With brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• From Fast Company:
"This month, Amazon was named one of the best places to work for disabled workers by the nonprofit organization Disability:IN. It was the second year in a row that the tech giant—which just so happens to be a corporate partner of Disability:IN—received a perfect score on the Disability Equality Index, an annual report that measures disability inclusion across companies.
"Some of Amazon’s disabled employees, however, might say otherwise. A new report released on Wednesday by United for Respect, a worker advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., claims that Amazon has failed to provide adequate accommodations to disabled workers, including those injured on the job."
The story says that "while Amazon’s worker safety issues have been well-documented, United for Respect seeks to shine a light on how the company responds when employees are injured or seeking accommodations that they are entitled to under the Americans with Disabilities Act … The report points to not only the productivity metrics that Amazon has become famous for, but also a lack of clarity around the process for requesting accommodations. Even when accommodations are granted, according to the report, there’s a disconnect between the team that handles those requests and on-site managers or HR employees; workers also told United for Respect that they believed managers weren’t incentivized to honor accommodations in part because of the pressure to hit production quotas."
Amazon has replied to the report by calling United for Respect "a union-created and funded organization," a charge that the group denies.
• NBC News reports on a wind farm project in Tunica County, Mississippi, owned by the Virginia-based energy company AES, which "will sell power to Amazon and is expected to generate enough electricity to run more than 80,000 homes starting early next year … The new wind farm in Tunica County reflects a growing green energy sector in Mississippi. Just over the county’s border in DeSoto County, construction is underway on a solar farm with the capacity to provide electricity for roughly 21,000 homes. In 2021, Mississippi’s Republican-dominated Legislature approved allowing local officials in Tunica and Chickasaw counties to grant incentives for renewable energy projects."
Tunica County is a place, apparently, that transcended poverty by opening casinos, but the bloom is off that rose and so local leaders are looking for ways to build up the tax base. It is amazing that this wind farm will be able to generate that much energy, and a great example of what is possible when companies look for ways to move energy generation away from traditional and toxic sources.
• From TechCrunch:
"Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users, according to Meta’s latest quarterly report. That’s quite the staggering number. Even though Facebook has declined in popularity among younger people, the platform is far from dead. Across Meta’s entire family of apps — which includes WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and now Threads — there were 3.88 billion monthly active users. That’s almost half of the world population.
"Milestones are fun, but perhaps more importantly for Meta and its investors, daily active users have continued to grow too. Facebook has 2.064 billion daily active users, up from 2.037 billion last quarter. That growth is pivotal, because in the final quarter of 2021, Facebook reported its first-ever quarterly decline in daily active users."
CEO Mark Zuckerberg judged the company's trajectory as being "the most exciting roadmap ahead that I’ve seen in a while."
