WASHINGTON—After manually prying his eyelids open to read from a report he had prepared on the matter, a badly swollen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech Tuesday in which he warned that Americans were not eating enough bees. “In our survey of American dietary habits, we were alarmed to find that the vast majority of respondents reported eating fewer than two bees in an average day,” said the wheezing health and human services secretary, who stopped speaking for several seconds to reposition his grossly distended tongue in his mouth before suggesting that breakfast cereals could be fortified with live bees to help address bee deficiency in the broader population. “The human body needs wing nutrients, antennae, and especially stinger venom in order to function properly, but processed foods have many of these essential bee components stripped out, if they were even there to begin with. Powdered bumblebee supplements can help in situations where live bees are hard to come by, though I personally believe Americans should be chomping into a loudly buzzing beehive every morning with breakfast. In fact, I’ve urged President Trump to sign an executive order providing American children with a fresh carton of bees in their school lunch so they can get all the histamines a growing body needs.” Kennedy later returned to the podium with quills sticking out of his face to add that Americans also weren’t eating enough porcupines.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation awarded the grant to Schreiner University’s Texas Center, which is led by a historian guiding the state in its social studies revision.
The mayor’s support for a measure limiting HPD coordination with ICE blew up his relationship with a staunch ally. The politically powerful police union will not endorse Whitmire for a second term, according to its president.
As Israel has breached a second ceasefire, this time launching well over 100 missiles at Lebanon in just ten minutes, world leaders has expressed ‘deep concern’ with Israel.
“Hey buddy listen, war crimes are not on ok?” said America while sending over more missiles to replace the ones used to slaughter civilians.
“You said you wanted Iran to share the Strait of Hormuz but they said they won’t do that if you keep indiscriminately bombing everyone.”
“We had a deal and you intentionally broke it. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed”
Reports suggest that if Israel continues to destabilise the entire world, allied nations will consider wagging their finger in disapproval.
The UN has even threatened to put an exclamation mark in their next letter calling for stability.
I recently attended an event where a speaker said that if a manager is evaluating to let go a lower-performing employee, they should ask themselves, “Would I hire them now?” And if the answer is no, then let them go.
I don’t believe in black and white decisions. The presenter probably didn’t think of it that way but it feels that way. What is your take on this?
If you’re trying to decide how to proceed with a low-performing employee, “Would I hire them today, knowing everything I know now?” is a useful question to ask yourself. I don’t agree that “no” should always point immediately to firing them, but it’s a useful question to reflect on. Very often, managers hold on to low performers long past the point that they should, and that type of question can be a way to bring clarity to the situation.
The question I prefer (and it’s discussed more extensively in the book on management I co-authored) is, “If you had a button which, if pushed, would lead to your staff member being replaced instantaneously, without any difficult conversations or the hassles of interviewing and training someone new, would you push it?” Very often, the main thing holding managers back from acting when they need to is not wanting to deal with what they imagine it will entail. Also useful is, “If the person walked into your office and told you she was leaving to take another job, would you feel concern or relief?”
But none of these mean “then you absolutely should fire the person.” They’re all just ways to get clarity on your thinking.
2. My coworker wanted to step back and then changed his mind, but I’m taking his job
I work as a middle manager. My department is fairly large, but most people only report to me for a small percentage of their time (i.e., they work in my department four hours out of their week, and the rest in their primary job).
Last year, my supervisor let me know that my colleague (Alf), who is at the same level but over a different team, was experiencing burnout and wanted to step back. Alf’s team works in an area related to the one I currently supervise, but is actually more aligned with my background and professional interests. There are also three full-time reports in his unit (or four with Alf returning to the team as a regular employee). I have been interested in getting more involved in managing the work of that unit, and my supervisor and I came up with a proposal to combine the two units under me (and dropping some other parts of my job that are not my favorite to ensure I had a reasonable workload). I love managing people and have been told many times that I am good at it and that the organization would be excited for me to be in this new role. I thought things were pretty set to transition this summer.
But now Alf has said that he wants to stay in his current manager role after all. However, our director (my boss’s boss) wants me to take this new role on anyway and for Alf to step down. Alf is a decent manager, but he’s not a big picture thinker, which we need due to massive changes coming in our field. My director feels I am the right person for the job at this moment. Still, I feel extremely awkward about this. I agreed because I was under the impression Alf wanted to step down. I don’t want him to feel like I am stealing his job against his will. To complicate things further, Alf was my supervisor for about seven years before I got my current job.
This is the kind of organization where people stay for their whole careers, so I will likely need to work with Alf for some time. It’s also possible he may continue doing work in one of the two units I oversee. Any advice for how I should approach him? Acknowledge that this is awkward AF? Reassure him I wasn’t trying to steal his job? Let him feel his very understandable feelings for a while before approaching? We are friendly, but don’t talk regularly now that I don’t report to him.
The primary messaging on this really needs to come from your director, who should be transparent with Alf about why this change is happening and what it means for his career there.
Once that’s done, your approach with Alf should be a positive one — you’re excited to work with him, he should let you know what he needs, etc. I would not say anything about it being awkward or reassure him that you weren’t trying to take his job; there’s too much risk that will make things more awkward for him than if you just keep things positive, matter-of-fact, and forward-looking. Give him some time to adjust to the change and operate as if of course he will adjust; if that doesn’t happen, you’ll have to address it at that point, but it’s a kindness to him to move forward without anticipating/assuming weirdness if you can.
3. HR thinks I completed an engagement survey but I didn’t
My organization recently used an outside company to conduct an employee engagement survey. I was on the fence about completing the survey because of how it was handled last year. I opened my unique survey link to click around and read the questions, but never submitted it.
At various points during the survey period, HR sent emails about survey completion by department. I noticed in one of these updates that my department had a 100% completion rate. I’m the head of the department, so I thought perhaps my own survey was not meant to count here and maybe rolled up into leadership instead, but none of the other categories made sense for where my survey would be counted. I assumed my survey results were slated to be yeeted into the abyss and decided not to submit it.
Today, I had a meeting with HR to review the results of the survey. They started the meeting by saying that my team had five people, including me, invited to take the survey and that all five, including me, did so. I didn’t confess that I didn’t because I didn’t want to derail the whole meeting or be slapped on the wrist for not participating, but I couldn’t help thinking that the results cannot possibly be accurate.
Should I have told them? I’m questioning if there are other issues with the survey or its analysis based on my knowledge that what I’m being presented is incorrect. What could have possibly happened?! Is it worth being chided by HR for my delinquency in order to shine a light on problems with the survey process?
Separately, what’s your take on employee engagement surveys? Are they valuable? Do organizations/companies make meaningful changes based on feedback provided in this manner?
As a department head, yeah, I think you should have flagged it. You’re part of the organization’s leadership and if you’re aware of major inaccuracies with the survey, you should say something. It doesn’t need to be a big deal — just, “Are you sure that’s right? I actually didn’t complete mine — happy to talk about why if you want — so I’m concerned that might indicate our numbers are off in other ways.”
And then if they wanted to know why you didn’t complete it, you could have explained the emails saying 100% of your department already had made you assume yours wasn’t being counted and thus wasn’t needed. Or you could have talked about whatever the issues were that made you on the fence about doing it in the first place, if that’s something you were willing to get into.
As for the value of these surveys, they vary widely by company. If your company is a place that welcome dissent and takes feedback seriously, they can be worthwhile. If they’re not, then they usually just breed cynicism and can in some cases make disengagement worse if feedback is solicited but always ignored.
4. My contact’s mentee thinks we’re hiring, but we’re not
A former coworker reached out asking if I’d do an informational interview with someone he’s mentoring who is applying for an open entry-level position in my division to talk about my work and the company. I am, of course, happy to meet with them.
Except I asked around about this position, including to the head of our division, who said she didn’t know what this job posting is because we are not hiring. I’m not sure how it got posted or if it got posted for the wrong division, but we are not hiring for any positions at this time due to budget issues.
I will still meet with this person, and they should probably still apply just to be in our system and perhaps they’d be considered for a real opening in another division. How transparent should I be that my understanding is that we are not actually hiring for this role? The job market is hard enough so I don’t want to give false hope or waste anyone’s time, but I’m also not really authorized to speak on hiring in this way.
There’s nothing wrong with saying, “As far as I know, we’re not currently hiring for this position. Where did you see the posting?” And if you wanted to, you could check with your manager to ask if it’s okay to officially relay that your division isn’t currently hiring; they may be fine with that.
5. What questions should I ask in an interview with a recruiter?
I’m searching for a new job and, after several years out of the interview process, I’ve noticed that many of my first-round interviews are now brief phone screens with HR recruiters rather than conversations with the hiring manager. I know it’s important to ask thoughtful questions at the end of an interview, but recruiters often don’t have deep insight into the day-to-day responsibilities or team dynamics of the role. What kinds of questions are most appropriate and effective to ask in that setting? Is it still important to have questions for recruiters?
Yes, you should still have questions — and most likely, you do have things you’d like them to answer if you think about it!
It’s true that anything nuanced about the job or the team is better saved for the hiring manager, but recruiters will be equipped to answer things about what qualifications and experience are most important for the role, the size and structure of the team, and why the position is open, as well as anything logistical, like the salary, remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office, the likely timeline for making a hire, and what they expect the process to look like.
This week on Lost Terminal: Meg's plan backfires, Lyosha remains unsatisfied, and Arctica has a change of heart. Lost Terminal will return next week! 📓 Free transcript: https://www.patreon.com/posts/155111766/ 🎵 Today's SIGNAL is: https://namtao.bandcamp.com/track/digital-tribe 🦣 Mastodon https://namtao.com/@lostterminal 📝 Tumblr https://lostterminalpod.tumblr.com 🎙️ Recorded using a RODE NT-1 v5 USB in 32-bit float, edited with REAPER on Linux 🙏 CREDITS Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer ❤️ Thank you so much to everyone who supports me, but especially my Patreon Producers: Ada Phillips Kit Mike McCaffrey Jade Felicity Bilkey Stephen McCandless Mike Schneider Catoxis
Yes, there were problems that were so bad that the program was effectively unfixable. The largest category of them were those which took various types of handles and figured out how to convert them to pointers, and then used those pointers to access (and sometimes modify!) the internal implementation details of those objects.¹ Not only did the implementation details change, but the mechanism they used to convert handles to pointers also stopped working because Windows 95 used a 32-bit heap for user interface and graphics objects, whereas Windows 3.1 used a 16-bit heap.
Sometimes the programs were kind enough to do strict version checks to confirm that they were running on a system whose internals they understood. Sometimes their version checks were themselves broken, like one program that assumed that if the Windows version is not 3.0, 3.1, or 2.1, then it must be 2.0!
There were other one-off problems, like programs which detoured APIs in a way that no longer worked, but the ones that dug into operating system internals were by far the most common.
¹ What’s particularly frustrating is the cases where the program did this to access internal implementation details, when the information they wanted was already exposed by a public and supported API.
I run a small healthcare practice and recently had a difficult transition with a long-time employee that I’m trying to learn from.
Sarah worked for me for about five years as our director of business development and marketing lead. During that time, I invested heavily in her development through training, tools, and absorbing the inevitable mistakes that come with someone growing into a role. She worked remotely, set her own schedule, had significant autonomy, and earned well above the market rate. I also referred clients to a small side business she ran.
About six months ago, she told me she had “outgrown” the organization professionally and wanted to change the relationship from employee (W-2) to contractor (1099). I raised some concerns about that transition, which led to an emotional conversation. Shortly afterward, she followed up with an email summarizing the conversation as though I supported the transition.
As we tried to work out the details, it became clear she didn’t fully understand the legal and structural differences between W-2 and 1099 work. Once we started mapping out the contract, she realized that many of the duties she previously handled could not legally remain part of a contractor relationship, meaning the scope and compensation would likely be smaller than she expected. She was upset and accused me of not being supportive.
After a lot of negotiation, we eventually arrived at a contract that met the legal definition of a 1099 relationship, and my company became one of her clients for several marketing services (social media, blog writing, online ads, and outreach).
Almost immediately after the transition, the quality of her work dropped significantly. When I raised concerns about deliverables, she responded by unilaterally removing two services from the agreement. Our contract allowed 30 days’ notice to terminate the agreement but did not allow individual services to be withdrawn while the contract remained active. At that point, I concluded it made more sense to transition to a new marketing firm rather than continue the relationship.
The whole situation has been frustrating because I feel like I lost someone I invested heavily in and tried to support. In hindsight, I also suspect she may not have actually wanted the contractor arrangement once she understood the implications, but by that point the relationship had already shifted.
My questions are:
When a valued employee pushes for a transition from employee to contractor, how should a manager handle that conversation?
Is it generally a mistake to agree to become a client of a former employee to preserve the investment you’ve made in developing that employee?
How do you avoid entirely losing someone you’ve invested in when they push for a change like this?
I’m trying to understand what I could have done differently so I don’t repeat this situation in the future. As a small business, a loss like this is huge. I feel nervous investing in the future, and I can’t shake the feeling I should’ve handled this differently.
The first thing is to accept that you will always lose employees who you invested in eventually, and that’s okay! If you try to stop that from happening at all costs, you can end up making choices that don’t serve the organization well. So first and foremost: be okay with the idea that people will move on and that it’s a natural and unavoidable thing that will happen in running a business.
I say that because it sounds like this all stemmed from you trying to find a way to hold on to Sarah, even if that arrangement didn’t make sense for the business. Instead, when Sarah told you she felt she’d outgrown the organization, it probably would have been better to wish her well and make a clean break.
There are times when converting a valued employee to contractor status can make sense for all parties. If you look at what the employee is proposing and can come up with an arrangement that makes sense for both of you — not just “we’ll agree because we’re desperate to keep them,” but truly makes sense — then great. But you shouldn’t agree just because they suggest it.
In Sarah’s case, it sounds like you were searching for a way to make things work even when you had significant reservations. It would have been okay, and probably better, to turn down the contract conversion — if not at the start, then definitely after your conversations revealed that you were so out of sync on what it should look like. You could do that without it being adversarial; it’s perfectly supportive to say, “I would love to keep working together, but we really need the person doing this work to be an employee. If that can’t be you anymore, I understand.”
You’ve framed this as wanting to figure out how not to lose the investment you’ve made in a good employee. But benefitting from your investment in a good employee doesn’t mean “they stay here forever.” It means your investment pays off in their good work while they’re there and in how their work hopefully sets the next person up for success. It also might pay off in the satisfaction it brings you to work with someone who you’ve seen grow and develop. But they will eventually find other opportunities and move on, and that’s just inherently part of running a business and employing people. You will make better decisions for the business and for yourself when you’re okay with that.
Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.
So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.
Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.
That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.
The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”
You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.
As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:
“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”
Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.
And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.
Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.
So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.
This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.
They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.
The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.
I’m seeking advice on an ADA matter, but I’ve run into a weird issue. It seems these days, most firms have a policy where they simply won’t talk to you about your current employer. I’ve actually been told by multiple firms to “call back when I get fired.” If there is a possibility I’m in the wrong, I’d very much rather know now, before it gets that far.
I suspect this is a result of firms using a contingency model where they only get paid if you win a lawsuit or settlement. That’s great if you already have a case to file (such as being wrongfully fired) but not great if you are still trying to avoid one and just need some advice.
I tried to find a firm that might let me pay a fee for an hour but have not been able to find any. Is there anything else I can do, or am I out of luck? Do employment lawyers just not do advice anymore?
Much of the plaintiff-side employment bar has moved to a contingency model. No termination, no clear damages, no case — at least not one they can monetize. So they screen aggressively. Pre-termination counseling? That’s harder to value, harder to win, and harder to scale.
But that doesn’t mean advice has disappeared. It just means your reader is looking in the wrong places.
First, not every employment lawyer works on contingency. Many — especially management-side lawyers — bill hourly and regularly advise on ADA compliance, accommodations, and interactive process issues. Yes, they typically represent employers. But plenty will consult with individuals on a paid basis. Your reader isn’t asking them to sue anyone, but for guidance.
Second, look beyond “employment litigation” firms. Search for “employment counseling,” “HR compliance,” or even “labor and employment boutique.” Those practices are built around advice, not lawsuits.
Third, consider bar association referral services. They often steer you to lawyers willing to do short, paid consults.
Lawyers still give advice. You just have to find the ones who get paid to prevent problems instead of profit from them.
Content warning for upsetting discussion of sexual abuse of children.
A reader writes:
I spent most of my 20s managing a business, eventually becoming more or less second-in-command. The owner was an older guy in his 60s. He was a bit of a grumpy guy and more conservative than me in many ways, but we overall got along very well. I found that he was generally a fair guy, and we bonded over a few shared interests. I wouldn’t call him a “friend,” but we had a good relationship.
He sold his business in 2020 (he was planning to retire that year anyway and the pandemic moved up the timeline a few months). He and I stayed in loose texting contact until I stopped hearing from him.
A few months ago, an old employee of mine reached out to me with some horrifying news: In 2023, our boss was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for receipt of child pornography.
According to court filings, he had over 84,000 images of child sexual abuse material in his possession, which he amassed after trading images on Russian sites. Many of these images were violent and gruesome in ways that are too horrifying to recount, though he denies looking at the more horrific ones. He started amassing this collection not too long after he retired and moved in 2021. He was arrested later that year and eventually made a plea deal. He’ll be in prison until he’s in his 90s.
His defense team admitted that he has a “criminal interest” in boys between the ages of 11-14ish. This part horrified me, because many of our employees started out as high schoolers. Based on his testimony and my own experiences with him, I’m inclined to believe no human being who ever encountered him was ever in danger and he wasn’t even consciously aware of his attractions until he fell down this awful rabbit hole in his retirement. But I’ll never know, and I don’t know if he will either.
Even though he’s not accused of child abuse himself, the court did acknowledge that his interest in these images keeps the child sex abuse going, something even he agreed with during sentencing.
In the process of this, he got divorced, spent all his capital on a legal defense, lost all of his friends, and will very likely die in federal custody.
Despite the fact that he took part in a horrific trade, and that he had that criminal interest at all, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. It’s easy to see a story like this on the news, think “lock him up and throw away the key,” and move on. It’s harder when it’s someone you know. It’s all his own fault, but it’s sad knowing how he was saving up for retirement and built a business worth selling, only to lose everything. It’s sad knowing that his friends and most of his family have largely abandoned him. It’s sad knowing that if he’s lucky enough to survive prison, he’ll be in his 90s and flat broke.
With that, I come to my ask: should I reach out to him? I’m conflicted on this.
Part of me thinks he’d be embarrassed if I reached out, because only one of our coworkers was reached out to about this so I don’t think he knows I’d know. But part of me thinks about how a guy who did something horrible could probably use a little connection to the outside world, because he’s almost certainly lonely beyond belief. There’s also the fact that sexual interest in children is sometimes the result of abuse, which – and I don’t want to speculate more than this – means he might have been a victim himself.
I’m not asking for judgment on whether he’s a good or a bad person, because he undeniably did a bad thing. But people who do bad things, even horrific things, don’t necessarily deserve to lose all contact with humanity. I have no tolerance for people who produce those images, but I think that a lot of the people who trade and watch them are more sick than dangerous, if that makes any sense.
Should I let him live in ignorance of me knowing that I know, or should I reach out and try to form a human connection and alleviate some of that loneliness – without, obviously, excusing what he did?
This is not really a work question; this is a question about being a human around other humans, some of whom hurt others, and how we deal with people who have committed some of the worst harms against others.
I can’t tell you what you should do.
I am going to point out that there’s a lot of minimizing language in your letter about a man who found sexual gratification by watching children being abused, thousands of them, perhaps violently, and who actively helped to create a market for that abuse.
Is he still a human who could use a connection to the outside world? Yes. Might he have been a victim himself? Maybe. Did he repeatedly choose to do something that causes severe and lasting harm to kids? Yes.
There are people who feel called to work with people who have committed some of the worst crimes possible, to find their humanity and connect with it. Maybe you’re one of them.
But I would get really clear in your head about what’s motivating you and whether you could explain it to someone who’s been a victim of this type of abuse and still come away feeling confident in your stance. If you can, there’s your answer. And if you can’t, I think that’s an answer too.
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:
Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.
Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement.
Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right.
It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers":
Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge.
I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:
I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:
While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:
So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.
This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:
Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.
So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?
After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it:
"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."
Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:
This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext?
Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":
I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.
In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them":
These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.
When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:
At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.
When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:
This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.
Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge
This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:
The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."
First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."
The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."
The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.
Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."
The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them.
The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.
Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."
This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."
I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.
And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know.
"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. First draft complete. Second draft underway.
"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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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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NEW YORK—In an announcement that left fans of the 2006 original buzzing with excitement, The Devil Wears Prada 2 director David Frankel confirmed Wednesday that actor Adrien Grenier would make a cameo in the film as a corpse on the street. “We’re so pleased to have not just Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep back, but the whole original supporting cast—Stanley Tucci as the charming Nigel, Emily Blunt as the assistant-turned-rival Emily, and Adrien Grenier as a bloated, black-and-blue dead body lying face down in the gutter,” Frankel said following the release of a new trailer in which eagle-eyed fans spotted the rotting corpse of Grenier’s character Nate being stomped on mercilessly in the background of a scene in which Streep and Hathaway’s characters discuss a runway show they have just attended. “Fans of the first movie have been begging to know if Nate would be in the sequel, with many suggesting he’d be perfect as either a cadaver being tossed out of a window or a sack of limbs washing up on the shoreline. It may be a small role, but we think Devil Wears Prada diehards will be very, very pleased.” At press time, movie critics were calling the performance Adrien Grenier’s best in years.
The Laredo Center for the Arts (LCA) was broken into and vandalized the night of Wednesday, April 1, resulting in damage to multiple rooms in the multifloor facility.
Melissa Amici, a board member of the nonprofit organization since 2008 and current Vice President, told Glasstire that the extent of the damage was still being assessed, but includes two artworks in the center’s permanent collection: a framed print by Eric Avery, a San Ygnacio artist, and a sculptural chair by Angelica Raquel, a San Antonio artist originally from Laredo. A painting on glass donated by Andres “Daddy Yonke” Padilla for a recent No Border Wall Coalition auction held at the center was also damaged.
Video stills of damage to the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
As first reported by the LareDOS news website, the perpetrator, Yvette Ibarra, was arrested and is being held by the Laredo Police Department. Ms. Amici said that Ms. Ibarra, with a criminal record extending back to 2022, left incriminating evidence in the form of a piece of paper with her name on it and fingerprints from Sriracha hot sauce, which she had sprayed over walls, countertops, and floors in the center’s kitchen area.
A piece of paper with scribbles and a name used as evidence in the valndalization of the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
Other damaged items include the center’s multipurpose 55-inch large-screen television, archival records of the permanent collection that had been stored in the building’s vault room — currently used as a records office — along with other operational documents, furniture, restroom fixtures, food items, and art supplies.
Ms. Amici said that seeing the damage firsthand while police investigated the scene was “initially really heartbreaking.” She added, “I was literally in tears, and the staff was shocked.”
The center had been set up for its Third Space Thursdays event for local creatives, and was preparing for the Caminarte first Friday downtown Laredo art walk. Both events went on as scheduled.
Artworks in the current exhibition, a Contemporary Art Month group show of San Antonio artists, went untouched, Ms. Amici said. She also expressed relief that artworks in the Art Acquisition Project permanent collection, including works by Cesar Martinez and Ethel Shipton, were not damaged. The center began collecting art formally in 2020, toward the goal of eventually creating a dedicated museum of contemporary art in Laredo, Ms. Amici said.
Luis E. Sanchez, LCA Programming Coordinator, organized a GoFundMe campaign, which so far has raised more than $4,000 of its $6,000 goal. Ms. Amici placed the amount of funds necessary to recover from the incident at $10,000, which includes installing a state-of-the-art security system, replacing a damaged laptop and TV, repairing the artworks if possible, and upgrading insurance on the building.
A damaged artwork by Andres “Daddy Yonke” Padilla at the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
Despite the negativity associated with the break-in and vandalism, Ms. Amici said an upside to the incident has been the outpouring of community support. In a Friday, April 3, social media story, Seyde Garcia, a Laredo resident and Glasstire contributor, called the center “a true pillar of the community.” The Laredo Cultural District posted, “We stand with [the LCA] heartbroken.”
Ms. Amici said, “The support that we’re receiving … has been overwhelming and really inspiring. … I’m proud of the community that I’m a part of, especially proud of our art community and how we’ve banded together.”
Visit the LCA website to learn more about its exhibitions and events programming.
LONDON—Urging the public to remain calm as authorities worked to recapture the mentally disturbed individual, city officials confirmed Monday that novelist J.K. Rowling had escaped from a London insane asylum.
At 7:33 this morning, medical staff reportedly discovered the Harry Potter author and outspoken anti-trans activist had broken out of her padded, maximum-security cell at St. Edmund’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she has been an inmate for the past 10 years. The news sent shockwaves through the United Kingdom, whose 70 million residents sheltered in place while law enforcement swept libraries, electronics stores, and other locations with free internet-enabled computers where it was believed the “dangerous” and “highly reactive” fugitive might try to access social media.
“Ms. Rowling currently poses an extreme danger both to herself and the public, and we will not rest until she is apprehended,” said Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Matt Jukes, who added that citizens should report sightings to an emergency hotline and should not, under any circumstances, attempt to debate her. “If you spot her, contact authorities immediately, and do not, I repeat do not, engage. Her brain doesn’t work like a healthy person’s. She has fallen far beyond the brink of reason.”
A security camera caught mental patient J.K. Rowling breaking free from her restraints.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Jukes added. “You will hear her, and her opinions, coming.”
According to guards, Rowling had a history of disturbing behavior within the high-security mental facility and would often go on unhinged rants, threatening to kidnap the late Queen Elizabeth II, imprison her in a life-size replica of Hagrid’s hut, and expose her as the transgender leader of a LGBTQIA+ cabal.
Despite her heavily impaired cognitive abilities, officials said Rowling was still “easily” able to unlock her cell’s half dozen electromechanical deadbolts, kill several armed guards with her bare hands, and use her feces to smear “TERF IS A SLUR” on the facility’s walls before scaling a 20-foot-tall barbed-wire fence and disappearing into the London night.
Sightings of a barefoot, straightjacket-clad individual who matched Rowling’s description were reported just hours after her escape. Terrified witnesses said this person sprinted into open traffic and jumped onto the hoods of vehicles, screaming, “This highway is for biological females only!” and “You’ll never be a biological woman! You’re a car!”
Several reports indicated that a decoy iPad loaded with nothing but the X app was planted at the base of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus, where officers lay in wait hoping that Rowling would take the bait.
“I’ve spent my whole career treating the most extreme cases of mental illness—many that ended in homicides—but J.K. Rowling is by far the most alarming patient I’ve encountered,” said a St. Edmund’s staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noting that healthcare workers at the psychiatric facility preferred working with rapists and murderers to the “unpredictable” and “erratic” Rowling. “No matter how many antipsychotics we gave her, she still thought every orderly was Emma Watson. Last month, she bit a nurse’s arm and then called her ungrateful.”
“We’d tranquilize her every night; otherwise, she wouldn’t sleep,” the staffer added. “She claims we gave her ‘male sheets,’ but I think she just means they’re blue.”
Authorities confirmed Rowling was sighted this afternoon in Hackney, where the bestselling author burst into the waiting room of a pediatric dentist office while foaming at the mouth, her appearance causing patients and their parents to scream and run for cover. A receptionist at the dental practice was reportedly left with minor injuries, including a broken nose, after Rowling assaulted her and accused the practice of performing “illegal gender surgery” on minors.
“I tried telling her, ‘I just answer phones here! We clean teeth!’ but she was having none of it,” said receptionist Rebecca Shepherd, who gripped her jaw and recalled with horror the “wild look” in Rowling’s eyes. “She said, ‘The teeth are the children! You’re mutilating the teeth!’ and then punched me in the face. I’ll never forget the look on her face. It wasn’t human—it was TERF.”
At press time, officials reported Rowling had been recaptured after entering an empty women’s bathroom, yelling “I know you’re in there,” and knocking herself unconscious as she tried to break down a stall door.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND—In what scholars have called the largest shake-up of the game’s rule set in centuries, the International Chess Federation announced Tuesday that it was adding a race car piece to the playing board. “In all officially sanctioned matches played from today forward, the pawn immediately in front of a player’s king will be replaced with a sick little hot rod that can move any number of squares horizontally, vertically, or in a circle like it’s doing donuts,” said the president of the game’s global governing body, Arkady Dvorkovich, who imitated the sound of a revving engine with his mouth as he maneuvered the new race car piece around a chessboard in a demonstration match with grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. “The race car piece gets to go twice in one turn because it’s so fast, and it can also launch off a rook of the same color to fly over the other pieces like this—VRRRRRR WOOSH. The pawns are its pit crew and can use a turn to turbocharge the race car, allowing it to capture all the enemy pieces in a straight line at once. The king can also go for a joyride in the race car, and then he’s invincible for three turns because the race car has a super powerful force field, too.” Dvorkovich went on to say that upon reaching the eighth rank, the race car piece could be turned sideways and gain the ability to Tokyo drift.
In brief: In today’s post we celebrate the recent Artemis II lunar flyby, and look ahead to warmer and somewhat cloudier weather after today. Rain chances spike on Friday, but they won’t entirely go away this weekend.
A total eclipse of the Sun, as seen from the Moon on Monday. (NASA)
Fly me to the Moon
I’m not sure I’ll ever look at the Moon the same way again. On Monday four astronauts—our friends and neighbors in Houston; Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—flew around the far side of the Moon (see images here). There they saw some incredible lunar geography (selenography in space talk), Earth setting behind the Moon, and a stunning eclipse of the Sun. I’m hoping this mission is breaking through to the broader public because this is an incredible crew, and it is delightful to see NASA daring to fly into deep space again. If we do this right, this is just the beginning of a long, sustained program to explore and settle on the lunar surface.
Wednesday
Back here on Earth, we are not going to see any eclipses, but we will see plenty of sunshine throughout the day. We are starting to see a more pronounced onshore flow, but dewpoints should hold in the 50s (read: drier air) through the afternoon before humidity shoots up later today. I expect high temperatures in the vicinity of 80 degrees, with overnight lows in the mid-60s.
Thursday
After today we’re going to see less sunshine for the next few days, but I don’t expect it to go away entirely. Highs on Thursday will again be in the range of 80 degrees, with a fair bit of humidity. Winds will blow from the east-southeast at about 10 mph with higher gusts. A few light showers will be possible during the daytime, but I don’t expect any real accumulations. Lows Thursday night will only drop to around 70 degrees. And that’s pretty much going to be our low temperatures for the next week, so get used to them.
Friday
This day will bring our best chance of rain for the week as an upper-level disturbance moves into the area and combines with a fairly moist atmosphere. The best chance of rain is likely to be southwest of Houston, so places like Fort Bend and southern Brazoria counties. However, I expect most of the area to see a healthy chance of rain, with much of us probably picking up between 0.25 to 0.75 inch of rain through Friday night. Highs will be near 80 degrees with another muggy night.
NOAA rain accumulation forecast for now through Friday night. (Weather Bell)
Saturday or Sunday
I’m afraid we’re still playing the will-it or won’t-it rain game for this weekend game. A lot of our modeling indicates that the chances for showers will drop off considerably by Saturday morning, but I’m not convinced there will be enough high pressure in play to entirely shut off the spigot. I’m going to go with a 40 percent chance of showers on Saturday, and 30 percent on Sunday, and not feel great about the forecast. Regardless, I don’t anticipate heavy rainfall this weekend. Expect highs around 80 degrees with continued warm nights and partly sunny skies.
Next week
Most of next week looks to remain on the warm side, with highs in the low 80s, warm nights, and plenty of humidity. Rain chances are never going to go away, but they may be a little higher during the middle of the week as the atmosphere becomes a little more perturbed. We shall see.
1. My boss blames my employee for getting stuck in the Middle East during the war
My employee used six weeks of vacation to go back to his home country with his pregnant wife and toddler. It was the first time he’d be with his parents and siblings all together in over a decade. He was due to fly back three days after the war with Iran started, and as his flight went through that region, his flight was cancelled. He was rebooked two weeks later but tried daily to get a different flight and showed up to the airport, he and his family fully packed, because flights going out that day weren’t officially cancelled until around noon each day. After a hellish 55-hour journey, he and his family are safely back and he’s back to work. That period between his normally scheduled flight and when he got back exhausted the small remaining amount of vacation hours he had.
But hark! HR told me we have a policy to allow for up to 10 days of admin leave in the event of a disaster, and said this qualifies. Wonderful! I asked if the policy is that the 10 days can be used first or if it can be used only after vacation time has been exhausted, which is a frequent stipulation in some of our other leave policies.
My boss responded that she thinks because “we all knew” war was imminent and he didn’t try to leave earlier, he should get to use only five days and not the full 10. If the employee was in Iran when the war broke out, she’d give him the full 10. But she wants to hear what efforts he made ahead to get out quicker.
She consistently lets her feelings about people’s work cloud her judgment to be a good human when it’s not only the most righteous, but also easiest, choice to make. But hey, at least she put this BS in an email so I can share it back with HR. How should I respond?
“We all knew” war was imminent? Some of Congress didn’t even know war was imminent. Your boss is an ass.
Your employee and his family went through a scary and exhausting ordeal. Your company has a policy set up specifically for disasters. This was a disaster. He should be given the full amount of time HR said was available.
Share your boss’s response with HR and say that you’d like your employee to receive the full 10 days, and that you’re dismayed by the suggestion to penalize him on the grounds that he “should have known.” You might also point out that your boss’s suggestion could be taken as national origin discrimination, which is illegal.
2. I’m about to get promoted but I want to quit
I am mid-20s working at a small office with less than a dozen people while I finish my degree. My boss has told me I will be promoted once funding is approved, and because of that I have been asked to take on more leadership tasks. I have three coworkers who were both hired less than six months ago who both think that, if promotions were to come, they should get them (this is their first job). I have another coworker who is technically an external contractor who works closely with the three new people. Because of her role/contract, she is essentially unfireable for the next two years. She often acts as if she is in charge, something management has told me she has been asked not to do.
A week ago, I had a startling conversation with her and my three other coworkers. She has a habit of staying in conference rooms during meetings she is not a part of, and during this meeting she said that she was the de facto manager of the office, told the other coworkers to disregard what I was asking them to do as it was “not their work” (it is), and asked why I am still working here and said I should have left by now. The other three seemed to feel that the work being discussed was beneath them and heavily implied that they saw me as an obstacle to promotion.
It was clear to me I cannot stay at this job. The power struggle being played into long predates my coworkers, and now that they are friends with this new person and feel half of their workload is irrelevant, I feel strongly that there is no way I can continue my work without being resented or undermined.
My problem is this. I have been working closely with my supervisors to prep me for this promotion. They will feel blindsided if I just quit, and I struggle to imagine how I could pretend everything is fine for the next two months. But if I tell my supervisor what happened, I assume they would try to address things, which I just don’t want. I don’t want to hurt my reputation by covering for them (especially as a recommendation from my supervisor will be important in future career/education steps) but I also don’t want to make the last few weeks of the job miserable. What should I say to my boss and how should I approach the next eight weeks?
Wait, wait! Deciding to leave feels premature — why not first talk to your manager about what got said in that meeting and share your concerns about what this means for your ability to be effective in your work there? If they’ve told this contractor in the past to stay in her lane, it’s very likely that they’ll be upset to hear she’s doing this again. If your manager is even a little bit decent at her job, there’s a strong chance she’ll want to intervene with both the contractor and the other three coworkers.
If you’re just done with this job and ready to get out regardless, that’s of course your prerogative! But otherwise there’s value in talking to your manager about this conversation before you decide anything.
If you do decide you’re going to leave … well, job searching usually takes some time and there’s a decent chance you could still be there two months from now. But at whatever point you do leave, if they’re blindsided by that when they told you to expect a promotion, that’s not necessarily reasonable on their side. It doesn’t sound like they’ve given you a specific timeline and “you’ll be promoted once funding is approved” can mean anything from “you’ll be promoted in three weeks” to “we hope you’ll be promoted sometime next year” to “there are no solid plans at all and I can’t give you any sort of timeline, but it’s something we’d like to do.” It’s not reasonable to assume someone will pass up other opportunities on that sort of thin promise.
But even if they have a solid timeline in place that you find credible, you’re still allowed to leave! You’d frame it as, “I really appreciate you going to bat to get me a promotion, but another opportunity fell in my lap and was too good to pass up.” Or, “I really appreciate you going to bat to get me a promotion, but I’ve realized staying doesn’t make sense for me because of X / a different role is more aligned with what I want to do / etc.”
3. New employee doesn’t want to work the hours we hired them for
We hired an employee for a specific time slot — evenings and Saturdays. Because of clients’ needs, we were able to move the original schedule earlier (11am-7pm instead of 5pm to midnight). The employee appreciated this. The employee then negotiated for Thursdays off because of regularly being scheduled for Saturdays. Then they asked that the Saturday work be remote, so we offered a trial of on-call that would require them to come in only if necessary. Now the employee is asking that Saturdays be rotational.
I would be sad to lose this employee, but I’m guessing we need to start searching again? The evening and weekend hours of this role were communicated up-front, and I find it frustrating that the employee is regularly coming back to try to renegotiate.
Yes, you’re probably going to need to start searching again, but first just be straightforward with the employee and ask for them to be straightforward in return: “We hired for this role specifically because we need someone to work Saturdays, and that’s not something we can change. Knowing that the job does require working Saturdays and it can’t be rotational, does the position still make sense for you?”
4. Explaining why I’m quitting the federal government
I thought I could stick out this administration, but my job has become a nightmare. After losing roughly half our group, the demands have only grown, particularly with quick deadlines. This, apparently, is in exchange for forcing us to commute every day, imposing a cap on the number of employees exceeding expectations, and changing the primary criteria to remove or demote employees due to performance evaluations.
Is there any exception to not disclosing reasons for quitting and the prohibition on speaking ill of a former employer when that employer explicitly is trying to put its employees in trauma and dread going to work every day? Is it too much to say it’s no longer a good fit, or the costs now are too great?
You can just say, “With everything going on in government work right now, I’m interested in moving to something more stable, and I’m particularly interested in this job because ____.”
You’re falling into the very common trap of thinking you need to give an accurate or comprehensive answer to this question; you don’t, and it’s often not in your best interests to, even when you’re 100% in the right (and even when the employer would know you were likely in the right; you want their focus on why you’d be great for the job they’re hiring for, not whatever bananas drama is happening at your old job).
I am a non-exempt employee who works in healthcare for a large company that provides a specific contracted service. My hours are unpredictable and vary day by day, week by week. Sometimes I work overtime, although usually I average about 30 hours/week. I punch in/out using an electronic payroll app on a company-provided device. We’ve recently gone through a period with an unusually high patient census and are also understaffed, so more hours and overtime for me.
During this time, I noticed that my paychecks did not seem to accurately reflect the hours that I worked, so I started keeping my own record and then compared it to my punch times on the payroll system. I found that my manager has been editing my timesheets. I believe she is trying to meet (in my opinion, unreasonable) company metrics, but it is extremely disheartening to be working these ridiculous hours to find out that I’m not being compensated for them. In the app, you can see that the time was edited and who did the editing (my manager’s name).
My partner is a manager for a well-known company, and he has a good relationship with his HR and asked for their advice. HR informed him that adjusting employee timesheets is illegal and a firing offense, and it puts the company at risk.
My partner wants me to report this. One of the reasons I never went into management is because of the politics and pressure involved, but I do love my job and my patients, and at this stage in my career I do not want to face retaliation or the inability to find another position in my field. Then again, I’m feeling anger and frustration at stepping up and working unreasonably long hours when no one else was available, without compensation for all the time that I worked. I’ve always had a good relationship with my manager so there’s the feeling of betrayal as well. My manager has also been in her position for many years, in a role that is notorious for high turnover, so I’m unsure whether the company would even be supportive if I reported. I’ve been thinking about contacting an employment lawyer to help me navigate this situation, especially in the event of retaliation. Honestly, I’d just like to be paid for my time and continue doing the job I love. Since I brought the discrepancies to my manager’s attention, my timesheets have not been touched. But I do wonder if this is happening to others on my team and within my company, and that is weighing on my conscience as well.
You absolutely need to report this to your company. It’s illegal, it’s a liability for them, and you are legally owed that money. It doesn’t matter what your manager’s reasons were for doing it; it’s flatly against the law, and you are being stolen from.
If you’re concerned about retaliation, you don’t need to mention that your manager is the one who did this when you report it. Just say that your paychecks aren’t matching up to the hours you’ve logged and ask that it be investigated and fixed. You don’t need a lawyer to do this; it’s worth involving one if you do start seeing retaliation, but most likely you’ll report it and your company will fix it since the law is black and white on this. If they don’t, then bring in the lawyer.
It’s that time of year again when we hear about how the plants are growing across the country. For the Washington Post, Ben Noll, John Muyskens, and Naema Ahmed have the maps for leaves and flowers.
Meteorological spring started March 1. The astronomical season started March 20. But there’s a third option: The season as decreed by the plants. They don’t follow any calendar and instead leaf out when it’s warm enough.
The first emergence of leaves can be estimated by temperatures since the start of the year. A certain amount of warmth needs to accumulate before leaves appear. This warmth is typically measured through a metric called growing degree days.
In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.
The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.
In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.
But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.
Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.
The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.
In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”
The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.
The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.
Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.
“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.
The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.
Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.
“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.
A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”
The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.
The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.
Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.
The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.
“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”
Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.
“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”
Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.
Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.
Drugs
As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”
He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.
“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”
The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.
National Security
Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.
The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.
“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.
Labor
The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.
Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.
A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”
The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.
White-Collar Crime
The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.
The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.
Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.
The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.
Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.
Promises Kept
The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.
Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.
The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
