#global corporate monoculture

[lenbryant]

(LONG POST) Being a piece from the New Yorker, this essay takes several paragraphs before it finally gets around to the main point. #refrigeratormagnet

David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero

The C.E.O. of a conglomerate that includes Warner Bros. studios, CNN, and HBO takes on an entertainment business in turmoil.

By Clare Malone, August 23, 2023

In 1941, a couple from New York bought an undeveloped parcel of land in Beverly Hills for fourteen thousand dollars from the writer Dorothy Parker, the most fearsome wit at the Algonquin Round Table. James Pendleton, an interior designer and art dealer of Regency and Baroque pieces, and his wife, Mary Frances, who went by Dodo, craved a particular vision of California living. They imagined a landscape of eucalyptus trees and rose gardens, with a pool house suitable for high-life entertaining—a Xanadu escape from their place in Manhattan. The Pendletons enlisted the architect John Elgin Woolf, who designed homes for Cary Grant, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn, to create a one-level house—Dodo had a bad hip—in a coolly sumptuous style that would come to be known as Hollywood Regency.

In 1967, Pendleton sold the house to Robert Evans, who, as the head of Paramount Pictures, went on to oversee a string of era-defining films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “Chinatown.” Evans led a life worthy of a film auteur’s attention—glamorous, accomplished, and more than a little sleazy. When he bought the house, which he called Woodland, he had been married twice; he would marry five more times. He became almost as well known as a host as he had been as a producer, throwing bacchanalian parties and entertaining such stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. In the nineteen-eighties, an addiction to cocaine and an association with a tawdry murder case helped bring his career, and the parties, to an end.

Evans died in 2019, at the age of eighty-nine. Three months later, a media executive named David Zaslav bought Woodland for sixteen million dollars. Though Zaslav was one of a select group of people who could afford this Hollywood palace, he was not part of the town’s aristocracy. Zaslav was then the C.E.O. of Discovery, Inc., the cable corporation whose channels included HGTV, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. At the time, his greatest claim to fame was the size of his paycheck. In 2014, he was the country’s most highly paid executive, with compensation of a hundred and fifty-six million dollars, mostly in stocks and options. Zaslav, whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear—logoed golf shirts and zip vests—had a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, adept at brokering acquisitions. Discovery was something of an entertainment-industry backwater, known for a portfolio of low-cost, lowbrow, highly profitable programs, of the kind you don’t tell co-workers you watch: “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Wives with Knives,” “Naked and Afraid.” Zaslav, a lifelong New Yorker, had never been involved in managing a Hollywood studio, but he seemed to like the idea of the town. “David has always been on the outside looking in on the content world,” a former Discovery executive told me. “He’s always wanted to be a player in Hollywood.”

In May, 2021, a year and a half after Zaslav purchased Woodland, he was announced as the C.E.O. of a new media company, Warner Bros. Discovery—a vast conglomerate that melded Discovery’s holdings with those of WarnerMedia, which encompassed HBO, Warner Bros.’s film and television studios, CNN, and a suite of cable channels including TNT, TBS, and Turner Classic Movies. Zaslav, the sixty-one-year-old head of a middle-market cable company, had suddenly achieved a cultural reach beyond what the likes of Robert Evans could ever have imagined. “Whoa—the minnow swallows the whale,” the former Discovery executive recalled thinking.

Under Zaslav, W.B.D. adopted a new slogan, “the stuff that dreams are made of”—an evocation of Hollywood glory borrowed from “The Maltese Falcon,” a hit for Warner Bros. in 1941. But Zaslav joined the movie business at a bracingly inglorious moment. The advent of streaming video has demolished old business models. The unions that represent the industry’s actors and writers are carrying out a bitter and prolonged strike. And the company that Zaslav has ended up leading is an ungainly entity, stuck with colossal debts.

Zaslav has said that he is focussed on the long term—a sensible position, since he’s made a pretty rough first impression. As soon as he took over W.B.D., he began slashing costs and laying off hundreds of workers. Last August, he scrapped a Scooby-Doo movie and a ninety-million-dollar Batgirl project, both nearly complete, and wrote them off for tax purposes. (W.B.D. justified the decision as “a strategic shift.”) On the picket line, actors and writers point not just at his compensation package—valued at two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2021, the year he brokered the W.B.D. deal and extended his contract—but also at his seeming interest in playing mogul while the entertainment business implodes.

For many, Zaslav is something of an antihero, at the center of the town’s story for all the wrong reasons. Those in what one insider half-jokingly calls “the Hollywood deep state” seem unsure that he is up to the task of building a new entertainment-industry power under difficult circumstances. Even Zaslav’s supporters describe him as an outsider feeling his way along. “Notwithstanding David’s long and distinguished media career, he is a relative newcomer to the motion-picture environment,” said Alan Horn, a former president and C.O.O. of Warner Bros. and chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who has been hired as an adviser to Zaslav. “That generated a lot of scrutiny, and it can take a while to be accepted.”

The deal that created W.B.D. was, like many mergers, a marriage of convenience. A.T. & T. had bought Time Warner in 2018, as part of an attempt to expand into the entertainment industry. This was a radical departure from A.T. & T.’s traditional business, but the company was eager enough to open new markets that it was willing to pursue an eighty-five-billion-dollar acquisition and to fight off an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. Three years later, it was equally eager to get out.

John Malone, Zaslav’s longtime patron, is widely considered a principal architect of the deal. A former cable magnate who was a powerful owner of Discovery, Malone is eighty-two years old, worth around nine billion dollars, and seen as one of the most formidable minds in business. The W.B.D. transaction, a Reverse Morris Trust, is a hallmark of his dealmaking: a complex maneuver in which a company spins off a subsidiary to its shareholders, then immediately sells it to another company, which forms a new entity in which the shareholders have majority control. A.T. & T. shareholders retained seventy-one per cent of the stock in W.B.D.; this exchange, executed by high-priced bankers and lawyers, prevented them from incurring capital-gains tax. Malone owns less than one per cent of the stock, but sits on the board and remains enormously influential. (Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast and The New Yorker, is one of the largest shareholders in W.B.D., with around eight per cent of the stock.)

Discovery didn’t really have the money to make the acquisition outright. A former media executive characterized it as a leveraged debt buyout, which is “unusual in the media business, because the media business is so volatile.” But the deal left the new company with substantial handicaps: Discovery, which was already carrying fifteen billion dollars of debt, went further in debt as it made a huge payment to A.T. & T. Thus, W.B.D. was born more than fifty-six billion dollars in the red. In order to keep his company intact, Zaslav would have to use its cash flow to pay down that debt. The former media executive told me, “The key is, in the next two to three years, can David pay off enough debt that he emerges with a viable business?”

The media industry is a seascape of big fish prowling for slightly smaller fish to eat. W.B.D.’s creation was Discovery’s bid to “scale up,” combining assets to compete with such streaming entities as Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, which have spent a decade enticing customers to cancel their cable subscriptions. The truism is that only the largest firms will survive in the post-cable world of streaming, which demands endless content. Traditional media companies have launched their own streaming services, but it’s been difficult for them to make scores of new movies and series while their once-reliable cash flows dwindle. Expensive cable subscriptions are quickly becoming obsolete. Advertising, too, has been lost to Big Tech, as Facebook and Google Ads have come to dominate the market.

Zaslav likes to tout W.B.D.’s vast library: “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Superman,” “Batman,” “Friends,” “Game of Thrones.” (He tends not to dwell on “Dr. Pimple Popper,” a reality series about a celebrity dermatologist.) His company, he boasts, is purely focussed on content, not distracted by selling phones or cloud storage or bulk toilet paper. But anyone who runs an enterprise like CNN or HBO knows that the days of easy money from cable fees have ended. CNN made a billion dollars in profit in 2016, and is expecting to make more than eight hundred million dollars this year—a good business, but a shrinking one. The future of entertainment might have been aptly described by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in 2016. “When we win a Golden Globe,” he said, “it helps us sell more shoes.”

Someone who has worked with Zaslav for years described his career as a series of cannily seized opportunities. Born in Brooklyn, he spent most of his childhood in suburban Rockland County, where his father was an attorney and his mother taught at a Jewish day school. Zaslav was a talented tennis player; Althea Gibson, the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam, was his private coach. After graduating from Binghamton University and Boston University School of Law, he went to work for the New York firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae, where he endeared himself to partners by joining them for matches. “I wasn’t a good lawyer,” he later told Time. “But I was a good tennis player.” (Zaslav declined to speak on the record for this story.)

In 1986, the firm hired Richard Berman, a former general counsel of Warner Cable, who brought along MTV and Discovery as clients. Zaslav was quickly drawn to the work. “It wasn’t the law that I was passionate about,” he later said. “It was the cable business and the idea of building a business.” A few years later, Zaslav recalled in an interview in 2017, he happened upon a story in the trade publication Multichannel News, which said that Bob Wright, the C.E.O. of NBC, wanted to get into cable. Zaslav wrote Wright a letter saying that he wanted to be part of the project. Soon after, he was hired as a junior lawyer for what would become CNBC.

Zaslav has told the story of the letter many times, though recently it got a bit of a punch-up. In the version he delivered in a speech this spring, the article appeared not in Multichannel News but in the Hollywood Reporter, and the letter went not to Wright but to Jack Welch—the C.E.O. of NBC’s parent company and perhaps the greatest corporate celebrity of his time.

When Zaslav started at CNBC, “there were a few layers between him and Jack Welch,” a person who worked there at the time told me. The startup network operated out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, far from NBC’s Art Deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Eventually, Zaslav began overseeing the negotiations with regional cable companies over how much each would pay to carry CNBC. “David was a transactional guy,” the former NBC co-worker told me. “He went from deal to deal.” But Zaslav was ambitious. His deals often seemed timed to close on the night before a big meeting, and he would show up bedraggled but radiating victory.

“David always attached himself to a higher-up boss,” a colleague from his NBC years told me. A former NBC insider said, “He was very good at managing up. He knows how to get somebody to buy into him.” Many cable-company executives of the era didn’t see themselves as media moguls; they were engineers and scrappy businessmen who had built the infrastructure to bring cable TV into millions of households. Among the most powerful of them was Malone, who ran Tele-Communications Inc., based in Colorado, which at the time was the country’s largest cable company. Malone—a soft-spoken, snowy-haired man with a permanently amused smile—is the controlling shareholder of Formula 1’s parent company and one of the largest private landowners in the United States. “I have earned so much money that money doesn’t interest me,” he told Der Spiegel, in 2001. “Now it is only the love of the game that drives me.”

In a 2017 interview, Zaslav told a story of staying at the office late one night to wait for a call from Malone. When Bob Wright arrived the next morning and found him still there, Zaslav explained why he hadn’t left his post: “You said I should wait for John Malone to call, so I did.” Wright, he said, “got Jack [Welch] on the phone and goes, ‘This guy stayed all night. Can you believe this guy?’ Years later, Bob said to me, ‘That was it. We said, you’re our guy.’ ”

Zaslav considers Welch and Malone his fundamental influences. Welch was known for ferocious cost-cutting and constant attention to the bottom line—which often came with mass layoffs. Malone has a near-fetish for tax avoidance and is a master of strategizing complex transactions. “Jack was analytics and costs and ‘figure out how to manage people out and get the best people in,’ ” Zaslav said on a podcast last year. Malone “is really about long-term strategic thinking and driving toward free cash flow,” he went on. “Somehow, I think the conflation of those two is my brain.”

Welch encouraged a hard-driving corporate culture, which Zaslav strove to embody. Compact and thrumming with energy, Zaslav has a distinct New York accent, and speaks in long narratives that always resolve in a salesman-like pitch. His two primary interests, people who know him well say, are business and his family. Zaslav met his wife, Pam, in high school, and they worked together as lifeguards at a summer camp. They now have three adult children, one of whom is a producer at CNN. Zaslav’s Instagram is filled with pictures of him golfing with his sons and eating at an Italian joint with his mother, who is ninety and lives in New Jersey. “What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family,” Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” wrote not long ago.

Zaslav’s gift for cultivating allies helped him advance, but it also forced him to take sides in a messy corporate conflict. In 1993, Roger Ailes, a Republican political consultant with roots in television production, came to CNBC to help boost ratings. He promoted Zaslav, who was then thirty-three, to head the affiliates division, negotiating deals with various cable companies. But Ailes was in a bitter power struggle with Tom Rogers, the head of the cable division, and he saw Zaslav as loyal to Rogers. According to Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” he enlisted comrades to keep an eye on Zaslav and exhorted them, “Let’s kill the S.O.B.” In a meeting, Ailes allegedly called Zaslav “a little fucking Jew prick.”

The conflict took a toll on Zaslav. Sherman writes that an executive saw him “almost visibly shaking in an empty office.” In a memo from the time, Zaslav described a pervasive sense of fear: “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously. . . . I feel endangered both at work and at home.” Ailes was investigated and ultimately left CNBC, in 1996.

Zaslav and Rogers had outlasted their rival, but the episode had unexpected consequences. Ailes’s separation agreement stipulated that he could not work for such competitors as CNN and Bloomberg, but it said nothing about Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corporation. Just weeks after leaving CNBC, Ailes held a press conference with Murdoch to announce that he would be the new leader of Fox News.

By 2004, Zaslav was the head of cable distribution and syndication for NBC Universal, a role that was distant from any programming decisions. He had attached himself to yet another boss, an executive named Randy Falco, who ran the business side of the division and was a candidate to take over the company. But Jeff Zucker, the former executive producer of the “Today” show, prevailed, and, according to the former NBC colleague, it was clear to Zaslav that he would never make C.E.O. of NBC. Though he and Zucker maintained a decades-long friendship, people who know them say that it was always tinged with competitive tension. “David kind of always coveted what Jeff was doing,” a person with knowledge of their relationship said. “He became C.E.O. of the company, and he was in charge of all the content and all the movies.”

Zaslav seemed determined to find his way into a similar position. In 2005, he joined the board of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, whose members included John Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery, and Robert Miron, the chairman and C.E.O. of Advance/Newhouse Communications, which, like Malone, was an owner of Discovery. “Suddenly he got in the room with the guys who built the industry from the ground up,” one person who knew Zaslav at NBC said. “They were long-term thinkers and planners, and serious businesspeople.” Zaslav was eager to develop relationships with them. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of assessing and analyzing financial information,” a former cable executive said, of Zaslav. But he was “extremely good at creating bonds with key deal decision-makers.”

One well-informed industry source told me that Malone came to appreciate Zaslav’s energy and skill as an operator—someone who could execute complicated strategies on the ground. The media executive Barry Diller, who has known Malone for decades, told me, “John Malone has had a great facility for finding people that he thought were competent and giving them an enormous opportunity that would not have been available, almost at first blush.” In the summer of 2006, Zaslav began talks to take over Discovery. He was officially installed early the next year, with approval from Hendricks and Malone.

As C.E.O., Zaslav had a difficult remit: take the channel public, shake up its culture, and grow internationally. “At NBC, he was on an easy street with good compensation, not having to work very hard—he could delegate—and, all of a sudden, he had to work his ass off to turn around a group of channels that were underperforming,” the former cable executive said.

Zaslav laid off many of the company’s executives and a quarter of its staff. “There were some real turkey businesses there,” Malone said at the time. “David had to take them out behind the barn and shoot them.” Zaslav needed underlings who would help change the company. “People were coming in at nine, nine-thirty, heading out at six,” he told Time. He wanted those people gone. While some of his top executives are women, Zaslav is “swayed easily by a certain kind of person who talks a certain kind of way, and they all tend to be white men,” one former Discovery employee told me. “Very confident, big swagger. Having a bad reputation can actually be a good thing in his eyes, because it means you’re tough.” Being too nice could earn you a reproach.

Discovery had become known for earnest, carefully made educational and nature programming: Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” documentary, the “Globe Trekker” travel series. Zaslav was more interested in taking advantage of the ongoing boom in reality TV. In 2007, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” premièred on TLC, opening a fruitful niche for Discovery, which then launched “17 Kids and Counting.” Zaslav showed demotic taste, and an instinct for gimmicks and provocations; in 2010, he green-lighted Sarah Palin’s reality show. “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a child-beauty-pageant contestant from Georgia, was followed by “Wives with Knives,” “Sex Sent Me to the E.R.,” “Naked and Afraid,” and “My Big Fat Fabulous Life.” In what seemed like a bid for more respectable life-style content, Zaslav courted Oprah Winfrey, and together they launched OWN in 2011. Television was then in what became known as its second golden age: “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men.” Zaslav made a point of not competing in that realm. “It’s like a kids’ soccer game—everyone saw something that worked and started chasing the ball,” he told Time. “It’s way too expensive.” Much of his programming was economical, lucrative, and relatively uncomplicated to produce. “Discovery’s model was completely different than the Hollywood content model,” the former Discovery executive told me. “It was very low-cost content that was made completely on a nonunion basis, owned one hundred per cent by Discovery.”

Malone based Zaslav’s pay mainly on the company’s performance, supplying much of it in the form of equity and stock options that vested over time. Discovery went public in 2008, and S.E.C. filings show that the following year Zaslav’s compensation was $11.7 million. A year later, it had jumped to $42.6 million. In 2014, Zaslav’s pay package was valued at $156.1 million, even as the stock fell by a quarter. “David is clearly a genius,” the former colleague from NBC said. “He’s taken probably about a billion dollars of stockholder money off the table since he started working for Malone personally.” (It’s closer to seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Still, a lot.)

Media-C.E.O. salaries have continued to grow, as the transformation of the industry requires more mergers and acquisitions, and riskier bets on unpredictable markets. But Zaslav was an outlier; even though Discovery’s stock value increased substantially in his time there, he was still the head of a mid-tier media company who in some years made more than Disney’s Bob Iger. In 2022, a firm advising institutional investors recommended that the company’s shareholders decline to reëlect three board members because of their “poor stewardship” around compensation.

For years, Zaslav lived in a tony village in Westchester County. Then, in 2010, he bought Conan O’Brien’s duplex apartment in the Majestic, an Art Deco co-op on Central Park West, for twenty-five million dollars. One person who has known Zaslav for years described the purchase as an act of self-assertion: “There’s a new player in town.” Still, a former Discovery insider who visited the Manhattan apartment said that the décor was almost shockingly modest. There were posters on the walls, and TVs playing programs from Discovery and CNBC—effectively an extension of his office.

Two years later, Zaslav spent another twenty-five million dollars on an oceanfront mansion in East Hampton, where he began hosting a “Shark Week”-themed Labor Day party. His guest lists started to appear on Page Six: Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Donna Karan, Martha Stewart, Jamie Dimon, Ryan Seacrest, Colin Powell. Even Roger Ailes was spotted at a Winter Wonderland party in 2014. These days, Zaslav goes to Taylor Swift shows with Kevin Costner and John McEnroe, and sits courtside at Lakers games with Michael B. Jordan and Bill Maher. Joy Behar, a co-host of “The View,” recently accompanied him to a Bruce Springsteen concert. “He’s very social,” she said. “He’s very alpha—he has a big personality.”

Zaslav enjoys this kind of socializing but sees it as an extension of his work, the media executive Kenneth Lerer, who is a close friend of his, said. Lerer thinks that, without a high-profile job, Zaslav’s natural milieu would be a back-yard barbecue. Zaslav is often seen out in New York—at Barney Greengrass for breakfast, at Le Bilboquet or Porter House for lunch, and at the Polo Bar for drinks. But he tends not to linger. “He would have one course, a glass of wine, no dessert—because, by nine o’clock, David’s out,” the former Discovery insider said.

Zaslav rises at 4:45 A.M. to read the news, and then, when he’s in New York, walks a few miles through the city while making calls. One person sent me a photograph taken of Zaslav hustling up Madison Avenue, in jeans, a sports coat over a zip vest, and dark glasses, talking animatedly on his phone. Zaslav can call underlings as early as 6 A.M., New York time; the conversations often last no more than a minute or two, and sometimes end so abruptly that he doesn’t bother saying goodbye. “Everyone wakes up and they got e-mails from me,” Zaslav once told CNBC. “Part of my job is to push everybody forward.” He can be similarly bluff in meetings. One associate told me that he tends to deliver long monologues and ask questions without seeming intent on hearing the answer. Another associate read the phenomenon differently: “He can be multitasking and you think he’s not paying attention, but he is.”

Some colleagues called Zaslav a short-term thinker, who moves restlessly from idea to idea. His proponents see it differently. “Of all the C.E.O.s I’ve worked with over forty years, he’s probably the most hands-on,” Lerer said. “He gets an idea and he just forces it until there’s a decision.” In that process, others note, he doesn’t always keep his temper in check. “He could be very warm and very nurturing, and then turn on a dime,” the Discovery insider said. “I saw him lash out when people bullshitted, pretending to know what they didn’t know.” An incident in 2008 became a subject of company gossip. When Leonardo DiCaprio, who was an executive producer on a Discovery series, didn’t show up to a première, Zaslav and one of the other producers had what an attendee called a “spirited conversation”—a screaming match. One of Zaslav’s sayings, according to a former employee, was “It’s not show friends. It’s show business.”

During Zaslav’s tenure at Discovery, the industry was undergoing a radical transformation. In 2013, Netflix had launched its first major original streaming series, “House of Cards,” and since then it had poured billions into original movies and TV series. Netflix didn’t much concern itself with profits; its strategy was to dominate the streaming sector first, in the hope that it would eventually generate huge gains. This made some media observers nervous. “One day soon, the finance gods, they’re gonna wake up and say to everybody, ‘Where’s the money?��� ” one former executive told me. Another industry insider said that “an irrational stock market” gave Netflix the incentive to overspend. “And that tipped the scales in the market and caused peak TV and then too much TV,” they said. But Wall Street valued Netflix more as a tech firm than as a media company, and its stock price continued to rise.

Though traditional media companies knew that they needed to adapt for an all-streaming future, their investors weren’t ready to take too many resources away from cable, which was still a reliable, if dwindling, source of cash. “We couldn’t turn ourselves into Netflix because the lion’s share of our network and even studio revenues came from the cable bundle,” the former Time Warner C.E.O. Jeff Bewkes told James Andrew Miller for his 2021 book, “Tinderbox.” Like many others in the industry, John Malone thought that the only way to compete with Netflix was to join forces against it. “You have to aggregate either through coöperation or consolidation,” he said. In 2018, Discovery made its first major effort at that sort of expansion, purchasing Scripps, which owned HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel.

A.T. & T. saw the acquisition of Time Warner as a way to expand into a new but complementary field; the idea was that customers could stream A.T. & T.-owned content over A.T. & T. networks on an A.T. & T. platform. That deal is now viewed as a disastrous culture clash, between the Dallas-based telecom giant and the “creatives” who made up the teams at HBO, CNN, and elsewhere. The Times reported that in one early meeting, John Stankey, the C.E.O. of WarnerMedia, outlined for his new executives the protocols for communicating with him: no calls on Saturday, no PowerPoints, and as few meetings as possible. (A spokesperson for A.T. & T. disputed this characterization.)

In February, 2021, as A.T. & T. grappled with the media industry’s rapid changes, Zaslav sent a message to Stankey. “I have an idea,” he wrote, adding a couple of golfer emojis and a smiley face with sunglasses.

The two men talked for a couple of hours, and later met at a Greenwich Village town house to discuss a potential transaction. Finally, they brought in advisers and bankers to settle the details of what Zaslav’s team took to calling Project Home Run. The deal officially closed on April 8, 2022. Two weeks later, in what is now referred to as the Great Netflix Correction, the company reported a drop in subscribers for the first time since 2011; it lost roughly fifty billion dollars in value virtually overnight, and Wall Street abruptly abandoned its enthusiasm for companies that spend huge sums on content. Malone and Zaslav had closed their deal just in time.

As the merger took shape, Zaslav went on a Hollywood listening tour. Bryan Lourd and Ari Emanuel, the co-chair of the talent agency C.A.A. and the C.E.O. of the sports-and-entertainment firm Endeavor, respectively, hosted dinners with writers, actors, and executives. The deep state—the managers and agents who make the industry function—remained relatively receptive to him, hoping that he could undo the damage of A.T. & T.’s ownership. Zaslav was solicitous of the old guard. “We talked a lot about the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, about how the business started to really change geometrically,” Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A., told me. “He wanted a foundation, he wanted roots.” Ovitz offered Zaslav some advice: move to L.A. “When people try to run these creative businesses from the East Coast, it was very difficult to do,” he said. “You don’t get the intrinsic feeling.” Zaslav moved to L.A.

He settled into a new office, in a leafy corner of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank—a recessed space where he works at Jack Warner’s old desk. A curving conservatory window opens on trees and a manicured garden. By the window is a sitting area where Zaslav receives guests. There, directly behind his chair, is a picture of him with Malone.

In Hollywood, Zaslav quickly adopted local habits. His Woodland house was under renovation, so he took an apartment at the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent a lot of time at its Polo Lounge. But he did not necessarily acquire the “intrinsic feeling” that Ovitz hoped he would. A well-informed source told me that Zaslav’s team fumbled through easy interactions; at one meeting, they asked painfully basic questions about residuals—long-term payments for reruns, DVD sales, and other repeat airings. Before the merger had even closed, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy piece on Zaslav, and Variety declared him “Hollywood’s New Tycoon.” The presumption that an out-of-towner was going to swoop in and fix everything rankled. There were snobbish dissections of his wardrobe and enthusiastic manner—though people were happy to attend parties in his honor and to take his money.

At the time, Jeff Zucker, Zaslav’s former boss at NBC, was running CNN. Zucker was popular with on-air talent, and the network had secured high ratings with aggressive coverage of Donald Trump’s Administration. Much of Hollywood was similarly resistant to his Presidency. But Malone, a libertarian who had contributed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration, chafed at CNN’s critical tone. During an interview in November, 2021, Malone said, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists—which would be unique and refreshing.” Zaslav, too, began to talk about the need for CNN to tack to the center. Two months before the deal was finalized, Zucker was forced to resign, for having an undisclosed relationship with another executive.

Zaslav did not interview any internal candidates for the new C.E.O. Instead, he quickly appointed Chris Licht, a longtime producer who had launched “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and run Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. In June, a long profile in The Atlantic portrayed Licht as a feckless and distant leader, whose ham-fisted decision-making led to such embarrassments as a televised town hall with Trump, in which the host struggled to manage the former President’s ad-hominem attacks as a sympathetic crowd cheered him on. Zaslav was portrayed as an intrusive micromanager, trying to move the network toward an ill-defined political center. According to The Atlantic, CNN employees thought that “Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.” Zaslav fired Licht days after the article’s publication. He is still searching for a replacement.

A CNN insider described the network’s prospects as the merger went through: the cable business was dying, but CNN had a devoted enough following that, with time and investment, it might be able to reinvent itself. Staffers saw CNN+ as their best hope; even though its programming was somewhat limited, it might help accustom viewers to streaming news from CNN. But Zaslav killed CNN+ after just a month. Now the future of CNN itself is uncertain. Though W.B.D. vehemently denies that it is for sale, many in the newsroom speculate that it would be a prime asset to sell if Zaslav’s debt-payment plan doesn’t go as quickly as Wall Street demands. Guessing at potential CNN buyers has become a media parlor game. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, is seen as a likely potential partner for W.B.D., but CNN might not survive such a deal intact. If W.B.D. and Comcast merged, they might want to offload one of their news networks. “David Zaslav will be remembered as the guy who squandered the opportunity to take the world’s best-known news brand and transition it into a digital future,” the CNN insider said. “Instead, he took the massive yearly profits that CNN has, and used it to pay down debt for this bizarre, complex, convoluted, debt-driven merger.”

But CNN is only a small part of W.B.D.’s business, and of Zaslav’s mandate. “Whenever I talk to David, the first word out of my mouth is, ‘Manage your cash,’ ” Malone said on CNBC last November. Cash generation, he added, “will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.” In fact, bonuses for W.B.D.’s top executives this year are officially tied to the company’s cash flow, along with debt reduction. “If you’re an investor, you love David Zaslav,” the former Discovery insider said. “He is a great businessman. If you put a number out, he’s going to make that number.” But, the insider added, “he’s a tractor who will run you down to get to that.”

This spring, Zaslav gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he attended law school. Wearing a red academic robe and sunglasses, he spoke dutifully of the five things he’d learned along the way. “Some people will be looking for a fight,” he warned graduates. “But don’t be the one they find it with.” Outside, the Writers Guild had assembled a picket line. A small plane circled overhead, trailing a banner that read “David Zaslav—Pay Your Writers.”

On Twitter, a writer named Annie Stamell poked at the new C.E.O.: “All we want is 2 Zaslav salaries for 11,500 WGA members, is that really so much to ask?” Two days later, Zaslav and the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hosted a party together at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Cannes, to celebrate a century of Warner films. The two were photographed in near-identical blue button-down shirts and cream-colored jackets, amid bottles of Dom Pérignon. Zaslav told a reporter for New York magazine that the party was for “our best friends, and our real friends, you know, no assholes.”

Zaslav was not alone in failing to project empathy. This July, as executives gathered for the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Bob Iger spoke in an interview about Disney’s initiative to control costs by “spending less on what we make, and making less.” This was a terrifying prospect for the creative class, but Iger dismissed the striking writers and actors: “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.” Disney had recently renewed Iger’s contract through 2026, at a rate of thirty-one million dollars per year. Fran Drescher, the sharp-tongued president of SAG-AFTRA, likened him and his fellow-C.E.O.s to “land barons of a medieval time.”

For writers and actors, streaming has meant a steep drop in residual payments, which once sustained them during career dry spells or made them rich if they created a hit. SAG-AFTRA has said that it wants its members to receive two per cent of the revenue that shows generate from streaming platforms, and wage increases to keep pace with inflation. The studios had put forth a proposal they claimed would offer the union a billion dollars in increased wages and residuals. But, as the Hollywood labor writer Jonathan Handel noted, that works out “to just $30 million per year per company”—roughly a single year’s pay for Iger or Zaslav.

Twenty months after Zaslav was declared “Hollywood’s New Tycoon,” it feels as if the town has turned against him. “He’s feeling the backlash,” as the former media executive put it. He has no choice about servicing his company’s debt. But, the executive went on, “human nature would say the other objective is to prove that you are the mogul. Five years from now, you want to be remembered as someone who helped rebuild the movie business.”

Warner Bros. studios are struggling, despite the billion-dollar success of “Barbie.” Zaslav likes to declare that the company has thirty-five to forty per cent of the world’s most valuable intellectual property—it just needs to take advantage of it. For more than a decade, Marvel’s superhero franchises have dominated the industry, while Warner’s equivalent, DC Studios, has struggled to keep up. Zaslav and his team hope to recruit the director Christopher Nolan, who made a string of successful movies before leaving Warner during A.T. & T.’s ownership. But some in the industry fear that Zaslav’s involvement in the movie business is distracting. Kenneth Lerer conceded that the hands-on instinct he sees as one of Zaslav’s strengths “does have some negatives with the Hollywood establishment, because you go to him, complain to him—he always jumps in. If David would jump in less, I think that’d be helpful to him.” A recent Variety feature on Warner Bros.’s new co-chairs, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, noted that Zaslav showed up at the interview and snapped a “photo of his film chiefs being interviewed, like a doting dad at an amusement park.”

The studio and the strikes are only one problem Zaslav and other executives must solve. Media C.E.O.s know that the loss of cable earnings can’t be replaced by the streaming model that Netflix and Amazon helped establish. Seventy per cent of W.B.D.’s revenue is tied up in its cable channels, while its television and movie studios account for roughly thirty per cent. Even as Zaslav works to establish himself in Hollywood, the vast majority of his cable assets are based in New York and Atlanta. He needs to squeeze them for cash while managing their demise. (A spokesperson for W.B.D. said that Zaslav wanted to devote time to his Hollywood businesses during the first year but now lives between New York and L.A.)

One of his biggest looming deals has to do with renewing TNT’s right to carry N.B.A. games. Live sports are a primary reason that consumers keep their expensive cable subscriptions, and so networks risk losing customers if they lose the contract. “It’s like heroin,” Malone once said. “You’ve gotta keep buying and buying it.” Disney and W.B.D. currently own the N.B.A. rights, but it’s likely that a streamer that wants in on the sports market will join the bidding, driving up the price. “David’s not going to want to say he lost the N.B.A.,” one close observer of the deal said. “He’s paying $1.2 billion per year right now. He will pay more than $1.2 billion to keep the N.B.A., with possibly fewer games.”

Zaslav and his team have blamed some of their difficulties on the condition of WarnerMedia. At an investor conference, Zaslav complained that some of the company’s assets had turned out to be “unexpectedly worse than we thought” before the deal closed. The former Discovery employee told me, “We knew the debt would be bad. When the number came out, we were stunned and scared.” W.B.D. went so far as to investigate whether A.T. & T. inflated the projections that underpinned WarnerMedia's value. Last summer, A.T. & T. paid W.B.D. $1.2 billion. (The spokesperson for the company said that this payment reflects a standard post-close adjustment.)

Whatever the cause, W.B.D.’s first year was rocky. Zaslav’s plan to cut costs began almost immediately and brought a stream of bitter reactions. Among other things, the company started removing little-watched shows from HBO Max, including the cult hit “Westworld.” “We don’t think anybody is subscribing because of this,” Zaslav said, of the removed programming, in November, 2022. “We can sell it nonexclusively to somebody else.” Writers, showrunners, and actors complained of a disorganized process of informing them about the future of their shows. “People who you would normally talk to have been fired, moved, or quit, so no one has any idea how to get the information they need right now,” the showrunner and animator Owen Dennis wrote on Substack. “Never cheer for a corporate merger, they help about 100 people and hurt thousands.”

Though jobs were slashed across the company, one of the biggest controversies came from Zaslav’s decision to cut the budget at Turner Classic Movies, laying off several senior executives in the process. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bryan Lourd and Steven Spielberg warned ahead of time that the cuts would attract outrage; the film industry cherishes its own history, and particularly the history of its greatest hits. Zaslav apparently complained that outsiders were telling him how to run his business.

After the cuts were announced, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson joined a Zoom meeting with Zaslav to plead the network’s case. Zaslav offered a concession, moving the oversight of TCM from the cable division to Warner Bros., run by the Hollywood veterans De Luca and Abdy. One TCM executive got his job back, too. The directors, seemingly pacified, released a statement: “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”

Some saw the incident as a demonstration of Zaslav’s impetuous decision-making. Others argued that, even though Zaslav craved acceptance in Hollywood, he knew that his mandate was to save money. On the ledger, W.B.D. seems to be making progress. This year, it launched a new streaming service, Max, which mixes premium HBO content with some of Discovery’s more down-market shows. Max allows subscribers to pay less in exchange for agreeing to view ads—a model that Netflix adopted last year—and increased streaming ad revenue by a quarter in its first few months, even as subscribership dipped. W.B.D.’s latest quarterly report says that it lost three million dollars on streaming, compared with a loss of five hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the same period last year. Though Hollywood is in crisis, W.B.D. has found a benefit to the strikes: you spend less money when you aren’t making anything. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the C.F.O., announced in August, “Should the strikes run through the end of the year, I would expect several hundred million dollars of upside to our free cash flow.” Since W.B.D. was formed, Zaslav has paid down nearly nine billion dollars in debt. Some $47.8 billion remains.

Those sympathetic to Zaslav’s project of “rationalizing” the economics of streaming think that the anger at him is unfair. “We are all little boats navigating uncharted waters,” Alan Horn, the former Warner Bros. C.O.O., said. “The issues we’re having right now in the middle of a strike are exacerbated by the fact that no one quite knows exactly how to get to a ‘new normal.’ ” By this argument, Zaslav is being blamed for an agonizing but inevitable period of adjustment. “He said, ‘Look, this company needs restructuring so that it may be as healthy as possible in the long term. That requires some short-term actions that are painful,’ ” Horn said.

Barry Diller, who spent “a great deal of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties” at Robert Evans’s Woodland estate as the C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, has known Zaslav since his NBC years. He’s optimistic about Zaslav’s project, if not entirely clear on what the future holds. “W.B.D. will make it through. I do believe that,” Diller said. “What comes out on the other end is, frankly, up to the gods.”

The actors and writers on the picket line are less sanguine. Even as they protest, they need Zaslav and his peers to help Hollywood make sense again: to calibrate a streaming system so they can make both art and money, if in a more modest way than they used to. But Zaslav has enough to do solving the problems of his own company.

Collage illustration of David Zaslav

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photograph by Steve Mack / Everett / Alamy

#twd #david zaslav #warner bros #hollywood #corporate media #global corporate monoculture #reality television ruins everything #pay your writers #studio

[headspace-hotel]

I'm not super favorable about "insects as sustainably farmed food" because I feel like it obscures the nature of the global food crisis.

We aren't anywhere close to a hard limit on the amount of food we can produce or the amount of people we can feed.

But our economic system keeps human labor forces that work on farms in dire poverty and sterilizes the landscape of smallholder farms that grow a variety of crops and cultivars while maintaining natural biodiversity, replacing them with vast monocultures and factory farms that replace human labor and sustainable practices with machinery and mass application of pesticides/herbicides/antibiotics/etc

The goal of the system is to consolidate as much wealth at the top of a pyramid of extracting wealth from land and labor, and this means farming ought to be consolidated under the control of Corporation, so the "solutions" considered to be viable are just those that simplify farming down to "input raw materials-> output Product" as much as possible. Most of the multitude of foods we can raise or grow sustainably require decentralized, personalized human labor to some extent, knowledgeable humans who are actually present and active in their relationship with the ecosystem

but our economic system sees the optimal way as "Dump corn into Facility-> Get sellable product." Farming as a way to convert land area and an investment of machinery and chemicals into Profit.

basically, insects are more factory-farmable than anything we have now and that's why they're considered such a good option as a sustainable food source

[thehopefuljournalist]

Seed networks are community organizations that have multiplied in the past decade in different Brazilian biomes to collect, trade and plant native seeds in degraded areas.

In the Chapada dos Veadeiros area, in Goiás state members of seed networks from several parts of Brazil met for almost a week in early June.

Along with environmental organizations, researchers and government officials, they participated in discussions to boost Redário, a new group seeking to strengthen these networks and meet the demands of the country’s ecological restoration sector.

“This meeting gathered members of Indigenous peoples, family farmers, urban dwellers, technicians, partners, everyone together. It creates a beautiful mosaic and there’s a feeling that what we are doing will work and will grow,” says Milene Alves, a member of the steering committee of the Xingu Seed Network and Redário’s technical staff.

Just in 2022, 64 metric tons of native seeds were sold by these networks, and similar figures are expected for 2023.

The effort to collect native seeds by traditional populations in Brazil has contributed to effective and more inclusive restoration of degraded areas, and is also crucial for the country to fulfill its pledge under international agreements to recover 30 million acres of vegetation by 2030.

Seed collection for restoration in these areas has previously only been done by companies. But now, these networks, are organized as cooperatives, associations or even companies, enable people in the territories to benefit from the activity.

Eduardo Malta, a restoration expert from the Socio-Environmental Institute and one of Redário’s leaders, advocates for community participation in trading and planting seeds. “These are the people who went to all the trouble to secure the territories and who are there now, preserving them. They have the greatest genetic diversity of species and hold all the knowledge about the ecosystem,” 

.

The Geraizeiros Collectors Network are one of the groups that makes up Redário. They were founded in 2021, and now gathers 30 collectors from eight communities in five municipalities: Montezuma, Vargem Grande, Rio Pardo de Minas, Taiobeiras and Berizal.

They collect and plant seeds to recover the vegetation of the Gerais Springs Sustainable Development Reserve, which was created in 2014 in order to stop the water scarcity as a result of eucalyptus monocultures planted by large corporations.

“The region used to be very rich in water and it is now supplied by water trucks or wells,” says Fabrícia Santarém Costa, a collector and vice president of the Geraizeiros Collectors’ Network. “Today we see that these activities only harm us, because the [eucalyptus] company left, and we are there suffering the consequences.”

Costa was 18 years old in 2018, when the small group of seed collectors was founded and financed by the Global Environmental Facility. She says that working with this cooperative changed the way she looks at life and the biome in which she was born and raised. She describes restoring the sustainable development work as "ant work", ongoing, slow. But it has already improved the water situation in the communities. In addition, seed sales complement geraizeiros’ income, enabling them to remain in their territories.

.

The Redário initiative also intends to influence public policies and regulations in the restoration sector to disseminate muvuca, the name given by the networks to the technique of sowing seeds directly into the soil rather than growing seedlings in nurseries.

Technical studies and network experiences alike show that this technique covers the area faster and with more trees. As a result, it requires less maintenance and lower costs. This system also distributes income to the local population and encourages community organizations.

“The muvuca system has great potential [for restoration], depending on what you want to achieve and local characteristics. It has to be in our range of options for meeting the targets, for achieving them at scale,” says Ministry of the Environment analyst Isis Freitas.

Article published August 3rd, 2023

#long post #climate change #climate #hope #good news #more to come #climate emergency #positive news #hopeful #climate justice #news #important #good post #links

[probablyasocialecologist]

By allowing existing trees to grow old in healthy ecosystems and restoring degraded areas, scientists say 226 gigatonnes of carbon could be sequestered, equivalent to nearly 50 years of US emissions for 2022. But they caution that mass monoculture tree-planting and offsetting will not help forests realise their potential.

Humans have cleared about half of Earth’s forests and continue to destroy places such as the Amazon rainforest and the Congo basin that play crucial roles in regulating the planet’s atmosphere.

The research, published on Monday in the journal Nature as part of a collaboration between hundreds of leading forest ecologists, estimates that outside of urban agricultural areas in regions with low human footprints where forests naturally exist, they could draw down large amounts of carbon.

About 61% of the potential could be realised by protecting standing forests, allowing them to mature into old growth ecosystems like Białowieża forest in Poland and Belarus or California’s sequoia groves, which survived for thousands of years. The remaining 39% could be achieved by restoring fragmented forests and areas that have already been cleared.

[...]

The research follows a controversial 2019 paper on the potential of forests to mitigate the climate crisis, which was also co-authored by Crowther, that provoked intense scientific debate among forest ecologists. The researcher inspired corporate action on forests and was credited with Donald Trump’s support for tree-planting schemes.

But several scientists felt that potential for nature to help meet climate goals had been overstated and the paper advocated for the creation of mass tree-planting, driving greenwashing concerns.

Simon Lewis, a professor of Global Change Science at University College London who was a leading critic of the 2019 paper, said the new estimate was much more reasonable and conservative.

“There is a lot of spin and bluster about what trees can do for the environment. To cut through this always ask: what is the amount of carbon taken up by a hectare of land, and over what time period, he said. “The spin on what trees can do for the climate will no doubt continue. But there is still only a finite amount of land to dedicate to forests, and ability of trees to sequester carbon is limited. The reality is that we need to slash fossil fuel emissions, end deforestation, and restore ecosystems to stabilise the climate in line with the Paris agreement.”

#trees #forestry #climate change #conservation #tree planting #its not just planting - protection and restoration are paramount

[fatehbaz]

At first glance, the statistics tell a hopeful story: Chile’s forests are expanding. According to Global Forest Watch, overall forest cover changes show approximately 300,000 hectares were gained between 2000 and 2013 in Chile’s central and southern regions. [...] On the ground, however, a different scene plays out: monocultures have replaced diverse natural forests while Mapuche native protesters burn pine plantations, blockade roads and destroy logging equipment. At the crux of these two starkly contrasting narratives is the definition of a single word: “forest.” The Mapuche people have been fighting for their ancestral land rights since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Chile in the 1540s. […] Their hopes were cut short when, at the height of the Cold War, General Augusto Pinochet came to power in 1973 […]. Pinochet’s wave of neoliberal reforms included Forest Ordinance 701, passed in 1974, which subsidized the expansion of tree plantations under the pretext of reducing erosion and gave the National Forestry Corporation control of Mapuche lands. This law set in motion an enormous expansion in fiber-farms, which are vast expanses of monoculture plantations Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus species grown for paper manufacturing and timber. Touted as creating a sustainable forestry sector and largely funded by foreign capital, these new plantations replaced native forests and further shrunk Mapuche land holdings. [...] While the confusion surrounding the definition of “forest” may appear to be an issue of semantics, Dr. Francis Putz of the University of Florida warns otherwise in a recent review published in Biotropica. […] Monoculture plantations are optimized for a single product, whereas native forests offer a diversity of services such as water regulation, hosting biodiversity, and building soil fertility. Putz cautioned, “if plantations are accepted as forests, then there is nothing wrong with replacing natural forests with monocultures.” [...] For change to happen, according to Putz, the distinction between plantations and native forests needs to be made clear. “Society, and certainly decision-makers, need to demand clarity on this issue, and the point that plantations are NOT forests needs to be made repeatedly,” he said.

-------

Text by: Julian Moll-Rocek. “When forests aren’t really forests: the high cost of Chile’s tree plantations.” Mongabay. 18 August 2014.

[sustainabilitythoughts]

What is sustainability?

After I wrote a post about getting started with sustainability actions, I started thinking about what sustainability means.  We hear the word a lot but how much do we know about what sustainability really means?  I looked at some definitions and thought about what I know about our planet.  Here’s what I think sustainability means. 

One article used the phrase “healthy planet”.  In the biggest sense, sustainability means that individuals, corporations, and governments make choices that support a healthy planet.  A healthy planet is one where all of the creatures (including people) and plants can live healthy lives in a habitat that supports them, for many millennia into the future.  Based on this definition, we have a long way to go to reach sustainability.  We are using irreplaceable resources at an alarming rate, polluting the planet, quickly losing biodiversity and habitat, and changing our climate.  And there is no Planet B.  I am not suggesting that everyone needs to cut back to using only enough resources to barely remain alive, because there is more to life than just existing.  However, if we make lifestyle changes where we can, it will make a difference.  Each of us needs to evaluate our own situation - what aspects of our lifestyle are most important to us and what aspects we can change.  Start your sustainability lifestyle changes using baby steps so the effort is not overwhelming.  Here is a more detailed list of aspects I would include in addressing sustainability.  The list seems overwhelming, but don’t let that stop you from taking baby steps.  I’ll write more on each of these topics as time goes by. 

Disposable items:  While many of us think of obvious items such as plastic straws, our disposable culture includes much more.  Items that are discarded instead of being repaired, reused, or recycled may be considered disposable.  Anything that goes into a landfill is actually a disposable item.  Items designed so they cannot be repaired are disposable even if you keep them for a few years. 

Biodiversity: The earth has many millions of living things with a wide variety of types and needs. All species of plants and other living creatures, including human beings, are intricately linked by their interactions with each other and the environments they live in.  Taking away or modifying habitat or the “residents” of that habitat has an effect on every other living thing in that habitat.  Healthy habitats and residents are essential for a healthy planet.  Threats to biodiversity include monoculture (large areas with only one type of plant), invasive species, and loss of habitat through human activities. 

Consumption: Manufacturing and transporting all the items we buy takes resources and energy.  Managing these items after we discard them also takes resources and energy, and some items create greenhouse gases as they decompose in landfills. 

Energy: Energy requires resources for production and use.  Even renewable energy sources require resources to manufacture and then dispose of the components.  Some forms of energy production generate greenhouse gases. 

Greenhouse gas emissions: These emissions are changing the earth’s climate.  There are many greenhouse gases, and some (methane, for example) are much more effective at increasing global temperatures than carbon dioxide.  Freon is not only a very powerful greenhouse gas but also destroys a high-altitude ozone later that protects the earth from some of the sun’s harmful radiation.

Pollution: Tens of thousands of different chemicals are put into the air and water every day and can cause significant problems.  The list includes simple things like air fresheners and complex things such as chemicals discharged into the air and water during a manufacturing process.

#sustainability #environment #environmental

[t0rschlusspan1k]

29.12.2023 | Petitions for the environment and climate change.

Please read, share wherever you can, talk about them and if you can afford it, please, please, please donate - consider taking up a collection among your friends.

Actions.eko.com: Nestlé and P&G: Stop setting Indonesia’s rainforests on fire

Indonesia’s forests are burning – a thick toxic haze suffocates half of the country, keeping children out of school and forcing people and animals to relocate. But it didn’t happen by accident and we know who the arsonists are. Together, we will hold them accountable. Nestlé and Procter & Gamble are doing business with rogue palm oil and paper producers who recklessly burn precious rainforests to the ground to expand their monocultures, steal Indigenous lands, and drive orangutans, rhinos, and elephants closer to the brink of extinction. (keep reading)

Rainforest Action Network - RAN: This one is for donating, they need 100,00$ by December 31!

We urgently need your help to fight for the world's last rainforests in 2024 by making any size donation today. Those who believe they can change the world are the ones that do. Donate now.

Help us challenge mega-corporations like Liberty Mutual, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and Mondelēz. Their thirst for endless profits contributes to the widespread destruction of irreplaceable rainforests like the Leuser Ecosystem of North Sumatra and the Amazon rainforest and fuels the expansion of dangerous fossil fuel projects that choke the life out of the planet. For a small organization, RAN's significant impact is only possible because of dedicated supporters like YOU. Your generous donation today makes a world of difference.

Rainforest Rescue: DRC: Do not sacrifice Congo's rainforests to the oil industry!

The DRC government in Kinshasa is nearing a point of no return: President Tshisekedi wants to sacrifice vast areas of Congo rainforest and peatland for oil. This would be an unmitigated disaster for the climate, biodiversity and local people. Together with our African partner organizations, we can put a stop to these plans. The rainforests of the Congo Basin are home to millions of people and countless animal and plant species, including chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. They are a treasure trove of biodiversity and crucial to the fight against climate change. Despite this, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) began auctioning 27 oil and 3 gas blocks in late July. The blocks cover some of the last remaining intact forests on Earth. Three of the blocks overlap the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, which are estimated to store 30 billion tons of carbon, the equivalent to one years’ worth of global emissions. The peatlands are so vast and remote that little is known about the biodiversity at stake there. Nine oil blocks overlap protected areas. More than half of the Congo Basin's peatlands and 60 percent of its rainforest are in the DRC, the country plays a key role in the fight against the climate crisis. The science is clear: the governments of the world must cut carbon emissions in half within the next eight years. In his speech at the UN's COP26 conference in Glasgow, President Tshisekedi promoted the vital role of the Congo Basin forests in regulating the global climate and his intention to enhance DRC’s energy mix by "combining several types of energy: biomass, hydro, solar." The cost of not doing so, he said, would be a climate crisis. The world cannot afford any further expansion of oil and gas. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an immediate end to new investment in fossil fuel supply projects is the first step to keep global warming below 1.5°C and achieve global net zero emissions by 2050. In an alliance of environmentalists from Africa and around the world, we want to keep the oil in the ground and the fossil fuel industry out of the Congo Basin. Please sign our joint petition!

DR Congo: Stop the destruction by miners and loggers in Tshopo!

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to the second largest area of rainforest on Earth. Defending it is crucial to the fight against climate change and the extinction crisis. Yet miners are polluting rivers and loggers clearing forests in Tshopo province. In the small town of Basoko, local people are fighting back. The people of the small town of Basoko fear for their health and livelihoods: the Aruwimi River, a tributary of the Congo, has been polluted ever since the Chinese mining company Xiang Jiang Mining began dredging for gold there. Some species of fish have disappeared completely. Skin diseases are on the rise. "We say NO to mining in Aruwimi, which is destroying our ecosystem in an anarchic way," states a memorandum to the county government read during a demonstration. On March 11, 2022, residents of the region protested on land and with boats against the trashing of their environment. Mining is not the only threat to nature in Tshopo province: companies such as FODECO, Congo Futur and SOFORMA are reportedly logging at a breakneck pace near Basoko. "They are systematically plundering the forests without any benefit to local people," says Jean-François Mombia Atuku, chairman of the environmental protection organization RIAO-RDC. "Anyone who demands accountability is silenced," he said, adding that workers are "kept like slaves" in the forest. "Human rights are not relevant for these companies." The grievances regarding mining have been heard in the capital Kinshasa: In January 2022, Environment Minister Eve Bazaiba called on Xiang Jiang Mining to cease operations by February 25, 2022. However, nothing has changed since then – the company is still operating, apparently unimpressed. "What we need now is international pressure," says Jean-François Mombia Atuku. It must be brought to bear on President Tshisekedi, who positioned his country as a heavyweight in the fight against the climate crisis during the COP26 climate conference. It’s time to apply that international pressure – please sign our petition.

#long post #signal boost #environment #climate change #rainforests #Indonesia #Congo #Democratic Republic of Congo #donations #petitions #climate crisis #mining #Congo Basin #COP26 #Glasgow COP26 #defending the Earth #defending the planet #animal extinction #animal conservation #forest conservation #nature conservation #my posts

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Eucalyptus Monoculture Threatens Biodiversity and Indigenous Rights

Valued for its termite-resistant wood for building purposes, pulp to create products like writing and toilet paper, and its oil, which has numerous health and household benefits, the eucalyptus tree generates big business worldwide. Native to Australia and Tasmania, the prehistoric tree has been planted in such volumes that eucalyptus plantations cover some 25 million hectares around the globe—larger than the entire land area of the United Kingdom. By 2028, according to forecasts, the global eucalyptus oil market is projected to exceed $213 million, while the worldwide market for eucalyptus pulp will expand to nearly $17 billion.

But the eucalyptus industry has a dark side. Eucalyptus plantations growing in regions spanning South America, southern Africa, southern Europe, and Australia have significant detrimental impacts on local communities and biodiversity. Communities located near eucalyptus plantations are likely to face water shortages—as these plantations utilize huge amounts of water—and pollution from agrochemicals, including exposure to glyphosate, which has been linked to various health problems, including increased cancer risk.

In addition, the presence of eucalyptus trees’ leaves and roots hinders the growth of other plants beneath them because they contain a biocidal oil that inhibits the survival and decomposition of most soil bacteria that come into contact with them.

In eastern Brazil, eukalyptus plantations have replaced the diverse and endemic Atlantic Forest ecosystem, with some municipalities seeing nearly three-quarters of their land area being covered by eucalyptus plantations.

Brazil is the world’s largest eucalyptus producer. With an estimated 7.6 million hectares of eucalyptus plantations, Brazil maintains 30% of the world’s total eucalyptus trees. In eastern Brazil, particularly in the states of Bahia and Espírito Santo, these plantations have replaced the diverse and endemic Atlantic Forest ecosystem, with some municipalities seeing nearly three-quarters of their land area being covered by eucalyptus plantations. Large corporations such as Suzano, Fibria, and Veracel dominate this industry, exporting eucalyptus as pulp for manufacturing products like toilet paper.

Continue reading.

#brazil #politics #brazilian politics #environmental justice #indigenous rights #environmentalism #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

[baphometaverse]

also unrelated but have you noticed that CERN is trying to erase the lockdowns from history

I wouldn't know how to speak on that as it's nothing I've got into.

To touch on the humour further, I kinda disconnected from saturating myself in truther stuff a little, except for a couple of mf's, as most've kinda been played like fiddles when it came to the C (myself included), into Chicken Littlesville (the sky is falling, the end is near yadda yadda). There was a lot of bait put out for people paying attention, it was very crafty. The truthers were supposed to always be the most sober and skeptical of all, and though I do believe more credit is to be given to intuition and inner "knowing" than is generally given in life, much of what 's been perpetuated in that community recently is based way too much on leaps of logic, or selective confirmation bias catering to inner emotions/fears and (not necessarily racial etc but primal/archetypal) prejudices. And they've "doubled down" in the dialectic, still even acting like the C was totally fake after catching it themselves or having loved ones die. Having fallen into IMO a trap of becoming what they were against, something like SJWs who double down on foolishness instead of ever being able to admit they were wrong or manipulated.

That's the humour I mean. How during Trump's election cycle the left were afraid minorities (and the children especially) were going to be caged, shipped off, even mass murdered. Mirroring that during Biden's the right was afraid the majority's children were going to be caged, shipped, murdered, drained of blood and fed on... (worth noting also the use of supposedly alternative media in those) For many years the right were the party touting corporations, globalization, monoculture, inorganic food/living, mainstream media, and war. Then it gets flipped and the left is for those things.

Part of it all is the jokes aspect for sure. Not saying I support it but stepping back trying to "profile" as if from the perpetrating adept POV, just tryna cool out and notice patterns.

Sorry to go on a tangent and for the disorganized rant, I could try to organize my thoughts and go into it better. Basically I think a lot (most/all?) of events/stories are for catharsis, like a modern effigy/wicker man for the collective to project their fears and emotions onto, in preparation and commemoration for new seasons.

At least I hope that's mainly what it all is. I definitely wouldn't let what could even be Stockholm syndrome in myself say it's benevolent, eg. the C operations transferring wealth upwards from the average business owner... and the insane amount of drugs, madness and rot pumped into city cores.

Maybe it is "chaos magick" - just turning up the volume and speed on everything. Whether that will lead to balance or something like harmony later idek bro.

But yeah I can't say I have a good idea what CERN is really for.

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Reading

Dan Saladino EATING TO EXTINCTION The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

-

From the publisher:

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still:

The source of much of the world’s food—seeds—is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.

If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health—and to the planet.

#reading #Dan Saladino #food security #monoculture farming

[wizardnaturalist]

reading environmental science books can be incredibly frustrating, because even when theyre written by professionals who actually know what theyre talking about, who are clearly passionate about their work and about the world, and know the steps needed to reverse the climate crisis, they are almost never radicals.

like they spend an entire book meticulously breaking down the importance of ecological stability, laying out the arguments that work for people who care, and for those who are only worried about money, putting together plans of action that require national and international action

and then at the end they go "and people should eat less meat and use paper straws :)" no!!!

for one thing "people need to-" is not an actionable plan. the people will not. it is not like policy or initiatives where, if you can convince the right people, you can make sonething happen. you cannot just change the habits if the entire world.

secondly, this fails to take into account the corporate interests in the situation. in massive national and international goods production such as the meat industry, supply and demand are no longer connected. it doesnt matter how many people stop buying meat, if the government is going to continue to subsidize its production and make up for any potential losses. and the government isnt going to stop doing that, because the meat industry spends millions of dollars on lobbying and directly enriches congressmembers. this is not something where you can simply speak to the secretary of agriculture and force a change.

and finally, all these books seem convinced that it is the Fact of, in this case, cattle farming, and not the How that is the issue. wild bison roamed the (not yet) american west in numbers equivalent to the current population of beef cattle, but their grazing and methane production were not blights upon the environment. it is the cultivation of monoculture turf fields, the use of pesticides, fungicides, and antibiotics, and the feeding of corn and other low quality scrap food that produces the problems associated with modern cattle farming. there are already some ranchers making strides toward more sustainable methods, and it's a growing movement!

what I mean by all this is, the scientists who write these books, who are clearly intelligent and mindful of their subjects, all seem deathly reluctant to challenge the overall economic and social system under which we live. they have no issue pointing out the flaws in our personal habits, our laws, and our philosophical connection with nature, but never seem to take the final step and say that the very system that created it all is in the wrong.

and I dont think it's a matter of trying to keep their goals realistic either. advocating for the complete dismantling of the cattle industry, or noninterference protections for a third of the oceans, or a comprehensive and enforced global climate initiative are about as likely to happen in the next decade as america becoming a socialist nation.

#'we already make enough food for 10 billion people so people should stop wasting the food they buy at the grocery store :)' #no!!!! corporations should stop yhrowing out perfectly usable food by the millions of tons because if it wont make them a profit #then they wont allow anyone else to have it either!! #the government should stop paying industrial farmers to theow out produce because they made more than they were able to sell!! #we should stop unnecessarily shipping foods all around the globe simply so we can say they came from an exoti locale #or so it could be produced by criminally cheap labour when it could just as easily be grown locally!! #fuck!!! #science #environment

[el-trotamundos]

“What the world buys and eats is becoming more and more the same. Consider the facts: the source of much of the world’s food - seeds - is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the USA to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in monocultures so vast their scale can only be comprehended from the view of a aeroplane or by satellite. This level of uniformity, from the genetics of the world’s most widely consumed crops, wheat, rice and maize, right through to the meals they become, has never been experienced before. The human diet has undergone more change in the last 150 years (roughly six generations) than in the entire previous one million years (around 40,000 generations).” #currentlyreading #bookworm #bookstagram #nonfiction #supportlocallibraries #foodwriting

#currentlyreading #bookworm #bookstagram #nonfiction #supportlocallibraries #foodwriting

[andrewrewald]

This garden contains selected native edible species native or endemic to the Big Scrub. Most are endangered, vulnerable or threatened by habitat loss and grow alongside selected introduced edible and medicinal species classified as weeds.

Small-leaf Tamarind (Diploglottis campbelli)

Native: Endangered

Strawberry Gum (Eucalyptus olida)

Native: Vulnerable

Pandanus Palm (Pandanus tectorius)

Native: Habitat vulnerable

Bush Nut (Macadamia tettraphylla)

Native: Vulnerable

Red Lilly Pilly (Syzygium hodgkinsoniae)

Native: Endangered

Native Elderberry (Sambucus australasica)

Native: Stable

Yulli / Angular Sea Fig (Carpobrotus glaucescens)

Native: Habitat vulnerable

Davidson’s Plum (Davidsonia jerseyana)

Native: Endangered

Native Lemon Grass (Cymbopogon ambigiuus)

Native: Endangered

Bunya Bunya (Araucaria bidwillii)

Native: Vulnerable

Giant Spear Lily (Doryanthes pameri)

Native: Vulnerable

Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora)

Native: Stable

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)

Native and Introduced

Broad leaf plantain (Plantago major)

Introduced: Invasive

American Elder (Sambucus canadensis)

Introduced: Potentially invasive

Burdock (Arctium lappa)

Introduced: Invasive

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Introduced: Invasive

Long leaf Pine (Pinus palustris)

Introduced: Invasive

Repurposed hessian bags representing monoculture surround the Plant Treaty garden, stencilled onto them are terms PLANT TREATY, CROP TRUST, SEED FUND, BIOSECURITY, GENE BANK. These terms are commonly used rhetoric by Big Agriculture and corporate food entities seeking to monopolise global food systems while green-washing their environmental impact.

Supported by a public program of talks by traditional knowledge holders, the Plant Treaty garden reminds us that such terms and their meanings are intrinsic to ancient and ongoing food­–plant–people relations. Relationships that are inherent to traditional Indigenous land care practices in Australia and many other cultures around the world. Practices that nurture water to drought-poof the land and create biodiversity, to support healthy ecosystems and sustainable foodways.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says protecting and restoring the world’s forests is critical for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but many argue political and business leaders are focusing too much on “restoring” rather than “protecting”, and latching on to methods they hope will offset emissions rather than prevent them.

At least a third of the corporations promising to plant trees under Benioff’s 1t.org campaign are doing so to offset emissions, according to a Financial Times analysis of 73 pledge documents. The 46 planting pledges so far amount to at least 3bn new trees.

“It’s greenwashing,” says Kate Dooley, a lecturer specialising in carbon accounting at Melbourne university. “Corporations are greenwashing us when they say they will achieve net zero if that is relying on removing carbon through tree planting.”

Planting trees is more complicated than it sounds. Ecosystems must be restored to avoid biodiversity collapse, experts say, but “on the right land and in the right way”. Multiple projects so far have failed to benefit local people, others have created monoculture commercial plantations that are poor homes for wildlife, and a lack of continuing care means many saplings simply die.

Twenty-four of the 1t.org companies claim to have already planted nearly 300mn trees, some as far back as 2004, but only two projects disclose in their pledge documents how many survived.

Alexandra Heal, The illusion of a trillion trees

#Trillion Trees #trees #climate change #carbon offset #greenwashing #Google 'The illusion of a trillion trees' and click on the link there if FT has issues

[vakarians-babe]

It's really important that more people talk about what is going on and has been going on in India regarding Sikh activists and even just. Normal people. It was announced on February 15th that Deep Sidhu had died following a suspicious car crash, where his passenger survived (though news outlets vary on how seriously they say they were hurt and what their identity is, it seems that it was his girlfriend). This comes after he was arrested for being outspoken on the issue of the Farmers Protest and held in jail for several months last year. This was because his activism was deemed illegal, as the Sikh Press Association states.

While we don't know for sure what happened, we do know that this comes in a long line of suspicious actions against Sikh activists and humans' rights violations, as documented by Ensaaf here. Spreading awareness of what's been happening and continues to happen is crucial. Since the 1984 Sikh Massacre, it seems as though things have only been getting worse. Despite Sikhi being the fifth-largest faith worldwide, the Indian government still blames Sikh people and activists for a large number of issues, and often refuses to acknowledge the damage done by the 1984 killings.

Although the Farm Bills were repealed in November, this is no guarantee that they will stay repealed. Elections are approaching and for many, the repeal is a sign only that the protests were becoming too inconvenient. The government has still not met its 2016 goal of 'doubling farmers' income' by 2022, nor has it agreed to guarantee minimum support prices (MSPs) to ensure that corporations cannot control the prices of foodstuffs, a major concern since the bills took away regulations for the selling of produce to corporations. Things have been at a crisis point for a long time, as was made very clear by the widespread brutality against protesters from September of 2020 through the repeal bill's passing in November of 2021. Estimates state that around 750 protesters died or were killed, some from heart attacks and exposure, some from suicide, some from suspicious accidents, and some in episodes of violence and police brutality.

Punjab, a state where approximately 70% of the population is involved in/supported by agriculture, is also a Sikh majority state. Following the violent partition in 1947, the state was again reorganized in 1966, leading to more disputes. Primarily, though, it is important to note that it was the center of the so-called 'Green Revolution,' which did away with indigenous crop varieties in favor of monocultures and cash crops that are prone to failure and require chemical assistance to grow, which has been linked to increased cancer rates. Debt levels in Punjab are also approximately 2.5 times the national average, and all these issues have been linked to increasing suicide rates in the state.

Sikh advocacy played a crucial role in the protests, and many Sikh activists like Deep Sidhu were responsible for the global recognition the protests received. The principles of Sikhi are ones of protection and social justice. And it is no coincidence that Sikhs have been targeted as a religious/social minority since 1947. The protests may be over in the public eye, but this does not end for the farmers of Punjab. It does not end for politically active Sikhs. It does not end for the Sikh community at large as we are called to protect those in need. Consider the way that Modi's government threatened to jail workers of Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp if they did not give up information on accounts related to the protests. Consider the way that internet service was cut to throttle communication during the protests in January of 2021. Sikhs have been silenced, shoved aside, disappeared, and detained. Do not look away.

#deep sidhu #farmers protest #india #sikhi #boost

[fatqueerandoutofcontrol]

Today I learned that Starbucks has a new public image campaign based on offering "comprehensive" trans health care.

Starbucks is also super racist and has horrific destructive/parasitic business practices*.

They lean on public image campaigns to stay popular.

SBUX also do not allow visible tattoos or more than two earrings per ear last time I checked. They perpetrate yt "professional standards of grooming" including pressuring black people to get rid of their 'locks due to their views of locks as "unsanitary" and an inherent violation of food handling safety.

If you want comprehensive trans health Care, a liveable wage, plus a PENSION that WILL give you the down payment on a house, and way less racism, go work for Trader Joe's.

Source: I was a Starbucks shift supervisor for two years (2003-2005) and I worked at trader Joe's for 6+ years. TJs isn’t flawless by any means, but, as a corporation, they paid better and were less intrusive into people’s bodies and private lives.

Please, PLEASE examine whether or not Starbucks is touting their health care because they are trying to enforce a binary "passing" paradigm and generally being truscum. Because this corporation WILL write you up for having an uncovered hand tattoo or more than two earrings per ear, so I can only imagine what they’d do to people who don’t embrace a binary gender paradigm.

If an Afrodescendant trans person who works for Starbucks can get free electrolysis, but cannot wear their natural hair because it “violates dress code as well as food handling safety regulations”, I’m gonna have additional questions.

Especially from a company known to call the cops on black customers for “loitering”, and who didn’t open any locations in historically black neighborhoods until Magic Johnson shamed them publicly and fronted millions of dollars in 1999 (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/09/how-magic-johnson-got-starbucks-ceo-howard-schultz-to-partner-with-him.html).

Yes there is no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism, but Starbucks has fully replaced Coca Cola as THE symbol for yt corporate American global cultural imperialism.

No I am not mad at ppl who take jobs to get healthcare. SURVIVAL FIRST. That’s actually in Leviticus, in case people need that level of weird scriptural justification to treat each other well.

My beef is first foremost and always with corporations that treat their workers like walking billboards.

Using the bodies of historically marginalized workers, such as trans workers, as human shields against accountability is wrong 💯.

Get the health care.

But don’t be fooled by corporate philanthropy or perceived benevolence.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

*Starbucks business expansion plan has always looked like this:

1. Use big corporate money to flood a city with locations, “creating jobs”

2. Use big corporate money to keep underperforming locations open until SBUX has edged out local coffee shops.

3. Close half of the locations, firing all those employees

4. “Lol, f*** all those people we hired, we actually created a net loss of jobs by forcing out independent coffee shops and creating a corporate monoculture”

** https://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-competition-independent-coffee-shops-2017-3

I dunno if y’all been paying attention to the last fifteen years, but Starbucks does this every few.

And I’m right there to remind people that Starbucks stands on its workers to avoid public accountability.

It seems like every time they are about to lose big money, they roll out another optics campaign.

They did it with veterans

They did it with working students

Now SBUX is doing it with trans workers

If you want to know why all of a sudden Starbucks is trying to “reach out” to marginalized workers, here it is:

They lost so much money during the pandemic/lockdown that they’re hurting. And they’re about to do another expansionist push (https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/business/starbucks-store-openings/index.html)

They need workers. But these will probably not be permanent jobs, given SBUX record of “flood and fold” (see above).

If you’re a trans worker: Get the healthcare. Survive. Thrive. Look good doing it.

But don’t forget to whisper “f*** Starbucks” at least once per shift 😅💯