Tech companies have reacted differently to the impending end of Roe V Wade. While most have remained silent on the issue, some have come out strongly against the Supreme Court’s (draft) opinion. The game developer Bungie denounced what it sees as “a blow to freedom in America and is a direct attack on human rights.” Microsoft and Amazon have gone a step further, pledging to cover traveling costs and other expenses for any employee who has to travel to another state to get an abortion.
PlayStation Boss Jim Ryan probably wishes that he’d kept silent himself. Instead, as Bloomberg was first to report, he put out a company memo addressing both the death of Roe … and the recent birthday of his cats.
Without expressing his own position on Roe, he began by asking employees to keep cool. “[W]e owe it to each other and to PlayStation’s millions of users to respect differences of opinion among everyone in our internal and external communities,” he wrote.
And then he decided to lighten the mood a little bit by talking about his kitties.
Ryan told employees that he
“would like to share something lighthearted to help inspire everyone to be mindful of having balance that can help ease the stress of uncertain world events,” saying it was recently his two cats’ first birthday and elaborating over the next [five] paragraphs about his cats’ birthday cakes, their noises and his desire to one day get a dog.
This infuriated more than a few employees, Bloomberg notes, who were taken aback by his weirdly oblivious tone in dealing with an issue that is literally a matter of life and death for pregnant people.
In internal discussions viewed by Bloomberg, which haven’t been previously reported, employees at several PlayStation studios expressed their displeasure at the tone of the email. Some women wrote that they felt their rights were disrespected or trivialized by the message. One employee said they’d “never been so mad about a cat birthday before.”
As loath as I am to admit it. there are times when it is inappropriate to talk about your kitties, or to post pictures of them wearing little hats. This was one of them.
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@ .45
It must be extremely hard for the youtuber having lost a child to SIDS, but I don’t think
is true. This is really basic research, while the levels of the significant chemical were on average higher in babies that died of SIDS there was a something like a 50% overlap in levels with babies who didn’t die. It sounds odd to say it because of all the years of research that have already happened but assuming it pans out, which it still may not, this is still just the first step on the path to finding a solution. It is an important finding, no doubt about that, but it isn’t anywhere near a final answer.Biology is hard.
Oh, bullshit. More like “I don’t want you to be complaining about this stuff because it will annoy ME.”
@Mish – Mei-Mei’s ruffly neck is positively Elizabethan! Give her some neck scritches for me.
@Ooglyboggles – Congratulations!
(Day after I finished my term I came down with COVID, which was annoying. But luckily it was fairly mild – still with bad headaches/earaches and general tiredness – and I’m starting to feel better.)
@FM Ox: Got it in one. Sometimes he’d just read it aloud, sometimes someone had the cash to have it blurrily duplicated. Usually it came from the guy who sent the tapes. But the person who got the tapes was a woman.
@Mish: Is Miss Mei-Mei Maine Coon or other lorge floof breed? Because her head and body shape looks like a half-MC boy I had who was the Best Cat Ever. Her impressive ruff and those elegant white gloves are the best. She looks to be calico, which means of course she has Opinions, which are always correct. Or else. My next cat was tortie.