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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
March 18, 2015
• The SEIU is still trying to get a $15 hourly wage out of McDonald’s. Meanwhile, McDonald’s workers in nineteen cities have filed a new complaint against the company for what they say are safety hazards. “Workers cite a persistent lack of gloves for ...

Daily Bafflements
March 17, 2015
• Maybe the only good thing to come out of South by Southwest this week: flying cars? (Via John Byrne; see also David Graeber.) • If you haven’t seen it yet, this send-up of Silicon Valley’s thoughtless privilege-and-profit machine, “WellDeserved,” ...

Daily Bafflements
March 16, 2015
• The National Journal has a funny little feature on conservative pols’ love affair with Chick-fil-a, the fast food that became a culture-war emblem when the chain’s CEO spoke out against same-sex marriage in 2012. Now, the chicken sandwiches are a must for ...

Daily Bafflements
March 13, 2015
• Drivers in California for both Lyft and Uber are filing cases against their employers; the drivers object to the companies’ classifying them as “independent contractors” rather than employees so as to avoid paying overtime and the threat of unionization. ...

Daily Bafflements
March 12, 2015
• It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today, a good time as any to re-read Maura Mahoney’s Baffler salvo from issue 5, way back in 1993, “Back in Black on the Beaten Path,” about Gap’s rather forced black trend and the commercial rediscovery of ...

Daily Bafflements
March 11, 2015
• In Georgia, a sanitation worker got sentenced to thirty days in jail when residents of a wealthy neighborhood complained that he was picking up their garbage too early in the morning and waking them up, reports the Christian Science Monitor (emphasis on their garbage). ...

Daily Bafflements
March 10, 2015
• Oh good heavens, Boston now has a “Startup Czar.” • The Apple Watch is fueling our class anxieties, while Apple’s CEO is fueling all of our other anxieties. • Wikipedia, along with eight other organizations, is suing the NSA over the mass surveillance ...

Daily Bafflements
March 06, 2015
• From Wired this week comes news of “A Smartwatch App That Lets Your Boss Track You Constantly.” Oh hey, cool! “It’s meant to be a social app, where people digitally ‘nudge’ each other to pick up the pace and congratulate colleagues when the ...

Daily Bafflements
March 05, 2015
• Headline of the Day, from the Washington Post: “Awash in cash, Bush asks donors not to give more than $1 million – for now.” • In case you missed it, Baffler contributing editor David Graeber talked about the history of debt for a radio series on BBC, ...

Daily Bafflements
March 04, 2015
• Today in Billionaires’ Dreams Do Come True: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s luxury yacht, the M/Y Octopus, is equipped with an exploration submarine. Allen announced this week that all his deep-sea explorations had not been in vain: he had discovered the wreck ...

Daily Bafflements
March 03, 2015
• At The Verge, Nitasha Tiku has a dispatch from the so-called “clean cannabis” movement, and in particular from a very silly-sounding, Gatsby-themed weed start-up launch party in a mansion made of redwood trees in the Berkeley hills. • Edgar Allan Poe was a ...

Daily Bafflements
March 02, 2015
• The San Jose Mercury News contributes to the “Before It Was Cool, Inc.” files: “Major companies are testing whether it would pay to tuck away their world famous logos in favor of more hipster guises” because “marketing experts say there’s ...