LOS ANGELES – Twenty-eight years after Bruce Willis and a ragtag crew of oil drillers saved humanity from cosmic annihilation, Hollywood is finally answering the question nobody asked: What if the asteroid was actually the good guy? Touchstone Pictures announced today that “Armageddon 2: The Asteroid Strikes Back” will hit theatres in summer 2026, reuniting […]
Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.
In the recent post on people applying for jobs that were clearly at odds with what they wanted to do, one theme that came up over and over was candidates who were way too honest in interviews. Here are 11 of my favorite stories you shared that fit that category.
1. The competition
A candidate once wrote in their cover letter that their dream was to one day work for [our competitor] and they saw us a an important stepping stone to getting there.
2. The mole
I was working for a very progressive Democratic candidate’s campaign, hiring a finance director. Someone with two decades of experience working in Republican offices applied. I decided to phone screen him just out of curiosity, and when I asked him why the switch to the other side of the aisle, he said his politics hadn’t changed – he just wanted the inside scoop on what we were working on.
3. The borrowed research
A presentation by an applicant for a faculty position in computer science began poorly when the fellow couldn’t get his slides to work. The candidacy really tanked when, following the research presentation, he answered a question about the material with, “Well, I don’t know. This isn’t actually my research, but I thought it was interesting.”
4. The wrong answer
I used to interview people for software quality engineering roles, as distinct from software engineering — different job responsibilities, different expectations, and it was always useful to make that clear right at the start to smoke out people who were just going to try to switch in six months.
I got on one interview call (at 2 am my time, mind you — global company), started right off with, “Why do you want to be a quality engineer?” and he responded “I don’t.”
Shortest interview I’ve ever done.
5. The aspiring film director
I was trying for my first career-type job out of college. I was recently graduated communications major with a concentration in film production and was interviewing to be an office manager at an advertising firm that did a lot of commercial shoots. The second person to come in the room to interview me asked, “So, describe your dream job to me.”
Friends, I did not know this was meant to be a “describe the job you’re applying for or maybe where you’d be in five years” question. I proceeded to talk at length about being a feature film director.
I did not get that job.
I also didn’t end up even getting into the film/TV industry, but I am all the happier for it.
6. The infiltrator
I work in entertainment. About 10 years ago, I was at a production company that prided itself on connecting with its fans and would take a meeting with pretty much anyone. One person we met with asked us for an internship and was very clear that he wanted to be part of the company because he was not a fan of our work. Our sub-genre was not his preferred sub-genre, and so he planned to infiltrate the company and take us down from the inside.
We explained that this wasn’t the way to get more of his preferred content made and wouldn’t be taking him on. He was shocked.
Years later, the company did go under, but not because of him.
7. The Francophile
My favorite cover letter I’ve ever reviewed was for a run-of-the-mill admin assistant temp position at a U.S.-based study abroad provider for college students. While there were other teams in the company that had lots of travel and excitement, this position was helping process application materials and answering phones. We tried to be up-front about this in our listing and our screening/interviews, as sometimes people would apply to “get a foot in the door” and then leave when they realized we needed them to commit to this very unexciting work.
We received an application with a two-page cover letter that read more like a personal essay than a professional document. In the letter, this candidate explained that she had worked doing very similar admin work for two years very successfully, but while on a lunch break in a park realized that she hated admin work and needed to move to Paris immediately. She quit on the spot and moved to Paris and loved living in France, but now she was back in the U.S. and needed a job. It is the only time I’ve read a cover letter that laid out, in explicit detail, why the candidate would not be happy to do the job for which they were applying.
8. The teacher
Interviewed a candidate for a position that was primarily teaching. At one point during the interview I needed to hand her off to a different person so that I could go teach, one of the things that she would have been doing if she got the job. I explained that’s where I was going and she laughed and said, “Oh, I totally understand. I just HATE teaching!”
9. The third choice
I was interviewing a candidate for an intellectual property attorney position at a federal government agency. A standard question is, “Why do you want to work here?” He made it clear that he would prefer private practice or a corporation and we were his third choice. He did not get a second interview.
10. The software developer
While doing phone screens for a junior software developer, we asked all the candidates, “Why are you interested in software development?” (or some similar phrasing).
One candidate answered, “I don’t know if I really am.” They did not get invited for an in-person interview.
11. The thief
I was doing induction for a small group of new starters, explaining to them our CRM system and the customer information database behind it. From one guy I got a lot of technical questions — How is the data formatted? How easy is to run queries locally? Can the results be stored on a flash drive? — so asked outright, “Why do you want to know?”
Back came the reply: “I’ve downloaded the customer databases of my last three jobs ready to start my own company in future. I just wanted to know how simple it’ll be to do that here before I leave.”
I finished my CRM presentation and left via the HR office. The guy was escorted out of the building 20 minutes later.
GameStop bid $56 billion to purchase eBay, hoping to challenge Amazon and other ecommerce platforms with the bold offer for a company with a market capitalization over four times greater than its own. What do you think?
“I’m worried this could create a monopoly in the used-copies-of-Pikmin 4 market.”
Ariel Donaldson, Lecture Booker
“Paid in stock, coins, and any power gems they’ve collected.”
And I linked in a card to Engineering Explained's demo, too, which may help those having a hard time wrapping their head around this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmxIsoV_Xo
Have you ever noticed that I've never done that whole influencer thing? That's all thanks to people like you! Viewer support through Patreon keeps this channel independent and possible. If you'd like to join the amazing folks who fund my work, check out the link below. Thank you! https://www.patreon.com/technologyconnections
00:00 Intro 03:31 The internal combustion engine and its flaws 09:12 The Atkinson cycle engine 14:04 What hybrid drivetrains unlock 19:21 An operational overview of Toyota's hybrid system 24:10 Conversion losses and why they're a problem 28:24 Regenerative braking and other hybrid drivetrain benefits 34:54 How it all works mechanically 46:42 Series vs. Parallel hybrids 51:22 A cool way to do AWD 54:44 bloopers
CHICAGO—Reacting with dismay to the immediate positive results yielded by the hair care product, local woman Taylor Suthers confirmed Thursday that the nicer shampoo she had bought was tragically worth the extra money. “Aw, goddammit, my hair really does look softer and smoother,” said Suthers, who appeared visibly distraught as she ran a hand through her hair to confirm that the $49.99 bottle of meadowfoam-infused shampoo had, indeed, left her hair neither dried-out nor greasy. “I just grabbed it off the shelf because they didn’t have Pantene, and I figured most shampoos cost the same. It definitely seems like I’m retaining natural oils now or whatever. And it smells like sandalwood, which I really do prefer to whatever the cheaper stuff smells like. Ugh, this sucks.” At press time, Suthers had reportedly groaned upon realizing that the nicer conditioner from the same brand would probably be worth the extra money, too
Object permanence: Linus v MSFT; Argentina v MSFT; Danny Hillis on theme parks v games; Smartfilter v Distributed Boing Boing; Rental laptops filled with spyware; Torture didn't help capture bin Laden; Massively parallel Apple //e; Stephen Harper v election law; John Deere v Iowa cartoonist; Qualia.
One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:
The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.
But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom. That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they really prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:
Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all. But capitalists really hate risk, hence the drive to monopoly: Mark Zuckerberg admitted, in writing, that he only bought Instagram so that he wouldn't have to compete with it ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg):
Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Feudalism is like capitalism, in that you have a ruling class that creams off the surplus generated by labor; but under feudalism, society is organized to protect rents (money you get from owning stuff) over profits (money you get from doing stuff). The beauty of rents is that they are insulated from risk: if you own a coffee shop, you're in constant danger of being put out of business by a better coffee shop. But if you own the building and your coffee shop tenant goes under, well, you've still got the building, and hey, now it's on the same hot block as the amazing new cafe that's driving its competitors out of business:
Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, buy options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk:
Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice. Think of the two giant packaged goods companies that fill your grocery aisles: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Practically everything on your grocer's shelves is made by a division of one of these two massive conglomerates. If you try to "vote with your wallet" by buying a low-packaging version of a product, it's going to be sold to you by the same company that sells the high-packaging version. If you switch to an artisanal brand of cookies made by a local family business, Unilever or P&G will buy that company and issue a press release declaring that they made the acquisition because they know "their customers value choice":
Gerrymandering strips your vote of any impact on political outcomes. Monopoly strips your purchases of any ability to influence economic outcomes. Wrap both of them in "revealed preferences" and you get a system that endlessly narrates its ability to deliver choice, and then blames your misery on your having chosen badly.
This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can't divorce, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, and politicians you can't vote out of office. Add to that Trump's assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC's ban on noncompetes, and his protection of "TRAP" agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get "jobs you can't quit":
Conservative strongmen like Trump and Musk exalt the value of self-determination – for themselves, at everyone else's expense. Trump's ability to stiff the contractors that built his hotels and Musk's ability to rain flaming rocket debris down on the people who live near his company town require that everyone else be stripped of protections. They get to determine their own course in life by taking away your ability to determine your own. Their right to swing their fists ends two inches past your nose:
Cheaters and bullies hate the rule of law, hence Trump's endless repetition of Nixon's mantra: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." But not everyone can be president, and the world is full of would-be Trumps in positions of power who would like to be able to commit crimes without fear of legal repercussions. For these people, we have something called "binding arbitration."
"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can't share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.
That makes binding arbitration another key weapon in the conservative movement's war on choice: not just jobs you can't quit and politicians you can't vote out of office, but also companies you can't sue. Binding arbitration is a creation of the Federalist Society and their champion Antonin Scalia, who authored a series of Supreme Court dissents and (ultimately) decisions that opened the door for binding arbitration everywhere:
Given the Fedsoc's role in shoving binding arbitration down every worker and shopper's throat, it's decidedly odd that they invited Ashley Keller to be their keynote debater in 2021, where he argued that "concentrated corporate power is a greater threat than government power":
Keller is a powerhouse lawyer, and an avowed conservative, who has pioneered many tactics for overcoming binding arbitration clauses. He helped create "mass arbitration," bringing thousands of arbitration cases on behalf of Uber drivers who'd had their wages stolen by the company. Since Uber has to pay the arbitrators in each of those cases, they faced a much larger bill than they would face in any possible class action suit:
Mass arbitration cases spread to all kinds of large firms that used petty grifts to steal from thousands or even millions of people, like Intuit, who deceive – and rip off – millions of Americans every year with their fake Turbotax "free file" system:
Mass arbitration worked so well that Amazon actually revised its terms of service to remove binding arbitration from their terms of service, because they realized that they'd be better off facing class action suits:
Of course, the point of binding arbitration was never to create a streamlined system of justice – it was to bring about a world of no justice, where you have no right to sue. It's part of the decades-old "tort reform" movement that the business lobby has used to take away your right to sue altogether. Any time you hear about a seemingly crazy lawsuit (like the urban legends about the McDonald's "hot coffee" case), you're being propagandized for a world without legal consequences for companies that defraud you, steal from you, injure you, or kill you:
That's why companies (like Bluesky) are now trying terms of service that also ban you from mass arbitration, while retaining the right to consolidate claims into a mass arbitration case if that's advantageous to them:
But Keller keeps finding creative ways around binding arbitration. He's currently bringing thousands of arbitration claims against Google, on behalf of advertisers whom Google stole from (Google is a thrice-convicted monopolist, and they lost a case last year over their monopolization of ad-tech, where they were found to have defrauded advertisers).
He also just argued before the Supreme Court in a case against Monsanto over the company's attempt to escape liability for causing cancer in farmworkers with their Roundup pesticide:
Keller appears in the latest episode of the Organized Money podcast, for a fascinating interview about his work and outlook, and how he reconciles his work fighting corporate power with his identity as a movement conservative:
Keller's first big, important point is that (basically), capitalists hate capitalism (see above). He cites Milton Friedman, who "always said that the tort system is the best way to ensure that companies behave and follow the rules." For Keller (and Friedman) the alternative to private litigation against bad businesses is "government regulation and the alphabet soup of Washington, DC agencies [that] try and police these companies."
But, of course, the businesses that want binding arbitration and tort reform (so they can't be sued) also want to "dismantle the administrative state" (so they can't be regulated). They're the impunity movement, the "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" movement, the "heads I win, tails you lose" movement. They're the caveat emptor movement, the "that makes me smart" movement:
They don't want efficient markets, with the ever-present threat of a better competitor putting them out of business. They want feudalism. They want to go meta. They want to have the kind of self-determination you can only achieve by taking away everyone else's self-determination.
I was very struck by Keller's claim to be engaged in an exercise that Milton Friedman identified as the best one for making markets work. One of Keller's most forceful points is that class action suits are especially important for reining in petty, recurrent grifts, the junk fees that are the hallmark of enshittification.
He quotes his old boss, the archconservative judge Richard Posner, who said "Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20." But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That's real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.
There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That's why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being "vultures." But as Matt Stoller says, "vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire."
I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.
Listening to Keller was a fascinating exercise. I thoroughly disagree with him about many things – the way he characterized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act couldn't have been more wrong – but it's quite bracing to hear a capitalist who doesn't hate capitalism defend it against the vast majority of capitalists, who hate capitalism more than any socialist ever did.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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by By Lexi Churchill, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune, and Pratheek Rebala, ProPublica. Photography by Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica.
Dozens of bills were rejected over nearly 60 years, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Some measures would have prohibited youth camps and new construction in high-risk flood areas.
1. My boss punished me for an HR investigation on her way out the door
A little over a year ago, I started in a new workplace. Things seemed great at first — much less stress and a more regular schedule than my previous job, great coworkers, and when I had a significant health scare requiring multiple surgeries (I’m fine now) shortly after starting, my manager was really supportive. As the honeymoon period waned, however, it became clear that there were a lot of serious boundary issues with our manager — lots of “we’re a family” style issues. Inappropriate, boundary-crossing things were being said, things that made a lot of jaws hit the floor when recounted. Long story short is that I ended up reaching out to HR, with the support and knowledge of most of my peer-level coworkers. The hope from me had been she would get coaching around professionalism (like not asking invasive personal/medical/sexual questions of employees during staff meetings).
There was an investigation, and my manager sort of spiraled. She revoked several privileges (like flexible work) suddenly (for most people, but notably not for everyone). And she would lash out emotionally about perceived slights, and made at least one person cry. Based on the way she channeled her aggression, it seemed like she was working through the people she suspected of reporting her.
Fast forward a few months, and she announced that she was leaving. I was already scheduled to take an approved vacation during her last week in the office. When I returned, she was gone and she had submitted my annual review in my absence, which included rating me as “approaching expectations” (as opposed to meeting) across multiple categories, saying that my “interpersonal conflicts are a distraction to [me] and the team” and that I don’t take constructive criticism well. This was about a week ago.
I think she received some kind of confirmation that I reported her, and I am pissed. I feel like I have no recourse because she is gone. If she was still here I would ask, in good faith, for examples, because I try to be open to the possibility that there is room for improvement. But I have never had an “interpersonal conflict” with anyone at work except for my decision to report to HR, and I cannot think of a single instance of criticism she provided, constructive or otherwise!
Do you think there’s anywhere to go with this? I feel like this was retaliatory, but she doesn’t work here anymore. And I worry that bringing it up with upper management will just be held against me. Do I just need to breathe deeply, move on, and try to start fresh with a new manager when/if they ever hire someone?
Go back to HR and say this: “I’m concerned that Linda’s annual review of me was intentionally retaliatory because of my report about her to you. She had seemed very upset ever since the investigation, began revoking various privileges for people, and lashed out at multiple team members. The review is so out of sync with the feedback she’s given me previously that — with some of it objectively incorrect — that I’m concerned it was retaliation for my report and the subsequent investigation. I’m not sure how to handle this since she’s now gone, but I’m concerned about having this in my personnel file when it’s false.”
2. My manager keeps firing people without any warning
My job employs a lot of part-timers, mostly younger people with little to no previous work experience. I’m one of several supervisors. Our main job is to support the part-timers, but our manager regularly asks for our input on things like hiring, policy changes, training, etc.
My manager is normally very good, and I’ve described her as the best boss I’ve ever had many times. She’s great at keeping multiple plates spinning, training new people effectively, project management, and giving good feedback. Unfortunately, the late-2024 federal funding cuts have hit us hard and compounded with other problems to result in my department running on a skeleton crew for months now. My manager has gotten noticeably more snappish, impatient, and overworked as a result. I’m full-time and grateful to be employed at all, especially since I’ve been looking for new jobs with no interviews for about a year, so I’ve been grinning, bearing it, and repeating, “That’s what the money’s for” to myself when she occasionally treats me somewhat unfairly out of stress.
However, she’s fired multiple part-timers over email with no warning since January. I think it’s unfair, arbitrary, and unnecessary. All of the people who were fired had attendance issues that are fireable offenses, but there are other workers with worse attendance who haven’t been fired because they’ve been here longer and/or my manager feels bad for them. I do too, but my manager has had months of in-person and email conversations with one employee warning her that she needs to hit a minimum amount of shifts with no improvement. The people who were fired got, at most, a vague hint over email that we needed them to shore up their attendance. There was never a face-to-face conversation with our manager making it clear that their jobs were on the line if they kept skipping shifts.
Do you have any ideas for ways I could pump the brakes on this fire-by-email trend, keeping in mind I have no hard power here? And should I start trying to warn employees with shaky attendance that our manager might fire them with little to no warning? On one hand, I want to keep out of the line of fire and just get my work done without making my boss think I’m trying to undermine her. On the other hand, I think our casual office culture has lulled some part-timers into a false sense of security, and these are undergrads without much work experience who might not realize that skipping shifts or even entire weeks of work is a lot more serious than skipping class. On a third hand, I’m busy enough as it is and about to get busier, so I don’t really want to throw yet another responsibility into the mix.
Talk to your manager! It shouldn’t take a huge amount of capital if you approach it as wanting what’s best for the organization, rather than taking issue with her judgment. Frame it as, “I know we’ve had to fire a bunch of people for attendance issues lately, and I think part of the problem is that we have so many people without much work experience who don’t yet understand what a big deal it is. Could we more explicitly warn people when their attendance is an issue? It might let us solve the issues without ultimately having to fire them, which would help lower the strain from the turnover.”
But also, yes — as a supervisor you should definitely be talking to employees about attendance expectations, even if your manager isn’t. You know she has specific attendance expectations (as most jobs would!), whether or not she’s going to talk to them about it — so if you see people running afoul of those, you should name it and let them know it’s a problem. You don’t need to say, “Jane might fire you with little to no warning”; you can say, “Reliably showing up when you’re scheduled is a requirement for keeping your job, and it’s something we do fire people over.” As a supervisor, you have the standing — and, I’d argue, the obligation — to have those conversations.
3. I’m continually passed over for the higher-level responsibilities we discussed when I was hired
I have been in my role as office manager and EA to the CEO for six years. Prior to taking this role, I was second-in-charge at my workplace, and functionally in a COO role. I took a step down when accepting my current role as it’s a more interesting industry and allowed better flexibility.
When taking the role, the CEO and COO talked about training me into the COO role, particularly as she was planning on taking long service leave. However, every time I have asked to learn parts of her role, it’s been pushed back or ignored (e.g., “oh yes, maybe,” then nothing).
This week I asked if I would be covering her role while she is on long service leave and was told that another team member would be doing it. The CEO seemed suprised that I was interested in doing it. I have definitely made it clear in all my reviews that I’m interested in getting back into a more executive role.
I consistently receive positive feedback on my work from the CEO and COO. I regularly ask if there is anything I need to improve, and am always told they are very happy. I’m not sure what to do now. I like where I work, but it seems like I will not be given the chance to improve my career.
You need to ask her about it directly: “When I was hired, you and Jane talked about training me into the COO role since I was doing that role in my previous job. Is that still something you’re open to and, if so, what kind of timeline do you envision for that happening?”
Since it’s been six years with no movement on it, it’s possible that she doesn’t even remember those conversations. If that’s the case, just saying in your review that you’re interested in moving back in that direction won’t necessarily solve it; it will be more effective to very clearly lay out what the original discussion was and ask if it’s still on the table.
It’s possible that it’s not, for all sorts of reasons (anything from they’ve pigeonholed you into the job you’re now in to their thinking on who they’d want in that role having changed in the years since the original discussion). But if that’s the case, you need to find out so you can decide if you want to stay under those circumstances or if you’d be better off looking outside the organization.
4. Glassdoor is making you link your account with Indeed
Remember how we were so annoyed a while back when Glassdoor started making you add your real contact information to keep your account? Apparently now they have been bought by Indeed, and they are forcing you to connect your accounts. I didn’t even have an Indeed account, and it wouldn’t allow me to log into Glassdoor until I made one. You then have to search through settings to opt out of letting company “job posters” on Indeed have access to your Glassdoor account information! It’s opt OUT!
Clearly some boneheaded exec either has it in for Glassdoor as a concept or really does not understand the point of it. I’m going to have to delete my account and make a new one under a fake name now. Why do they have to make everything terrible??
What the actual F. Anonymity is essential for Glassdoor to work so what a terrible and nonsensical policy that drains Glassdoor of most of its utility.
5. Can I ask for a start date two months away?
I work in an industry where giving a month’s notice is expected from managers. After years of working in a very intense job, I’m considering a move to greener pastures. But wondering how to negotiate the latest date possible. If possible, I’d love to have a month off between jobs to truly rest, recharge, and see my extended family. Doing so would give employers two months wait for my start date. Is that possible and how do I ask without sounding as burnt out as I feel?
In a lot of jobs, you can ask for a start date two months out. Some will have the flexility to agree to that and some won’t, but it’s a thing people ask for, particular with more senior-level jobs. You’d simply say, “I’m expected to give my employer a month’s notice, and I’m hoping to take some time off to recharge before starting with you. I can be flexible if needed, but would a start date of X work on your end?”
So this post is a behind the scenes chat about at why the site (and the socials) have been so quiet recently. The short version is: AI is bad, supporting other is fun.
Now for as long as ErrantScience has existed the core content has been freely available to anyone that is willing to spend the time enjoying it. I absolutely love making the content and provided people were enjoying I have, over the last 15 years, been very happy to keep making it 🙂
Now my primary way of knowing how much people enjoy my content was either views on this site or shares/likes/comments on social media. I don’t obsess over the stats but I do look at them and over the years it’s sometimes shaped what I do and sometimes kept me going when I was finding it hard to fit ErrantScience into my world. At one point I think ErrantScience’s regular social media impact was just shy of 3 million impressions a week. Which I have to say is very gratifying to have so many people regularly enjoying my terrible cartoons and even worse jokes.
But, social media in particular has always been a hard thing to manage. The death of Twitter meant that instead of one core social media platform I suddenly had to manage 5-6 platforms. Then the rise of AI has meant that those platforms are now hungrier than ever for content. When I don’t keep up with the post rate the social media companies want I quickly find my content being served to less and less people.
Added to that the rise of AI now means that my content gets very frequently stolen, scrubbed of credit and re-posted. This used to be a rare thing but now it’s pretty common for me to see my own cartoons re-made and re-posted as other people’s work, in my own feed. This one below from Instagram is a pretty good example but it’s one of so so many many.
All of which means that my content is reaching less people and when it is reaching people it’s a regurgitated AI slop version! Neither of which makes me feel all that great about continuing to put out the content. I was starting to feel like I was drawing cartoons for more AI accounts than I was for actual humans to enjoy.
Now as all this AI content navel gazing was happening (mostly in early 2025) I had an uptick in request for help with outreach and custom cartoon content. I’ve been asked to draw cartoons around chemistry, work practices, human augmentation, scientific writing and smelly explosives. All of which have been super fun, interesting and required zero social media sharing.
This culminated in my taking on the post of Director of Outreach in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Southampton. Where (as part of a research position) I support the School in doing as much and the best outreach they can. This means that while I’m still doing outreach and still drawing cartoons my focus is actually not trying to promote my outreach but trying to promote the outreach of a whole school of chemists!
So where does that leave ErrantScience?
Well still very much active, but more focused and a lot more quiet about it.
I’m still doing cartoon work and outreach work with schools, universities and other organisations. Just last month I very much enjoyed my annual 24 hour cartoon marathon with #RSCPoster. But there is going to be a lot less of it on my accounts, or on this site. That way I get to keep doing the outreach I love, but I don’t need to wrangle the Social Media monster or fight off AI mimics. Neither of which feel like battles I can win.
Sorry, I realise that’s not a great place to be for all the amazing fans that enjoy my content, who will now not see as much of it. I am working to have all of the ErrantScience archives, archived with proper DOIs. I am also always keen for others to share my cartoons themselves (please don’t feed it into AI and remove my name).
But, I’m still here, I’m still drawing cartoons and I’m still extremely grateful for all the love and support you’ve shown me over the years
Miami, [CENSORED] – Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her impactful work on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and people like [EXPUNGED] who allowed [DELETED] to [SANITIZED]. “I am very grateful to be recognized this way,” yelled Brown while running away from men in suits attempting to gag […]
When Claire finally came along, we have to imagine that the storeroom was running very low on raw materials, so they concentrated on finish rather than volume.
With Spring fully in motion, we felt it prudent to keep Canadians informed of the ever present threat poised by Branta canadensis, better known as Canada geese, the leading cause of car wash visits and airliner crashes, as they return from their migration. While we are sure that all of you have had disastrous and […]
Your response gave me a lot to think about, and ultimately I realized that I was completely bored by my job and needed something with more challenge and growth potential. I decided to take a transfer to a more high powered team. It was a lateral move with no pay increase and more work, but a ton of skill building and potential for growth into other higher paying cross-disciplinary teams. I took the transfer about halfway through my pregnancy so I was able to onboard and finish my training before maternity leave. Infant care spots are incredible few and expensive here, so I took a short leave and negotiated a part-time, completely flexible work schedule for when I came back from leave so I could be at home with my baby for the first year.
Professionally this has been the right move for me, and I did fine — some recognition, a few high visibility projects, and good performance reviews. Now two years out, I’m really happy with my decision and love my team and the work I’m doing.
Personally that first year was rough — I was always working or taking care of my baby (something the comments warned me about!) and the stress combined with the isolation of mothering a newborn took a toll on my mental health. I’m glad I did it — I didn’t have great options for infant care, and we made the best of a tough spot. But if I had to do it again, I would try and prioritize my rest. I also realized that the reason I had been able to do my job efficiently was because I had been relying on my memory and executive functioning at work, and new motherhood and lack of sleep made those disappear overnight. That first year was definitely a lesson in grace and lowering expectations.
Thanks for all your advice and the advice of your commenters!
I saw an ad for a job at a company that says they ask candidates to spend 3-5 paid days working with them before they’ll make an offer. Their ads reads, “Spending 3-5 days in person working together on a real problem is so much higher signal than interviews could ever produce.” They also say that almost every candidate they hire says they love the experience and wouldn’t want to take a job without a work trial in the future because they learned so much about how the organization operates.
Curious for your thoughts on this. It seems like a great way to screen for desperate folks without current jobs? Or is it just obvious rage-bait?
Well, on one hand, of course you learn more about candidates by working with them for five days (and they learn more about you) than you do in an interview. In a vacuum, it makes perfect sense! Some people interview really well but aren’t so good once you see them on the job. And from the candidate’s point of view, some managers sound great in an interview and turn out to be nightmares once you’re on the job.
The problem, though, is that our system isn’t set up for this. It’s not realistic for most people to be able to take off three to five days from their job (out of whatever limited vacation time they have for the year), and possibly on short notice, to do this. If someone is unemployed, it gets easier — but a ton of candidates will have to have jobs, and this isn’t a reasonable expectation to put on them.
Plus, imagine that lots of companies started doing this, and that you’d have to do multiple work trials before one ended in an offer. You could easily blow through your full amount of vacation time for the year, or even exceed it, just doing work trials.
I do think it’s a great idea, for some jobs, to ask finalists at the very end of the process to complete a sample work projectand pay them for it. I’ve done that before, and you learn a ton that you didn’t necessarily see in the interview and it can really differentiate your best candidates. But that’s a much lower burden than asking someone to spend a week with you.
Interviews aren’t a perfect system — far from it. But week-long work trials aren’t a reasonable solution for most people.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]
Have you ever filled a bucket with water from the garden hose? It’s kind of a slow process. Or at least it feels slow while you’re standing there waiting. If you played with a garden hose at all, you know the trick of putting your thumb over the end to get a stronger jet. Obviously, the water is flowing faster with your thumb on than off. So if you do that - put your thumb over the end of the hose - to fill your bucket, do you think it’s going to fill faster, slower, or take the same amount of time?
Seems like kind of an elementary question, but I found this in the online notes for a college physics class. The only issue with the professor’s answer to the question is that it was wrong. Pipes seem simple, but there are a lot of misconceptions about pipes and how they work. The field we sometimes call Closed Conduit Hydraulics is a place where intuitions don’t always serve you well. And “closed conduits” matter. Lots of essential parts of our lives depend on fluids moving through pipes. So I put together a few demonstrations in my garage to try and correct some misconceptions. Let’s take a look at what really happens inside a garden hose, or really any pipe system to gain some intuition. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.
The question I posed about filling up a bucket was from a lesson on continuity. The basic idea is that water isn’t very compressible. So in any closed system, there has to be the same amount coming in as there is going out. In mathematical terms, that looks like this. Velocity multiplied by a pipe’s cross-sectional area is the volumetric flow rate. So v-in, a-in is equal to v-out, a-out.
The professor’s answer was that the time to fill up the bucket will be the same, regardless of whether your thumb is over the end or not. The velocity out is higher, but the area is smaller. The volumetric flow rate should be the same in both cases. It sounds reasonable. Let’s test it out and see if that’s true.
I’m going to speed this up so you don’t have to suffer through the full duration. I used a big bucket to show the difference better. It’s not night and day or anything, but this makes it pretty clear that putting your thumb over the end of the hose actually slows down the flow rate. This is probably not earth-shattering news for you, but the reason for the difference is a little complicated.
Just to be clear, this demonstration doesn’t violate the principle of continuity. In engineering and physics, when we use conservation rules to solve problems or answer questions, we have to be explicit about the boundaries. Usually, that means applying a control volume, a defined region of space where we can easily describe inputs and outputs of flow, energy, momentum, and so on. In my demonstration, I can define a control volume here, and it’s easy to show that the flow rate through the hose is the same as that coming out of the end. Same thing with my thumb over it: the velocity in the hose is lower than the velocity leaving, but the area of the hose is larger than the nozzle I’ve formed with my thumb, so it equals out. But you can’t apply the principle of continuity across different control volumes. In other words, these are completely different situations. And if I change this demo up a little bit, it will be more obvious.
Now I have a mechanical thumb to constrict the end of the hose. In other words…a valve. Functionally, this does the exact same thing. When I turn the valve, it creates a varying obstruction across the pipe from wide open to fully closed. Let’s measure the flow rate for a full range of valve positions and see what happens. This is a chart of the data, and you can see there’s a pretty clear relationship. More restriction; less flow. This is the answer that the professor missed by assuming the flow rate IN was the same in both cases. Again, probably not earth-shattering news to anyone that when you close a valve the flow rate goes down. But you might not have ever considered, “Why?”
To answer that question, we have to look at a different conservation equation: energy. Basic physics separates energy into two forms: potential energy that is stored in some way, and kinetic energy: the energy of motion. Fluid in a pipe has both. Potential energy takes the form of pressure or elevation, kinetic energy in the form of velocity. The trick is that you can convert between types of energy, and of course, the total amount of energy in a closed system doesn’t change. And knowing this allows you to answer all kinds of questions. Let me show you an example.
This is a basic hydraulic system. A tank on the left and a pipe that constricts down, then expands back out. You know I love graphs, and there is a graph that makes solving closed conduit hydraulics problems a lot simpler. It’s called the hydraulic grade line, and it basically describes the potential energy in a fluid along its path. In the tank, there’s hardly any velocity, so all the energy in the fluid is potential energy. The hydraulic grade line is equal to the free surface. But once water enters the pipe, it picks up speed, so the hydraulic grade line drops down. The difference is the potential energy converted to kinetic. At any snapshot in time, we know that the volumetric flow through a pipe is constant. You really can’t have more water coming in than going out, just like we discussed with continuity. So the hydraulic grade line is constant as long as the velocity is constant.
The fluid has to accelerate as it goes into the narrower pipe. That converts more of the potential energy to kinetic energy, so the hydraulic grade line drops again. Same thing on the other side. The flow slows down as it expands into the larger pipe, so you get a conversion of kinetic energy back into pressure. If this seems complicated, just remember that the hydraulic grade line is basically the answer to the question: “If I tapped a vertical riser into this part of my pipe system, how high would the fluid go up it?”
I think this is intuitive for most people. It’s Bernoulli’s principle in action. But it’s missing something that makes it impossible to apply to our garden hose demo. Let’s hook up some pressure gauges, and you’ll see what I mean.
I put a pressure gauge at the beginning of the hose and one at the end. When I turn on the water, we see a pressure just under 70 psi or about 450 kilopascals at the upstream end. At the downstream end where the water’s coming out, it’s basically zero. That doesn’t jive with what we’ve learned so far about the conservation of energy. Let’s sketch out the hydraulic grade line to figure it out.
Here’s our hose. It’s close enough to level that we can neglect differences in elevation, so all the potential energy is in pressure. On the upstream end, it was 70 psi, and on the downstream end, essentially zero. That makes sense because the end of the pipe is exposed to the atmosphere. You can’t really have any pressure if you don’t have a pipe. That means our hydraulic grade line looks like this. We know in a pipe with a constant cross-section that the flow velocity isn’t changing, and yet, we’re still losing potential energy along the way. Where’s it going?
Well, we need to talk about losses. Of course we know energy can’t be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. We talked about pressure, elevation, and velocity already. But there’s also heat through friction in the system. No pipe is perfect. You’re always going to lose some energy along the way. Unlike pressure or velocity, frictional losses are unrecoverable. Once they’re lost, they’re lost. The garden hose example shows it perfectly.
Let’s assume the inlet pressure is always constant. It’s not really, since there are more pipes upstream of this point in my house’s plumbing. But assuming a constant inlet pressure, this hydraulic grade line is always going to look the same. You can make the pipe smoother, rougher, longer, or shorter, wider, or narrower. As long as the shape doesn’t change along its length, you’re always going to have the inlet pressure on the left, zero pressure on the right, and a straight line connecting the two. In other words, you’re always going to lose 100% of the potential energy in the water to friction from one side to the other. How’s that possible? It’s because the flow in the pipe will speed up or slow down until it’s true. Frictional losses are roughly a function of the fluid’s velocity squared, so higher speed means more losses. Again, assuming you can maintain a constant pressure on one side of the system, in effect, what controls how much flow you can get out of the other end of the pipe is how much friction happens along the way.
And, by the way, that’s kind of a tough question to answer. The friction is a function of pipe roughness and turbulence. Turbulence is a function of the flow rate, so you have to know the flow rate to calculate the friction to calculate the flow rate. So these computations usually require some iteration or at least some simplifying assumptions. I said that generally friction scales as a function of flow squared. I can show that in my demo with the pressure gauges. If this valve is closed, we get the full static pressure. There’s no movement, so there’s no frictional losses anywhere in the hose. I have the same amount of energy at the end of the hose as I do at the beginning. When I open the valve, the difference in pressure grows because the flow speeds up. And if we plot the difference in pressure as a function of flow rate, it looks something like this. Friction goes up a lot faster than velocity.
But friction in a pipe isn’t the only source of energy losses. Any transition in geometry is going to have losses, too. And now, we’re back to the thumb. We sometimes call pipe friction the “major” losses in a system and those at transitions “minor losses.” Researchers have measured all kinds of situations, making it possible to estimate how a pipe system will behave, no matter how complicated it is. And the results are pretty interesting.
For example, at a sharp-edged inlet into a pipe, the minor loss coefficient can be around 0.5. A higher number means more energy lost. If you round the inlet, you can get that coefficient down to 0.03. Huge difference. Same thing with expansions or contractions. If you have a sudden change, especially when the difference between sizes is larger, you get high loss coefficients. If you make the transition gradual, the coefficient goes down, since there’s less turbulence and gentler acceleration as the fluid changes speed. And every type of transition has an associated loss coefficient that can vary a lot depending on how smooth and consistent that transition is. In fact, valves take advantage of minor losses to give you some control over flow, and we already said that a valve is basically a mechanical thumb.
I have one more demonstration to show you. I’m going to fill this tank two more times. In one case, I put a cap over the hose with a hole drilled into it. In the other, I 3D printed this nozzle that has a smooth taper from the hose diameter down to the exact same diameter I drilled in the end cap. With an understanding of minor losses, it should be an easy guess which one can flow more water. And here’s the proof. Both hoses are discharging through the same-sized hole, but the one with a smoother transition but the one with a smoother transition lets a lot more water through. And if you compare the 3D printed nozzle with the fully open hose, it’s not quite the same flow rate, but it’s close, and it’s a lot closer than the sharp contraction created by the cap with the hole.
The point I’m trying to show with this is that a nozzle or any other type of obstruction you put in a pipe system doesn’t increase or decrease the flow from one side or the other. It just creates a loss in energy that slows down the whole system. Transitions and pipe roughness create friction, and the flow rate naturally adjusts itself until the available energy between two points is equal to that friction. And this is not necessarily intuitive.
For example, we often compare water in pipes to electricity in wires: pressure is like voltage, flow rate is like current, and a narrow or rough pipe is like a resistor. That analogy works pretty well for building intuition, but it breaks down once you care about the details. In a wire, resistance is usually close to constant for a given material and temperature, so current tends to scale more neatly with voltage. In a pipe, the “resistance” isn’t a fixed number. Friction losses grow faster than the flow and can change as the flow becomes more turbulent. But of course, you can build that intuition. Think about firefighters.
The operator’s job is to run the pump. They choose a throttle setting based on the pressure needed at the nozzle. How do they make that choice? Well, that depends on the diameter of the hose, the length of the hose, the elevation of the nozzle if you’re pumping up a hill or a ladder, and the characteristics of the nozzle itself. It’s important to get this right. Too little pressure at the nozzle, and you don’t get enough flow to quench the flames. Too much pressure and you can damage equipment or throw the nozzle operator around with excessive reaction forces. Firefighters learn the basics of hydraulics in training, but there are no desks with graph paper set up at a fireground to work through a bunch of engineering equations. Operators need good hydraulic instincts about how different configurations of hoses, apparatuses, and nozzles will affect the required pump settings.
Even the plumbing in your house follows these same simple hydraulic principles. If you have narrow pipes, or lots of bends, turns, and transitions, you’ll definitely notice if someone flushes the toilet while you’re taking a shower. The shared lines see higher total flow, meaning more friction, meaning less pressure. I mentioned earlier that we couldn’t really assume a constant inlet pressure at my hose bib. That’s because there are a lot of pipes and transitions from that point upstream. And it’s true from my house through my service line through the water mains all the way to the water towers and high service pumps at the treatment plant. The pressure and flow rate I can get out are almost entirely a function of how much friction the water encounters along the way, which is a function of both the flow rate and the geometry of the pipes. You may even notice that your water pressure drops in the mornings or evenings when everyone in your neighborhood is using more. It’s the same issue: more flow through the water mains creates more friction, converting kinetic energy into heat so you get less at the end of the line.
The garden hose is a backyard version of the same problem engineers and operators deal with every day: how much flow can you get through a real system, and what does it cost you in pressure? In a perfect world, you’d convert pressure to speed and back again with no penalty, but real pipes always take a cut. Sometimes that cut is spread out over a long run of pipe. Sometimes it’s concentrated in a single valve, elbow, or your thumb. Either way, the flow rate adjusts until the available pressure is fully “spent” on those losses. Once you see it as an energy budget, the weird stuff starts making sense.
Object permanence: NK dictator's son v Tokyo Disneyland; Mainstream press and Bushies v Colbert; Taliban v Pakistan's first McDonald's; Norwegian sovereign wealth fund v exec compensation; Copyright v cheerleader uniforms; Dishwashers are Iphones.
The three armies fighting for the post-American world (permalink)
Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.
Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.
This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.
But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations – the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies – are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.
But I'm much more interested in the international coalitions that are forming to fight Trump. It started with my longstanding fight for a good internet, free from surveillance, extraction and manipulation, the three evils inherent to the business models of America's shitty, enshittifying tech companies.
Under normal circumstances, you'd expect tech companies in other countries to capitalize on the fact that America exports its obviously defective tech products around the world. As Jeff Bezos often reminds his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." Whether it's Apple taking a 30% margin on iPhone payments, Apple and Meta creaming 51 cents off every ad dollar, Amazon harvesting 50-60% from every platform seller, or inkjet printer companies marking up the colored water you use to print your grocery list by 25 quattuordecillion percent, there's a ton of opportunities to disrupt these comfortable ex-disruptors.
But no one does that, because the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into enacting an "anticircumvention" law that makes it a crime to modify America's tech exports. The quid pro quo for this? Free trade with the USA – and tariffs for any country that didn't fall into line. Well, they all fell into line, and Trump tariffed them anyway.
That means that America's tech giants' margins are now everyone else's opportunity. The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers. A year ago, no country could afford to allow a company headquartered in its borders to get into this business, lest they be clobbered with tariffs. Today, any country that isn't thinking about this is a sucker that will end up buying these tools from another country that gets there first.
This means that digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum for 25 years), suddenly have a new ally in the fight against enshittified tech products. Today, there are people who want to help you protect your pocketbook and your privacy, but not because they believe in human rights – rather, because they want to get really, really rich. They see Big Tech's margin as their opportunity.
But it's not just entrepreneurs and activists who want a post-American internet – we have a third member of our coalition: national security hawks. Trump wants to steal Greenland. He wants to steal Alberta. He wants to steal all the oil in Venezuela. He wants to interfere in foreign elections to keep his dictator cronies in office, lest they lose power and find themselves facing prison. And when Trump's allies do face justice, he wants to fire the judges who dare hold these corrupt, powerful men to account.
So when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address.
The ICC was just a warmup: Trump did the same thing to the Brazilian high court judge who sentenced the dictator Jair Bolsonaro to prison for attempting a coup after he lost his re-election bid, having presided over a term of gross misrule.
All of this has inflamed concerns within every (former) US ally's national security establishment. These people all understand that Trump doesn't need to roll tanks to take over their countries: he can just brick their key ministries, major firms, and households. He doesn't need to send an army to steal Greenland, he can just shut down Denmark and cut off the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic and ferociously strong black licorice.
Combine the natsec hawks; the economic development wonks, entrepreneurs and investors; and the privacy and digital and human rights activists, and you've got a hell of an anti-Trump coalition around the world, all pulling together to build the post-American internet, a disenshittified and enshittification-resistant internet built on international digital public goods and running on servers outside of the USA:
But this coalition isn't limited to the post-American internet – you'll find a coalition much like it in every place where Comrade Trump is calling forth a post-American world. That's the shape of the coalition that's winning Trump's war on fossil fuels: climate activists (hippies), electrification manufacturers and installers (businesses) and national security hawks who don't want to get hormuzed:
I'm not as plugged into the other areas where Trump has dismantled US hegemony, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a coalition much like this one is popping up in the countries where Trump and Musk doged the public health system into oblivion. The global south is full of countries that signed up to enforce US agricultural and pharmaceutical patents and US restrictions on birth control and abortion in exchange for the food-aid and health-aid that Elon Musk and his merry band of broccoli-haired brownshirts killed. It's easy to imagine that reproductive rights and health justice advocates in those countries are now on the same side as investors who'd like to get into business selling generic pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs, and that they're being backed by people worried that their country's food and health sovereignty are at risk unless they hasten the transition to a post-American world.
I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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PHILADELPHIA—Attempting to remain calm while the massive green creature gyrated on top of the dugout, a terrified Adolis García reportedly asked teammates Tuesday if anyone else could see the Phillie Phanatic. “This is gonna sound crazy, but I swear to God, I keep seeing a green dancing bear on the field,” said García, nervously gripping a baseball bat in case he needed to defend himself from the bug-eyed, pear-shaped monster, who then climbed down from the dugout, hopped onto an ATV, and began speeding across the outfield grass. “There’s no way a monster is just driving a quad across the field, right? Like, this doesn’t happen in real life. Bears don’t jiggle their bellies like that. Am I hallucinating? This is really freaking me out.” At press time, García had reportedly checked himself into the MLB player assistance program to get mental health support for his delusions.
Students from a Mississippi school banded together to prevent their bus from crashing after their driver blacked out from an asthma attack. What do you think?
“I hope they were all disciplined for getting out of their seats while the bus was still in motion.”
Addison Chan, Molasses Bottler
“All buses and cars should come with a backup kid for safety.”
At 9:03 a.m., Ms. Delgado makes the mistake of asking the class what their parents do for work.
“Dentist,” says Maya.
“Firefighter,” says Liam.
“Bus driver,” says Emma.
Oliver raises his hand. “My dad mines crypto.”
Ms. Delgado nods politely, the way adults do when they encounter a sentence they hope will not require follow-up questions.
Unfortunately, Sophie raises her hand. “What’s crypto?”
Ms. Delgado considers saying she doesn’t know. Instead, she says, “Imagine everyone has stickers.”
The class brightens immediately. Stickers are a language they understand.
“Everyone gets ten stickers,” Ms. Delgado says, drawing circles on the whiteboard. “You can trade them with each other.”
Oliver nods approvingly. “Yes,” he says. “That’s like crypto.”
“Great,” says Ms. Delgado. “So if Liam wants one of Maya’s stickers, he gives her something for it.”
Liam raises his hand. “What if Maya says she never gave me the sticker?”
Ms. Delgado pauses. “Well,” she says carefully, “we write the trade down so everyone knows it happened.” She writes STICKER LIST on the board.
Oliver raises his hand. “That’s the blockchain.” Ms. Delgado writes BLOCKCHAIN underneath. “Exactly,” she says, hoping confidence will make the sentence true.
Emma raises her hand. “Where are the stickers?”
Ms. Delgado hesitates. “The stickers are… invisible.”
The class waits for the rest of the explanation.
There is no rest of the explanation.
“So we’re trading stickers we can’t see,” Sophie says.
“Yes.”
“And we know we have them because of the list.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody is in charge of the list.”
“That’s correct.”
Liam raises his hand. “What if someone takes the stickers?”
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