Hello. I put my shopping cart in the return area, but stuff still happens.
So what's up? Watch the sky next weekend.
Because for people in North and Central and South America,
America, there's going to be a solar eclipse.
October 14th, around midday, an annular solar eclipse will happen.
You're going to be able to see the Ring of Fire.
Thanks, Moon.
I have linked a website in my newsletter that will let you see exactly where it's going to be
and how much coverage you can expect at what time.
Go check that out.
And if you're going to look at it, please wear protective lenses.
Not sunglasses, specifically eclipse glasses.
They do a lot more than just make it dimmer.
If you burn out your eyes, how are you going to see the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
Meta has rolled out an AI that generates stickers for use in chat.
It'll generate basically anything.
One reporter was able to get it to generate Elmo with a knife,
Mickey Mouse with a gun, gender-bent pregnant Shrek.
This is primarily hilarious.
And while a real artist would be able to just make these stickers anyway,
the issue is that Meta, which is a company that makes profit,
has an AI that can generate just copyright infringing things that are also really bad.
I don't think Disney wants Meta having people sharing Mickey Mouse with a gun,
let alone facilitating it.
But, you know, go off, I guess.
More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare employees are currently on strike
during negotiations for a new contract.
The strike only lasts a few days, but they're asking for pay raises
and fixes to chronic understaffing at most of the locations.
Big shocker, they're pointing to the fact that Kaiser has had record profits recently,
while employee wages have stagnated and CEO wages have gone up.
Hey, pay workers.
It's not that hard.
The Biden administration has waived dozens of regulations to speed up construction
of the border wall from the Trump administration.
Yes, Biden's border wall.
Environmental regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act,
the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act have been waived
so that we don't have to worry about environmental impact
while building a border wall that the administration says they don't approve of.
The administration maintains that their hands are tied,
and while they don't approve of the use of funds,
the funds must be used for constructing this wall.
And so because their hands are tied,
they're going to waive a whole bunch of environmental regulations to make that go faster.
An argument could be made that they're doing this to make it so that it's not more expensive
to do the border wall or something, but you're against it.
Why are you facilitating it?
And why are you facilitating it by reducing environmental oversight
while also claiming to be a progressive president that cares about the environment?
Environmental advocates are noting that this border wall is going to be built
right through the habitat of an already endangered species,
and it's going to fuck up migration patterns.
All because, of course, we have to stop migrants from seeking refuge in this country.
This country that famously has never taken in migrants seeking refuge.
Can't be having that. That has no place in our history.
Never mind that this isn't even our land to begin with.
Anyway, as a kicker, the Biden administration is also resuming deportation for Venezuelan migrants.
There you go.
Joe Biden claims to be the most progressive president in history, and perhaps he is,
but the most progressive U.S. president is still center right.
On this day in 2010, a little-known app called Instagram was founded.
It was originally intended to be a check-in app, more like Foursquare,
but they decided that was not a good idea and instead pivoted towards image sharing.
I guess that worked out because a couple years later,
Facebook purchased them for $1 billion in an acquisition that is largely criticized
as anti-competitive despite getting approval from regulators.
At time of writing, it is estimated that there will be about 2.5 billion monthly
active accounts on Instagram. There are 7.8 billion people on Earth.
So it's probably, you know, probably not one-to-one people to account.
I think we know that.
But that's a lot of accounts. Maybe. Just maybe.
There shouldn't be websites with billions of users.
Lightning Round.
A Russian airstrike targeted a civilian town in Ukraine, killing 51 people.
The town is small enough that that is 20% of their population wiped out in one strike.
Many of the people who were there were attending awake at the time.
I didn't want to dwell on this one, but I mean, reminder.
Fuck poo.
The Biden administration has approved $9 billion of student debt relief for 125,000 borrowers.
Maybe they can approve not building more border wall.
Elon Musk is now being sued again, this time by the SEC,
compelling him to testify in an ongoing case investigating his actions around stock purchases
while buying Twitter.
He has been just not not testifying.
And they're like, dog, like, you got it.
The state of Virginia in the US accidentally purged a bunch of eligible voters from their
voter rolls. They're saying that they're working on it, but they don't know how many
people got kicked out.
It seems to be associated with people who had parole violations.
So you're probably okay if that's not you.
But those people have the right to vote and it was just taken away.
Patreon got a big old branding update.
If you want to check it out, you can go to their website, patreon.com slash endeavorance.
And finally, for today, Metta is doing even more layoffs, this time targeting their Metaverse
subdivision, which totally was a good investment.
What a what a solid choice on old Zuckerberg's part.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Hit the stuff keeps happening dot online for sources, bonus content, and that link that I
talked about about the eclipse.
Hey, a real one.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.