The Smoke Eater For May 13, 2020
Couriers, gun fights, and Tintin
The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angles fly over Chicago, May 12, 2020. Photo by Dominic Gwinn.
Good afternoon, this is The Smoke Eater for Wednesday, May 13, 2020, and just think really small, or don't think at all.
Quick Hit
* The conundrum with courier services * Shoot'em ups * Facebook's PTSD problem * "I'm not going to say it was aliens, but it was aliens" * GREAT SNAKES! *
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Just The Tip?
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced new rules that will force delivery companies to disclose the fees they charge restaurants. The announcement comes after a local pizza place posted a photo to social media showing how the company only made $376.54 in total sales after GrubHub pocketed over $650 in assorted fees. GrubHub says the case is an outlier and that restaurants choose the particular services it offers.
Heather Kelly writes in the The Washington Post about how people in some cities are fighting back against what some see as predatory business practices from delivery services. Some of the tech companies argue that they've reduced fees during the pandemic to help small businesses and employees, while some fed up couriers have started offering their services directly for trusted clients.
Delivery drivers are struggling to find places that will let them use the bathroom, Lauren Kaori Gurley reports for Vice. Even before the pandemic, couriers had a hard time finding a clean, safe place to do their business while doing their business as many places reserve bathroom privileges for customers. Because the couriers are contractors, not employees, they aren't subject to OSHA laws governing potty breaks. Gurley writes that the consensus among gig workers is that "peetainers" or "trucker-bombs" are the best course of action since drivers can get in trouble for pit stops.
Delivery services like GrubHub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates operate at a loss and have faced pressure from investors to turn a profit in recent months. Additionally, major fast-food and restaurant chains, like McDonalds, began strong-arming the delivery companies for lower rates and exclusivity deals last year.
In February, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company's struggling delivery service, Uber Eats, would cut its costs in order to raise profits for its own food delivery service. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that Uber had made a move to acquire GrubHub, and that two have been in talks for months.
Nothing To Lose But Our Supply Chains
The New York Times has a story about how the breakdown of supply chains have affected people. Basic supplies like pasta, flour, and cleaning products are flying off the shelves -- and that's if delivery drivers get to the city.
For a little while, violent crimes rates seemed to be decreasing all over the world as people quarantined. Non-violence activists were even distributing food, info and PPE to the homeless in Los Angeles in order to keep in touch with local communities and prevent flare ups. But that seems short lived as new data shows rates of gun violence are not only par with previous years, they're increasing in some cities. A study by The Trace, a non-profit news org, shows multiple cities that include D.C., Chicago, Boston, Dallas, and Nashville have seen a spike in gun violence.
Robert Muggah writes in Foreign Policy that the clamp down on supply chains have forced smugglers and cartels to shift their business models. Cartels in Central and South American have seized this as opportunity to brutally crush competitors, while Asian animal traders have opened up new trading avenues. Drug traffickers, who flooded markets ahead of quarantines, are now raising street prices -- possibly fueling the spike in gun violence.
For Your Radar
Facebook has agreed to pay a $52 million settlement to current and former third-party content moderators as compensation for for mental health traumas they developed while sifting through hours of shitposts, snuff films, hate speech and other garbage. Casey Newton, who originally broke the stories (here, and here) about the horrific conditions Facebook's third-party content moderators faced, has a great breakdown in The Interface, and notes that (according to lawyers) half of all of Facebook's content moderators will develop PTSD. NPR notes that Facebook hasn't admitted any wrongdoing, and is already patting itself on the back.
Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick over at The War Zone FOIA'd the Navy for hazard reports after that big TicTac UFO thing got everyone's undies in a twist last year. The reports are curious and raise some significant questions, but they're benign. UFO nuts will pour over this crap and claim it's proof Uncle Sam kidnapped E.T. and imprisoned it in a sex dungeon, but it's just as likely some pilots stumbled across a drone program. The truth is out there, or whatever.
BONUS: Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke with Vice's Ben Mackhu on the CYBER podcast last week about why he quietly pushed for more transparency in the Pentagon's black budget that looked into weird, spooky shit that flies.
One More Thing...
"Tintin" may be one of the more controversial and studied characters in comics. From its beginnings in a far-right and pro-fascist Catholic newspaper in the late 1920s, there's been considerable debate for decades about reproducing or exhibiting early Tintin stories due to their politically sensitive (read: fucked up) content. Over the proceeding decades, Tintin comics became rather apolitical adventure comics; cornerstones of popular culture that would influence artists like Andy Warhol, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Tintin comics have been adapted to fit various mediums, including radio, theater, film, and they've been recreated by fans as contemporary social satire. There's the anti-Thatcher/pro-communist pamphlet, "Breaking Free," the meta-parody sex romp, "Tintin in Thailand," and even a criticism of the George W. Bush administration, "Tintin in Iraq." In 2011, Steven Spielberg produced and directed a feature film, Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn, co-produced by Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy, written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, and starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. The motion capture animated film follows Tintin, an investigative reporter, and a drunk seaman, Captain Haddock, on a quest for the Haddock family's lost pirate treasure. (via Crackle)
OK, here's a cute critter video: QUOKKAS!
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