we can run a model and predict the arrival time and impact of magnetic events,” Toth said.
NASA has developed and launched a number of missions in recent years to better predict the tumultuous behavior of our local star. In 2006, for example, the space agency launched the STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission in which a pair of observatories measured the “flow of energy and matter” from the Sun to Earth. Currently, NASA is working on two more missions — Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) and HelioSwarm — to more fully understand the Sun-Earth connection.
“MUSE and HelioSwarm will provide new and deeper insight into the solar atmosphere and space weather,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a February news release. “These missions not only extend the science of our other heliophysics missions—they also provide a unique perspective and a novel approach to understanding the mysteries of our star.”
MUSE aims to study the forces that heat the corona and drive eruptions in that solar layer. “MUSE will help us fill crucial gaps in knowledge pertaining to the Sun-Earth connection,” Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, added. “It will provide more insight into space weather and complements a host of other missions within the heliophysics mission fleet.”
The HelioSwarm, on the other hand, is actually a collection of nine spacecraft tasked with taking “first multiscale in-space measurements of fluctuations in the magnetic field and motions of the solar wind.”
“The technical innovation of HelioSwarm’s small satellites operating together as a constellation provides the unique ability to investigate turbulence and its evolution in the solar wind,” Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division, said.
These ongoing research efforts to better comprehend our place in the solar system and how to be neighborly with the massive nuclear fusion reactor down the celestial block are sure to prove vital as humanity’s telecommunications technologies continue to mature. Because, no matter how hardened our systems, we simply cannot afford a repeat of 1859.
Those who play Fortnite on console, for instance, don’t need to create a full Epic account. Instead, they’ll have a “nameless” Epic Games account that doesn’t have its own display name or an email address attached to it. Fortnite had more than 350 million registered players as of May 2020, and those appear to make up a significant proportion of that 500 million figure.
The Epic Games Store hit more than 194 million users in 2021, an increase of 34 million from the previous year. The company said that “daily active users peaked at 31.1 million, and peak concurrent users reached 13.2 million,” while there were 62 million monthly active users in December.
The publisher has invested heavily in its free PC games program, which will continue for at least the rest of this year. Documents that emerged from Epic’s legal battle with Apple showed that it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the endeavor. Last year, Epic gave away 89 different titles and 765 million free games overall.
Offering Grand Theft Auto V at no cost brought in 7 million new Epic Games Store users in a single day, as The Vergenotes. Giveaways for the likes of Civilization VI, World War Z and Subnautica led to smaller, but still notable spikes in new user numbers. Rocket League switching to a free-to-play model boosted user numbers too.
Players spent around $840 million in the store in 2021, an increase of 20 percent from 2020. Just over a third of that was spent on third-party games. The biggest third-party titles on the store last year were Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, Hitman 3, Far Cry 6, Genshin Impact, Darkest Dungeon, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Chivalry 2 and GTA V.
Meanwhile, Epic says there have been more than 6 million downloads of The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experienceacross PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in two months. The tech demo, which is well worth checking out, shows off what UE5 can do. There was also a 40 percent increase in the number of Unreal Engine downloads last year, while Epic says 48 percent of announced current-gen games are being built on Unreal Engine.
“Public officials should remove all conflicts of interest — whether you’re at the federal or the state level,” the Democratic senator said of the ethics proposals.
When you take an Uber, you get to rate your driver at the end of the trip, while your driver gets to rate you. This lets both future drivers and riders know a bit about each other, so a driver with a lower-than-average rating might not be as preferred, while a rider with a similarly low rating could also find it harder to get rides.
However, if you’re interested in finding more details about your rating as a ride, then you’ll be pleased to learn that Uber has since announced that they will be providing users with a more detailed breakdown of the ratings that they’ve received from their drivers.
According to Uber, “Starting today, all Uber users can access a breakdown of their average rating in the Uber app’s new Privacy Center. You’ll see how many drivers gave you a stellar 5-star rating, how many handed out the dreaded single star, and everything in between.” Now, there won’t actually be any comments attached to these ratings, it’s not like an Amazon review.
Instead, users will be able to see how many stars they’ve received, what the majority of their ratings are, and so on. Uber notes that these ratings aren’t necessarily in real-time, so you won’t exactly be able to check which particular driver gave you what rating, but it might still be helpful anyway.
The problem with having a public social media profile is that pretty much anyone in the world can see what you post and write. This in turn leaves users open to trolls and harassment by people that they don’t know. This is also why Twitter, back in 2021, introduced a Safety Mode.
The feature was introduced last year where it was initially only available to a small handful of users as part of a test. However, Twitter has since announced that they will be expanding the coverage of Safety Mode to more users and also more countries. This will cover about 50% of accounts from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.
Remember when we began testing a new feature called Safety Mode? After months of feedback from beta users, we’re excited to expand this to some of you in several new English-speaking markets to gain more feedback and insights. https://t.co/8TM7S5Zfujpic.twitter.com/AqVOUwyNQv
Note that this isn’t a full rollout yet so it appears that Twitter is still testing out the feature and are essentially just expanding on the number of users they are testing it out with, so if you don’t see the feature available to you, don’t worry about it yet.
For those who are unfamiliar, Twitter’s Safety Mode is a feature that will automatically block accounts that the company thinks might be using harmful language against you. These accounts will be blocked temporarily for seven days where they will not be able to interact with you, but users will have the ability to review those tweets and accounts and unblock those that users think Twitter might have gotten wrong.
This is better than users having to go through all these accounts and block them manually, and it can also shield users from having to view these accounts or comments.
There are some games whose storylines feel like they would be great as a TV series or even as a movie, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is one of them. HBO recognized the potential and for those who are unfamiliar, back in 2020 it was announced that the game would be getting its own TV series on HBO.
Now, it has been about two years since the original announcement and for those who have been eagerly anticipating the release and hoping to see it this year, we have some bad news because it looks like it will only be arriving in 2023.
This is according to HBO and HBO Max Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys who told Deadline that the show was still being shot and that it will not air in 2022. Bloys suggested that it will most likely arrive in 2023, but even then the way he phrased it didn’t feel like a very concrete date.
According to Bloys, “It’s not going to air in 2022 — they are still shooting in Canada. I imagine you will see it in ’23,” He adds that based on what he’s seen so far, he is pretty excited for it. “I have seen some early episodes and I’m very excited. Craig did Chernobyl for us, he is a fantastic writer and director. What I’ve seen looks amazing, so I’m excited for it, but it will not be in ’22.”
As much as we like Bose’s QuietComfort 45 headphones, they haven’t been a tuner’s delight — you had to trust the automatic EQ adjustments would deliver a pleasing sound. You’ll have more control from now on, though. Bose told Engadget it has updated the QC45 firmware with an Adjustable EQ feature that, as the name implies, lets you tweak the output to your liking. You can customize the bass, mid-range and treble to suit your tastes, or pick from presets if you’re in a hurry.
The new firmware (2.0.4) is available by launching the Bose Music app and choosing “Install Update” from the QC45 control screen.
You might not be in a rush to use Adjustable EQ. The QC45s already provided balanced audio in our experience, and it might involve more effort than it’s worth if you listen to a wide variety of music genres. With that in mind, the update might be just what you need if you regularly listen to a particular genre (such as bass-heavy electronic music) or otherwise want to consistently override Bose’s judgment.
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.
There are some games whose storylines feel like they would be great as a TV series or even as a movie, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is one of them. HBO recognized the potential and for those who are unfamiliar, back in 2020 it was announced that the game would be 