Cowboy Who?

#Ryo #RoninWarriors

Cowboy Pat disappeared? #CowboyWho

Oh ... well ... hi there little partners! Well ... couple of technical problems down here but, well, that's ok. Because it's time for this week's exciting episode of Trail of the Royal Mounted! #CowboyWho

E-commerce giant Vevor is expected to open its first U.S. flagship store sometime this week. The company is best known for white-labeling home improvement, kitchen, and gardening tools under the Vevor brand. Meaning Vevor doesn’t manufacture products directly; instead, it contracts with existing factories to produce them. Vevor’s business model to date has been exclusively online, through third parties such as Home Depot and Amazon. According to a representative at the new Vevor store in ...

It’s Valentine’s Day on Saturday so let’s talk about workplace romance. Did you spot coworkers having a secret affair without realizing how obvious they were being? Did your boss date your dad and try to get you to go to couples therapy with them? Did you spend a ton of time mediating between two employees who hated each other and then they ended up dating? Was your coworker always making out with his girlfriend at work? Did your colleague leave a rambling, drunken message for his secret office girlfriend — but accidentally leave it on the boss’s voicemail instead?

Let’s discuss workplace romance gone both wrong and right.

Read a round-up of some of my favorite stories from this post.

The post let’s discuss workplace romance gone wrong … and right appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Over the years, we’ve had many letters about animals at work. Here are some of them.

my employee doesn’t think we’re doing enough about bears at work (and the update)

people only ask me about the ducks I work with (with a video in the update!)

the pumpkin-eating cat

my office got us turtles to take care of and bring home on weekends

my office is infested with wasps

our building is full of bats, sewer smells, moths, and more

an unexpected office bird

how much can I pet my cat on video calls? (and the update)

my colleague is allergic to me because of my cats

actual llamas

head of HR is waging a pressure campaign to make me adopt a puppy

my VP of HR says my service dog is too small (and the update)

I bring my dog to work — but an anonymous note asked me not to

my company wants to sponsor me for a service dog, but I’m not sure I should accept (and the update)

my boss’s dog rampages through our work gatherings

the secret goat, the geese vs the CEO, and other stories of animals at work

here are animals taking over home offices

here are your animal coworkers (and part 2)

the cats of AAM

And we’ve had so many letters involving dogs at work (not all included above) that I created a whole new tag just for them.

The post animals at work appeared first on Ask a Manager.

DETROIT, MI – Billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose family recently lobbied the Trump administration to publicly threaten the Gordie Howe International Bridge which competes with their interests, has praised the ease of use of President Trump’s new EZ-Bribe phone app. “Before when I wanted to bribe a public official it was a complicated matter of hiring […]

The post Billionaires who lobbied Trump to halt Canadian bridge praise EZ-Bribe App appeared first on The Beaverton.

The post Pam Bondi Thought That Went Pretty Well appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Hailing the move as a more wholesome and patriotic substitute for the current U.S. territory, conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA announced Thursday that it was setting up an alternative Puerto Rico. “Finally, Americans will be able to enjoy a family-friendly tropical paradise that actually celebrates traditional values,” said Turning Point CEO Erika Kirk, adding that the island would be known as “Port Rick,” a mistranslation of “Puerto Rico” that nevertheless reflected the new territory’s English-only mandate. “Good people who love America will no longer have to be intimidated by arroz con gandules and can sink their teeth into the new national dish, hamburgers. Of course, we’ll also be overhauling the music within our alternative Puerto Rico, replacing reggaeton and other aggressive styles with familiar, straight-ahead country music and Christian rock. And going forward, we’ll even be revamping the geography itself, swapping out the titillating bioluminescent bays for far less provocative basins of colorless water.” Kirk added that unlike the original Puerto Rico, the alternative would promptly receive disaster relief from the Trump administration.

The post Turning Point USA Announces Alternative Puerto Rico appeared first on The Onion.

In brief: In today’s post we provide some timing details on what to expect with Saturday’s front, which should bring a line of storms along with it. We also outline what looks to be an exceptional second half of the holiday weekend.

Timing of storms on Saturday

If you’re trying to make plans for Valentine’s Day, I want to tell you what I think will happen that day in terms of weather (I can make no predictions on the love side of the equation!) This forecast is still a bit tentative, but our confidence is increasing. An upper-level system will approach Houston, eventually dragging a cold front into the area. In terms of timing, Saturday morning should see a few light, scattered showers. At some point during the afternoon, activity may become a little stronger and more widespread.

However it now appears likely that a robust line of showers and thunderstorms could move through during the evening hours. My best guess is that this line moves through the Houston region between 6 pm and midnight on Saturday, with the slight possibility of some severe thunderstorms. This line may drop 0.5 to 1.5 inches of rain, but again rain totals will vary. For now I don’t anticipate flooding concerns, but if we get some over-performing or slowing storms, there may be some briefly flooded streets. Matt and I will keep a close eye on this for you.

Thursday

A weak, and dying front has stalled over Houston, dropping most of the area into the upper 50s this morning. It will lift back north today, leaving us with a sunny day and highs in the upper 70s. Winds will be light, from the southeast. Lows tonight will drop to around 60 degrees. Fog will remain a possibility during the overnight hours through Saturday morning.

Friday

This will be a partly sunny and mild day, with high temperatures in the mid-70s. Lows on Friday night will be a few degrees warmer than Thursday night, likely in the low 60s.

Saturday

As noted above, we expect showers and thunderstorms to pass through the area on Saturday, likely during the evening hours. Highs during the daytime will reach the mid-70s, with overnight lows dropping into the upper 50s, as drier air from the front arrives after midnight.

Sunday

This will be a splendid day, with highs likely in the low 70s, sunny skies, and much drier air. Winds will be gusty from the north during the morning hours, but probably will moderate after that. Lows on Sunday night will drop into the low 50s in Houston, with cooler conditions further inland.

Monday

The President’s Day holiday looks splendid as well, with highs in the low- to mid-70s, dry air, sunshine, and light winds. Expect another night in the 50s.

Rest of next week

Most of the rest of next week looks mild, with highs near 80 degrees, lows near 60, and partly sunny skies. Some sort of front may arrive toward the end of next week, but the details are fuzzy.

I’m back, baby.

Rapper Nicki Minaj has aligned herself with MAGA, stating that she is President Trump’s “number one fan.” The Onion sat down with the artist to discuss music, politics, and the controversy she’s created.

The Onion : During President Trump’s first term, you criticized his administration’s policy of separating families at the border. What changed?

Minaj: My Trinidadian cousin kept threatening to move here with his huge gross balls.

What do you and Trump talk about?

The struggle of finding a good makeup artist after alienating the LGBTQ+ community.

Which of your songs are the president’s favorites?

He said he liked all of them, which is the most of anybody I’ve ever met.

Is this about getting pardons for your husband and brother?

That’s ridiculous. Trump would pardon two sex criminals whether I supported him or not.

Do you worry about alienating your fans?

What fans?

What makes you the Queen of Rap?

Like any monarch, I turn a blind eye to the pedophiles in my family.

How will politics change your music?

“Super Bass” is now about fishing.

The post The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Nicki Minaj appeared first on The Onion.

A study published in Science found that a bonobo named Kanzi could play along when researchers offered him invisible juice and grapes in a manner akin to a child’s make-believe tea party, concluding that the primate could imagine and track the nonexistent objects being manipulated. What do you think?

The post Study: Bonobos Capable Of Human-Like Pretend Play appeared first on The Onion.

SAN FRANCISCO—Heralding what it called a “bold new age” in warping the mind of the nation’s elderly leader, OpenAI introduced a new premium video generator Thursday marketed toward White House advisors manipulating President Donald Trump. “Our new Stephen video generator is an easy, user-friendly text-to-video model that can create clips up to two minutes long and will easily trick the commander-in-chief into believing Mexico has deployed nuclear weapons on the U.S. border,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who revealed that the cutting-edge software had been trained on footage of protests, riots, immigrant arrests, and media interviews with Democratic politicians. “Stephen can create complex, detailed scenes of tattooed Guatemalan gang members robbing a child’s lemonade stand that can easily fool President Trump. We’ve seen incredible interest from White House aides and senior officials, who would like to generate dozens of videos a day to convince President Trump to arrest critical journalists or carpet bomb Brazil. All aides have to do is upload photos of Elizabeth Warren or Hakeem Jeffries and then make them do or say whatever they want. We’ve also added much more control for users, allowing aides to easily customize videos to meet their specific propaganda needs: Get creative and show Christians being buried alive on the streets of Africa, or homeless encampments in the Statue of Liberty. Or just have some fun with it and make a video of China landing on the moon. With the kind of influence and productivity Stephen enables, you could go from an assistant to a senior White House advisor in months. Of course, OpenAI’s mission is for all humanity to benefit, so we’ve added a security layer that asks ‘Are you sure?’ before generating a video of a Haitian immigrant barbecuing a baby.” At press time, Vice President JD Vance had reportedly been arrested after a dozen different White House employees generated videos of him protesting ICE and burning an American flag.

The post OpenAI Introduces Premium Video Generator For White House Advisors Manipulating Trump appeared first on The Onion.

As a child, my secret “cool kid” skill was the ability to eat the sourest candy—the kind that children only pop into their mouths when dared by the neighborhood bully—and shrug it off like it was absolutely nothing. The mean kids would encourage me to eat yet another Warhead or Tear Jerker, but I’d wolf it and stare back at their surprised faces without so much as an eye twitch. I not only tolerated the sourness well, I reveled in it. Warheads, sour gummies of any shape, entire lemons: If it had that puckering taste, I would demolish it.

No sour confection is safe when I am near. So when my friend Wyatt first introduced me to Trolli sour gummies years ago, I promptly asked him to hide the bag from me. Because for me, there was only eating Trolli sour gummies until I burned away all my taste buds, and my lips, teeth, and tongue turned toilet-cleaner blue.

Recently, I discovered the appropriately named “frozen novelties” aisle in my local Kroger. That’s where, as I paused to consider which flavor of vegan ice cream to take home, I found Trolli Gummi Pops staring back at me. They more than called to me; they screamed.

I immediately purchased a box and ripped into it the second I got home.

I tore open the wrapper, eager for that sour hit mixed with saccharine delight, and was disappointed to learn that Trolli Gummi Pops are not, in fact, sour. Not at all. Which was surprising given that every package of regular Trolli gummies promises three things: 1. Sour. 2. Brite. 3. Crawlers. (And occasionally 4. Electric.) Trolli Gummi Pops make good on number two: the grape-strawberry flavor I tried is brighter than a Peeps factory at peak Easter-season production. And Trolli Gummi Pops come fairly close with number three, crawlers: These frozen treats certainly look like original Trollis, albeit larger, girthier, and frozen-er. But the sour coating that truly coalesces the pucker-to-sweetness ratio into perfection? Nonexistent.

This soft, gummy, yet also frozen hard popsicle has the mouthfeel of chewing on a silicone kitchen utensil. The taste is your standard artificial flavor frenzy, but the texture falls somewhere between licking plastic and eating a slimy carrot—a texture that can only make you wonder how many microplastics you’ve just ingested. The box showcases an image of the Trolli popsicle jiggling, and I can confirm that once the freezer burn has nominally warmed, this stick of sick delight does wiggle back and forth, if you wave it around like a conductor in a candy confection orchestra.

Thanks to the classic Trolli gummy taste that’s engineered to make you eat an entire bag in one sitting, the popsicle was impossible for me to stop eating, even as the texture made me consistently question if I’d mistaken an eraser for food. (In fact, it didn’t wear down through lickage alone. It’s the only popsicle that I’ve ever had to chew.)

I gobbled it in less than three minutes.

But my husband, who was initially intrigued by this frozen novelty, was not nearly as tempted. He left two-thirds of his to melt in our kitchen sink. Yet melt it did not. For five. Solid. Hours. Instead, it formed a gloopy glob, making me wary of rinsing it down the sink for fear of repercussions on our fragile plumbing.

Unlike a bag of Trolli sour gummies, the remaining four Trolli Gummi Pops from the package will stay in my freezer until after the apocalypse, when, starving and desperate, we will drag them out and be grateful for the disturbing amounts of corn syrup, xanthan gum, and artificial strawberry flavoring that will no doubt keep Trolli Gummi Pops shelf-stable for millennia. But what if (it being the apocalypse) we don’t have a functioning freezer? Fortunately, we’ve already established that Trolli’s Gummi Pops will indeed hold their shape and resist the urge to melt into a puddle of artificial sweetener the way that inferior popsicles with better texture inevitably will.

Because when the end times come, I won’t just want a popsicle. I’ll want one that jiggles.

For people in relationships, February 14 is a day to celebrate love and romance with a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a thoughtfully written card. But for those in less clear-cut dynamics, Valentine’s Day creates a difficult quandary: How to acknowledge your insignificant other without jeopardizing the carefully crafted gray area of your situationship. They’re definitely not your Valentine, but they’re still… something. And surely that something deserves a card too?

Oh no! 45 minutes of work down the drain.

Thanks for putting a label on my life’s work.

The post Luge Gold Medalist Probably Main Luge Guy Now appeared first on The Onion.

 Gray walls, gray floors, gray ceilings, gray fixtures, gray appliances, gray home inspector, gray Realtor, gray real estate lawyer, gray grass, gray life, gray Earth, gray eternity. $1,300,000.

Reference #44439

The post It’s Gray Time! appeared first on The Onion.

Robert Donahue, 58, died suddenly while crawling through the woods in his deer costume.

The post Robert Donahue appeared first on The Onion.

The Food and Drug Administration has refused to review Moderna's application for an mRNA flu vaccine, the company revealed Tuesday.

While the move came as a surprise to the high-profile vaccine maker, it is just the latest hostility toward vaccines—and mRNA vaccines in particular—from an agency overseen by the fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his first year in office, Kennedy has already dramatically slashed childhood vaccine recommendations and canceled $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines against potential pandemic threats.

In a news release late Tuesday, Moderna said it was blindsided by the FDA's refusal, which the FDA cited as being due to the design of the company's Phase 3 trial for its mRNA flu vaccine, dubbed mRNA-1010. Specifically, the FDA's rejection was over the comparator vaccine Moderna used.

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Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website's anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia's volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

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It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Our new work stations will be outside our building’s security screening

I work in a government office, in a building that does full security screening of every person who comes in, with metal detectors and an x-ray machine for their bags. My department does some cashiering.

As part of renovations to the building, they are adding cashier stations to our office that will be pre-security, meaning people can come directly to us off the street with no screening. We’re assured these stations will operate as check-only, no cash, but I’m still nervous about doing this. I’ve expressed my concerns but have been told our department doesn’t have a choice, and we’ll just have to try it.

Do you think it’s reasonable to refuse to man these stations? And if I do so, what is the most professional language I can use?

Can you band together with coworkers and push back as a group? One person refusing to staff those stations is more likely to hear, “Well, it’s a requirement of the job so you’ve got to decide if you want to stay in it or not,” whereas a group of you all pushing back will have more power.

In doing so, you might point out that the fact that the building has that level of security indicates there’s reason to think there’s a need for it, and you and other cashiers shouldn’t be randomly excluded from those safety measures.

2. My boss surveyed the entire staff on my work after 90 days

After 10 years with my organization, I was thrilled to accept a big job as a division director. Among the department’s directors, I was relatively junior; however, leadership insisted that all they wanted was for me to be successful. I was new to the department and had not worked with anyone in it previously.

About 90 days in, my boss informed me that he’d circulated a survey to the entire staff (including the 20 employees who reported to me and 20 others who were not in my chain of command) to gain insights on “areas warranting additional focus” on my part. I thought that kind of feedback would be useful and said so.

The results of the survey were all over the place. More concerning, a couple respondents consistently left really vicious and in some cases wholly untrue comments about my conduct, professionalism, and qualifications for the work, to the majority of questions.

Before presenting me with the results, division leadership fed all the comments through ChatGPT to create a summary. When I requested the original responses, I could tell by their writing styles that three who reported to me made negative comments or false statements about me or my performance. A few others used the survey as an opportunity to air grievances about the division in general, including problems that had long pre-dated me and couldn’t possibly be resolved in under 90 days. So, the summary skewed heavily negative. Unfortunately, this was all leadership was able to focus on.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but ultimately, given the lack of support offered to me both before and after the survey, I chose to resign, and haven’t looked back.

How typical is it for team members to be asked to do a formal evaluation of their new director within 90 days of their start? I’ve worked professionally for over 15 years and was never asked to offer feedback about any of my supervisors. Is this an unusual practice?

It’s very normal to ask around about how things are going with a new manager; the new manager’s manager should be doing that, so that they hear about how things are playing out on the ground that they otherwise might not see. It’s much less usual to do it via an anonymous survey that apparently made it easy for people with an axe to grind against the organization to grind it against you simply because it was a chance to air broader grievances.

But what’s more problematic is that your leadership then just accepted that feedback unquestioningly and passed it on to you without getting more info or applying their own judgment to it. Part of the reason for managers to have actual conversations when gathering feedback about this kind of thing is so they can bring their own judgment to bear on what they’re hearing, as well as being able to probe when something seems surprising or off.

3. Two of us left and only one person is getting a leaving gift

Last week I left my job for one in another department within the same organization, and left on really good terms with my current team: leaving tea, cake, card, and promises to stay in touch.

As I’ve not yet been taken off the department mailing list, today I got copied into a message laying out details for another colleague’s (Tessa’s) departure: saying that there would again be a leaving tea, there was a card in the office to sign … and a link to an optional collection pot for a gift for the entire department to contribute to.

Logically I know I shouldn’t expect a leaving gift. I didn’t expect a gift! I was perfectly happy without a gift! And now I’ve seen my colleague is getting a leaving gift when I didn’t and, if I’m completely honest, I’m pretty stung by it. Adding insult to injury, I was in the department a lot longer than her, have been described as having turned around the area I was working in, and had periods where I felt very under-appreciated by my boss. It genuinely feels like a snub after I put in a hell of a lot of work into my role.

I suspect the main reason why this might have unfolded in such a way is because Tessa is part of a sub-team that has worked together for a long time, with a manager who is very on it with this sort of thing. I, on the other hand, recently got reorganized into a team that hasn’t worked together all that long, with a boss is pretty useless with “pastoral” stuff, so in some ways it doesn’t surprise me that this happened. Nonetheless, I still do feel decidedly under-appreciated by how this unfolded. (It doesn’t help that I’ve had a look on the collection pot website and seen that people throughout the department – including people within my chain of command who could have organized any hypothetical gift for me — have donated. If this was just amongst Tessa’s sub-team, I wouldn’t care quite as much.)

I’ll be going to Tessa’s leaving tea next week and am feeling uncomfortable about what a sour taste this has left in my mouth (and I obviously don’t feel that way about Tessa or most of my teammates!). I want to stay on good terms with my department, and my former boss has already expressed a hope that I’ll provide useful insight for him into the team I’ve relocated to, so I know I’ll be hearing from him again. I feel embarrassed about how much this has struck me, but I feel so tempted to say something to my former boss. Is there any way I address how bad this looked from my perspective – short of going, “Oh, I didn’t know this department did leaving gifts’ rather pointedly when Tessa gets her present, which I rather suspect would be slightly inappropriate(!)?

It’s absolutely because you’re on different sub-teams, and Tessa’s team has a manager who’s on top of this kind of thing and your team doesn’t. That’s all it is!

I hear you about people throughout the department having donated to Tessa’s gift, and so why didn’t they realize no one was organizing one for you … but most people don’t think that much about this stuff. Someone tells them a gift is being organized, they donate, and they don’t put much more thought into it. Yes, ideally someone would have thought, “Wait, Jane just left too and I didn’t see a gift for her” — but it’s not personal that they didn’t! It’s just people being consumed with their own stuff.

I do think there’s room to say to your old boss, “I don’t know if you realized this, but it didn’t feel great that Tessa is having such a fuss made over her departure when that didn’t happen for me, and I just wanted to flag it in case it’s something you can watch for when other people leave.” In other words, frame it as feedback for the future, not as “give me a gift now.” But it’ll be way more helpful for your peace of mind to just see that as reflective of things you already knew about your boss and not read more into it than that.

4. Should I tell my interviewer I like that the city is LGBTQ-friendly?

I have an interview coming up with a university in a famously queer-friendly area, and part of the reason I’m interested in this job and others like it is because I live in a less friendly area. Normally, I wouldn’t bring up anything identity-focused in an interview, but being a visible trans woman interviewing in one of the trans capitals of the world, I wonder if it makes sense to say something when they inevitably ask, “Why are you interested in this role?”

More generally, I’m just curious about how you’d advise any marginalized person to handle this, especially in the current moment where a lot of folks are considering these types of moves. One friend recommended saying something like, “This area is a really good fit for me culturally” and leaving the rest to them to figure out. What do you think?

They want to know why you’re interested in the job — meaning the specific role and its work, and so a strong answer will speak directly to that. You can definitely mention that the area is a good fit culturally (and that can be helpful when they know you’d need to move to take the job), but it should be more of an aside, not the focus of your answer.

5. How should my resume list many projects under one company?

I’ve worked at the same company for the past 10 years, but due to *gestures broadly*, I’m looking for a new position. The company I work for is basically a contractor, and I have worked on probably over 20 projects at this company, some for 3 months and some for 3+ years, and I’m usually simultaneously working on at least 2 projects.

The problem is, I don’t know the most useful way to put this experience on a resume! For any job posting I’m looking at, I probably have at least 2 projects that are the most relevant that I assume I should put first, but I still have room on my resume, so then what? Should I list the current projects I’m working on, or the longest running projects I was on? The most impactful? And what is the clearest way to show these aren’t the only projects that I’ve worked on, just like a relevant/recent subset?

Secondly, I’ve been promoted multiple times at this company and was also an intern before starting full-time. Putting just my current role makes it look like I’ve been that role the entire 10 years, so I assume I should put all of the roles I’ve been, but do I need to also put the dates? Can I just list them?

Yes, list the most relevant projects first. After that, choose the projects to list that (a) most closely demonstrate the skills that will be relevant to the job posting or (b) speak to a track record of achievement in general (so if you did something really impressive — built something, saved a failing project, overcame a challenge that had stumped others, etc. — include those things because they demonstrate that you are a competent person who gets things done).

You should list all your titles, and while you don’t have to include the dates for each role as long as you have the overall dates for your employment at that company, it’s often info that hiring managers want and that will strengthen your resume. So for example, it might look like this:

Oatmeal Association, June 2016 – present
Tasting Director, August 2025-present
Tasting Manager, December 2024 – August 2025
Oatmeal Taster, May 2020 – November 2024
Oatmeal Stirrer, January 2017 – May 2020
Groats Intern, June 2016 – December 2016
* accomplishment
* accomplishment
* accomplishment
* accomplishment

Or you can list the accomplishments for each role under the title they go with, depending on the specifics of what you’re listing.

The post boss surveyed the entire staff on my work after 90 days, new desks will be in an unsecured area, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

The post Keys, Spare Change Fly Out Of Luge Athlete’s Pocket On First Turn appeared first on The Onion.

A reader writes:

In 30 years, I have been late to work twice.

The first time, management used my emergency contact number to track me down when I was one hour late. I believe this was a misuse of my personal information, and I removed this contact information from the company systems.

Now, years later, it has happened again. My manager sent police to my home for a “wellness check” because I was two hours late. In this day and age, when federal agencies are claiming that they can come into your home without a warrant, it’s more than a bit alarming to see police at one’s door.

Is this even remotely acceptable? I do realize that some employers will simply terminate on a no call/no show, but these actions have me not wanting to share any personal information at all, and have me questioning whether it’s even worth waiting the 10 months I have till retirement.

Both these incidents were due to scheduling confusion, and I am not completely blameless. But I work third shift, and it was freaky being awakened at 1 am by police at my door.

Both of these were bizarre overreactions. Calling your emergency contact after one hour? And sending police to your home for a wellness check after two hours?

The point of a wellness check or calling emergency contacts is supposed to be, “We’re genuinely concerned about this person’s safety because we haven’t heard from them for an extended period of time.” Two hours — let alone one hour — doesn’t meet that standard.

If you’re an hour or two late, they should call you. If they don’t reach you, they should leave a message. In most cases, I wouldn’t think about calling emergency contacts unless you’re still not reachable the next day. And escalating to a police wellness check should take longer than that and should only come after they’ve attempted to reach your emergency contact (and in the current moment comes with a particularly high need to be cautious about your safety). In both cases, we’re not talking about acting after only a few hours.

That said, this is fact-specific and there are situations where the circumstances could warrant acting more quickly — like if you’re someone known to have a potentially life-threatening health condition and you normally show up like clockwork — but we’re still not talking about taking those steps when you’re only an hour late.

Acting within one to two hours reads like they were using your emergency contact and the police as ways to get you to work, not because they were genuinely concerned for your welfare.

The post my job sent police to my home when I was 2 hours late appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Internal Department of Homeland Security documents revealed that less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses. What do you think?

The post Report: Less Than 14% Of Those Arrested By ICE Had Criminal Record appeared first on The Onion.

As the associate vice provost for the Office of Asynchronous Online Courses for Student-Centered High-Impact Learning (OAOCSCHIL, an office we created in the last few years after realizing how lucrative these things are), I want to address a growing concern on campus: the rumor that asynchronous online classes are “basically a scam.”

I understand the confusion. Outsiders are quick to pass judgment on these courses stocked with hastily recorded video lectures from 2020, auto-graded multiple-choice quizzes, and reflection message boards that are now 87 percent bots talking to other bots. Because there are no scheduled meetings with professors or classmates, and grading consists of counting whether students clicked the correct buttons, the fact that we charge tuition for the privilege of participating in these experiences could be mistaken for a scam: one in which no learning and very little effort are exchanged for grades and credits.

But, I assure you, this is not a scam. This is innovation.

Let me walk you through our new pedagogical model, which we in the OAOCSCHIL call Vibe-Teaching. You may have heard of “vibe-coding,” the revolutionary new software methodology in which programmers no longer understand code, write code, or even read code. They simply tell a large language model (LLM) what they want, run whatever it produces, and then tweak the prompt until the contraption is complete. Coding becomes cycles of evaluating outputs driven by persistent hopefulness.

Vibe-Teaching brings this cutting-edge, iterative feedback loop to higher education. Rather than building courses through faculty expertise or disciplinary knowledge, faculty gather complaints from alums now trying to get real jobs, feed those complaints into AI, and allow the system to revise the course accordingly. This continuous-improvement cycle transforms real-world disappointment into automated course updates, freeing faculty time for research (about AI), service (related to AI), and existential despair (you can guess the topic).

This instructional design reflects our commitment to inclusive pedagogy: All learning pathways are valid, whether students engage as manual human learners or outsource their consciousness to a chatbot. We support all modalities, confident that each demonstrates a different facet of multiple intelligences—or whatever we’re calling it this year.

In Vibe-Teaching, faculty are no longer required to read the AI-generated slop that students themselves have not paused to read. We only uphold one high-touch requirement: Vibe-Teaching faculty must log in every two weeks to respond to the pop-up message, “Are you still teaching?”

Some have asked why we don’t simply focus on helping students learn things. We appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately, AI has made it impossible to measure actual learning. Every assignment is now an unverifiable collaboration between a stressed undergraduate and a VC-backed robo-parrot. Detecting “authentic” student thinking is technically possible, but prohibitively expensive. Think about it: We would need to pay real human faculty to interact with real human students. We do not have the budget for that.

So we have stopped trying to change student thinking. Instead, we focus on the continuous improvement of vibes. In lieu of learning outcomes, we now ask whether students have a warm sense of what learning might feel like and whether they can recall, with confidence, that they took “chemistry.” If so, we mark that as “exceeds expectations.”

And because we are a modern, data-driven institution, we have checked our dashboards to confirm the effectiveness of this approach. GPAs are rising, fail rates are down, and student satisfaction with online learning is trending in the right direction! Our website now proudly proclaims our AI-enhanced commitment to student success. The naysayers may fret about a post-literate world, but they have clearly not looked at the data. Numbers don’t lie.

From an institutional perspective, the benefits are substantial. Vibe-Teaching allows us to maximize enrollment and graduation rates without expanding facilities, faculty positions, or effort. It satisfies student demand for maximum flexibility, minimal cognitive effort, and zero human interaction, while meeting accreditation requirements (in vibes, if not in letter).

There is, of course, some risk of corroding the very foundations of our university’s mission. But institutional survival requires adaptation. Our graduates must become “AI-resilient and future-ready members of the workforce”… whatever that means.

The truth is, everyone wants this. Why they want it is beside the point. In light of these market demands, we humbly ask everyone to stop referring to asynchronous online courses as a “scam.” That word implies deception. In Vibe-Teaching, we are fully transparent:

We provide the illusion of education.
Students provide the illusion of engagement.
Together, we uphold the illusion of academic integrity.

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I knew Grimm's fables were pretty dark, but some of them seem to have been written purposefully as a time capsule to frighten the future.

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