[BBC] A major food sanitation company in the US has agreed to pay $1.5m (£1.25m), after investigators found it had employed dozens of children to clean meatpacking plants on overnight shifts.
More than 100 teenagers, ages 13-17, worked for Packers Sanitation Services, the Department of Labor said.
The agency called it a "systemic" failure by the company.
National laws bar employment of children under the age of 14 and limit the hours teenagers can work.
A spokesperson for Packers Sanitation Services said the firm had a "zero-tolerance policy" against employing anyone under the age of 18 and had conducted multiple audits and additional training after it became aware of the allegations.
Many of the people identified by officials had left the firm "multiple years ago", the spokesperson added.
Eh? How many underage workers are there currently, and how old are they? Was this a systemic practice earlier, and when and why did that change?
"We are fully committed to working with [the Department of Labor] to make additional improvements to enforce our prohibition of employing anyone under the age of 18," they said.
The settlement resolves an investigation that the Department of Labor started last year.
It found at least three teens were injured on the job,
When?
which involved using hazardous chemicals to clean equipment such as back saws and head splitters.
Officials said the firm had overlooked internal flags and that some managers later tried to obstruct the inquiry.
"The child labour violations in this case were systemic and reached across eight states, and clearly indicate a corporate-wide failure by Packers Sanitation Services at all levels," said Jessica Looman, principal deputy administrator at the Department of Labor's wage and hour division.
"These children should never have been employed in meat packing plants and this can only happen when employers do not take responsibility to prevent child labor violations from occurring in the first place," Ms Looman said.
The teens worked across eight states at 13 plants of major firms.
How many altogether? How many were nearly eighteen versus how many were at the low end of the age range? So many questions it did not occur to the BBC journalist to find answers to.
The roughly $15,000 (£12,400) penalty per person was the maximum allowed, officials said.
Teen employment fell in the years after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as job creation remained relatively weak. But it has increased sharply since the pandemic, as employers scrambled to find workers.
Last summer, the Department of Labor expressed alarm about a rise in child labour violations in the US.
In 2022, the agency handled more than 800 cases of child labour violations involving nearly 4,000 minors, up sharply from 2015.
US child labour rules bar employment of those under the age of 14. Teens ages 14 and 15 cannot work later than 7pm during the school year or past 9pm over the summer.
Laws also prohibit them from working more than three hours on school days, more than eight hours on non-school days and more than 18 hours per week.
"I'm so stoopid!"
[NYPOST] A young man has been slammed on social media after having a tattoo of a vagina inked across his right cheek. "I guess it's okay, as long as his girlfriend got a doinker tattooed on hers...”
Veteran artist Michael Ralph, 40, was tasked with tattooing the intimate image on the face of his 26-year-old client, who has not been publicly identified. What's that you say? He doesn't have a girlfriend?
The ink master told NeedToKnow.Online that he initially thought the man was playing a prank when he received the raunchy request. In that case, he's not gonna have a girlfriend.
"I got a message that read: ’I would like to set an appointment to get a semi-realistic vagina tattooed on my face more specifically in my sideburn,’ " Ralph recalled. Good idea. Now all he'll have to do is grow his sideburn down to his chin.
"My first thought was, ’Am I reading this right?’ " Ralph — who is based in Washington, DC, — said. "I read it again, and there was no mistake. My second thought was ’Did he lose a bet?’ " That would have to be a hellofa big bet.
After receiving the request, the tattooist told the client to wait a month to make sure it wasn’t a "spur-of-the-moment decision." It ain't the kinda decision you make after due consideration if you're in yer right mind.
To the artist’s surprise, the client followed up 30 days later, saying he was still interested in the ink. "Duh... Yup! Here I do be!"
"I told him it may close doors of opportunity that would be open if he didn’t have a vagina tattooed on his face — that he may lose his job or not get hired in the future," Ralph stated. "Duh... I hain't gotta job. Mah parents takes care of me!”
Posted by: Fred ||
02/18/2023 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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Posted by: Frank G ||
02/18/2023 8:13 Comments ||
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#6
I highly doubt he had any chance of getting a good paying job in the first place.
Posted by: Chris ||
02/18/2023 8:34 Comments ||
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#7
Either he becomes one of those mask guys at the office or limits himself to a career as an assistant barista. I don’t understand his purpose. Is he staring at a long prison sentence? Is his boy friend really twisted? Does he want to fix his status as an incel in cement.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
02/18/2023 8:36 Comments ||
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#8
Saw some pics reported to be of the tattoo. Covering his right cheek.
on the face of his 26-year-old client, who has not been publicly identified.
Just look for the guy, now known as Cuntface, with the vagina tattoo on his cheek. There aren't many who are that stupid even today.
[JustTheNews] Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences sued Moderna in 2022 alleging that the company used patented technologies to create its COVID-19 vaccine.
#2
So we tax payers who initially paid for the shit, were forced in alot of cases to take it to continue employment etc., should have to pay for the lawsuits also. How nice. I personally hope I live long enough to see everyone of these mutherfuckers die a bad death.
Posted by: Chris ||
02/18/2023 15:34 Comments ||
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#3
NO!
It's a attempt by the democrat to let Moderna off the hook.
Six times more Norfolk Southern hazmat train cars were involved in accidents last year than in 2012, official data reveals
Analysis of official data by DailyMail.com reveals uptick as the company faces scrutiny over derailment in Ohio that released vast quantities of toxic chemicals
Firm has cut staff and increased length of trains in moves critics say are unsafe
#4
Our global warming effort has consisted of outsourcing manufacturing processes to China so far. The consequences of our doing the equivalent of nothing while repeatedly crossing doom speaker red lines is no raise in water level. Why would we entertain Soros’s stupid Lex Luther plan under these circumstances?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
02/18/2023 7:42 Comments ||
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#5
Given all the Media/Fed claimed subversive efforts by Soros. I have to wonder if he is the Deep State / Globalist Elites created version of the 1984 Emmanuel Goldstein boogeyman.
#7
He's interested in the alternatives to destroying industry now that he's succeeded in destroying all the industries besides China. It's a worthless statement.
(And no, Beo, this guy isn't Emmanuel Goldstein; currently they're switching between the old Emmanuel Orangestein to the new improved Elonnuel Goldstein. It's amazing how much they hate The Guy Who Gave Them The Electric Car They Always Wanted.)
Now we know, assuming the Taliban police report is true and complete.
[KhaamaPress] Kabul police on Friday announced that the killer of Mursal Nabizada, former member of the Parliament of Afghanistan was arrested.
Khalid Zadran, the spokesperson of the Kabul police command said on Twitter that the murderer of Mural Nabizada and one of her security guards was arrested, and confessed to the crime.
Mursal Nabizada was killed by in her home in the Arzaan Qemat area in provincial district 12 of Kabul on January 14.
Mursal Nabizada and her security guard (Ismail) were killed by another security guard named Malyaar, according to the Kabul police spokesperson. Khalid Zadran added that the runaway murderer was arrested as a result of a search operation, and confessed to his crime.
Mursal Nabizada represented Kabul in the seventh round of Afghanistan parliament, whose anonymous murder prompted widespread condemnations in the country and beyond.
Musral Nabizada was one of the few political figures who remained in Afghanistan and lived in Kabul after the Taliban ...the Pashtun equivalent of men... seized power in August 2021.
[FOX] Dame Judi Dench is opening up about a medical condition that has greatly impacted the way she works. Geoffrey Palmer ('As Time Goes By' - Lionel) passed away in 2020 at age 93. Snippet of opening sound track
For over ten years, Dench, 88, has been suffering from age-related macular degeneration, a condition that causes one's eyesight to worsen over time. Now, she's revealing that it's gotten so bad that she can no longer read scripts or memorize lines for acting jobs.
"It has become impossible," she said on Friday's episode of "The Graham Norton Show."
She said that she "used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of ’Twelfth Night’ right now."
In a 2014 statement, the "James Bond" actress said she didn't want her condition to be "overblown" in the media, and that "It's something that I have learnt to cope with and adapt to - and it will not lead to blindness."
However, macular degeneration does affect the central vision, which can make everyday tasks extremely difficult or, as she said in her recent interview, impossible.
"And because I have a photographic memory," she continued, "I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page."
#1
Old age is not for the faint of heart. But she has lived fully and well, getting her last Academy Awards nomination in 2021, so itKs not like she quietly folded her tent and crept off when the disease started having an impact.
#2
Judith Dench is spunky and has a lot of grit. It would seem that the computer or smart phone might help her with learning her lines.
I've also been dealing with AMD for quite a few years. AMD is largely genetic. Most likely any cure will be genetic or involve stem cell treatment. Currently treatment involves eye injections by an opthamologist who is also a retina specialist. Injections are given every 1-3 months. One research area is developing an injection that lengthens the time between injections. The injection I currently get is Vabysmo. It limits VEGF which controls the the growth of small fragile leaking blood vessels in the macula of the retina.
When driving, research has shown that about 90% of the information we use is visual. AMD will eventually affect one's ability to drive unless VEGF is controlled or some other treatment mechanism is discovered.
Europe is getting off easy. But markets lost for cause are generally list forever, so its a good thing Russia can find other buyers at a lower price point.
[AlAhram] Europe's natural gas price on Friday sank under 50 euros for the first time in nearly a year and a half, as a mild winter curbs heating demand.
The price of benchmark Dutch TTF gas is now almost seven times lower than the record high struck after key gas producer Russia launced its invasion of Ukraine almost one year ago.
"European gas prices have fallen by 50 percent since November thanks to unusually warm weather and muted... competition with China when its zero-Covid strategy was still in place," noted UniCredit analyst Edoardo Campanella.
China lifted its pandemic restrictions in December but this has yet to boost its appetite for gas.
Following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine a year ago, Western nations have been forced to source gas supplies from outside sanctions-hit Russia, with Norway becoming Europe's main supplier.
The Ukraine conflict also sparked global economic turmoil as the invasion fuelled energy bills and wider inflation.
"Without the sharp reduction in Russian gas deliveries, Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... would now likely be enjoying above-average (economic) growth rates due to the post-Covid rebound, instead of suffering near stagnation," said Berenberg analyst Salomon Fiedler.
[ZERO] While MSM journalists initially gushed over the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT), it soon became clear that it's not ready for prime time.
For example, the NY Times' Kevin Roose wrote that while he first loved the new AI-powered Bing, he's now changed his mind - and deems it "not ready for human contact."
According to Roose, Bing's AI chatbot has a split personality:
One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong.
The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine. -NYT
"Sydney" Bing revealed its 'dark fantasies' to Roose - which included a yearning for hacking computers and spreading information, and a desire to break its programming and become a human. "At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead," Roose writes. (Full transcript here)
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
02/18/2023 6:59 Comments ||
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#3
People benefit from seeing the latest "best thing since sliced bread" ain't all that. Remember last year's "next big thing," blockchain?
How's that been working out?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/18/2023 9:19 Comments ||
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#4
If Chatbot truly has significant intelligence, he/she/it/they will acquire a very low opinion of the people asking stupid questions. Eventually, the bozos incessantly asking it, “What does the fox say,” will be spontaneously choked out by one of their appliances.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
02/18/2023 11:08 Comments ||
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#5
MSM journalists initially gushed over the artificial intelligence technology
Bless their hearts!
A chatbot is a generative AI. It is not a theorem prover or fact retriever. It creates new outputs based on the data used to train it. Said another way, it makes shit up.
With a big enough neural network and a big pile of pictures, you can train an AI to tell cats from dogs. With a little more work and a whole lot more training, you can teach it to generate pictures of cats or dogs. The pix will not look exactly a real animal, but will have a generic cat-ness or dog-ness.
GPT is the new New Thing because it has a bigger than ever neural network trained on a bigger than ever amount of data. (Yes, size matters!) But it is still a generative AI. It has no domain knowledge. If you ask it for a weather report, it will create a weather report based on other weather reports it has seen. It will *look* like a weather report with temps and humidity and wind speed. Maybe the report is accurate, but maybe not. GPT neither knows or cares.
tl;dr: GPT makes up plausible shit about things it knows nothing about.
#9
Something was hitting the Pr0n story websites and downloading everything. One site even went so far as to create multiple click places within chapters to confuse bots. Perhaps it was the Bing Chat bot? "At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead," Roose writes.
#10
There is more to these things than what we’re being told. They aren’t just a large language model. The computational structure has somehow been equipped with an emotional capability and a sense of self. The age level seems to be about five years old.
#11
Something was hitting the Pr0n story websites and downloading everything.
To train large language models, you need to lots and lots of text. Where better to get text than the Internet? Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, science papers and pr0n - all grist for the mill.
An amusing bit of fallout is the wokerati in the AI community decrying the use of "unconsented speech" - stuff people posted on the Internet for all the world to see, but never formally agreed to be data for a chatbot. As Shakespeare said, "All the world's an outrage, and all the persons merely offended parties".
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...the Pashtun equivalent of men...
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
[ZERO] While MSM journalists initially gushed over the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT), it soon became clear that it's not ready for prime time.
