Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?

May 1, 2023

The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.

Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.

It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.

Screenwriters?

Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.

Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.

And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:

Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.

“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Cold comfort

December 11, 2021

The sun peeks over the Sandias.

Speaking of filthy weather, looks like I made the right call when I skipped cyclocross nats in Illinois.

USA Cycling announced via Twatter this morning that powerful winds had caused “heavy damage to both the course and the venue,” and that the industry races would be canceled and other events delayed and shortened.

Still, could be worse. This is apparently a love tap from a series of storms that roared through the Midwest and South like Sherman marching to the sea.

Kentucky may have gotten the worst of it, though a tornado in Illinois ripped open an Amazon fulfillment center like a wassail-crazed holiday reveler taking a box cutter to a package.

“About half of it’s missing, it’s gone,” a fire department captain told The New York Times. The building was about 400,000 square feet. One wonders how many car condos were parked nearby, their occupants grabbing a bit of shuteye between holiday shifts.

Here in The Duck! City we awakened to temps in the teens, but the usual blue skies appear poised to prevail. The furnace is running like a cyclocrosser with a 60-mph tailwind, but at least the roof is still on.

Fulfill your destiny, Burqueños

May 27, 2020

“I’ll need $6.5 mil’ for improvements to your feeble industrial park.
I trust that won’t be a problem?”

The bad thing about being a former copy-desk guy is the questions you don’t get to ask assistant city editors and reporters.

Here are a couple of examples:

Raytheon shuts its operation near the Sandia National Labs-Kirtland AFB complex in Albuquerque, where it employs 200 people as an arm of Raytheon Missile Systems, based in Tucson. In the service of consolidation their work is going elsewhere, along with the paychecks for same, and Raytheon has returned $850,000 in state economic-development funding, the company announces.

Meanwhile, Amazon proclaims that it is building a “fulfillment center” on the west side. In a press release, Bernalillo County says it will kick in $6.5 million for “a regional public infrastructure improvement project” to encourage “future development” in the Upper Petroglyphs Industrial Park.

Bad news, good news, yeah? The basic ingredients for any publication. Add some filler to hold it all together — cute kitten videos, celebrity breakups, the latest dispatches from the phone of Adolf Twitler — and you’re good to go. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Well, maybe. Me, I’d kind of like to know, without having to Google it, what sort of work the Raytheon people did (it involved microwave and laser weaponry, apparently); what the average salary was; how they feel about the loss of their jobs; and what their next steps might be.

I’d also be interested in learning how many people the Amazon warehouse will employ, what they will do, and what they will earn; what the county can expect to get for its $6.5 million investment; and whether someone has calculated that Albuquerque’s economic future involves herding boxes, not making zap guns.

I’m guessing that some of the newly idled Raytheon employees will not be a good fit for an Amazon fulfillment center. Unless Darth Bezos is planning a little Death Star project on the side.