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I think that we're about two months away from her openly calling for violence

Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.

[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]

The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. 

The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...

Why it matters

The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 

"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."

Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.

The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

Real-life consequences

In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.

In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.

In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings. 

-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024

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Note:

A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.

In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger Kings to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)

Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)

The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)

Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

She has a lot to say

Concentration camp.

They built a concentration camp.

I don't think words can describe what this other than genocide.

Virtual reconstruction of the thermopolium discovered during the last excavations in Pompeii.  Made by the Spanish archaeologist Pablo Aparicio Resco, based on original photographs by Luigi Spina / Parco Archeologico di Pompei.

Note: “Thermopolium” is a popular word created by the archaeologists; there was no such word in Latin, the actual word is Caupona; the modern equivalent of Restaurant, and at the same time Cafe/Bar and fast food stall.

Art by Zaruba

I don't always agree with the decisions of Wikipedia's volunteer editors, but having learned that their decision on how to handle the James Somerton situation was to deem him non-notable and turn his article into a redirect to a brief writeup of Hbomberguy's plagiarism investigation – well, like I said, this may not be a good decision, but in context it's an extremely funny one.

Oh my god you weren't joking

Wikipedia says "you haven't contributed anything significantly original enough to be a notable figure."

It's not about whether he's original or not. It's that there were no reliable independent sources about him outside of the plagiarism. Since we found he was only notable for the plagiarism, the article was redirected to the article where the plagiarism was discussed. This is pretty standard for articles about one-trick ponies and has nothing to do with judging him for being unoriginal.

to be fair the intersection of GNG (not pictured) and more specialized guidelines like NARTIST (Fig. 2) is fuzzier than anyone would prefer

Technically speaking every SNG including NARTIST is supposed to be subordinate to GNG in the sense that an SNG is supposed to reasonably predict the subject having SIGCOV, but people argue them as gospel in and of themselves, which is stupid. (Either way my point about why Somerton got merged still stands).

whatever this is girls keep doing it

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I don't always agree with the decisions of Wikipedia's volunteer editors, but having learned that their decision on how to handle the James Somerton situation was to deem him non-notable and turn his article into a redirect to a brief writeup of Hbomberguy's plagiarism investigation – well, like I said, this may not be a good decision, but in context it's an extremely funny one.

Oh my god you weren't joking

Wikipedia says "you haven't contributed anything significantly original enough to be a notable figure."

It's not about whether he's original or not. It's that there were no reliable independent sources about him outside of the plagiarism. Since we found he was only notable for the plagiarism, the article was redirected to the article where the plagiarism was discussed. This is pretty standard for articles about one-trick ponies and has nothing to do with judging him for being unoriginal.

I've seen baby Mordecai floating around here and there and figured I might as well make a decent post for him so people can view it properly if they'd like. I don't think anyone really knows it was my patron piece lol

Made by the wonderful @lackadaisycats 🩷

Enjoy!

I don't always agree with the decisions of Wikipedia's volunteer editors, but having learned that their decision on how to handle the James Somerton situation was to deem him non-notable and turn his article into a redirect to a brief writeup of Hbomberguy's plagiarism investigation – well, like I said, this may not be a good decision, but in context it's an extremely funny one.

For any nerds interested in the inner workings of Wikipedia, that decision came as the result of this "Articles for Deletion" discussion (AfD), which closed with a consensus to merge the Somerton content to the Hbomerguy page.

AfD is basically a public forum where Wikipedians argue about whether or not a given article is notable enough by our standards to merit its own article. There's a lot of nuance that goes into this, especially when it comes to people who are kind of only important for one event, but by and large it comes down to whether or not reliable, independent sources have covered the topic.

In this case, since Somerton pretty much only got attention in the context of the plagiarism scandal, it was determined that the information about him was better placed on the Hbomerguy page.

Found this in the notes and felt it was worth clarifying, because this actually reflects some misunderstandings about Wikipedia and how we do things (and about the history of Somerton's article).

The Wikipedia community determines which subjects have an article based on our notability criteria. It can be a little Byzantine to explain, but for the most part, a subject needs to have coverage about them from reliable independent sources to be considered notable. Reliable sources are things like newspapers, journals, magazines, books, and other media.

For individual people, we also consider when they're notable only for one event. Articles about people who are found to be notable for only one event are often merged, usually to the page for that thing. (For example, that kid who got momentarily famous for making that “Dreams” song go viral a couple years back had his article merged into the article for the song after this AfD.) We make this determination based on what reliable independent sources say about the person.

The community consensus found that Somerton was very much the definition of “guy only notable for one thing”, based on the available reliable coverage about him, all of which solely focused on the scandal. You can see this lack of sourcing in the evolution of his article, actually: Somerton didn’t even have an article until the plagiarism scandal hit. The article was created as a redirect to Hbomberguy’s article on December 26, 2023. It wasn’t until December 28 that it was expanded by another user into a ~250 word blurb solely about the plagiarism. The article maxed out at about 324 words just before the deletion discussion was closed in January 2024, at which time it was still entirely about the plagiarism. During the deletion discussion, no one found any sourcing that covered him outside the context of the scandal, which means that, in Wikipedia terms, he was just “some nobody”.

On to the second point: notability is not temporary. If someone is previously notable for X and then reliable sources report that X was a fraud we don’t delete the article, we revise it to include the fraud. An article about a notable sportsperson exposed for doping doesn't get deleted, it gets rewritten. Similarly, if Somerton had been found to be notable outside of the plagiarism scandal – let’s say someone had found a bunch of reliable sourcing about his activities pre-Hbomberguy – then we would have kept his article and rewritten it so that it covered his entire career, pre- and post-scandal. In other words, yeah, we would kinda “slap a big PLAGIARISM watermark over it”.

you people are NOT reblogging this