United Auto Workers Outsmarted the Bosses, Amid Widespread Popular Support

As my American readers are no doubt aware, the “big three” auto companies have been refusing to negotiate with United Auto Workers (UAW) in good faith, and so UAW declared a strike. The important backstory here is that until the 2008 crash, auto workers were guaranteed an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to their pay. This was a hard-won victory, and it meant that the workers could expect a consistent standard of living for their work, despite inflation. In 2008, the big auto companies were in danger of going out of business, and so in addition to the government bailout, the workers agreed to a temporary suspension of their COLA – making a sacrifice for the good of everyone. Since then, the auto companies have refused to restore the adjustment, and have created a new “employment track” in which new workers will never get the same benefits or pensions as older workers. All this, despite making record profits, and spending billions on stock buy-backs, which are basically direct transfers of cash to shareholders. The 40% raise that the UAW is asking for (and that the CEOs are saying is so unreasonable) would move workers’ wages to where they would have been had COLA been in place since 2008. The money is absolutely there, and anyone claiming this would bankrupt the companies is lying.

And so, the union decided to strike, and they have made a couple brilliant tactical moves.

The first, which I initially didn’t understand, was to only strike at some factories, at first. I think when I first heard about this, it was framed as being a bit feeble, when the goal is to force auto makers to realize how much they need their workers to choose to work for them. The reality is that this was a strategic move to conserve resources. As I’ve said before, a strike is a siege. It’s the workers trying to “starve out” the bosses, by hurting production and thus profit, while the bosses try to literally starve out the workers, and force them to give up their demands to avoid homelessness and starvation. In any siege, it’s a question of who can make their resources last longer, and strike funds exist to help workers pay their bills while on strike. Only striking at select factories allows them to extend their strike fund, and gives them room to increase the pressure as time goes on.

The second move – and I love this one – was to mislead the companies as to which locations would be striking. The UAW didn’t say which plants would be striking, and the companies tried to guess, and to preemptively shut down those plants by having their parts shipped elsewhere, and shifting the production schedule. Basically, they tried to dodge the strike. What happened instead, was that they inadvertently shut down several of their own plants, because the workers know more about car production than the bosses. Not only did the UAW extend their strike fund, they managed to trick the companies into effectively striking against themselves:

Brandon Mancilla, a director for the UAW’s Region 9A, which spans New England and the Northeast, told The Intercept that the auto manufacturers are creating more problems for themselves than they would have faced had they come to an agreement with the union before the contracts for its 150,000 workers expired last week. “Instead of bargaining in good faith and understanding our demands and meeting us at the table,” Mancilla said, “these companies are conducting strikes on themselves.”

The UAW did not announce the plants where it intended to hold work stoppages until just before the strike deadline last Thursday night. The targeted facilities — GM’s Wentzville Assembly Center outside St. Louis, Stellantis’s Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio, and two divisions of Ford’s Michigan plant — were not among those that workers reported companies making preparations at. So far, some 13,000 workers are on the picket line, affecting the production of classic American cars like the Jeep Wrangler and the Ford Bronco, with more to follow if the union’s contract negotiations are not concluded by week’s end.

In the run up to the strike, UAW members at auto plants from Georgia to Tennessee to Ohio took to Facebook and Twitter to share accounts of partial plant closures and faulty information from plant managers leading to chaos on shop floors across the country.

Scott Houldieson, a worker at the Ford assembly plant in Chicago, told The Intercept that company bosses seemed to have no idea where planned strikes were going to take place. “Our local plant management started emptying out vehicles from paint ovens and dip tanks. If they leave cars in there, they get ruined so they start emptying those out and preparing to shut the ovens down. So that’s what was happening here because they thought that our plant was going to be one that was called out,” Houldieson said. “The plant chairman was telling me that ours was the one they were going to strike.”

Houldieson said that other automakers had transferred parts from plants elsewhere in the country, including one in Tennessee. “At GM in Spring Hill, they loaded engines to send to Wentzville because they thought Spring Hill would be the target. Turns out Wentzville was where they struck, so there was a lot of disinformation out there that really put the company on their heels,” he added.

In other words, the company had moved product from a plant that was not striking and to one that did. (The GM spokesperson said that “there’s been no work interruption at Spring Hill as a result of the Wentzville strike.”)

Stellantis admitted that it was caught off guard and took preparations at plants that were not ultimately affected by the strike actions.

There are a number of ways in which the class war can be seen as a literal war. It’s also a very one-sided war. I’ve talked before about how lives are taken to further the interests of the capitalist class, but it doesn’t go the other way. The working class are the only ones whose lives are at risk, almost entirely because workers are allowed to keep so little of the wealth they generate. That means that every move that extends limited resources is a very real victory. Everything I hear from UAW president Shawn Fain indicates that he has a similar view on the nature of this conflict, and so he’s going to use any trick or stratagem that will bring the union closer to victory.

For all my talk of “the class war”, I want to be clear that this strike is not a revolution. The UAW is not trying to take over ownership and management of auto companies, nor do they have the power to do so. It is, however, an important moment in the current labor movement. Support for unions and strikes is incredibly high right now, and if the UAW, and SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA manage to win their strikes, it will be proof of the effectiveness and usefulness of organizing. It will be proof that putting time, money, and effort into unions, is a worthwhile investment.

Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, while I always knew pro-union people, and grew up listening to old labor songs, I also was aware of a general hatred of unions, both among conservatives, and in mass media. They were portrayed as corrupt, and largely ineffective – a burden on workers and bosses alike. I think it’s fair to say that every institution has the potential for corruption, and it should be obvious that the corporations tend to be entirely corrupt, pretty much by design. That’s also why I think the “time and effort” part of investing in unions is important. From what I can tell, democracy is something that requires constant maintenance and improvement, especially in the presence of massive wealth inequality. Unions are not, and never will be perfect – no institution or system can be – but how good they are seems to be far more under workers’ control than are the companies for which they work.

The current support for unions and for these three big strikes is something of a victory all by itself, and I’m hopeful that winning these strikes will solidify that support, and show Americans the good that can come from collective action. Political participation in the US tends to be pretty low. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think one big one is the belief that there’s not really any point in participating. It’s just a waste of limited free time, all to elect someone who’s just going to keep serving the rich. I think when people say that politics don’t matter, it’s less that they don’t think the things done by politicians matter, and more that they don’t believe anything they do can actually affect what the government does. It’s a very understandable reaction to the world as it has been throughout my life.

Obviously, I also think that it’s a misguided reaction. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. My big hope from these strikes, in addition to the ways in which they stand to make life better for millions of people, is that they will convince more people that the problem isn’t with political participation. It’s with the kinds of participation that were offered to them as the only options. There are other ways to fight for change that have nothing to do with elections and political parties, and that are much harder for the rich and powerful to corrupt, and turn to their own ends. Collective action isn’t a panacea, but I think it offers a real chance at a better world.

Accuracy standards on the internet

A basic observation about the internet is that there are differing accuracy standards in different contexts. For example, the accuracy standards of a newspaper are supposed to be higher than that of a “hot take”. This here blog has standards somewhere in the middle. I’m not speaking extemporaneously, so I’m expected to do some fact checking. But I’m also not paid to do that for you, so reader beware.

Conflict can occur when content of certain accuracy standards get judged by different accuracy standards than was understood by the author. The classic example is when someone tweets out a casual thought they had while in the shower, and then it goes viral because it contains some error. A small indiscretion–a stupid thought like what we all have–gets turned into a large one.

Audience size has a lot to do with it. The price of an error is spreading misinformation, which is proportional to the size of the audience. The price of fact-checking is spending time to do your homework, which is unrelated to the size of the audience. So for a larger audience, the cost-benefit analysis leans more and more towards fact-checking. For a small audience, at some point it’s like, why bother? You can issue a correction later if you have to.

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These ‘aliens’ wouldn’t be out of place in a roadside museum

The USA has been one-upped. Our congress listened soberly as crackpots told them all about UFOs whizzing about through our skies, but the Mexican congress got to see alien bodies.

Are you impressed by all the anatomical details, the CAT scans of the bodies, the boldness of the speaker? I hope not. Here’s a video of these specimens.

They’re doll-sized. They look like they’re made out of papier mache.

I suspect they’re a bit like the Fiji mermaids, which were made from monkey bodies stitched to fish. I’m going to guess these are mangled and manipulated animal bones, crudely covered with a rough matrix of some sort, and that’s it.

Putting three eggs in one of them was a nice touch, though.

Trump’s obsession over the classified documents is even weirder than I thought

I have mentioned before that I just did not get serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) weird obsession with holding on to the classified documents that ultimately led to his indictment. I can (sort of) understand that he took some with him during his chaotic final days before he left the White. House. But why was he so obsessed with holding on to them even after he was told that he had to return them? What value could they possibly have for him?

But clearly he wanted them very badly, to the extent that he even defied his own lawyer’s advice to hand them over. His lawyer Evan Corcoran warned him that of he did not do so voluntarily, the FBI would get a search warrant from a judge for Mar-a-Lago, and that is precisely what happened. But of course, then SSAT expressed outrage at this utterly predictable outcome.
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At last, a concrete example of “woke”! Poetry.

You may have noticed that Tommy Tuberville was holding up military appointments. We now learn what kind of thing he thinks justifies his dilatoriness.

Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”

“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”

OH MY GOD. Sailors might hear poetry. Real men don’t read or listen to poetry, or pay any attention to song lyrics. It is not surprising at all that a moron like Tuberville lacks all music or prosody in his brain. Poor man.

These people are mad

In all senses of the word. This has been a disease raging through certain people since at least the Gamergate days — they are ideologically warped, committed to a bizarrely hateful perspective.

So here’s this guy, playing the shiny new role-playing game du jour, and he gets to the beginning character creation screen, a staple of these kinds of games since Dungeons & Dragons. It asks what pronouns his character will use, and he fucking melts down.

Jesus, guy. It’s a game. A role-playing game. You’re going to have to save some of that energy and fury for when it asks if you want to be an elf or a dwarf or whatever (I haven’t played Starfield. Martian or Venusian? Whatever.)

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Yeah, it’s hard to think of anything to add, so I’m just leaving the floor to Nebraska State Senator Hunt:

IMF Correctly Castigates Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Ignores Own Role in Climate Crisis

I’m sure that you are aware, dear readers, that the fossil fuel industry has always been at the receiving end of various forms of government assistance. Wars for oil, cops crushing protests, car-based infrastructure, and then there are the subsidies. Subsidy discourse underwent an interesting change maybe a decade ago, as opposition to renewable subsidies was easy to rebut by pointing to fossil fuel subsidies, many of which take the form of enormous tax breaks. I started seeing more and more people claim that they weren’t really subsidies, because all taxation is theft, and so a tax break was just letting them keep more of their own money. A subsidy, they say, is when the government cuts a check!

The reality is that tax breaks are absolutely subsidies, they’re just the most efficient way to go about handing them out. Rather than the cost of cutting and verifying checks, transferring the money (yes, that stuff actually does take at least some labor and resources), you just knock some money off of what the corporations have to pay. The net effect is identical to cutting a check, though it wouldn’t shock me if doing it this way was always a bit of a shell game to hide just how much support the federal government gives to fossil fuel corporations:

Fossil fuels benefited from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund, despite being the primary cause of the climate crisis.

The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education. Countries have pledged to phase out subsidies for years to ensure the price of fossil fuels reflects their true environmental costs, but have achieved little to date.

Explicit subsidies, which cut the price of fuels for consumers, doubled in 2022 as countries responded to the higher energy prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Rich households benefited far more from these than poor ones, the IMF said. Implicit subsidies, which represent the “enormous” costs of the damage caused by fossil fuels through climate change and air pollution, made up 80% of the total.

Ending the subsidies should be the centrepiece of climate action, the IMF said, and would put the world on track to restrict global heating to below 2C, as well as preventing 1.6 million air pollution deaths a year and increasing government revenues by trillions of dollars. The researchers acknowledged that subsidy reform was politically difficult, but said carefully designed policies that supported poorer households could work, especially if coordinated internationally.

Now, those who would make the earlier argument about tax breaks probably also wouldn’t like the inclusion of the costs incurred by pollution and climate change. Let us assume, for a moment, that their objection is in good faith. We’ve known for well over a century that by increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, we were warming our planet. Fossil fuel corporations knew how quickly the problem was moving, and how dangerous it was, and they lied about it. They actively worked to bring about the disasters that governments and the people pay for. They’ve also been perfectly aware of the dangers of the air pollution caused by their products, and lied about that as well. As this nurse said of the US, “We don’t have safety nets for our poor in this country, we have a greased chute. And at the very bottom of that greased chute of poverty, is a trip to your local emergency room.” USians also pay in terms of higher insurance premiums because of fossil fuel use, while tiny-minded assholes on TV rant about the “public health crisis” of obesity. Even in countries that do have real safety nets, they are still absorbing all the costs incurred by fossil fuel products.

If a toy company was poisoning children, they’d get fined for that. If any normal product is seriously dangerous, it gets recalled. With fossil fuels? The world just eats the costs. We all, together, pay for worse cardiovascular health, and extreme weather events, and problems for fetal and childhood development, and the list goes on, and on, and on. No, it’s very clear that by consistently paying for the vast and growing harm done by the use of fossil fuels, we are, without question, subsidizing that industry.

The costs of all of that together, according to the IMF, came to thirteen million dollar per minute in 2022, and as long as the planet keeps warming, and the fossil fuel industry is allowed to continue operating, that number is only going to get higher.

Now – the IMF is not, in my view, a good organization. Its primary role seems to be getting former colonies into debt traps to keep them from advancing – the economic counterpart to the CIA’s assassinations and coup-mongering. They are also a big part of how the world runs right now, and they spend a fair amount of time crunching numbers. I’m inclined to agree with them on this, but as a rule, I think it’s good to view them with skepticism. While it is important to end fossil fuel subsidies (and to end the industry overall), the IMF is far from blameless, and will have to end many of their own practices if we want a real response to climate change:

One of the biggest factors preventing governments in the Global South from taking climate action is barely discussed at conferences and debates meant to find solutions to the planet’s existential crisis.

It is time for us to talk about debt. Especially now, with the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held recently and economic policy options for Global South countries under the spotlight. If we want countries to have the freedom to take action that is in their interests, we must understand that the World Bank, the IMF and private banks based in wealthy countries are preventing climate progress.

How? Because of their unhealthy obsession with debt repayments from the Global South at any cost.

This extortionate debt which hangs over the heads of many countries is forcing them to make difficult choices in order to pay that debt back. Indonesia, for example, is paying back loans equivalent to more than 40 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), a key factor leading it to cut down rainforests to make way for money-making palm oil plantations. The need to repay external debt worth more than 80 percent of GDP has also been a factor in Brazil’s prioritising of soybean exports over the protection of the Amazon. And an external debt equivalent to 101 percent of GDP is why Mozambique has been trying to expand its coal and gas production in recent years.

This type of external debt almost always needs to be repaid in US dollars or other foreign currencies. So even when countries would benefit from supporting smallholder farmers, agroecology and small and medium-sized businesses, many have been forced to shape their economies around destructive fossil fuel and large-scale industrial agribusiness exports, in order to earn the dollars needed for debt repayment.

And the difficult decisions continue, with many countries spending more on servicing their debt than on education and health. Even though many have paid back their original loan amounts, a combination of rising interest rates, successive currency devaluations, fluctuating global commodity prices and the destructive impacts of climate change have kept the debt repayment finish line perpetually out of reach.

Indeed, sometimes the climate crisis has forced countries to take on more loans at even higher interest rates.

Even worse, loans from the World Bank and the IMF almost always come with rules attached – that countries privatise their public services, cut public spending, and go gung-ho into producing export commodities. These “conditionalities” and the power wielded by these institutions are worsening the climate crisis, and undermining countries’ capacity to take climate action through investing in green technologies, resilience or recovery from disasters.

Sniffing the climate winds of change, the IMF and the World Bank are now desperately attempting a makeover, and trying to present themselves as responsible climate leaders. But in reality, the IMF has advised more than 100 countries to expand their fossil fuel infrastructure, while the World Bank has spent $14.8bn supporting fossil fuel projects and policies since the Paris Agreement was signed. Their claims of being responsible climate leaders do not hold up to any scrutiny.

New research by ActionAid finds that 93 percent of countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis are in debt distress, or at significant risk of debt distress. This reflects a vicious cycle in which climate impacts put countries into debt, but that debt accelerates the climate crisis and leaves countries even more exposed to its impacts. And so the cycle continues.

All this points us towards a clear conclusion: that the global debt crisis is a major barrier to climate action and that debt cancellation can be a highly effective climate solution.

In general, when the most powerful organizations in the world start blaming each other for the problems of the world, it’s a good idea to look into why they might want your eyes elsewhere. Fossil fuel subsidies are a serious problem, but they are far from the only problem. The causes of the climate crisis are baked into how our global economic system has come to operate with the “end” of colonialism over the last century.

And this is where you can all join in on the chorus – global warming is a systemic problem, and solving it requires systemic change.

The people and institutions that wield global power are all very aware of the dangers posed by a rapidly warming planet, and are also aware of their own role in creating this crisis. While many of them may genuinely want to see it go away, they are willing to let everything be destroyed if it means that they aren’t the first to give up wealth or power. It’s basically the same as when US pundits and politicians point the finger at Chinese or Indian emissions, when saying that the US shouldn’t lead. Leaving aside the childishness of this response, the reality is that everything needs to change at least a little, and the closer you get to the top of global wealth and power, the more change needs to happen. We can’t expect the powerful to be honest, but I think they’re more likely to tell the truth about other powerful people and entities, when deflecting attention away from their own problems.

If you value the work I do, please consider helping to pay for it over at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Even small contributions add up to make a big difference! If you can’t afford a dollar or so per month, then I definitely don’t want your money, but I’d appreciate it if you shared this post with others, to help me increase my readership. Thanks for reading, and be sure to take care of yourselves in this scary world!

Avi Loeb found what he was looking for

You were expecting little green men?

Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.

From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.

Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”

“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.

The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.

Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.

So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.

What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.

The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.

I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.

But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.

In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.

From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.

It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”

Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!

Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)

Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.

By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.