Hovertext: On the last Socrates joke, like a dozen people told me I should've called his nutritional supplements Himlock, and it just kills me that I didn't.
Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.
The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).
I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.
‡ Ugh
It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.
There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.
Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.
You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.
Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author – that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.
Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue – it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.
Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.
That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.
There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.
"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 ( words today, total)
"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
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I have a new employee, Joe, who has been with me about six months. The headline is that he’s pretty terrible. He lacks knowledge, his work is slow and often wrong, he lacks attention to detail, shows no sense of urgency, ownership or understanding of priority, and requires constant hand-holding to even get close to completing tasks. There’s a lot to unpack about him but the short story is: I made a big hiring mistake and I know separately that I need to address it. This letter isn’t quite about that though.
Recently, a distant relative of Joe’s wife’s passed away. That’s sad. He was sending me constant (and unnecessary) updates about it. We have a super generous and broad vacation day policy — everyone gets 30 days a year, it’s easy to take. I told him he didn’t need to worry about keeping me updated during this difficult time; he should feel free to take the time he needed. I would ensure things were covered and we’d circle up when he was back. I want to emphasize here that I believe people should have leave when they experience a death.
That said, he decided to work one day this week. Instead of working, however, he dug through a surprisingly arcane part of our leave policy, one I didn’t know existed, to find an obscure bereavement leave process I was also unaware of. He asked if he could take bereavement leave instead of regular leave. I had no idea about this, so I dig up the HR policy. It was very clear: bereavement leave is only for immediate family (parent, child, spouse) and is only three days. So, I told him that based on my reading of the policy I didn’t think I would be allowed to approve bereavement leave, but I would be happy to approve as much regular leave as he needed. He doesn’t take much time at all, so he had 27 days banked, just for context.
So, again, instead of doing his job, he contacted HR asking if bereavement leave would be allowed for distant relatives especially if he was “close” to the relative. HR wrote back and said “oh yes, of course!” which frustrates me on a separate front. It seems illogical that HR has a clear policy that they apparently don’t require people to follow. As a manager, this makes me look bad when I’m just trying to follow the rules — but whatever! HR stinks. So anyway, he sent this email to me and then promptly requested five days of bereavement leave. Since HR obviously didn’t care about the policy regarding the type of relative, I figured why the heck would they care about the three-day limit — so I approved it. He’s off this week; I hope he’s getting through it.
Except! I’m quite livid about this and seeking your advice to get through it. Joe put more immediate and consistent effort into figuring out how to avoid taking a vacation day than he has on literally anything he’s worked on in six months. I’ve never seen him own, care about, and follow through on something like this. He’s making almost six figures and regularly performing far below his expected level. I’ve started providing constructive feedback, but he always spirals, claiming he’s trying hard and doing his best. He responds to nothing I say about how taking notes during meetings might help him remember things, or that making a to-do list might help, or that he should feel free to ask questions if he’s unsure about something. I’m not mean, I don’t yell, and I don’t convey any of this in a threatening manner. I do my best to be gentle, kind, and encouraging. Nothing seems to work — he’s just consistently an under-performer, except it seems, when it comes to something he cares about, which is apparently not his job or the quality of his work. It’s about ensuring he can maximize time off for the death of a distant relative to whom he has no direct relation. In that case, he was eager to go find information, push for resolution, ask questions, and care about the details.
As he’s been out, I’m just getting mad about this. Now I see that he’s capable of the behaviors required for his job — so he isn’t struggling and in need of mentorship or guidance. He’s capable of doing a good job, but he doesn’t. That’s probably an oversimplification. I do think he lacks many core skills for his job (again, this is my fault regarding hiring, I really messed up).
At the end of this long note, my question for you is: Is there some way I can contextualize and offer feedback to Joe about this situation? That, as his boss, I would like him to try doing his job as well as he did when he was trying not to do his job?
This is hard because I don’t want to misstep and come off as insensitive about death, sadness and emotional stuff. If had told me he wanted to take two weeks off, I would have approved it. We work in a state with generous paid leave; if he wanted a month, I would have helped him navigate that. My core issue here is that he dug deep on something so obscure to achieve an outcome. This is exactly the behavior I wish he’d exhibit at work (owning tasks and driving them to completion), yet I’ve seen him do it zero times until now.
Ultimately, I probably just need to start hard documenting his various failures and get him PIP’d out. But I just genuinely thought he was inexperienced and capable of improvement, so I believed mentorship, guidance, and support would be a path to success that I, as his boss, could provide. I no longer think that.
Beat me up here if I’m being unreasonable – I’ll take the feedback, I promise!
In that case I’m going to say it bluntly: This is more on you than it is on Joe!
It’s on Joe, too. But as his manager, it’s mostly on you.
You have an employee who you describe as “pretty terrible,” who does indeed sound pretty terrible, who doesn’t respond to feedback and hasn’t shown any improvement despite coaching. That’s the problem that has been requiring far more urgency from you, and that would be the case even if the bereavement leave situation never happened.
It sounds like the bereavement situation jolted you into seeing it more clearly, but it’s been the case all along: you need to manage Joe much more actively and be more assertive about resolving the situation one way or the other (meaning that he needs to either raise his performance to a good level in the very near future or you need to replace him with someone else).
But you should not use the death of his relative as a way to say, “This kind of persistence and initiative is what I need from you in your job.” Nor do you need to! You should just start managing him much more closely — which at this point means moving from just coaching to more serious warnings, as well as a clearly structured path that will end with him either making specific improvements by a specific timeline or leaving the job. You needed to be on this path before the bereavement situation; you can get on it now without referencing the bereavement.
On the bereavement leave specifically, I do think you made some weird choices — approving him for five days of leave when the policy only offers three doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re saying “well, HR clearly doesn’t care about who you can take bereavement for, so they probably don’t care how many days it is either,” but that’s a pretty big leap. When Joe asked for five days, why not contact HR at that point and say, “Joe is asking for five days and my understanding is that it’s only three — can you confirm before I respond?”
On the issue of who he can take the leave for: if this is really a distant relative of his wife who he wasn’t close to himself, then yes, he’s abusing the policy … but do we actually know that? He knew enough to give you play-by-plays of what was happening, so it seems possible that he was closer to this person than you realized. Or maybe not, of course — some people do abuse this kind of situation and stretch the truth when it will benefit them, and maybe that happened here. But it’s not outrageous for your HR to choose to trust him when he said they were close. And yes, HR needs to clarify the policy because otherwise you’ll have people thinking they can’t take the leave for the death of the aunt who raised them, when that’s apparently not their intent, but you leaped really fast to “throw the whole thing out.”
Anyway, the upshot is that you need to manage Joe more assertively. You’re feeling frustrated because you’re not getting what you need from him, but that just means you need to step things up on your side. You have all the power here.
WASHINGTON—Expressing certainty that they wouldn’t make it to spring without resorting to drastic measures, the American people stated Wednesday that they had been left with no choice but to eat 35 million Canadians to survive the harsh winter.
According to sources, the United States endured below-freezing temperatures and depleted food rations for weeks before a terrible hunger drove all 340 million of its residents to turn to cannibalism in order to increase their odds of staying alive.
“After so many days without a proper meal, I could feel my body starting to eat away at itself,” said Amy Hanrahan of Roseau, MN, who along with the rest of the country managed to persevere amid the hostile conditions by reluctantly consuming nearly 85% of Canada’s population. “It may sound barbaric to an outsider, but the cupboard was bare. We ran through all the reserves we’d laid in for the winter, people didn’t have half a bag of pizza rolls between them, and the Dairy Queens had all closed for the season. We were facing certain death.”
“At first, we said we wouldn’t eat beyond the flannel and the denim,” she continued, “but you do what you need to do to survive.”
The nation is said to have made a few ineffectual attempts to forage locally, but with months of winter left to go and no indication that help was coming, a new plan was made. In a last-ditch effort to find sustenance, several hundred thousand intrepid Americans ventured north on an expedition across the border. Between Newfoundland and Yukon, they reportedly discovered nearly 6 billion pounds of surplus Canadians.
While some U.S. residents said they were ethically opposed to consuming their Canadian brethren, the severity of the situ-ation soon led them to accept that sacrificing their North American neighbors was their only hope of avoiding starvation.
“Either I eat the guy, or I go hungry,” said Ione, WA, man Lee Danvers, who is believed to have been the first of many millions to try a Canadian when he cut into a Winnipeg banker and swallowed a matchstick-sized piece of flesh. “Once we ran out of people to eat in Puerto Rico and Guam, we really didn’t have a choice.”
“It tasted so good,” Danvers added. “It was our only option, and it was delicious.”
Many Americans reported feeling residual guilt over the three generations of Canadians they ate their way through, while others were unapologetic, noting that Ontarians provided a lot of sustenance and the Quebecois possessed a rich, buttery flavor that was highly satisfying. Nearly all agreed the Canadians would have readily eaten most of the Midwest if the situation had been reversed.
“You should have seen the crazy look in their eyes,” said Canada’s Joseph O’Brien, who stumbled upon the “feral, blood-covered” American popul- ace while on an early morning hike near his home in Banff, Alberta, where the landscape was crimson with the slaught-ered remains of his gorged-upon countrymen. “I was lucky to make it out alive. They had so much meat, yet they still ran after me. God, I can still hear the sound of them sucking on the bones.”
“I really don’t understand what would drive a person to do something like that,” he continued. “There are over 4,000 Tim Hortons locations in this country they could have eaten at instead.”
LOS ANGELES—Urging the next generation of NBA talent to learn from his mistakes and avoid going down the wrong path, Shaquille O’Neal issued a stern warning Monday to young basketball players not to star in a movie about a genie. “When you come into the league and suddenly have all this money and fame, it’s easy to get carried away, whether it’s spending too much or partying too much or agreeing to appear in a poorly written movie where you play a streetwise rapping genie who lives in a boom box,” the Hall of Famer said during an appearance on The Bill Simmons Podcast, advising fresh-faced rookies to be wary of predatory film executives who might try to cast them in doomed low-budget kids’ movies that end up notching a 5% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. “These young guys think they’re unstoppable, but trust me, all it takes is one film where you play a fast-talking genie tasked with helping a wayward child reconcile with his estranged father, and you’re in a bad spot,” he continued. “I don’t care if they let you do a few songs for the soundtrack, I don’t care if they use state-of-the-art 1990s computer animation to make it look like you’re rolling the bad guy up into a ball and dunking him into a garbage chute—as soon as someone pulls out that golden vest and the pointy shoes, you need to walk away.” O’Neal added that if he could give any further advice to younger players, it would be to make dozens of commercials for Icy Hot.
WASHINGTON—Still sweating from the 7.5-mile walk from the White House to the video game retailer, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were spotted Thursday attempting to trade in a 1797 portrait of George Washington at a D.C.-area GameStop. “One PS5, please,” Donald Jr. said as his younger brother Eric pushed the 18th-century Gilbert Stuart oil-on-canvas across the counter and assured the silent middle-aged employee on the other side that it was a real painting. “It’s a super good picture, so it’s worth a lot of money. You don’t even have to keep it if you don’t want to. You can just use the fancy frame. It’s all golden and stuff, see, so it’s probably worth a lot of money too. We carried it all the way here. You got to give us something because we can’t carry it all the way back. Say, are you done yet? Do you have Grand Theft Auto VI ?” At press time, the GameStop employee was reportedly telling the Trump boys that the best he could do was a Donkey Kong Amiibo.
Sure, you denied yourself many things as you scrimped and saved enough for a down payment on a home, but it’ll all be worth it when your father calls it a total dump.
If you choose to fight Renoir at this point, he is close enough to your party's level that it is a balanced and dramatic experience. If you instead choose to continue playing the videogame -- because why wouldn't you? -- you get to come back tens of levels later and flatten him before he gets a chance to show you his cool moves.
Laying in the back seat listening to Little Willie John, yeah, that’s when time stood still! A new Solver chapter begins, HULL OR HIGH WATER. It forms part of a loose-three parter with Little Days and the upcoming and inappropriately timed Christmas Special to round out Solver volume 2. I don’t just make this stuff up on the hoof, it’s carefully constructed. Over-engineered, like a Victorian aqueduct.
Calgary, Alberta – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has once again invoked the notwithstanding clause, something meant for only the most dire times to pass legislation, to get around a small legal problem. “This is exactly the kind of reason the notwithstanding clause exists,” argued Smith while double-parked in a handicap spot. “If me want to […]
WASHINGTON D.C. – Following the confirmed death of Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S.-led airstrikes, observers question whether Iran’s allies will retaliate, and also whether President Trump will finally win his late father’s approval. “The Middle East is at a delicate stage right now, and the key to understanding lies in that dead […]
OTTAWA – After publishing an official statement on behalf of the Canadian government supporting the joint US-Israel bombings in Iran this morning, Prime Minister Carney was spotted happily putting the rules-based international order sign back in the window of Parliament. “Look, guys, when I made that speech at Davos about ‘taking the sign out of […]
MORE FUNCTIONS! Hello again, this video is a follow up to my video on functions in higher dimensions, and this time I use an algorithm known as symbolic regression to automatically generate, mutate, and evolve the functions to create some trippy patterns.
Object permanence: RIP Octavia Butler; "Midnighters"; Freeman Dyson on "The Information"; Korean Little Brother filibuster; Privacy isn't property; With Great Power Came No Responsibility; Unsellable A-holes; Cardboard Cthulhu; Chinese map fuzzing.
California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (permalink)
For months, the hottest will-they/won't-they drama in Hollywood concerned the suitors for Warners, up for sale again after being bought, merged, looted and wrecked by the eminently guillotineable David Zaslav:
From the start, it was clear that Warners would be sucked dry and discarded, but the Trump 2024 election turned the looting of Warners' corpse into a high-stakes political drama.
On the one hand, you had Netflix, who wanted to buy Warners and use them to make good movies, but also to kill off movie theaters forever by blocking theatrical distribution of Warners' products.
On the other hand, you had Paramount, owned by the spray-tan cured tech billionaire jerky Larry Ellison, though everyone is supposed to pretend that Ellison's do-nothing/know-nothing/amounts-to-nothing son Billy (or whatever who cares) Ellison is running the show.
Ellison's plan was to buy Warners and fold it into the oligarchic media capture project that's seen Ellison replace the head of CBS with the tedious mediocrity Bari Weiss:
This is a multi-pronged media takeover that includes Jeff Bezos neutering the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a Nazi bar, and Trump stealing Tiktok and giving it to Larry Ellison. If Ellison gains control over Warners, you can add CNN to the nonsense factory.
But for a while there, it looked like the Ellisons would lose the bidding. Little Timmy (or whatever who cares) Ellison only has whatever money his dad parks in his bank account for tax purposes, and Larry Ellison is so mired in debt that one margin call could cost him his company, his fighter jet, and his Hawaiian version of Little St James Island.
Warners' board may not give a shit about making good media or telling the truth or staving off fascism, but they do want to get paid, and Netflix has money in the bank, whereas Ellison only has the bank's money (for now).
But last week, the dam broke: Warners' board indicated they'd take Paramount's offer, and Netflix withdrew their offer, and so that's that, right? It's not like Trump's FTC is going to actually block this radioactively illegal merger, despite the catastrophic corporate consolidation that would result, with terrible consequences for workers, audiences, theaters, cable operators and the entire supply chain.
Not so fast! The Clayton Act – which bars this kind of merger – is designed to be enforced by the feds, state governments, and private parties. That means that California AG Rob Bonta can step in to block this merger, which he's getting ready to do:
As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, state AGs block mergers all the time, even when the feds decline to step in – just a couple years ago, Washington state killed the Kroger/Albertsons merger.
The fact that antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level is a genius piece of policy design. As the old joke goes, "AG" stands for "aspiring governor," and the fact that state AGs can step in to rescue their voters from do-nothing political hacks in Washington is catnip for our nation's attorneys general.
Bonta is definitely feeling his oats: he's also going after Amazon for price-fixing, picking up a cause that Trump dropped after Jeff Bezos ordered the Washington Post to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris, paid a million bucks to sit on the inaugural dais, millions more to fund the White House Epstein Memorial Ballroom and $40m more to make an unwatchable turkey of a movie about Melania Trump.
Can you imagine how stupid Bezos is going to feel when all of his bribes to Trump cash out to nothing after Rob Bonta publishes Amazon's damning internal memos and then fines the company a gazillion dollars?
It's a testament to the power of designing laws so they can be enforced by multiple parties. And as cool as it is to have a law that state AGs can enforce, it's way cooler to have a law that can be enforced by members of the public.
This is called a "private right of action" – the thing that lets impact litigation shops like Planned Parenthood, EFF, and the ACLU sue over violations of the public's rights. The business lobby hates the private right of action, because they think (correctly) that they can buy off enough regulators and enforcers to let them get away with murder (often literally), but they know they can't buy off every impact litigation shop and every member of the no-win/no-fee bar.
For decades, corporate America has tried to abolish the public's right to sue companies under any circumstances. That's why so many terms of service now feature "binding arbitration waivers" that deny you access to the courts, no matter how badly you are injured:
But long before Antonin Scalia made it legal to cram binding arbitration down your throat, corporate America was pumping out propaganda for "tort reform," spreading the story that greedy lawyers were ginning up baseless legal threats to extort settlements from hardworking entrepreneurs. These stories are 99.9% bullshit, including urban legends like the "McDonald's hot coffee" lawsuit:
Ever since Reagan, corporate America has been on a 45-year winning streak. Nothing epitomizes the arrogance of these monsters more than the GW Bush administration's sneering references to "the reality-based community":
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Giving Ellison, Bezos and Musk control over our media seems like the triumph of billionaires' efforts to "create their own reality," and indeed, for years, they've been able to gin up national panics over nothingburgers like "trans ideology," "woke" and "the immigration crisis."
But just lately, that reality-creation machine has started to break down. Despite taking over the press, locking every reality-based reporter out of the White House, and getting Musk, Zuck and Ellison to paint their algorithms spray-tan orange, people just fucking hate Trump. He is underwater on every single issue:
Despite the full-court press – from both the Dem and the GOP establishment – to deny the genocide in Gaza and paint anyone (especially Jews like me) who condemn the slaughter as "antisemites," Americans condemn Israel and are fully in the tank for Palestinians:
Despite throwing massive subsidies at coal and tying every available millstone around renewables' ankles before throwing all the solar panels and windmills into the sea, renewables are growing and – to Trump's great chagrin – oil companies can't find anyone to loan them the money they need to steal Venezuela's oil:
Reality turns out to be surprisingly stubborn, and what's more, it has a pronounced left-wing bias. Putting little Huey (or whatever who cares) Ellison in charge of Warners will be bad news for the news, for media, for movies and TV, and for my neighbors in Burbank. But when it comes to shaping the media, Freddy (or whatever who cares) Ellison will continue to eat shit.
"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 (1022 words today, 40256 total)
"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
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
The anti-DEI movement put the future of the high school class in question, but it ultimately survived state board review. Its supporters say that offers a lesson for other states.
Almost two centuries ago, dozens of Texans gathered in the town of Washington-on-the-Brazos to sign Texas’ Declaration of Independence from Mexico. Today, the site is investing in becoming a historical destination.
