Definitely interesting. We had an issue in Australia with 457 visas back in 2014. Where claims of pay were disputed when a whistleblower showed 200 white-collar 457 visa workers, about half of whom were Korean nationals aged under 30, were clocking up more than 84 hours a week.

They were employed by the contractor Samsung C&T at Gina Rinehart’s mine and were being paid the equivalent of $16 an hour for what should have been much higher paying jobs.

I’d love to see the stats on this.

There are no grownups left. Only revolutionaries.

Good explanation

We can all agree that polling is completely meaningless now yeah? It obviously has zero correlation with reality.

Gosh it’s a good thing that some rich bastard whose companies are subject to regulation isn’t going to put in charge of some government position that he can leverage to quash any possible accountability he may be subject to…

They’re bringing back Enron? Who’s fucking idea was that?

I think there is a specific “class” of people they’re going to target.

It is absolutely possible under America’s legal framework. Mackenzie v Hare was the 1915 Supreme Court case, which ruled that a natural-born U.S. citizen woman could lose her citizenship by marrying a non-citizen man.

The holding functionally stood until 1967, when there was a case called Afroyim v. Rusk, where the court held that natural born citizens cannot be stripped of their citizenship involuntarily. But that was a 5-4 decision in the Warren Court, in many regards, the most liberal supreme court in history. A decision that barely won a majority in a court drastically more liberal than this one is what’s standing between the US today and a world where natural born citizens can have their citizenship deemed forfeit.

Hello. Australian here. Just ask our sadistic government. We do it all the time. Hint: It involves putting people in camps.

I’d take it

The pearl clutching from the bourgeois is becoming a bit annoying.

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here’s the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”

Not that I think he should have. I’m just saying he had theoretically unlimited power and he chose to protect his family above all else.

Fuck that. Peacefully handing over the country to the oligarchy and this is what he uses his now completely unlimited presidential power for. What a fucking dick.

He could have expanded the court. He could have abolished the electoral college. He could have assassinated Trump. He could have done anything to help anyone but his family but he didn’t. What a fucking dick.

EDIT: Not suggesting he should have gone dark Brandon and assassinated Trump.

You got to love this. The Pentagon just failed its 7th audit in a row. It has a budget of $1tr. And yet the cost savings team decides that penny pinching by making life harder for workers is where the real savings are to be found. Not the giant black hole of finance which is the military industrial complex.

I used to say that in any situation on any given day, 10% of people are willing to hurt you, 10% are willing to help you, and the other 80% could go either way. I feel like I have to adjust that to 30/10/60 split now.

Nope they genuinely think that the only reason we’re having these weather events is because there’s NOT ENOUGH carbon in the atmosphere.

Love watching the oligarchs take over…it’s nowhere near as subtle as I thought it was going to be.

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