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After negotiations between the United Parcel Service and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters broke down last week, UPS on Friday announced “business continuity training” to prepare for a potential strike by 340,000 union members next month.
“We remain focused on reaching an agreement with the Teamsters that is a win for UPS employees, our customers, our union, and our company,” the shipping giant said. “While we have made great progress and are close to reaching an agreement, we have a responsibility as an essential service provider to take steps to help ensure we can deliver our customers’ packages if the Teamsters choose to strike.”
“Over the coming weeks, many of our US employees will participate in training that would help them safely serve our customers if there is a labor disruption. This temporary plan has no effect on current operations and the industry-leading service our people continue to provide for our customers,” UPS added, claiming that such activities “will not take away from our ongoing efforts to finalize a new contract” with union workers.
Meanwhile, the Teamsters told The Associated Press on Friday that “UPS is making clear it doesn’t view its workforce as a priority.”
“Corporate executives are quick to brag about industry-leading service and even more quickly forget the Teamster members who perform that service,” the union said. “UPS should stop wasting time and money on training strikebreakers and get back to the negotiating table with a real economic offer.”
As the Teamsters explained earlier this month, the union is fighting for a deal that “guarantees better pay for all workers, eliminates a two-tier wage system, increases full-time jobs, resolves safety and health concerns, and provides stronger protections against managerial harassment.”
Last month, 97% of UPS workers represented by the Teamsters voted to strike if there is no deal by July 31. The union has been holding practice pickets, including one in Brooklyn, New York on Friday that was joined by Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters general president.
“For too long, this multibillion-dollar corporation has padded its bottom line with the unpaid wages of our members who sacrificed themselves and their families during the pandemic,” O’Brien said at the event, according to the union. “UPS is not ready for the fury of 340,000 Teamsters.”
After the Friday rally, O’Brien made clear that the union is still prepared to negotiate with UPS, telling Reuters that “the clock is on our side, not theirs. I assume at some point they’ll be reaching out looking to try and get a deal.”
The last strike by UPS workers represented by the union was in 1997 and is considered a major labor win in US history. As Labor Notes recalled in 2017: “For 15 days, Teamsters shut down UPS nationwide. Managers struggled to make even a tiny fraction of deliveries… Out of options and running out of time, management surrendered on every key demand.”
If the looming strike happens, “things could be a lot worse this time around, putting even more pressure on companies, consumers, and UPS. That’s because the economy a quarter-century ago is entirely different than now—one where package delivery is more important than it’s ever been,” Vox reported Friday. “While competitors like FedEx and the US Postal Service could pick up some of the deliveries, experts said logistics networks are too strained to fill many of the gaps that would be created.”
“A 10-day strike would cost the economy more than $7 billion and be the costliest work stoppage in at least a century, according to a new study by Anderson Economic Group, which researches labor disruptions,” Vox noted. “That includes $4.6 billion in losses to consumers and businesses that rely on UPS, as well as more than a billion in lost wages and $800 million in company losses.”
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Twenty-three years after the reversion of the Panama Canal, today the Panamanian government, betraying the generational struggle that ended the colonial enclave of the old Canal Zone on December 31, 1999, intends to sign a contract with Minera Panama and its affiliates, which is the same and worse. This government, without any counterweight, accepts a contract that’s harmful to the Panamanian sovereignty over the national territory.
This contract, in all of its parts, reveals the cession of the sovereign rights of the Panamanian state to ensure the preservation of its habitats, its natural resources and the conservation of its environment. It also gives up the sustainable development of vulnerable areas such as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor that runs through the District of Donoso, which, like the Omar Torrijos Special District, has fragile soils and vulnerable forests that will be significantly affected.
Through a mediated consultation through the ÁGORA platform, only two proposals were considered. The rest of the proposals were unavailable to be part of the citizen consultation. We were told that it was not considered binding, but was a mere procedure. The contract is harmful in part and in whole because it gives away rights and contains extremely unconstitutional defects:
These are some of the considerations that the College of Sociology and Social Sciences of Panama (CoSCieSPa), denounces as harmful to Panamanian sovereignty, by which the current government surrenders to Minera Panamá, SA and its affiliates; without fully guaranteeing the best interests of the country, of sites affected by opencast copper mining and other materials, whose forecast of environmental recovery will be “80 to 100 years,” as noted by Stanley Heckadon.
It is urgent to comply with the declaration of unconstitutionality made by the Supreme Court, to safeguard the dignity of the Panamanian State and bequeath to future generation a nation with values and principles forged by the struggles for the freedom and self-determination of our people; as well as for the preservation of our natural resources.
The National Assembly of Deputies has only one way: reject the mining contract. Let’s avoid the sale of Panamanian territory to new colonizing companies. We recommend that the executive branch take control of the mining area, to prevent further damage to Panamanian sovereignty.
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Si los humanos estamos organizados en alrededor de 200 estados, y en el mundo hay en torno a 6 000 lenguas, salta a la vista que el bilingüismo es más común de lo que solemos suponer. Se trata de un hecho cada vez más visible que deja sin argumentos al modelo (todavía predominante) de “un estado, una lengua”, consecuencia de unificar las naciones bajo un solo nombre.
Con este cambio de perspectiva, en las últimas décadas se ha estado investigando el bilingüismo para estudiar su incidencia lingüística y cognitiva. La cuestión de si el bilingüismo es útil como protección para el alzhéimer lleva en el candelero algún tiempo, e incluso hoy se plantea hasta qué punto podría ser eficaz para combatir el declive cognitivo.
Resolver esta duda no es nada sencillo dado que estamos ante dos condiciones que, por sí mismas, ya son muy complejas de investigar por separado. Y más aún en su interacción. El cúmulo de variables emotivas, cognitivas, lingüísticas y sociales que concurren en el bilingüismo y el envejecimiento hacen que los resultados de las investigaciones en un contexto concreto no sean generalizables a todas las poblaciones.
Por otro lado, no existe una única forma de bilingüismo. Para empezar porque, según el momento de aprendizaje, distinguimos entre bilingüismos precoces o simultáneos –que se adquieren en la primera infancia– y bilingüismos sucesivos –cuando el segundo idioma se incorpora más tarde–.
Las investigaciones acerca del bilingüismo precoz, hasta los cuatro o seis años, se centran en las repercusiones estructurales y permanentes en el cerebro al manejar más de una lengua. En estos años iniciales, denominados “período crítico”, tiene lugar un enorme desecho neuronal de lo inútil, en paralelo con la formación de un ingente número de conexiones y circuitos. Entre otros muchos cambios, en esta etapa se categorizan los contrastes fonológicos y se omiten los que no se practican, que posteriormente serán muy difíciles de aprender.
Los estudios del bilingüismo sucesivo analizan los distintos periodos de adquisición secuencial. Concretamente se distinguen tres etapas donde sí hay diferencias: antes de los 12-15 años, de los 16 años a los 30 y de los 31 a los 60.
También hay muchísima variedad: es muy distinto ser bilingüe manejando un léxico básico de 6 000 palabras que dominar 60 000 conceptos-palabra por duplicado en dos idiomas y con pocos errores.
Estos errores, precisamente, son una vía de estudio sumamente interesante. Normalmente los errores en la producción del habla –hablar o escribir– son más frecuentes y distintos que los errores en comprensión –escuchar o leer–, donde sorprende su mínima presencia.
Se debe a que los procesos de producción de un discurso, oral o escrito, en un idioma son más complejos: incluyen seleccionar, identificar, ordenar, evaluar y completar el contenido.
La comprensión, en cambio, al basarse en el reconocimiento de material ya conocido y usado, es más simple lingüísticamente. Aunque sin obviar que existe un trabajo inferencial sobre lo implícito (lo que no se dice) que resulta clave para una buena comprensión, e implica un exigente trabajo con muchos recursos mentales.
Precisamente gracias a la investigación sobre este trabajo inferencial se han hallado evidencias de que los bilingües disponen de mayores habilidades. Ser bilingüe implica tener que responder a más opciones donde hay que elegir (lenguas y culturas), ser capaz de dirigir la atención, manejar un mapa mental… Y eso requiere y proporciona, según la capacidad y la experiencia, más recursos cognitivos.
Si a eso le sumamos la complejidad del discurso (social, narrativo o profesional) y los múltiples estratos emocionales a los que se accede, se entiende por qué una buena traducción resulta tan compleja.
Recientemente se ha publicado un excelente trabajo sobre las repercusiones del bilingüismo en el envejecimiento: el estudio DELCODE. Basado en 746 participantes, compara los tres grupos de edades antes mencionados. Sus datos muestran con claridad cómo, en contextos de uso similares, tanto el bilingüismo simultaneo inicial como el sucesivo de uso frecuente (diario) resultan beneficiosos.
En concreto, se ha constatado que el bilingüismo sucesivo –no más allá de los 60 años– influye en el sostenimiento de las funciones cognitivas, sobre todo en relación con el aprendizaje, la memoria en general, la memoria de trabajo, las funciones ejecutivas y la competencia en el lenguaje.
A nivel estructural, el volumen de materia gris es mayor en bilingües que en monolingües, tanto para los bilingües iniciales como para las personas de media edad.
En resumen, a pesar de que el bilingüismo sucede en situaciones muy diversas, con matices para cada individuo, hay evidencias suficientemente claras de que favorece cambios beneficiosos y fijaciones estructurales duraderas en el cerebro. Además, en una población de nivel cultural medio, el bilingüismo sucesivo posterior no solo implica mayor amplitud comunicativa y cultural: también mejora la competencia cognitiva de forma permanente. Y, como consecuencia, protege frente al desgaste cognitivo.
Miquel Serra Raventós, Catedràtic j. de Psicologia Cognitiva y experto senior de la Comisión de Bioètica, Universitat de Barcelona
Este artículo fue publicado originalmente en The Conversation. Lea el original.
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“A newt?“
Most probably, the former president’s proxy candidate to retake his old Cambio Democratico party was not confused with The Tulivieja by the majority of CD primary voters who rejected her. But you never know.
Both as to Judge Baloisa Marquínez and as to National Assembly member Yanibel Ábrego, you will encounter a feminist current in Panamanian thinking which takes the phenomena as two partisan sides of this coin that vilifies women whenever they step into prominent roles in public life.
As a society, Panama will eventually get past this moment.
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As a kid, I worked in a men’s store tailor shop on the East Side of Cleveland. It was chaos, watching master tailors cut, sew, and press tiny threads into modern fashion. My job was to clean the shop, oil the machines, and keep the steam presses hydrated. Thread was everywhere and constantly needed to be swept up, as each garment was crafted with care and purpose.
Whether Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg realized it or not, the name of his new text-based social media platform, Threads, is the perfect metaphor for the new platform we’ve all been craving. Will it be sewn into something beautiful or just another tangled mess that needs to be swept up?
Elon Musk’s decisions at the helm of Twitter and the longstanding issues surrounding the lack of controls against bullies and bots have disgusted millions of users. But is jumping ship to a new platform—owned by a flawed company that has not cleaned up its own issues—the way we want to engage?
Social media fashions have changed from when we first logged on over a decade ago. We are no longer excited by chaos, stunts, or gimmicks, or learning basic HTML to customize our backgrounds on MySpace. Many of us just want an uncluttered, simple social platform that’s bully and bot-free, and isn’t trying to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, knows this, and was quoted in The New York Times saying he wants “Threads to be a ‘friendly place’ for public conversation.”
But is that even possible, given that Threads has seemingly already fallen short on protections? After my first day on Threads, I already faced issues that have plagued Twitter—a blatantly similar type of platform—for years. I had fake profiles and bots already following my account.
If Threads wants to succeed, it needs a bobbin to keep it running smoothly. Think of it as adding some simple guardrails to help guide the threads from jamming the machine. Without this basic intervention, we already know the downward spiral that’s coming next.
We have watched social networks, including Meta, fight to keep and expand archaic protections that were granted in 1996’s Communications Decency Act. These protections were created to allow companies like AOL and Prodigy to be treated as blind infrastructure, like a telephone line, and never be held liable for any communications on their railways.
These laws were created before there were modern-day social networks, let alone billions of dollars in advertising revenue being moved through them.
Unfortunately, as each of these platforms competes to become the largest network in the free market, without any intervention or protections, they will create more of the same bot-driven cesspools, spreading misinformation and disinformation and promoting false advertising. There is no real incentive for them to do anything different in the United States. Threads is not yet in the European Union, since the E.U. has stricter privacy laws. It also has yet to implement advertising, but that’s just a matter of time.
Now is the time to evolve the Communications Decency Act so that the next generation of social networks are sewn into a more wearable garment. This is not unAmerican. Think back to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Let’s follow this lead and advance our social platforms by evolving Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act and force these powerful companies to take accountability for their actions.
Historically, Twitter only took performative actions to resolve or remove bots and fake accounts before they testified before Congress or before a major election. The company was well known for putting out self-congratulatory press releases on how it clamped down and removed tons of bots and bad actors—but let’s be honest, they never implemented long-term fixes to these known problems.
A simple change in liability, the bobbin, will ensure social networks run smoother by forcing them to focus on their consumers. This simple change will make these companies spend resources on security measures, monitoring technology, and even hiring staff to review advertising for accuracy, just like every other media outlet in America.
In other words, a small-government intervention will clean up the public market and force Threads—and Meta—to build a better, safer sewing machine. One that does not allow its users to be threatened by hate speech or acts of violence without real consequences.
It’s time for Congress to take out their brooms, evolve the Communications Decency Act, and help clean up these threads.
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After a seven-month investigation, a group of congressional Democrats and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders released a bombshell report Wednesday showing that private tax prep firms have been secretly sharing US taxpayers’ sensitive personal information with tech giants for years, a practice that the lawmakers condemned as outrageous and possibly illegal.
The report, spearheaded by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in the Senate and Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) in the House, notes that TaxAct, H&R Block, and TaxSlayer “used computer code—known as pixels—to send data to Meta and Google.” The lawmakers’ investigation was sparked by recent reportingin The Markup.
“While most websites use pixels, it is particularly reckless for online tax preparation websites to use them on webpages where tax return information is entered unless further steps are taken to ensure that the pixels do not access sensitive information,” the lawmakers’ 54-page report states. “Yet, the tax prep companies described this as a ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘common industry practice.'”
The three tax prep giants, which have lobbied fervently against efforts to establish a free IRS tax filing program, each admitted to sharing taxpayer data through the use of the Meta Pixel and Google tools.
“The Meta Pixel and other Meta tools used by TaxAct collected far more information than was previously reported,” the report reads. “In addition to taxpayers’ filing status, approximate [adjusted gross income], approximate refund amount, and names of dependents, the Pixel collected approximate federal tax owed and buttons that were clicked and names of text-entry forms that the taxpayer navigated to.”
“H&R Block and TaxSlayer also revealed an extensive list of data shared via the Meta Pixel, including transmitting information on whether taxpayers had visited pages for many revealing tax situations,” the report adds. “Although the tax prep companies and Big Tech firms claimed that all shared data was anonymous, the FTC and experts have indicated that the data could easily be used to identify individuals, or to create a dossier on them that could be used for targeted advertising or other purposes.”
Facebook’s privacy policy states that it “may retain” data gathered with the Meta Pixel for up to two years.
David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former consumer protection chief at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), told CNN on Wednesday that the revelations in the Senate report are “a five-alarm fire” for taxpayer privacy.
“On a scale from one to 10, this is a 15,” said Vladeck. “This is as great as any privacy breach that I’ve seen other than exploiting kids.”
The lawmakers alerted key federal agencies to their findings in a letter on Wednesday and demanded prosecution for “any company or individuals who violated the law.”
“The findings of this report reveal a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy by tax prep companies and by Big Tech firms that appeared to violate taxpayers’ rights and may have violated taxpayer privacy law,” the lawmakers wrote. “The Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice should fully investigate this matter.”
“We also welcome the recent IRS announcement of a free, direct file pilot next year, which will give taxpayers the option to file taxes without sharing their data with untrustworthy and incompetent tax preparation firms,” they added.
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