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NCommander is publishing a Meta story today: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/11/20/0342250 It will be published on the front page with all of the restrictions that apply to such stories and discussions.

In it NCommander explains how he sees the future of the site developing with regards to software, hardware and administration. Some of those views are different now from the views that many of us held in 2014. The requirement for some of our servers is no longer justified, and there are better technologies available for achieving what we are trying to do thus also reducing our running costs. The administration of the site is placing an increasing burden on the relatively few administrators that remain in the support team. Society has also changed. Some discussion has been replaced by intimidation and threats. It is much more polarised than it was in 2014. In many ways this is the same as for numerous other web sites. However, the abuse and toxic atmosphere created by a small number of Anonymous Cowards is unacceptable and must be reversed if the site is to survive. The responsibility for some of the problems that we are experiencing, and the resulting actions that we have had to take, is placed entirely at their feet.

A few months ago the majority of the community opted - albeit very reluctantly - to remove AC posts from the front pages of the site. This action has successfully removed the vast majority of the abuse from our discussions. We are seeing a slow increase in the number of comments week-on-week and the signal-to-noise ratio is now much higher. It is only right that we also reconsider the implications of that change.

This journal entry is to enable anyone who wishes to remain anonymous to express their views. I promise that I will read it and will ensure that genuine views are considered when the community decides which path it wishes to follow. I cannot make any assurances that other members of the site's administration will read it - although I expect that at least some will. If you have an account then I strongly encourage you to leave your views under NCommander's Meta story and not here.

I further my promise that I will try to represent your views as honestly and fairly as I can.

If you abuse this journal then you are simply giving more support to the alternative options that might be considered than you are to the status quo. I encourage you to expresses sensible, logical and considered views but should you decide that abuse is what you prefer then this journal entry can simply be removed. You are being given an opportunity - do not throw it away.

Here is the deleted journal, which can also be found in my real web page.

The Man With No Belly Button
A True War Story

        You may think that the movie “Forest Gump” was unbelievable because you can’t believe anyone that dim could ever be accepted by the military, but I wasn’t in the Air Force long before I found that if you have a mental disability, you’re fine. Maybe intelligence is a detriment, although there are some stupid stunts that they won’t stand for.
        One was possessing marijuana, a felony in 1972, outlawed on the basis of lies.
        It was my day for clean-up duty in the barracks, as well as the duty sergeant’s. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but Private Gump was a lot smarter than him. As we were cleaning the day room, where there were couches and a TV, the sergeant found a doobie. A big fat one, a real hog’s leg. He asked me if I knew what it was.
        I took it and looked at it. “It’s a hand-rolled cigarette.”
        “Could that be... marijuana?”
        “One way to find out,” I said, and broke it in half. “I never saw green tobacco before,” I said, handing it back to him.
        “What should I do with it?”
        I shrugged. “Throw it in the dumpster.”
        “You don’t think I should turn it in to the SPs?” The SPs were the Security Police, what other branches call the MPs.
        “Hell, no! If you do, you’re going to be there all damned day filling out paperwork.”
        He did. I saw him in the hall the day after next.
        “You were right, I should have thrown it in the dumpster. I spent all damned day yesterday at the SP’s filling out paperwork!”
        Two friends I was stationed with there were Stan Rogers and Chuck Woods. Chuck hated the tongue twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
        Late one afternoon as I was reading, Stan dropped by my room to show off a gun he had gotten, from God only knows where. It was a snub nosed .38 pistol.
        My dad was a hunter, so I was brought up around dogs and guns. I was taught dog safety and gun safety at an early age. It was obvious that Stan had never seen a gun of any kind except on TV and movies, and the two days during basic training.
        I ran him off, despite his protestations that it wasn’t loaded. I was sure someone was going to get killed and I didn’t want to be around when it happened, especially if it happened to me.
        Later in the evening a fellow whose name I don’t remember, the company clerk, a practical joker and doobie toker who hung with and smoked with the guys I hung around with, knocked on my door. I put down my book again and answered it.
        “Stan shot Chuck!” He seemed really excited. Nice acting, I thought.
        I frowned. “Peddle your sick joke somewhere else.”
        “No! Really!”
        I slammed the door and picked my book back up, a truly evil book I had checked out from the base library. It was Aleister Crowley’s “autohagiography”, the book that Ozzy Osbourne obviously named his album “Diary of a Madman” for, and sang about in the song “Mister Crowley”. It’s a book of black magic with instructions on how to perform it, drug abuse, murder (he claimed the King of England was Jack the Ripper), rape, sodomy, bestiality, suicide, ocean voyages, and mountain climbing. Four thousand evil pages. I read the whole damned thing, Delaware was the most boring place I’ve ever been in my life.
        But real life was just as ghastly that night. The fellow wasn’t joking, Stan really did shoot Chuck! But it wasn’t on purpose.
        I don’t know why I didn’t hear the gunshot or hear the sirens. I never thought about that until now that I’m writing it down. Maybe I had dozed off? A C-5 took off at the same time? Those things are really loud, although an SR-71 is a hell of a lot louder. Or maybe I was so absorbed in the batshit crazy book that I was just oblivious.
        At any rate, Stan had visited Chuck after I had run him off. They took turns playing with the gun that Stan had insisted was unloaded.
        I learned gun safety at a young age, as I said, and rule one is to never treat a gun as if it’s unloaded, even if you just unloaded it yourself. My dad always said that more people are killed by unloaded guns than loaded ones; I don’t know how accurate that was. But Stan and Chuck sadly didn’t know the rules.
        Chuck later told me what happened.
        He was leaning against a wall. Stan, a tall thin fellow, was twirling it like the “cowboys” (the word “cowboy” was an insult in the 1800s, referring to a drover, who held America’s worst job) do on TV and in the movies.
        His unloaded gun went off. The slug hit Chuck square in the belly button and exited from his left buttock. He told me as he recounted the tale, “When I die, I want it to be from getting shot. The only way I knew I was shot was my leg started twitching.”
        He slumped down the wall.
        “Oh, shit!” Roger exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Oh, fuck! Are you okay?”
        “No, God damn it! You fucking SHOT me!”
        I imagine a lot of blood was pooling, but he didn’t mention the blood, but said he wasn’t freaking out. I imagine it was like the car wreck I had in 1976; I was calm, but the ambulance guys were freaking out.
        Stan was frantic. “Oh shit! Oh Shit! What should I do? What should I...”
        “Get the God damned duty sergeant you fucking moron!” Chuck yelled. Stan ran down for help, and came back with the sergeant, of whom, as I said, Terry Pratchett might have said wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and might even be a spoon.
        “Holy fuck! What do I do?”
        “Get an ambulance! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
        Yes, unlike TV and the movies, in real life military men freak out and panic sometimes, just like civilians. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital and the doctors started surgery.
        The hospital lost power halfway through the operation, and they had to get a generator from the flight line.
        Before they started sewing him up, the generator went out. In my 3½ years on the flight line towing AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment), that was the only time I ever heard of those things failing; the military keeps a sharp eye on their equipment. Most of the vehicles I drove were older than I was.
        Someone on the internet said that my science fiction story “But Sir, I’m Just a Robot” was unbelievable because of the string of bad luck that befell the robot’s owner, but Chuck’s story is actually true; all of this happened to the best of my memory. Mark Twain said ”truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be believable” (Terry Pratchett disagreed).
        I never saw poor Stan again. He was immediately incarcerated, and stayed in jail until he was court-martialled on the charge of bringing a prohibited weapon on base; the only firearms are supposed to be owned by the government, and Chuck’s injury illustrates why.
        Stanley was found guilty, and spent the next six months in Leavenworth, before receiving a dishonorable discharge. Nixon was in office, and the nation would be in a recession until Clinton’s administration, so life must have been really rough for Stan after the Air Force.
        Chuck was in the hospital for a long time, but bore no ill will towards Stan. It was an accident, and it could have been just as easily Chuck shooting Stan. But he was pissed off at the hospital; they had incinerated his shirt and jeans because of the blood. He wanted them for souvenirs, I guess the big scar wasn’t enough.
        He did recover from his injuries, but lost his belly button.
        If you’re thinking about buying a firearm, please take a safety course. More gunshot wounds are accidental than murderous.

About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier.

That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page complaints onto the docket and targeting more than 30 defendants with a bizarre set of allegations claiming the election, that Trump won, had been rigged. That such an alleged rigging would result in Trump’s victory suggests either the defendants secretly wanted Trump to win or, more logically, that the plaintiff was full of shit.

The district court ruled against Trump roughly six months after the lawsuit was filed, finding that it was not only not the RICO (yes, that was in there too), but it wasn’t anything else either, no matter how many words Trump’s lawyers had tossed together in exceedingly long legal filings.

The lawyers representing Trump in this ridiculous waste of publicly funded time are now being hit with sanctions by the court that had the misfortune of handling this lawsuit. They will join a long list of other lawyers currently or formerly employed by the former president who have been fined or sued for engaging in baseless lawsuits over election results.

The sanction order [PDF] helpfully lists the offending legal professionals right up front, allowing readers to avoid accidentally seeking representation from this group of lawyers who decided to shed their respectability to engage in extremely performative litigation.

Defendant Charles Dolan has moved for sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Upon review of the motion (DE 268), Plaintiff’s response (DE 270) and Defendant’s reply (DE 276), and for the reasons explained below, the motion is granted. Accordingly, sanctions shall be awarded jointly and severally against Alina Habba, Michael T. Madaio, Habba Madaio & Associates, Peter Ticktin, Jamie Alan Sasson, and The Ticktin Law Group.

That’s who is getting sanctioned. Here’s why: mainly it’s all the lying.

The pleadings in this case contained factual allegations that were either knowingly false or made in reckless disregard for the truth. The following examples are indicative.

When suing someone it helps to know where they live, as this can have subject matter or personal jurisdiction significance. In this case for instance, Mr. Dolan argued that he engaged in no activities in Florida that made him susceptible to suit here. He filed an affidavit stating under oath that he lived in Virginia. His lawyers advised Mr. Trump’s lawyers of that. Moreover, the summons in this case indicated an Arlington, Virginia address and the return of service indicated he was served there. Yet the Amended Complaint alleged that Mr. Dolan was a resident of New York. The Trump lawyers’ answer:

[I]t must be noted that Charles Dolan is an incredibly common name, and Plaintiff’s counsel’s traditional search methods identified countless individuals with said name across the country, many of whom reside in New York.

While alone not of great significance, this response reflects the cavalier attitude towards facts demonstrated throughout the case.

Just one of many problems with the allegations. Those are things in court cases that are supposed to be factual. These weren’t. Trump’s legal reps couldn’t seem to decide whether Dolan was the head of the Democratic National Committee, a senior Clinton Campaign official, or just someone who happened to be in the racketeering business of keeping Trump out of office. The lawsuit cherry-picked information from a government indictment in an attempt to portray Dolan’s statements to investigators as deliberate lies deployed to further a conspiracy against Trump. None of this was true and pretty much everything alleged was either provably false or entirely inaccurate.

The court sums it up this way:

In short, I find that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were warned about the lack of foundation for their factual contentions, turned a blind eye towards information in their possession, and misrepresented the Danchenko Indictment they claim as their primary support. The lawyers failed to conduct a pre-filing inquiry into the allegations against Mr. Dolan and have continued to advance Plaintiff’s false claims based upon nothing but conjecture, speculation, and guesswork. This is precisely the conduct Rule 11 is intended to deter.

[It continues....]

I’m a n00b all over again.
        I first started using Linux with Mandrake, after trying unsuccessfully to get Red Hat to behave on my hardware, later learning that that distro was better suited for a web server than a desktop. I used Suse for a while on one machine, and lately kubuntu. All were dual-boot, and the Linux side was honestly not used much except for a laptop that was stolen; Windows was annoying but worked okay.
        At least, until I got a virus. I assume it was a virus, but who knows, it could have been targeted. I don’t know why I would have been, but it would be possible. At any rate, all my efforts to vanquish it led to the computer becoming unusable, so I just replaced the computer. I would have replaced the hard drive when I was young and poor. Replacing the computer’s pretty easy to do when the data are all on a network drive.
        The replacement was the same make and model computer, and both were running Windows 10. I never got around to installing Linux on the new one, and the useless one sat under a table sulking.
        Several times in the past, Microsoft had instituted measures to cripple Audacity with its Windows “updates”. Rolling back the updates fixed it. But the last time, they also disabled THE COMPUTER’S OWNER who bought and paid for it from rolling back updates. Virus? Microsoft is its own malware.
        So I bought a new hard drive for the unused infected computer. They’ve really gotten cheap and huge lately! I tired of building computers years ago; hell, I’m old. But I opened the infected box up and replaced its infected drive with the new, giant clean drive that was physically smaller. It’s not properly installed, but fuck it, it works. Well, after the Linux Install CD formatted it and installed Linux, anyway.
        But I never had to do two things: find a new repository and install it, and install the network drive that Windows and Android have no trouble with. I want GIMP and XMMS and Audacity, since Audacity was the reason I bought the drive.
        I was able to download a working copy of Audacity from their web site, but it won’t install, it just runs. At least it’s usable, although I can’t run it by clicking one of its files. I also can’t record the internet with it, but I can record the Windows computer through a patch cord.
        The network drive is what drives me crazy, because I had it working on the old infected drive. And I’d like to be able to install shit.
        This brings up something else, something my daughter Patty and I were disagreeing about the last time she visited home from Cincinnati. She’s going back to college at age 35, and grew up with shareware, freeware, and open source along with some commercial software, but the college, probably bankrolled by Microsoft, has brainwashed its students into believing that normal people can’t use open source software, only freaks like you, me, and her.
        I tried to convince her it’s just what you’re used to. But then, I bought my first computer as a birthday present to myself on my 30th birthday, forty years ago and I’m having trouble with Linux.
        Yes, an OS isn’t an app, but try explaining that to a college professor who has been likewise brainwashed. But at any rate, I’m looking for good information on how to connect the network drive; what I’ve found on the internet is missing a lot of needed info.
        Then there’s new software, Kubuntu’s repository is tiny, missing much of what I need, like Audacity, XMMS, and GIMP. Where can I find these apps and how do I install them?

Way back in 1977 when I was in college, my history class was assigned a book by F.L. Allen titled Only Yesterday. It surprised me; I was expecting a dry, scholastic work devoid of flavor or writing skill.
        But I was wrong. This “textbook”, in paperback for ninety five cents plus tax (how much did you pay for your textbooks? My most expensive one was ten bucks) was written as if it were a high quality magazine article. I was impressed.
        It sat on my bookshelf for almost half a century until the Covid pandemic struck, and reminders were everywhere of the last pandemic a century earlier.
        I had referenced this book since I got on the internet when some ignoramus spewed some nonsense about the “roaring twenties”, which my grandmother, an eighteen year old new mother in 1921 said only roared for the rich. The book agrees with Grandma, although weakly.
        But I began to see similarities to our twenties, the 2020s, and figured that this book would be of interest to everyone in this decade.
        There’s a mention somewhere in the book about time repeating itself, but never exactly. Some things were very similar to now, some were the exact opposite. In the last ’20s the Republican president took the Democrat’s job, in our ’20s the Democrat took the Republican’s job.
        Rather than a right wing mob storming the capitol, in the 20th century Bolsheviks bombed the stock market on Wall Street in New York. Alcohol prohibition began in the 1920s, cannabis prohibition ended in Illinois in 2020. In 1920, Women gained the right to vote. In 2022 they lost the right to have an abortion.
        Like our decade, theirs started at the end of wartime. Like their decade, ours followed a quarter century of technical innovation. Like our decade, the nation was very divided a hundred years ago.
        So I decided to put it on my book web site.
        I found an HTML copy on the University of Virginia’s website quite a while ago and decided to get the text from there. Its book is a file per chapter, so I copied the text into a text editor, and then went to format it.
        I had a real good start, to chapter four, I think, and something just didn’t look right and I couldn’t figure out what, so I looked for other copies. One was at the Australian Gutenberg, and apparently my memory was at once better and worse than I remembered it was; the two didn’t exactly match. I put the project away for a while; I like to get things as close to perfect as I possibly can.
        Then looking for something completely different, there sat Mr. Cleese himself in the person of a PDF file scanned from a Houghton-Mifflin 1957 copy by the Kansas City Library. That book was a hell of a lot fancier than my paperback copy, and than the Gutenberg and VU copies.
        I had a lot more work ahead of me, loading the PDF into GIMP as an image per page. Saving about four hundred images would take a while, so I thought I’d try something I was sure wouldn’t work, trying to OCR the PDF directly.
        My OCR program was included with a scanner a quarter of a century ago, and I wasn’t sure if they even had PDFs then but was certain that the ancient OCR wouldn’t read a new PDF file. Apparently they did have PDFs back then, because it actually worked, seemingly against all logic. And it worked better and with more accuracy than I’ve ever seen it do before.
        And I discovered the invisible hyphen. I’d never seen, or even heard of one before. It’s a hyphen that is invisible in an HTML page unless it falls at the right side of the page, when it becomes visible. But you can’t copy and paste it in Notepad, as when pasted it becomes a normal hyphen.
        This was a problem formatting the book, because in Notepad there was a hyphen, but “school-board” became “schoolboard” in HTML.
        But this thing could be very useful! Someone should write a program that had a word database and would put one between syllables. It would be great for HTML full justification! I left in many of the useful ones, at least after I started understanding what was happening; I’d deleted a lot and wasn’t going to start over from scratch again!
        I wish I had more information about it. What is its real name? Its ASCII value? Does anyone have any links to information about it?
        Anyway, I decided to make my HTML copy as fancy as the PDF from the hardcover book, including foreign characters and drop caps. In two ways it’s fancier. You can’t click a link on paper. Another way was making the “th” in dates superscript as is common today.
        For drop caps, I used the same kludge I used in the HTML version of Random Scribblings, an image of the character. I’ve been doing hacks and kludges since I was a teenager in the ‘60s, when I was unable to afford a multi-hundred dollar guitar fuzzbox from a music store, so I made one out of a broken transistor radio. This doesn’t count the meaningless gizmos I made in 6th grade, like the Dufus Detector that would light up when it was pointed at a dufus.
        I decided that when a movie or book title showed up in the text, I would link movies to movies in the Internet Archive, and books from Gutenberg, but there was a roadblock with the movies. I copied the URL from the browser’s bar, but on testing it led to some stupid page about their stupid policies. Stupid. And they want me to donate! I donate to Wikipedia because I use it almost daily and Jimmy Wales isn’t an idiot like the morons who run the Internet Archive.
        Gutenberg was far more intelligent, and I noticed that they’ve improved their search capabilities, although they’re still really weak. I should be able to enter a title and get that one book, if found, instead of every book with any book in the book you’re looking for’s title.
        I later found some mentioned movies on YouTube, who encourages you to share.
        The links are all black, because you just don’t see colored texts in any book except a magazine or a child’s book. The table of contents is the exception.
        I see no point to linking the magazines that still exist. None are much like they were a century ago. At any rate, I’m not done with editing. When I’m satisfied with it, it will be at mcgrewbooks.com/Allen/.
        If anyone has any information about the weird hyphen, or links to any unlinked books, or direct links to any mentioned movie (most are in the public domain, all made before 1927 are public domain), please let me know.

upstart writes:

The Gig Law Causing Chaos in California Strip Clubs:

Teddy earned what she considers good money as a self-employed dancer working in California's strip clubs. Yes, there were slow nights when wages slumped, says Teddy, who asks to use a pseudonym because not everyone in her life knows she is a sex worker. But the slow nights balanced out with evenings when the club was crammed full of customers. She says on average she never took home less than California's minimum wage (currently $15 per hour).

Teddy now refers to this period as the "era before AB 5"—a California state law officially called Assembly Bill 5, which aimed to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. Under this law, more workers are entitled to benefits such as overtime and minimum wage. The law's supporters, such as US Senator Elizabeth Warren, described the law as an answer to exploitation in the gig economy. But a controversial 2020 public vote meant the rules have not yet been applied to companies such as Uber and Lyft. Instead AB 5 reshaped a raft of other industries, from yoga studios to theater productions and trucking.

The debate about AB 5's impact on industries beyond the gig economy is in the spotlight again, as the Biden administration explores a new federal law to protect workers from misclassification. Although the US House of Representatives passed a federal version of AB 5—called the "Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act"—back in March 2021, it has since stalled in the Senate. Last week, the Department of Labor proposed a new law designed to turn more self-employed Americans into employees entitled to the minimum wage.

"The Department of Labor's proposal does not go nearly as far as AB 5," says Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon who studies the impact of gig work regulation on offline workers. "AB 5 created a presumption that most workers hired by firms were employees," he says, while the Department of Labor's new rule effectively creates a test to be used in court to understand if a  worker should be considered an employee by considering a series of factors, including how much control they have over their earnings and the way they do their jobs.

Yet the unintended impact that AB 5 is having on strip clubs serves as a warning to policymakers who focus too much on misclassification in the gig economy. Since AB 5, that trade has experienced some of the most dramatic changes in the state. Dancers are divided about whether they want to become employees. But there is a growing consensus that strip clubs' interpretation of the law has resulted in dancers' pay being slashed and their jobs becoming more precarious. Although there are similarities between dancers and gig workers, dancers also believe there are important differences that mean they deserve tailored legislation. They say they do not want to be regulated like gig workers.

"AB 5 has been implemented in an absolutely horrific way throughout clubs in California, in ways that pushed a lot of people out of the industry and made it a way less lucrative and way less viable job than it was before," says Teddy, who is now a member of the activist group Strippers United. "AB 5 was meant to protect gig workers and it just happened to catch dancers in a technicality."

[...] Workers and researchers warn the gig economy is warping the debate about employee status, meaning that the problems faced by independent contractors in different industries are being lumped together. "Everyone talks about these bills as gig worker bills. But when you look at them, they apply to workers across industries, digital and analog," says Cunningham-Parmeter. "Even today, in 2022, the vast majority of low wage workers are not gig workers."

Other industries are divided about whether AB 5 had a positive impact on self-employed workers. Writers and typists are among those who have campaigned to repeal the law, claiming it hurts their ability to find work. "Due to California law AB 5, SpeakWrite cannot accept applications from California residents," says one job advert posted by transcription service SpeakWrite. Truckers have also complained about AB 5's changes. In July 2022, a convoy of truckers blockaded the port Port of Oakland to protest AB 5, arguing their new status as employees meant they have less flexibility in when and how they work.

Before AB 5, California employment officials estimated that companies misclassified up to 500,000 workers as independent contractors, says Cunningham-Parmeter. He believes the introduction of minimum wage and overtime protection was a positive development for the vast majority, even if  some companies abuse the spirit of the new law.

"Studies indicate that companies can save up to 30 percent of payroll and labor costs by misclassifying their workers as independent contractors," he says. "Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when some businesses, like strip clubs, were forced to finally treat their workers as employees, many such firms passed those new costs on to workers in the form of reduced wages or hours."

In a first, Ukrainian and Russian human rights officials met Monday during a prisoner exchange between the two sides.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, met with Tatyana Moskalkova, Russian Human Rights Commissioner, during the swap of more than 200 prisoners of war.

Moskalkova posted video of the meeting on Telegram. It is unclear where exactly the exchange took place.

In the video, Lubinets and Moskalkova approach each other on a deserted highway, shake hands, and have a brief exchange.

Today is the day that our civilian sailors will be coming home, Moskalkova told Lubinets. It's also important that we ensure that safe corridors exist for our work with the evacuated. We have a Iot of questions, but the most important is returning all their documents to them. So that's what I am coming to you today for, and I'm here to help in the case that an evacuee or refugee needs a specific document or confirmation of their identity.

It's an important humanitarian aspect in terms of social rights, she said.

Lubinets replied that we are exchanging lists, and I request that you will work through it and be in touch on what's possible.

Most importantly, we have activated the process of exchanging civilians of our countries. I'm sure that you want this as much as we do.

Moskalkova said that certainly everyone is interested in this path forward.

In a summation of the meeting posted on Telegram, Moskalkova said that she met for the first time with Commissioner for Human Rights of Ukraine Dmitry Valeryevich Lubinets. We had a constructive dialogue and agreed to continue working to ensure the proper treatment of prisoners, keep working for future exchanges, to protect the rights of civilians, and learn the fate of missing persons.

Lubinets,on his Telegram account, said that the need for negotiations is the humanitarian sphere.

In particular, we talked about the need to intensify the repatriation of prisoners of war and the release of civilian hostages, he said.

He said that the two discussed, among other things, the need to develop ways to visit prisoners of war, inspect places of their detention, both on the territory controlled by the Russian Federation and in Ukraine and thorough searches for missing persons.

They also discussed Ukraine's desire to visit prisoners of war held in Olenivka, which is in an occupied portion of the Donetsk region.

At the end of the meeting, it was agreed to send official letters for the implementation of the discussed tasks involving the protection of human rights, Lubinets said.

upstart writes:

Federal gig worker proposal tanks Uber, Lyft and DoorDash stocks:

The stock prices of Uber, Lyft and DoorDash slid on Tuesday after the Department of Labor announced proposed changes to how workers should be classified. The prospective guidance is intended to "combat employee misclassification," the federal agency said in a statement.

Soon after, Uber's share price dropped by more than 10% to $24.61, while Lyft's tanked more than 12% to $11.22 and DoorDash's fell more than 5% to $44.98 at the time of writing.

The rule could make it easier for contractors to gain full employment status if they are "economically dependent" on a company. However, the scope of the proposal itself would be limited to areas such as minimum wage enforcement.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash depend extensively upon gig workers, who haul people and meals around on their behalf but do not receive many hard-won benefits of employment — such as employer contributions toward their Social Security and Medicare taxes. Despite pressure from labor organizers and some lawmakers, some tech firms have fought to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors, arguing the status benefits their businesses, other local businesses and workers themselves.

Ride-hail and meal-delivery companies say that changing how gig workers are classified would threaten their businesses, yet these firms — Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — have also posted hefty net losses under the status quo.

Attempts to alter gig worker classification in the U.S. include a recently rejected ballot measure in Massachusetts, which could have explicitly defined such workers as independent contractors.

In California, an effort to secure benefits for gig workers — AB-5 — passed in 2019. A year later, app-based gig workers in California were excluded from the law via Proposition 22, which itself was deemed unconstitutional in the state in 2021. However, app-based gig companies have appealed that ruling and continue to operate in California under the guidance of Prop 22. (Every day is a winding road.)

[...] The Labor Department's proposal is subject to a public comment period, which runs from from October 13 to November 28.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the county jail. Baca's department became infamous for its internal corruption, something manifested by its obstruction of federal investigations and rogue jailhouse informant program.

Enter Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Elected after promising to clean up the troubled department, Villanueva soon showed he was more interested in shielding his officers from public scrutiny and ignoring the internal rot that had turned the agency into a menace to Los Angeles society.

The new sheriff created a handpicked "Public Integrity Unit," an entity whose name seemed to indicate Villanueva would be cleaning up the department. Shortly thereafter it became apparent the unit was far more interested in targeting the department's critics in the Los Angeles government.

Villanueva only amped things from there. He threatened county leaders with defamation suits for continuing to (accurately) portraying the department as infested with cliques of rogue deputies. He also sent his officers out to raid the homes of two prominent critics involved in civilian oversight of the department under the pretense the LASD was investigating fraudulent acquisition of county contracts.

With members of the county's civilian oversight sufficiently cowed by legal threats, non-compliance, and seizure of their electronic devices, the sheriff has moved on to shutting down the internal remnants of LASD accountability, as Alene Tchekmedyian reports for the Los Angeles Times.

This astounding display of power follows Villanueva's (unfounded) assertions that IG Huntsman is a "Holocaust denier" and his still-unproven claim that the Inspector General has committed crimes of his own, such as "stealing" confidential files on LASD officials from the department. The Inspector General has responded his access was limited to his office's investigations and was lawfully obtained.

This suggests the LASD is doing nothing more than concocting criminal charges to bypass internal and external oversight — an impression that isn't helped by the LASD's failure to move forward with charges against the Inspector General, despite making these claims for more than three years.

Original Submission

(Apologies to Country Joe)

Well, come on on all you comrade men,
Uncle Vlad needs your help again!
He's got himself in some terrible pain
Way out west in old Ukraine.
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lot of fun!

And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!

Well c'mon generals, let's move fast,
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and kill them dead,
The only good Ukie is one who's dead.
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown ‘em all to kingdom come!

And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!

Well c'mon on, Oligarchs,
Don't be slow,
Why, this is war a-go-go!
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplin' the Army with the tools of the trade.
Just hope and pray that if we drop the bomb,
Civilization won’t be gone!

And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!

Well c'mon mothers throughout the plain,
Pack your boys off to old Ukraine.
C’mon pops, don't hesitate,
Send ‘em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box!

And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!