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For regretful Tesla owners who don’t want fellow motorists to mistake the vehicle theyre driving as a show of support for CEO Elon Musk, they can always try rebadging it. While sales of anti-Musk bumper stickers with messages like I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy have surged since President Donald Trump’s election win last November, some Tesla owners are opting for a disguise instead. Looking for a visual way to distance themselves from Trump’s biggest campaign donorwho now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)some owners have pulled Tesla badges off their cars and replaced them with other automakers branding marks. View this post on Instagram A post shared by COURIER (@couriernewsroom) Photos on social media show cars with the distinctive, streamlined Tesla silhouette carrying badges for Mazda, Honda, Audi, and Rivian Others have opted to take the Tesla branding off and leave their vehicle blank. Once every symbol that they put on there is gone, the whole thing becomes more clearly, I think, a statement, Jordan Schwartz, a man who removed Tesla badges from his Model Y and from a friend’s car in the Seattle area, told KUOW. [Image: Tesla] How to remove your Tesla badge Tesla’s own service manual says to remove its badges, position a monofilament line, which can be used for fishing, under a corner of the badge and make a sawing motion to remove it; clean off any remaining residue with isopropyl alcohol wipes. Online, Tesla owners are sharing their own tips. Many recommend using a heat gun or hairdryer to pull the badges off more easily, and one commenter on a Reddit thread claimed he used dental floss. Finding replacement badges from other car brands can be as simple as searching on Amazon and eBay. While such disguises might not fool everyone, some Tesla owners see reason to take a symbol that’s become a political target off their vehicles. Since Musk’s taken a very public role in slashing government agencies, Tesla showrooms have become protest zones, and Tesla vehicles and charging stations have been vandalized. Tesla’s stock price has also suffered, with the carmaker losing more than half its value since December. Drivers don’t always notice details about the cars around them, but keep your eyes peeled. The Mazda 3 or Honda Civic you’re sitting behind in traffic might actually be a Tesla in disguise.
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The Trump administration has repeatedly said it wants to deport as many people as possible. What that means for the estimated 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the American workforce is unclear. It is also unclear whether those mass deportations will happen. The deportations recorded so far arent on track to meet Trumps goal. And the economic reality is that deporting huge numbers of immigrants could cause severe labor shortages. As many as 1 in 20 U.S. workers are unauthorized immigrants. If they all were forced to leave or were too scared to show up to work, it could harm the economy. In some cases, the labor rights of unauthorized workers could be another obstacle. I am a professor who has spent more than two decades researching immigrant labor organizing. In Scaling Migrant Worker Rights, a book I coauthored with sociologist Shannon Gleeson, we explained that unauthorized workers in the U.S. have labor rights and how those workers can defend them. While challenging, in some cases, labor laws have protected some unauthorized immigrants from deportation, at least temporarily. Legal protections Federal and state laws guarantee some basic protections for all workers, regardless of their immigration status. That includes the right to have a safe workplace and to earn the prevailing minimum wage where theyre employed, as well as overtime pay. Workers can report labor violations to the government, even if they are foreign-born and lack the legal authorization to work in the U.S. Its illegal for employers to retaliate for labor organizing at the workplace or for reporting minimum wage or overtime violations, unsafe working conditions, sexual harassment, or racial discrimination. To be sure, ensuring that these rights are respected is hard for workers who fear deportationespecially during an extremely anti-immigrant administration like the one Trump leads. And unauthorized workers dont have all the labor rights of citizens and permanent residents. For example, if an unauthorized worker is illegally fired for trying to form a union, they arent entitled to back pay or reinstatement as a citizen or an immigrant who has obtained the requisite authorization to work in the U.S. would be. This limitation essentially renders the right to organize a union meaningless for unauthorized immigrants if their employers retaliate. Obstacles and intimidation Enforcing immigrants rights is, of course, hard to do. Many immigrants dont speak English well. They may distrust the government. They could have trouble affording a lawyer or finding one who will represent them for free when faced with a labor law violation. Labor standards enforcement for unauthorized workers relies heavily on worker complaints, placing the burden on victims to speak out and submit a claim when faced with a violation. But they find it difficult to navigate through many layers of bureaucracy to file complaints with the proper authorities. Many undocumented workers also face intimidation from their employers, who might threaten to report them to immigration authorities if they complain to the Labor Department about unfair treatment or unsafe working conditions. This fear of deportation keeps many vulnerable workers silent about their exploitation. With only 650 investigators on staff at the Department of Labor in charge of enforcing minimum wage, overtime, and child labor lawsas of late 2024enforcement is mostly reactive. Only 1% of all farm employers were investigated annually, even before the second Trump administration began. Those numbers could climb if the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, were to resume the large-scale enforcement raids the Biden administration halted in 2021. Previously, ICE had visited meatpacking plants and other employers from Texas to Tennessee that rely heavily on immigrant labor, in order to verify employment authorization documents. The authorities detain workers without valid papers, possibly deporting them. Their employers may face criminal fines and penalties and be ordered to stop hiring unauthorized immigrant workers. By early March 2025, the second Trump administration has not raided any large businesses. Instead, it has emphasized traffic stops and visits to small employers in communities with large numbers of unauthorized immigrants. But many big employers and communities are bracing for a wave of those operations. Wage theft and contributions to fund benefits they cant get Working conditions for immigrants without authorization were already difficult before Trump took office for a second time. Partly due to fear that their employers will report them to federal immigration enforcement authorities if they speak up, many of them experience wage theft, meaning that they dont get all of their pay and benefits, or their compensation falls below the minimum wage where they reside. Despite their typically low earnings, immigrants living without authorization who are employed in the U.S. pay more than $96billion in federal, state, and local taxes per year. They also contribute to the Social Security system even though they cant access these benefits when they retire, which the Internal Revenue Service requires of employers. Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program Yet, over the years, many undocumented workers have come forward to defend their labor rights with the support of worker centers, labor unions, migrant-led organizations, and consulates from their countries of origin. Decades of increasingly visible grassroots advocacy for immigrant workers without authorization paid off in January 2023, when the Department of Homeland Security launched the Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program. Known as DALE, it protects immigrant workers from exploitation and encourage reporting labor violations without fear of immigration consequences. This government program provides temporary deportation protections and work permits to eligible workers, with more than 7,700 work permits issued by October of 2024. The DALE program has encouraged many workers to come forward and report labor violations without fear of retaliation for speaking up, thus increasing minimum labor protections for all workers at thousands of workplaces. DALEs fate, however, is unclear now with Trump back in the White House. Xóchitl Bada is a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Scores of wildfires broke out across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia in early March 2025 as strong winds, abnormally dry conditions and low humidity combined to kindle and spread the flames. The fires followed a year of weather whiplash in the Carolinas, from a flash drought over the summer to extreme hurricane flooding in September, and then back to drought again. Storms on March 5, 2025, helped douse many of the fires still burning, but the Southeast fire season is only beginning. Wake Forest University wildfire experts Lauren Lowman and Nick Corak put the fires and the regions dry winter into context. Why did the Carolinas see so many wildfires? Most of North and South Carolina have been abnormally dry or in moderate drought since at least November 2024. Consistently dry conditions through the winter dried out vegetation, leaving fuel for wildfires. When the land and vegetation is this dry, all it takes is a lightning strike or a man-made fire and wind gusts to start a wildfire. Hurricanes did flood the region in late summer 2024, but before that, the Carolinas were experiencing a flash drought. Flash droughts are extreme droughts that develop rapidly due to lack of precipitation and dry conditions in the atmosphere. When the atmosphere is dry, it pulls water from the vegetation and soils, causing the surface to dry out. In August and September, Tropical Storm Debby and Hurricane Helene caused extensive flooding in the two states, but the Carolinas received little rainfall in the months that followed, leaving winter 2025 abnormally dry again. How unusual are fires like this in the region? Fires are historically fairly common in the Carolinas. Theyre a natural part of the landscape, and many ecosystems have evolved to depend on them. Carnivorous plants such as Venus flytraps and pitcher plants rely on frequent fire activity to remove shrubs and other plants that would grow over them and block the light. Even some wildlife depend on fire for their habitats and for food from the mix of native plants that regrow after a fire. The expected return periods for wildfires (how often fires have historically burned in a region) range from 1 to 10 years for the Piedmont and Coastal Plains in the east and 10 to 40 years in the Appalachian Mountains. However, many unplanned fires today are put out. That means underbrush that would normally burn every decade or so can build up over time, fueling more intense fires when it does burn. To avoid that overgrowth, land managers conduct annual prescribed fires to try to mimic that natural fire activity in a controlled way. These controlled burns are critical for removing vegetation that otherwise could provide additional fuel for more intense and damaging wildfires. Is dryness like this becoming more common? Extreme weather events are becoming more common across the U.S., including in the Southeast and the Carolinas. Increasing temperatures mean the atmosphere can hold more moisture, amplifying how much water it can draw from the land surface and eventually drop in heavier storms. That can lead to more extreme storms and longer dry periods. In humid regions like the Southeast, where there is an abundance of dense vegetation, periods of warm, dry conditions that dry out that vegetation will increase the risk of wildfire. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the southeastern U.S. experienced more droughts than other regions in the country in the first two decades of the 21st century. The weather variability also makes it harder to clear out forest undergrowth. Prescribed burns require that vegetation be dry enough to burn but also that winds are calm enough to allow firefighters to manage the flames. Studies show those conditions are likely to become less common in the Southeast in a warming world. Without that tool to reduce fuel, the risk of intense wildfires rises. Lauren Lowman is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Wake Forest University. Nick Corak is a PhD candidate in physics at Wake Forest University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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