Hello, you beautiful podcast listeners. This is Endeavorance. I just wanted to record a quick heads up.
The fourth story of today's episode does talk about animal abuse.
I don't go into specific details about the abuse, but there are mentions there.
So just a fair warning that's in this episode. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy
as much as you can. Take care, be well, I'll see you in the next one.
Well, I guess I won't see you. You'll hear me in the next one. All right.
Bye bye. Hello. I wore a comfy sweater today, but stuff still happens. So what's up? Victoire!
The strikers did it good. They did great. The writer strikers, the ones who were the writers that
striked, they did good. And they reached an agreement with Hollywood executives that
shouldn't have taken this long. Let me try that again. The writers guild have won their strike,
tentatively. After months of striking, they reached an agreement with Hollywood executives to get
concessions on, you know, paying them what they're worth. Weird. This could have happened at any time
and only didn't happen because of corporate greed. They were not asking for very much. They were just
asking to be paid for their work. Contractual wins include better royalty payouts, protections from
being replaced by AI, and protections from just like malicious cancellations of shows. The
executives thought that they could starve out the people who actually make the art that they profit
from, but it turns out the worker solidarity outlasted the executives desire to fuck them over.
Won't somebody think of the poor shareholders? Oh, but speaking of companies doing dumb shit in the
face of striking workers, Ford is hitting pause on their 3.5 billion dollar electric vehicle battery
plant that they're going to build in Michigan. Despite literally billions of dollars in publicly
funded subsidies for this facility to be built, Ford is citing the striking auto workers as like,
oh no, we can't build this facility because it's too spooky because because the employees might not
be there. As opposed to, you know, reaching a deal with the workers who would staff the building
that you're being subsidized to build. Quoting the ever fire United Auto Workers president Sean
Fain, this is a shameful, barely veiled threat by Ford to cut jobs. We are simply asking for a just
transition to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.
Notably in the face of this decision, the state of Michigan is like, okay, but what if we just
throw more money at Ford? Maybe they'll build it then. I love that. I love it when all of our
taxpayer money is being given to private companies to do things that the private companies can just
decide not to do. That has worked out in the past many times and has always resulted in good things.
So the big cops are now investigating the little cops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
You haven't heard Baton Rouge, which is a police department that's largely known for being
horrible, has been using a warehouse to torture people. They refer to it as the Brave Cave and
they take detainees there and do horrific things to them because that's what cops do. If you were
here to argue that isn't what cops do, I would point to the fact that this is what cops are doing.
Now the Baton Rouge Police Department is no stranger to scandals. They have them all the time.
In fact, their current police chief was brought on after a massive scandal in 2016 and he was
supposed to clean up the department and quoting him, this is a literal quote, there were some
mistakes made. Although the police chief did say that when he found out about the torture warehouse,
he went to the FBI himself and he was like, hey, investigate this, I guess. But for some reason,
I find it hard to believe that the literal police chief was not aware that he had cops in his
department taking people to a warehouse. Like there's footage. What? It remains to be seen
what's going to happen as a potential fallout from this. But hey, maybe we shouldn't have people in
positions of authority who can do that. And hey, maybe when people are saying all cops are bastards,
it's because they're referring to people participating in a broken system that is viewed
as irredeemable. But I didn't go to police boy school, so maybe I'm just not aware about the
extremely helpful method of torturing people in a warehouse. Maybe that's just, you know, that's
just good cop behavior. You may have already heard about Neuralink, Elon Musk's company that's trying
to develop a brain implant chip for humans to control computers or whatever. And you've
probably heard about how they've been doing a lot of animal abuse and they're testing for that. But
you may not be aware of just how bad it actually is. While Musk has been publicly trying to downplay
the effect that they've been having on these animals, saying that they've only been testing
on animals that are near death anyway, and that they're doing everything they can to minimize harm,
that's just straight up not true. A report from Wired, which did a bunch of actual investigative
digging and talking to employees and whatnot, found that they just brutalized a bunch of monkeys
and other animals, thousands of them. I will not go into the specific details about what was done
to these animals, but suffice to say, it's horrific. And they were essentially made to live in
excruciating pain for weeks on end until ultimately being euthanized. The SEC is potentially
investigating the just absolute lies from Musk as he was trying to sell Neuralink to investors
and whatnot, just lying about the animal abuse and the danger of the thing that they're building.
I want to be clear that brain implant technology has incredible potential when approached like
ethically and from a standpoint of improving human health and capability. There are a ton of
people who have things like locked-in syndrome, who are otherwise bedridden and can't communicate
with the world. Having something in their brain that would allow them to communicate more easily
would be incredible. And that's just one extreme example. There are a ton of actually good medical
applications, and there are also existing firms that are working to make this stuff
with better results. But again, a lot of the focus is on Musk because of course it is. And
in very Elon Musk fashion, he's just pushing back on any notion of doing things safely in the hopes
of just making something flashy. I'm looking forward to the medical benefits from places that
are doing this for the purposes of medical benefit and not beaming ads directly into your brain.
On this day in 1975, Spain used the death penalty for what is hopefully the last time in the history
of their country. They executed five people who were members of anti-fascist and separatist movements,
and that sparked international outrage and almost condemnation from the U.N. I say almost condemnation
because while there was a proposal to condemn Spain and their use of the death penalty in this case,
the United States stepped in and was like, well, hold on now. After the United States intervened,
ultimately what was put out was just a generic statement about human rights that didn't even
mention Spain specifically. To this day, the United States remains in the vast minority of
countries that still use the death penalty. Lightning round. Marking the fifth year anniversary
of popular streaming service dropout, they will be officially canning the college humor brand.
U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has said that she would raise the retirement age
for social security benefits for only young people. She's previously said that 65 is way too low of
a retirement age. An EU report has found that Twitter has the highest ratio of false information
and Russian propaganda from any of the major social platforms. Game engine company Unity has
U-turned on a lot of the stuff they were doing with their new pricing model, but it might be a
little too little too late. Reddit is now looking into potentially being able to pay out to users
via Reddit gold after all that stuff that happened with the protests on their website recently,
and they lost a bunch of traffic. It's not great for them right now. Amazon Prime Video is going
to start having ads because of course they will. And finally for today, a judge has ruled that
Donald Trump committed billions of dollars worth of fraud over and under inflating the value of his
properties to benefit him depending on the scenario. Elevating his value to get loans and
deflating his value to avoid taxes. The Trump organization may have to entirely dissolve. We
don't quite know yet. We're going to see that unfold over the next couple of weeks. And hey,
an announcement. I will be attending Packs Unplugged December 1st through 3rd in Philadelphia.
I'll be there doing content stuff, so that's pretty exciting. And if you see me, come say hi.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening. Head to
StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content, and a big light in the sky.
My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on Friday. Take care and be well.