Category: Business

“United Sued for Packing NFL Charters With Young, Blond Crews” (Bloomberg) warms my heart on so many levels, and not simply as a proud former Delta employee.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. packs its charter flights for sports teams with young, blond crews and bars older flight attendants from working the plum routes, according to a new lawsuit.

The attendants — a Black woman who has worked for the airline for 28 years and a Jewish woman with 34 years of tenure — say that they both tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get assigned to work the charter flights.

Sharon Tesler and Kim Guillory said they were told by supervisors that they were unable to get work on the charters because they weren’t on “preferred” lists that were based on team preferences, according to the complaint.

They said they later discovered that young, white blond attendants — with less seniority — were given the assignments.

United Airlines “has adopted and continues to implement procedures that are designed to ensure that young, white, blond/blue-eyed, female employees receive positions with the charter program, while more senior, and Black and Jewish employees such as plaintiffs, do not,” they said in the complaint.

Is it fair to say that this repairs all of the damage from the Jesse Jackson Hymietown incident?

“$1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history” (Axios):

The vandalism and looting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police will cost the insurance industry more than any other violent demonstrations in recent history, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring were mostly peaceful, but the arson, vandalism and looting that did occur will result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims — eclipsing the record set in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who brutalized Rodney King.

Shops in the suburbs weren’t torched or looted, right? Rational insurance companies will therefore charge higher rates going forward for retail stores in urban areas. Combined with the extra risk of being shut down due to coronapanic, the risk of losing customers as richer city-dwellers flee during coronapanic, and the higher minimum wages that some cities mandate relative to surrounding suburbs, why would rational business owners decide to continue operating a lot of these shops? So the white suburbanites who came into the cities to join the protests, ostensibly to help their Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, will have ended up permanently degrading city life for Blacks of all gender IDs.

Stopping alongside one of the elegant restaurants that the Maskachusetts License Raj hasn’t managed to shut down, I was offered a gourmet meal:

If there can be a “Travis Scott Meal”, why not a “Jacob Blake Meal” for those who want to demonstrate their commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement? For those who never think about anything other than COVID-19, a “Dr. Fauci Meal” whose contents may change from day to day? For the politically oriented, a “President Harris Meal”?

I am hopeful that readers will notice a more responsive server as of last night. The virtual server behind this site had hit a load average of 21 while simultaneously using only 1-3 percent CPU for user processes. How is that possible? The Unix top command was showing up to 98 percent CPU used for “st”. If you’re a dinosaur like me and most of what you learned about top was learned in the 1980s, this is confusing indeed. “st” is “steal time”, i.e., time that was “stolen” by other virtual machines on the same host and/or the hypervisor. If st is more than 10 percent, that’s a sign that the underlying physical machine is overloaded.

Why hadn’t the hosting service noticed this issue and migrated some of the demanding virtual machines off the physical machine to prevent this kind of overload? What could they be doing if not writing a Perl script to catch problems like this? “We stand with the Black community”:

(The page notes that the company will offer “Paid time off for voting”. Perhaps there will be a few decades of unpaid time off for any employee who shows up with an “All Lives Matter” T-shirt or a MAGA/KAG hat!)

The company is sufficiently committed that a banner reading “Black Lives Matter. Linode is committed to social justice and equality.” appears at the top of every page for a customer’s tech nerds. Want to know the operating system running underneath your server? IPv4 versus IPv6 traffic? See if your server was backed up? The hundreds of pages that show information like this are all headed by a “Black Lives Matter” message.

Readers: On the theory that humans aren’t great at focusing on multiple goals at the same time (witness nearly the U.S., now entirely devoted to the single goal of avoiding coronadeath and the folks who switched attention to BLM immediately abandoned all thoughts of social distancing), is it fair to say that any company that truly commits to Black Lives Matter will also deliver an inferior product and service compared to if they hadn’t made this commitment?

Related:

• “Who Stole my CPU? Few Basics on CPU Steal Time”

Who knew that the Frito Bandito was an expert on social justice? Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand delivers Do You Hear Us Now? #AmplifyBlackVoices via YouTube:

On the YouTube site, the company says “Doritos is taking meaningful action in the push for real change.”

(How many tens of thousands of pounds have black Americans gained from eating Doritos while locked into their apartments and houses for 4+ months during coronapanic? Maybe the “real change” Frito-Lay is talking about is transitioning from obesity to morbid obesity?)

From the slender friend who sent this to me: “I’ll do a 180 on social justice warriors if they get Doritos cancelled. So gross. Cool ranch Doritos are an abomination.” (she also coined the term “coronapudge”)

Related:

• Frito Bandito in his prime
• Frito Bandito sings