1. My coworker doesn’t want me to lift heavy boxes
I work in a supply store that sells a variety of goods and also does returns for a large, very well-known company. One of my coworkers, a middle-aged man named “Carl,” has attempted to stop me (a woman in my 20s) from moving the closed return boxes every time we’ve worked together, warning me “they’re heavy.” (Our computer system ensures that nothing weighs over 40 pounds). I’ve told him that I don’t mind moving heavy boxes, but it doesn’t seem to register.
Yesterday, when he told me not to take a full cart of boxes to the back room, I said, “You seem concerned about me moving the boxes, but it’s not a problem.” I didn’t smile, but I think I said it respectfully. A few minutes later, he called me over and said, “This is a male thing.” He went on to explain that he “wasn’t picking on me,” but “in my country, we don’t let our females lift anything heavy.” He also told me that he didn’t doubt my ability to lift the boxes, but still thought I shouldn’t.
Today, we went to the back room to unbox a recent delivery and restock the store. Carl made a big deal about putting together a cart of items for me to stock without anything heavy on it. He even had me lift one of the bins that only contained a few items to feel how light it was. Then, towards the end of the day, he tried to take the package of bottled water I was carrying, but I didn’t let him.
I don’t know if Carl doesn’t understand why I find this demeaning, or if he’s actually being malicious. Overall, he’s a friendly person and seems well liked in the store, so I’m leaning towards the first possibility, but that doesn’t make it less infuriating!
I know you’ve covered this topic before, but I feel like I’ve already used the scripts you’ve mentioned in other posts. Saying “I’ve got it” doesn’t make it stop, nor does asking Carl why he’s doing it, nor does ignoring him. Do you have any advice on how to proceed if/when this continues? The store manager is very reasonable, and I’d consider asking her to talk to Carl if it came to that, but I’d rather try and solve the problem on my own first.
“I know you don’t mean to be rude, but this is coming across very disrespectfully. If ever need help, I will ask you for it. If I don’t, please give me the respect of trusting me to do my job.”
If he tells you again that he doesn’t let women lift anything heavy, you can say, “At work, you should be treating men and women the same. Again, please respect that I know what I am doing.”
If that doesn’t work, then yes, ask your store manager to tell him to cut it out.
2. Should I ask an employee about her computer background?
I have a direct report whose cube is open to the general office. The other day I noticed their computer background (attached). Having watched the entire series of The Good Place, I know exactly what this background is and what it represents. (Spoiler alert, everything is not fine and this is really The Bad Place). Does this mean they think of work as The Bad Place? Have they never seen the show and related to the general tone of “Everything is Fine” since the world is a mess?
They’re somewhere in their early to mid 20’s and I’m about 20 years older, if that matters. We do have semi-regular check-ins and they seem generally satisfied with their role. I feel I am pretty open and approachable as a supervisor. I have tried to figure out the language to ask if this has a deeper meaning, and the versions I tried on my partner at home all came out very Big Brother-y. Advice, please!
If your concern is whether it has deeper meaning about their satisfaction with their job, leave it alone. It’s likely just an expression of general cynicism and/or “the world is a mess / capitalism is a mess.” Probing into it would be putting too much weight on it and, yes, a little Big Brother-y.
However, if you’re concerned about the optics of it to others (particularly if she has a public-facing job where it could be pretty inappropriate in the sense of “we don’t telegraph our dissatisfaction to clients”), that’s not off-limits to raise.
3. How much detail should I share in a phone screen?
I’m a manager hiring for a position with a couple unusual aspects, and I’m wondering how much information to include when I’m phone-screening candidates.
First, the role is temporarily remote but will eventually transition to hybrid. This job is located outside our main service area where we don’t currently have an office space. So this person will initially work from home but once we establish a worksite, they will be in-office twice a week with the rest of the organization.
Also, for equity reasons, our organization doesn’t negotiate salary. Our range is $70k-$100k for the role, and starting salary is based solely on years of relevant experience. It is very rare for a new hire to come in over the mid-point of the salary range.
Much of this is described in the job posting as well, but in my experience, applicants usually don’t remember details other than the salary range.
During the phone screening, is it best to explain all of the above and allow time for questions? Or do I simply say, “This position is temporarily remote but will eventually transition to hybrid. Starting salary is $70k,” then move into the typical first-interview questions?
In other words, how much detail belongs in a phone screen so candidates can decide if the role feels like a fit, but don’t feel overwhelmed or discouraged?
You should share details about all of this. It’s exactly the kind of information where the details could make or break whether the candidate is interested in the job.
You shouldn’t just say “starting salary is $70,000” because that doesn’t give enough information for candidates who are looking for (and would be offered) more. Ideally you’d say, “The range is $70k-$100k and is based on solely on years of relevant experience. For a candidate with your background. I’d expect you to be offered right around $X. I want to be up-front that for for equity reasons, we don’t negotiate our offers. On your end, does it make sense to keep talking?”
For work location, ideally you’d share a likely timeline for them needing to be in the office since there’s a big difference between “you’ll be in the office sometime this quarter” and “getting an office space in your area is probably a few years away.”
4. Leaving for a new job when my boss is terminally ill
I’m at a small firm, and I am something of an executive assistant in addition to my main job. I worked very closely with a director at our company, as well as my grandboss, the owner/founder. Other than that, I’m a one-person department.
Last fall, my grandboss, who was my director’s long-time mentor, got very sick. He’s been taking a leave of absence, which has been somewhat fraught. I moved into more executive assistant duties for the director instead of for owner, and this long-suffering director has come to rely on me. Around new year’s, I reevaluated my goals and started applying for new roles, which had more to do with the consistent punching-bag nature of my position and almost nothing to do with the changes surrounding my boss’s illness. I’m pleased to say I anticipate having an offer very soon.
Things haven’t been improving for my boss, and I’ve learned today that he will be entering palliative care. I feel bad leaving for a new role and leaving the director in the lurch during this very sad and strange time. I don’t know anyone who has gone through anything remotely similar. I think I know what to do, that I should do what’s right for my career and take a good role if one comes my way … but I don’t have a sense of what’s a normal way to behave under these circumstances. Is this unusually heartless? Or would anyone else in my position accept a new offer?
It is not unusually heartless. You can care about your coworkers as people but still make career decisions that are in your best interests. (And for all we know, the director could be job-searching, too — if you turned down an offer out of loyalty, there would be no guarantee that she wouldn’t leave herself soon afterwards!)
Your obligations here are to give a normal amount of notice and transition your work as best as you can; no one reasonable would expect you to put your own career progression on hold.
I’m sorry about your boss.
5. Ashes at work for Ash Wednesday
I’m not client-facing and I work remotely, but if an employee were client-facing and they observed Ash Wednesday and the imposition of ashes, could an employer require them to wash off the ashes prior to any client or public meetings? I’m guessing not, but could the ashes be considered distracting? (For the record, I’m Christian and observe Ash Wednesday, but the imposition of ashes was never an option at the churches I attended, so I never really gave this any thought.)
No. The ashes are a religious observance, which employers are required to accommodate as long as doing so doesn’t cause them what the laws calls “undue hardship.” Courts have been clear that clients’ potential biases don’t qualify as “undue hardship” to the business (similar to how you also couldn’t decline to hire someone of race X or gender Y because clients might find their race or gender distracting, or discomforting, or so forth).
The lieutenant governor’s request to delay renewing the camp’s license came hours after parents who lost children in the July 4 flood sued the state for its alleged failure to enforce an evacuation plan requirement.
A federal court ruling means the new Utah voting districts that give Democrats an improved shot at winning a U.S. House seat can be used in this year's election.
WASHINGTON—In an effort to protect visitors to the violently contested territories south of the U.S. border, the State Department advised American tourists on Monday to temporarily avoid shootouts with Mexican drug cartels. “While at this time, we see no need for American travelers to cancel their vacations, we do strongly recommend that they refrain from exchanging gunfire with pistoleros from the Sinaloa Cartel or any other drug-trafficking enterprise with paramilitary capabilities,” said State Department spokesperson Hannah Griffin, who added that the Mexican military’s killing of the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel had inflamed the region and made the situation far more precarious for tourists hoping to carry out targeted assassinations and public executions of collaborators. “We’re not officially prohibiting American visitors from ambushing a group of soldados in the back of a pickup truck and publicly displaying their severed heads to intimidate police who might investigate. But we are suggesting that U.S. visitors focus on keeping themselves safe and, for the time being, leave their AK-47s in their hotel rooms.” Griffin later emphasized that once the situation in Mexico had stabilized, American tourists would be welcome to resume murdering with impunity.
Higher education faces looming threats from every direction. Dwindling enrollments. The demographic cliff. The enduring myth that professors have the time, inclination, and personal charm to brainwash the nation’s youth. Fire. Brimstone. Eternal damnation. The philosophy department getting merged with seven other departments, leading to your redundancy, your likely firing, and your doomed attempts to spin your PhD in poststructuralist theory into a job as whatever a “project manager” is.
But have you heard the good news? The college is rolling out a new strategic initiative.
We know the faculty feel overworked. Between teaching, research, advising, and ever-increasing but little-acknowledged service to the college, you’re beyond burnout. One more request for additional uncompensated labor and you might literally explode into a nerdy-ass ball of flame.
But the strategic initiative has a bigger plan for us all. You’re suffering now, but if you fight through the pain and work extra hard in support of the new strategic initiative, you’ll taste the sweet afterlife of a successfully executed strategic initiative. Once the prophecies of the strategic initiative have been brought to fulfillment, budget deficits will shrink, prestige and reputation will grow, that weird smell on the first floor of the student center will dissipate, and you’ll never be frazzled or beleaguered again.
Praise initiative!
A lot of you are probably wondering what the new strategic initiative is. Well, it’s complicated and hard to explain. It moves in mysterious ways. We’re building this plane as we fly it, as they say in the new strategic initiative biz. But fear not, because the strategic initiative will reveal itself in all its glorious details at a time when you are ready to comprehend it.
When we reach the kingdom of the new strategic initiative:
The low enrollment shall be made high.
The once apathetic students shall do the reading gratefully.
Tweed blazers shall give “dark academia chic” rather than “thrift store clearance.”
The US president shall cease his extortion, and the state legislators shall cease their content surveillance.
The anxiety-induced eczema shall clear up, and your mother shall cease her intimations that law school would have been a better choice.
The humanities departments shall be respected, or at least tolerated, or at the very least, the science departments will let their Humanities colleagues teach service courses like Medical Narratives and Medical Ethics, and maybe even History of Medicine.
The art studio, once damp and unventilated, shall become exalted—as exalted as the shiny locker rooms of the recruitment-driven sports teams—unless the new strategic initiative involves cutting Studio Art in favor of a new Corporate Logo Design degree, but we’re not saying that is part of the new strategic initiative; again, all the details have not been worked out.
Thanks be to initiative!
Yes, we understand that some of you may feel that the new strategic initiative does not substantively address the college’s problems. That’s because those heretics don’t yet have a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, the college’s new strategic initiative. All you need to do to attain that personal relationship is to welcome the new strategic initiative into your hearts.
And you can invite the new strategic initiative into your hearts by filling out the volunteer survey, which will arrive in your email shortly after this meeting. Time commitment and compensation are among the details that have not yet been worked out. However, the strategic initiative giveth and the strategic initiative taketh away, and we’d wager a guess that it giveth minimal compensation and taketh away loads of time.
I have a few employees who have told us they do not celebrate birthdays, but they do sit to eat the lunch the company buys for the birthday person and then leave when it’s time to sing “happy birthday.” (One of them asks for cake after everyone goes back to work.)
These same employees say they do not observe holidays and do not attend parties (like the employee Christmas party), but they say they can receive the Christmas bonus that the company gives out.
Would the company be in the wrong not to invite them to the lunch or give them a monetary Christmas bonus since we are trying to comply with their religious beliefs?
Yes, the company would be 100% in the wrong.
Your employees are the experts on their own religious beliefs, and if they are comfortable receiving Christmas bonuses or eating birthday cake, then that’s how it works for them. The company has no standing to say, “Actually, we know better about your religious observances than you do.”
You can’t really claim that you’re trying to comply with their religious beliefs while overruling them about what that observance should look like.
It sounds like the subtext here is that you think they’re trying to get away with perks they somehow don’t deserve — like that they don’t really object to holiday celebrations when it can benefit them — but even if that were true, the stakes would be so low that it shouldn’t matter in the slightest. They’d be “getting away” with, what, eating cake without sticking around for a birthday song? Skipping a party? Who cares?
It would be different if the impact was greater, like if they said they couldn’t work Sundays for religious reasons and so other people always had to cover Sundays, but then suddenly they were willing to work on a Sunday when Rihanna was scheduled to tour your plant. Even then, you’d have a tricky time navigating that — because again, they’re the experts on their own religious observances, but it would at least be more understandable for it to raise some eyebrows.
But it would be astonishingly petty to try to withhold cake from them — and flat-out illegal to try to withhold the bonus on religious grounds.
Time for yet another Q&A post, in which we answer your questions about area weather and Space City Weather itself. If you missed past Q&As, we keep an archive of them here. Submit your own questions via the Contact link on the blog’s home page, or post it to our Weather Talk topic on our Discourse forum.
Q. Every year for the past 20 odd years I’ve been raking leaves on my property in North Houston and this would normally stop by mid January. It’s mid February and maples and water oaks are shedding like crazy, not to mention that it seems like the drought made pines start dropping their needles like a month earlier. What is going on!?
A. First of all, I’ve noticed this phenomenon as well this winter, and have wondered the same thing. Second, I am not an arborist (although I do love trees). However, I do think the weather is involved here, and probably explains what has happened.
The only thing a pile of leaves is really good for.
Live oaks typically keep their leaves well into winter, as you note. Then, they finally drop their leaves just as new ones are ready to emerge. So why is it happening later this year?
I would go back to our very warm weather in December (especially the second half of the month), followed by similar conditions through the first three weeks of January. This led to a delayed drop. Then, I suspect the Arctic fronts in late January and early February were a shock, causing most of our trees to lose all of their leaves at once. Our region’s lingering drought may well have also played a role. When you’re done raking at your house, would you care to come to mine?
– Eric
Q. We appreciate and rely upon your succinct forecasting and reporting our weather. However, we are frustrated by your haphazard timing each morning. We need to have your forecast by 7 a.m. and some mornings we have it, but often we miss it.
A. The only thing a lot of people really need before 7 a.m. in the morning is coffee, but I take your point.
Time for coffee! (Digital Clock Maker)
Over the years the time I’ve posted on Space City Weather has varied based on the time I needed to get up and write a forecast before dropping one or both of my girls at school. That generally was before 7 a.m. However they’ve both graduated now, so there’s no forcing factor. Sometimes I “sleep in” until 6:30 a.m. or so, and this causes the post to be published later in the morning. There are also some days when the forecast is really complex, and I spend a lot of time trying to really understand things before writing a word.
But these are excuses, and in reality you are not the only person who has asked for this. So dear reader, I will commit to trying very hard to get the daily posts out by 7 a.m. There may be some mornings when I’m traveling for my day job, or when life happens. And I am not going to commit Matt to this deadline because he still has young kids.
But most days we’ll hit ‘publish’ by or before 7 a.m.
– Eric
Q. As a meteorologist, the usage of AI to make slop art is pretty disappointing. I think the comments on your posts about it tell you everything.
A. Wait, did we receive some negative feedback for the use of this image? I’m kidding. There were lots of comments and concerns, so I want to explain why we did so, how we use AI, and to try and allay reader concerns.
We have used AI-created images (always clearly labeled as such) only seven times in the history of Space City Weather, but most recent time we did so came on February 5th, here. This was, by far, the most controversial time. I used the image that morning because it was a humorous post, and I wanted a similarly “fun” image. I thought the AI-created image really fit the tone of the post, so I ran with it. It was a spur of the moment decision. This did not put a graphic artist out of business. Had I not used the AI-generated image, I would have just used a standard weather map or something.
I feel very conflicted about artificial intelligence, and its increasing prominence in our lives. A line in a recent op-ed in the New York Times really resonated with me: “”All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it.” Basically, some of the most powerful business leaders in the world are aggressively pushing this stuff on us, and I don’t think they have our best interests at heart. I worry about the environmental implications. And I worry about the disruption to society a lot, and what the future is going to look like for my kids. So one one level, yes, I’m definitely uncomfortable with AI.
However, like it or not, this stuff is coming. And it behooves me—a perpetually online writer, forecaster, and journalist—to understand the technology and its implications. So yes, I experiment with AI tools and have found some utility in them. For forecasting, some of the AI-based weather models are quite good and Matt and I use them daily alongside traditional, physics-based models.
About one year ago we published an article outlining how Space City Weather will, and will not use AI. In that article, I wrote, “We have not, nor will we use any AI-based service for the writing of our forecasts. Very occasionally we may use an AI-based illustration, but if we do it will be clearly labeled as such.” That is the commitment we made to readers at the time, and we stuck with that, including our controversial use of an AI image a couple of weeks ago. However, I do want to reiterate that every word printed on this site in the past, today, and in perpetuity will be written by a human hand.
– Eric
Q. Houston’s such a big place, the weather is all over the place and yes, that pun was intended! Why do you only have 12 cities to pick from on your app? Why isn’t my city/town/neighborhood included?
A. Did you know that the city of Houston covers more than 600 square miles? It’s true! And that one of my favorite jokes about living here is that “Houston is an hour away from Houston”? “A big place” is something of an understatement …
This is one of our most-asked questions. When we first set out to build and release a mobile app for the site, we had to make some hard choices about which locations to include in the city picker (tap the 3-line menu on the upper left corner of the app’s home screen to see it). Eric and Matt tried to ensure that the region got wide-ranging coverage, but we only had five slots in the initial design. We were able to expand to a dozen in later updates, where we remain today.
When the SCW app first launched, there were only five regions to choose from, as seen on the left. Users now have a dozen.
Besides Eric’s & Matt’s judgement calls, there are some technical and design limitations. On most phones and tablets, we didn’t want to force users to scroll through a bunch of city names (though on smaller devices there may be a bit of a scroll), and we wanted to keep the app “lite.”
In addition, we use location-based conditions and forecast feeds from the National Weather Service, and if there is not a feed for a particular city, we can’t provide that data.
Your best bet if you don’t see your exact location in the picker is to choose the city closest to you. Yes, Houston’s spread out, but the weather source nearest you is very likely to have the conditions and forecasting info you need. For example, I live in the Montrose/River Oaks area, so I choose Hobby as my location. That works out pretty well.
One of the other reasons for our current approach is that we don’t track anything you do in the app, and that includes location. But we are considering changing that – location tracking may be added to a future version of the app as an opt-in feature. If you wanted to know the conditions and forecast at your current location, this feature would do that. But again, it would be off by default.
Also, we are looking at the feasibility of adding cities for every available NWS feed and letting users pick their 12 cities – or letting the app choose for you based on location, if you opt-in. A big under-the-hood change planned for this year could enable that. These are all proposals, nothing yet set in stone; let’s just say it’s … aspirational!
Q. I’ve been dealing with some serious allergies. Have you noticed any data showing a surge in allergens like pollen or cedar? Does this seem earlier than usual for the season, or could it be tied to that big temperature swing from the hard freeze to the 80s this week?
A. This question tends to come up each spring, or late winter as it is in Houston. Is allergy season starting earlier than it has? There’s some evidence in research that says this is occurring as the climate warms. But looking practically at recent data specifically in Houston, it’s a little more mixed. Tree pollen is considered high once levels hit about 80 or so. But the first really, really bad day of spring typically hits when we get to around a level of 500. If you’re curious, the worst day we’ve had since we’ve tracked this back to 2017 was April 7, 2022 when pollen levels exceeded 12,000!
So when has Houston hit that first “500” of the season?
2017: January 4 and again February 9 2018: January 12, 23, and February 2 2019: January 24, 29, and February 5 2020: January 27 and February 4 2021: January 7, several more times through Feb 1, then not again til mid-March 2022: February 18 2023: January 6, 13, 24, and February 7 2024: January 2 and February 1 2025: January 31 and February 10 2026: February 12
What can we make of this? Well, for one it seems like we almost always get 1 to 3 bad allergy days before February. Usually that’ll be a bunch of cedar blowing in behind a cold front with strong winds. But we don’t really see our true “season” establish until around the first week or two of February. From that point of view, this year seems to be right on time, if not perhaps a little late.
Houston’s tree pollen count from January through April; no data on weekends or holidays. (Houston Health Department)
The glaring outlier is 2021, when the mid-February freeze likely caused enough damage to trees to keep pollen from becoming an issue again til March and April. But as you can see from the chart, we are quite early in the game. We haven’t seen anything yet, and it’s likely the next 2-6 weeks will be rough for seasonal allergy sufferers.
– Matt
Q. For a while there, it seemed like Houston had a flood every year, sometimes more than one. That seems to have faded in the past few years. Is there a bigger-picture thing happening, or is it just the roll of the weather dice?
A. If you look at the history of Houston flood events, you’ll find a mix of all sorts of years and event types that triggered them. In some ways 2015 (Memorial Day) and 2016 (Tax Day) were just dumb luck thunderstorm events. Neither were “freak,” per se, but they had a sense of randomness to them.
Then, in 2017 Harvey was caused by a remnant hurricane and 2019 was a stalled out tropical storm (Imelda). You are correct that since then, things have tended to be a little calmer. Since 2019, Houston has only had one year of above average rainfall (2024), and of course that was tied heavily to one event (Beryl) and an active spring thunderstorm season. So just generally speaking, we’ve been drier than usual, reducing the overall odds of rain events.
A parking garage at the intersection of Waugh and West Gray flooded badly during Hurricane Harvey after water rushed in off the street. (Dwight Silverman photo)
Also, keep in mind that Houston is merely a dot on a map. Regionally, there have been some bad flooding events since our bad luck finally eased up. News of the recent massive expansion in floodplain coverage across Harris County, however, should give us all pause that while we’ve been more than deserving of a few years of calm, the pendulum will one day swing back again.
WASHINGTON—Saying his advocacy for consuming animal products had painted a target on his back, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed Monday that anti-protein extremists had left a head of lettuce on his doorstep. “Yesterday morning when my wife went out to get the paper, she discovered a gruesome threat left by radical herbivores attempting to intimidate me,” a visibly shaken Kennedy said at a press conference, adding that the FBI was processing the head of iceberg lettuce for fingerprints and would investigate the incident as an act of suspected anti-protein terrorism. “I never had any illusions that ending the War on Protein would go unanswered by these enemies of muscle mass. Nonetheless, I’m shocked by this brazen and disgusting attack on my family. I felt so sick after seeing those leafy greens that I couldn’t even finish my plate of raw liver. But I will not be cowed by this heinous provocation. I will continue fighting for Americans’ right to consume protein no matter how many cabbages, zucchinis, or stalks of celery these monsters wield against me.” Eyewitnesses reported that Kennedy ended the press conference by defiantly chugging a glass of raw hamburger.
NEW YORK—In an unprecedented effort to “pour gas on the fire” and grow the popularity of the league, NHL officials announced Monday that it was launching a new $800 marketing campaign in a major push to attract new fans. “Move over, NFL and NBA, because we are pulling out all the stops to make the NHL the biggest thing in sports, starting with a bold new banner ad we’ll be running on Yahoo.com,” said NHL chief marketing officer Heidi Browning in a press release, noting that the three-figure initiative aims to highlight the most exciting elements of the sport, from “the toots of the refs’ whistles” to “the game’s many rules” to “the players’ high-tech safety gear.” “We’re going to be passing out hundreds of promotional stickers and snazzy brochures encouraging folks to check out their local NHL team. And once the computer whiz we hired for $30 an hour finishes getting our Google business profile set up and blasted out to the web, it’s just a matter of time before everyone in America ‘catches the cold’ of professional hockey!” At press time, NHL officials confirmed the campaign was already paying in dividends after the Yahoo banner ad racked up 14 unique impressions in the first day.
THE HEAVENS—Admitting He felt torn between His true feelings and His fear of the unknown, the Lord God Almighty announced Monday that He no longer loved humanity but was too afraid to leave. “Any affection I ever had for the human race is long gone, but I’m just terrified at the thought of walking away and being alone,” said Our Heavenly Father, adding while He has felt “stuck” for millennia in the company of the species He adored long ago, He still worries He would have no real identity without them and starting over at His age was terrifying. “Sometimes I imagine myself ending it, striking out on my own, and discovering who I really am as God. But then reality comes crashing down. I’ve been with humanity since the sixth day of creation. What am I supposed to do, start over with bonobos?” At press time, The Almighty acknowledged that He would face little resistance if He left, as humanity has also been growing increasingly distant for some time now.
Mexico introduced tactical robot dogs as part of security preparations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with officials claiming the robotic units will assist police with surveillance, monitoring, and intervention operations during the international soccer tournament. What do you think?
“How many human police dogs lost their jobs for this?”
Peter Greenleaf, Anvil Molder
“There’s no rule that says a robotic dog can’t guard soccer.”
Josh Samayoa, Mink Rescuer
“Robot dogs can be easily distracted by throwing them a juicy piece of lithium.”
If passed into law, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act will create new barriers to voting in federal elections by requiring documentation of citizenship to register and imposing strict photo-identification rules at polling places. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the SAVE America Act.
Q: What is the goal of the bill?
A: To ensure the pristine integrity of American elections by making sure they never happen again.
Q: What form of ID can be used to confirm citizenship?
A: NRA membership cards.
Q: Is the Senate expected to pass the SAVE America Act?
A: Depends on which senators die between now and the vote.
Q: Where’s my birth certificate?
A: Did you check the bottom drawer of the living room cabinet? There should be a purple folder underneath all those old receipts.
Q: Why did Trump endorse it?
A: To stop the many thousands of immigrants who aren’t here anymore from voting.
OTTAWA – Following the closing ceremonies of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Canada’s athletes received an unusual message from President of the United States Donald Trump, stating simply “Give me all of your Olympic medals.” The blunt demand arrived amidst ongoing trade negotiations, and was delivered at 1am via Trump’s Truth Social platform. “Canada wouldn’t have […]
In brief: In today’s post, although it is quite chilly this morning, we report that Houston is probably done with freezing weather for this season. We also look ahead to a warm day on Thursday, followed by mild conditions this weekend.
Last freeze?
Temperatures are rather cold across the Houston region this morning, dropping into the low- to mid-30s are inland areas such as Conroe and Cleveland, with the low 40s in the urban parts of the region. However, with it not freezing this morning, Matt and I are fairly confident the Houston region will not see a freeze again this season.
Temperatures should be above normal for most of the United States well into March. (Pivotal Weather)
Could it freeze in parts of Houston? On average, the city experiences its last freeze in mid-February (last week), but there have been plenty of years in which temperatures have reached freezing in March. So this is not a firm guarantee from your friendly meteorologists at Space City Weather. But looking ahead at our weather the next two weeks, there is nothing to suggest freezing temperatures are on the horizon. Overall, things look pretty spring-like for us, and that pattern is likely to carry on through March.
Speaking of winter, a powerful winter storm has hit the northeastern United States during the overnight hours. This was well predicted by forecasters, but still quite a striking event for the region from Washington D.C. to Maine. Winds are gusting up to 60 mph, in addition to 1 to 3 feet of snow, in some locations. Matt has been writing about the impacts of this massive blizzard over on The Eyewall.
Monday
By contrast, our weather here is likely to be fair in the days ahead, with sunny skies prevailing for the most part. High temperatures today will push up into the low- to mid-60s, with light northeasterly winds. Low temperatures tonight will again drop into the low 40s in Houston, with the potential for upper 30s for some areas further inland.
Tuesday
This will be another sunny day, with highs pushing into the lower 70s as high pressure eases away from the region. Winds will turn gusty from the south, perhaps up to 25 mph during the afternoon and early evening hours. Lows on Tuesday night will drop to around 60 degrees.
Wednesday
This will be another day in which southerly winds really whip up across the region, gusting to perhaps 25 or even 30 mph, bringing more humid air into the region. Highs on Wednesday will likely reach up to around 80 degrees, with mostly sunny skies. Lows on Wednesday night will fall only into the 60s.
By Thursday, temperatures will be sizzling across Southern Texas. (Pivotal Weather)
Thursday
This will be the warmest day of the week, and perhaps the year to date, as highs push into the low- to mid-80s across the region. Temperatures may feel upward pressure due to compressional heating as a cool front pushes southward, likely reaching the area during the afternoon or early evening hours. I don’t expect much in the way of rain with the front, but it should knock lows into the upper 50s by Friday morning.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
The weekend looks to be mild, with high temperatures in the vicinity of 80 degrees, and mostly sunny skies. Overnight lows will range from the mid-50s to 60 degrees, probably, with moderate humidity levels. It won’t be cold, but it won’t be steamy hot, either.
Next week
Our mild weather continues into next week, with highs likely in the vicinity of 80 degrees. Some rain chances may return by around the middle of next week, we’ll see!
Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"
What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.
I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.
In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.
There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.
This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.
All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":
One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:
There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:
Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):
As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."
Which brings Broderick to his main question:
If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?
His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."
For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.
Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.
This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming as a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.
But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:
Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.
Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:
A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":
Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.
And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."
I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).
I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:
It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.
It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.
"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 (1035 words today, 351334 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
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I have a direct report whose cube is open to the general office. The other day I noticed their computer background (attached). Having watched the entire series of The Good Place, I know exactly what this background is and what it represents. (Spoiler alert, everything is not fine and this is really The Bad Place). Does this mean they think of work as The Bad Place? Have they never seen the show and related to the general tone of “Everything is Fine” since the world is a mess?
![[img]:hxsxtx](https://analognowhere.com/_/hxsxtx/hxsxtx.png)
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