#Rowen #RoninWarriors

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Well ... we've had an awful lot to think about today, and 'fraid the times up. So, until next time, think about it! #CowboyWho

The Chinati Mountains State Natural Area encompasses 39,000 acres of pristine Chihuahuan Desert landscape. Marfa Public Radio recently got a sneak peek of the new park, which is not set to formally open until 2032.

Both the Spanish and French used the mission during the state’s colonial period.

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

1. Bringing alcohol to the home of a recovering alcoholic

My coworker is a recovering alcoholic; he doesn’t discuss it but never drinks, occasionally refers to “when I was drinking,” and once was frightened when he learned there may have been alcohol in a dessert he’d eaten (there wasn’t). His wife has generously invited our office over for dinner. She told us that “we keep a dry house” but we’re welcome to bring alcohol if we want it with our meal.

This has created a debate within the office. Two want to bring alcohol, arguing that she told us (without us asking, I should add) that we could. The rest of us feel it would be rude and we should respect the rules of her house and our coworker’s feelings.

We’ve agreed we won’t bring alcohol. I’m wondering, though, what is your take?

Yeah, don’t bring alcohol. It’s not like bringing along your own allergen-free food to ensure there will be something you can safely eat; you don’t need alcohol with the meal, and it’s more respectful to your coworker not to. And really, if someone feels like it will be an enormous inconvenience not to have alcohol with a single meal, I’d wonder what was up.

It might be different if you were close friends and better positioned to judge how much it would actually bother them … and how much the “you’re welcome to bring your own” comment was sincerely meant versus something they say but still prefer people not do. (And yes, they shouldn’t say it if they don’t mean it, blah blah blah, but people being humans, it happens anyway.) But you’re colleagues and not as well positioned to dig into “how much would this really bother you?” as you’d be with a friend, so it’s better to err on the side of respecting their alcohol-free home.

2. Should I consider a candidate’s obnoxious Facebook commenting when hiring?

I work in nonprofits. For anonymity’s sake, I’ll just broadly say I work in the arts. I am part of several arts-related groups on Facebook, including several specific to my niche and several region-specific groups. I’m not a huge Facebook person, so I mostly just join to keep up with local events and interesting initiatives in the field. But over the past year or so, I’ve noticed one woman, Hannah, who has joined every major arts group as well, plus all of the region-specific groups. She stands out as particularly difficult. She’s aggressive on almost every single post. She will get into heated arguments, and frequently tells other people that they don’t know what they’re talking about. The real kicker is that she is wrong about quite a bit. She gets extremely defensive when called out, despite admitting that she is relatively new to the field. To be clear, I’ve never actually tried to find her content, and I’ve never even engaged with her — this is just what I see every single time I open the group pages. It definitely sours the overall vibes of the group.

At work, I’m on a hiring panel for a role that does not report directly to me, but works under my guidance on a few projects. The other day, HR mentioned that they’d be sending along a new resume, for a woman named Hannah. I didn’t think anything of it until I hopped on Facebook later in the day and, once again, saw Hannah getting into a heated debate in the comments of an otherwise positive, non-controversial post. Obviously, I have no idea if this is the same Hannah. She has a common first name but a very unique last name, so it will be easy to tell when I see the resume.

I’m very doubtful this will happen, but mostly out of curiosity: what if it’s the same Hannah? Would I need to bring it up to the hiring panel ahead of time? I know people have been fired over social media posts, but from what I’ve seen, that is mostly in egregious cases. As far as I can tell, Hannah’s never said anything really terrible — she is just a constant, argumentative presence in groups, harshly criticizing others and often making statements that are plain wrong. Aside from her being a difficult coworker, my first thought is that a combative (and fairly visible) social media presence would be a liability to our organization. But what would be the ethical and professional guidelines here? Is it reasonable to consider personal social media encounters when making a hiring decision?

It is reasonable to consider your own firsthand experience with a candidate, and it is reasonable to consider how a candidate presents themselves within industry-specific spaces. Both of those are in play here!

In fact, I think it would be negligent not to fill the rest of the hiring team in on how you’ve seen Hannah operate in field-specific places. Not only is it data about what she’s likely to be like to work with, but it’s also relevant to how hiring her might be received by others in your field!

3. My roommate shaved my eyebrow just before a big interview

I know by the time you get this it’s going to be too late but I’m freaking out. I’m probably going to tell them I’m sick because I look ridiculous and there’s no way to explain this to them.

I have an interview for a really cool internship tomorrow. This would be my first time working in my field and I’ve low-key been panicking about it before this whole trainwreck.

My roommate had some of our friends over, so I was hanging out with them tonight. I’m currently trying some medication that makes me sleepy, so I fell asleep on the couch.

I woke up to my roommate shaving my eyebrows! She and everyone were super giggly and drunk. They kept trying to say it was fine but I ran to the bathroom and … my stomach is still dropping every time I see my face. She basically shaved off my entire left eyebrow. There’s some hair left, but it’s super obviously shaved and the razor cut me a little so I had to put on a bandaid. I look crazy.

I don’t even know what to do. The firm I’m interviewing at is pretty formal and I’d be seeing clients, so this look is a total no-go. I feel like I can’t even explain what happened because their first impression would be I’m some high-drama party girl. And I can say I’m sick, but I can’t reschedule it anywhere near enough time for my eyebrow to grow back! This has ruined my chance at a job I was so excited for and I feel so stupid.

Eyebrow pencil! You can draw it back on well enough to pass for having an eyebrow at an interview!

4. How early is too early for meetings with an international team?

I’m young and in my first corporate job on an international team (U.S., UK, India) and we have a weekly stand-up at 7 am. As it’s only once a week, I’m alright starting my day earlier to keep my Indian colleagues from staying late but that made me wonder how far outside of work hours is too far for work meetings? 7 am seems unreasonable to me if it were a daily meeting but so does 7 pm for my colleagues in India (given we do 9-5).

Yeah, this is pretty par for the course when you work on an international team. If you need a slot when people in time zones that far apart can all be available, it’s going to be an inconvenient time for someone. But ideally the inconvenience would be rotated so it’s not always the same team getting scheduled outside of normal hours every time.

5. How long should I wait after getting a promotion before job-searching?

I work within a very small (and shrinking) but necessary team in my company. Recently our team’s core personnel was reduced to just me and the team lead, leaving a vacant position, and just today they significantly cut the team lead’s pay, leading him to walk. This leaves me as the only person with significant day-to-day operational knowledge in a technical position, as everyone else are mid- and high-level management who work with several teams and oversee much larger programs.

I’m the senior most member of the team besides the lead and am very likely to get the vacant position. Given the recent state of the company, however, it’s clear that I should not count on any long-term plans with them.

The raise is likely to be significant and the position would look good on a resume, but I’m certain they will overwork and underpay me. But I’m afraid, and with some precedent, that if I refuse, they will lump whatever of his work they can on me and divvy the remaining responsibilities among the upper levels as a “temporary” or “necessary” measure. But I also fear that taking this promotion could shackle me to this position for a while yet.

If I take the promotion, how long should I wait before seeking new employment? I imagine recruiters would look at someone applying soon after a promotion rather negatively, particularly since this would be a jump into a leadership role and could lead to me being seen as either unreliable or unable to handle such a position. Is there any other way I could diplomatically present this within interviews besides “differences of opinion” and “not seeing eye-to-eye with [Employer]”?

You don’t need to hold off on job-searching. Take the promotion and start a job search. It’s not going to look weird.

If a recruiter asks why you’re looking so soon after being promoted, you can say, “I was happy to help out with the role when the company asked me to, but the company has also been making a lot of cuts and I’m looking for something more stable.”

6. Holiday book fair

Just sharing this from a reader:

I think this is coming too late for your holiday posts, but I need to share. I work at a library and every year, we get pretty nice gift bags at the holiday party. But like all gift bags, there are always things that don’t work for some people (particular treats, scented candles, blankets when you have 20-million blankets at home already).

This year, we walked in to discover a BOOK FAIR. The local independent bookstore brought a bunch of hardback books of different genres, puzzles, games, reading lights, etc. Everyone got to pick out something and take it home. I’ve never seen 150 adults so happy about anything. I will be riding that book fair high for months.

The post bringing alcohol to the home of a recovering alcoholic, a candidate’s obnoxious Facebook comments, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

I’m not too proud of this. Just print my name small.

WASHINGTON—Stressing that he was prepared to remain in the role for as long as necessary, President Donald Trump claimed Monday that he would marry Venezuelan first lady Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro. “Until we can find a suitable long-term replacement, I’ll be married to Mrs. Maduro,” Trump said in a news conference in which he repeatedly insisted his position as Flores de Maduro’s temporary spouse would not interfere with his current obligations to Melania Trump. “Cilia is a woman with tremendous potential who’s been hampered for too long because of a corrupt and illegitimate husband. So I’m going to step in as her dearly beloved for the foreseeable future while we figure out a way to give her a proper wedding day.” Trump added that his planned honeymoon with the Venezuelan first lady would not cost the American taxpayer “a single cent” because of the involvement of domestic oil companies.

The post Trump Claims He Will Marry Maduro’s Wife Until Suitable Replacement Found appeared first on The Onion.

Well, they say you should never trust a politician, and it seems I’ve been duped.

As an avid reader of the New York Post, the New York Post’s X feed, and transcripts of several-minute-long voice memos from my relatives who have never lived in New York and will never live in New York, I was promised one thing from a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty: chaos.

Campus chaos. Anti-ICE chaos. Chaos in our parks, sidewalks, and public spaces.

And as an anarcho-communist-accelerationist-antifascist-nihilist-transplant-gentrifier-crisis actor living in a rent-controlled penthouse bodega paid for by some combination of my mommy and George Soros, that’s exactly why I wanted Zohran to win.

A city in collapse? A desperate citizenry? The demise of hope? I can’t think of any better conditions for my punk band / musical improv team / woke clowning syndicate to thrive.

But here we are, in Mamdani’s New York, and in a sick and destabilizing twist, there has yet to be a sick and destabilizing twist.

I was assured that a Mamdani administration would mean an exodus of New York City business leaders. But I showed up to work this morning, and my boss was still here. And worse: He made me do stuff. He’s supposed to be halfway to Florida by now. I didn’t put in all of this hard work just for my tax dollars to go toward the continued collection of massive corporations’ tax dollars.

“Go ahead, vote for Zohran,” they said. “The NYPD is going to abandon the city,” they said. Tell that to the officers who blasted their sirens at me this morning so they could run a red light before promptly turning off their sirens once they were past that red light. Unless they were conducting an emergency self-deportation to Long Island, it’s business as usual. Mamdani’s opponents swore that the next time a New Yorker was in danger and called the police, none of them would be there to help. But it’s just the opposite: All of them are still here to not help.

The way everyone was talking, I thought the streets would look like Mad Max. But the only similarity is that there’s a healthy amount of space between cars, thanks to the success of congestion pricing. And there’s always one guy blasting some absolute bangers from his custom sound system.

And speaking of custom sound systems: When can I expect my free stuff? Not childcare and buses—they’re actually hard at work on that. No, I’m talking about the $10 billion in socialist freebies that I kept seeing mentioned in the paper. I only saw the headline—I don’t have time for any more long-form reading once I’m finished with Bill Ackman’s tweets—so I could only assume based on the tone that a massive dump truck full of communist goodies would be rolled up to my building by now. But there’s nothing. No hammers. No sickles. No guillotines. Not even the free juice Zohran promised when running for high school president, a fact that it was absolutely in the public interest for me to know.

By the way: Where is the Islamic cultural revolution that I was promised I was being promised? My own senator made me believe we were on the verge of “global jihad.” I understand that in government, change happens incrementally, and the mayor just got started. But despite having five years in the State Assembly, Zohran Mamdani was unable to deliver even a single act of jihad for his local district. That’s his whole political project in a nutshell: all talk, no jihad.

Oh. Also. The other movie I thought it was gonna be like was The Purge.

It’s almost as if Mamdani was being widely mischaracterized as a dangerous extremist by overlapping political and media empires in a no-holds-barred campaign to scare New Yorkers away from electing a candidate whose most unorthodox idea was putting their interests above those of the elites.

But I hope not. Because if the wealthiest New Yorkers, cops, and Islamophobes aren’t leaving, then I might have to. Unless Staten Island does first.

Kaitlin spent the first weeks of her newborn son’s life in a panic. The hospital where she gave birth in October 2022 had administered a routine drug test, and a nurse informed her the lab had confirmed the presence of opiates. Child welfare authorities opened an investigation.

Months later, after searching her home and interviewing her older child and ex-husband, the agency dropped its investigation, having found no evidence of abuse or neglect, or of drug use.

The amount of opiates that upended Kaitlin’s life — 18.4 nanograms of codeine per milliliter of urine, according to court documents — was so minuscule that if she were an Air Force pilot, she could have had 200 times more in her system and still have been cleared to fly.

But for Kaitlin, the test triggered an investigation with potentially life-altering consequences. (ProPublica is using Kaitlin’s first name because her full name has been redacted from court documents. She declined to be interviewed for this story.) 

The ordeal “tempered what was otherwise supposed to be a joyous occasion” for the family, according to a lawsuit filed in 2024 by New Jersey’s attorney general against the hospital system, Virtua Health.

The hospital said in a statement that it has “a relentless commitment to evidence-based, equitable care for every family.” In court documents, it denied the lawsuit’s allegation that it discriminated against pregnant patients and noted that Kaitlin consented to the test. It also said that New Jersey law mandates it to submit reports of “substance-affected infants” to the state’s Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The lawsuit is pending and a judge has referred it to mediation.

Drug-testing labs typically report results in black and white: positive or negative. But a little-known fact about the industry is that those results are often based on standards that are wholly discretionary. For example, nearly all states use a threshold of 0.08% blood alcohol content to decide if a motorist is intoxicated. But for other drugs detected in urine, saliva and hair, cutoff levels vary from test to test and lab to lab — including Kaitlin’s test for opiates.

There’s no consensus among labs on what level should confirm the presence of codeine in urine, said Larry Broussard, a toxicologist who wrote an academic journal article on “growing evidence” that poppy seeds in bagels and muffins provoke positive test results. (Kaitlin ate a bagel shortly before taking her drug test, according to court documents.) There’s more consensus for some other drugs, but labs still disagree on appropriate cutoff levels for common drugs such as THC (the compound in marijuana that creates a high) and meth, said Broussard.

In 2022, the same year Kaitlin tested positive for codeine, the Department of Defense noticed a surge in personnel on military bases blaming positive tests on poppy seeds. Scientists at the military’s labs concluded that a change in the manufacturing process of some poppy seeds had led to contamination, causing service members to be falsely accused of abusing drugs.

So far, 62 positive tests for codeine have been “overturned and adjusted in Army records,” an Army spokesperson told ProPublica. In response, the Department of Defense in March 2024 doubled the military’s cutoff level for codeine tests to avoid false positives triggered by poppy seed muffins, bagels and other foods. Service members are now cleared for duty with up to 400 times more codeine in their urine than is used to justify child welfare investigations in some states, ProPublica found.

ProPublica reviewed cutoff levels used to confirm the presence of common drugs, including opiates, meth, THC and cocaine, as cited in court records, labs’ contracts with government agencies and scientific journals, as well as in interviews with toxicologists. We found that the cutoff levels used by the child welfare systems vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. One large state agency, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, contractually required a lab to use levels that it later acknowledged were “scientifically unsupportable.” 

Ted Simon, an expert toxicology witness and a board member of the nonprofit Center for Truth in Science, which advocates for objectivity in research, said agencies are better off consulting with labs to set cutoff levels. That’s because “some labs do validation testing to ensure the accuracy of their cutoffs based on knowledge of human biology.” But even when labs set levels, they don’t always get them right. Some labs “just use the sensitivity of the chemical analysis to measure vanishingly tiny concentrations with no way to assess the relevance to humans,” Simon said. This can result in situations like Kaitlin’s, where the hospital’s cutoff was near the lower limit of what sophisticated lab instruments can detect, he said after reviewing her case.

Meanwhile, “labs tell their clients what they want to hear and are hesitant to disclose the uncertainty inherent in their methods,” Simon said.

There’s no industry consensus on what, or if anything, should be done about the differing standards. Some experts see a need for uniform levels but acknowledge it would require lengthy vetting before toxicologists and other stakeholders agree on what’s appropriate. Others maintain that as long as labs are transparent and support their decisions with research, they should continue choosing their own levels. “The labs do what works for the instruments that they have,” said Simon.

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Child welfare agencies employ a patchwork of drug testing standards, according to contracts and procurement documents.

Some, like Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, require labs to use high cutoff levels that protect against false positives. Other agencies’ contracts with their drug testing services do not specify cutoff levels, leaving the decision to the lab.

A few large agencies require labs to use ultra-low levels, which catch more users but come with risks. Incidental exposure to a substance in the environment and over-the-counter medications can trigger positives. “The smaller the concentration that you try to detect, the more likely you are to get false positive results,” said toxicologist Paul Cary, who wrote a guide to testing for drug courts, which aim to address the addictions of people accused of drug-related crimes and avoid incarceration.

The federal government sets standards for drug testing 14 million people. These include public-sector employees as well as workers whose performance affects the safety of others, known as safety-sensitive roles, like airline pilots, truck drivers and those working in nuclear facilities. For decades, the program was known for a rigorous scientific review and inspection process to ensure accuracy. 

In 2025, President Donald Trump’s second administration overhauled the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal agency responsible for the testing standards program, and dismissed half of its staff. It also disbanded the expert panel that proposed scientifically valid cutoff levels, the Drug Testing Advisory Board. “There could be issues for national security or safety sensitive issues that might be impacted given the recent changes,” said Hyden Shen, former regulatory and policy oversight lead at the health agency’s division of workplace programs. In the spring, Shen resigned alongside almost half of his division. He spoke to ProPublica after leaving federal employment.

Private labs have long been free to set their own standards, independent of the federal government’s recommended levels. The CEO of a laboratory company specializing in testing for probation departments, child welfare agencies and courts testified in a lawsuit that in 2018 the lab had lowered cutoff levels for cocaine in hair follicle tests by a factor of five without amending its contract with the state child welfare agency. The company said that the change was to align its levels with scientific updates and that state agencies were made aware of the new cutoffs when it reported test results. The lawsuit was settled with the lab denying wrongdoing.

Federal workers who test positive for drugs can’t be punished until their results are scrutinized by medical review officers, physicians who verify that positive drug test results aren’t being triggered by legitimate medications. (For example, without a special follow-up called an isomer test, over-the-counter Vicks VapoInhaler is indistinguishable from street drugs in multiple types of drug tests.) But medical review of test results is expensive, and few state agencies require it for child welfare cases or for testing people on probation. One lab competing for a contract to test probationers and juveniles in a residential facility in Kansas discouraged the use of medical review officers, saying it would “result in extra expense and extra time for results delivery.” Other state agencies, especially those that oversee parole, probation or prisons, skip confirmation testing entirely and rely instead on cheaper, less accurate immunoassay tests, unless someone contests their result and can afford to pay out of pocket for a follow-up, according to contracts between state courts and labs. 

Agencies “are effectively saying, ‘Most of these people probably did use drugs. And, yeah, OK, there’s a handful that didn’t. But it would bankrupt us to have to confirm all of these,’” said Karen Murtagh, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, which has represented inmates in drug testing cases.

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In the spring of 2019, Marie Herrera was working to reunite with her four kids in Michigan’s foster care system. (ProPublica is referring to Herrera by her middle name at her request, to maintain her privacy as she moves forward with her life.) At a hearing on her case, a foster care worker testified that it was going well, according to a filing from her attorney: “Mother had attended all eleven parenting times, had procured employment, was in therapy, lived in three-quarters housing, and tested negative for illegal drugs during the current reporting period.”

Then that July, Herrera’s saliva tested positive for cocaine. Herrera admitted to being in recovery from an addiction but denied using the drug. Over the next eight months, two more of her drug tests were confirmed positive for cocaine by the state’s lab. She sought testing from an outside lab, which didn’t detect illegal drug use.

According to her test results from the state’s lab, which Herrera shared with ProPublica, the levels of cocaine and its metabolite in her system ranged from 1.065 to 1.774 ng/ml, just above the state’s cutoff of 1 ng/ml in saliva. If the positive-test threshold for federal workers had been applied to Herrera’s tests, she could have had more than four times as much of the drug in her saliva and still been cleared to fly a plane.

But Herrera’s positive test from December 2019 caused the judge to take away her unsupervised parenting time, according to court records.

“The positive drug tests turned my world upside down and ruined my life,” said Herrera. What she didn’t know is that behind the scenes, Michigan’s child welfare agency was reviewing — and preparing to raise — its cutoff levels.

Michigan’s levels for cocaine and other drugs in saliva had been set by its drug testing vendor, Forensic Fluids, in 2018, according to public records. (Forensic Fluids did not respond to a request for comment.) Michigan contractually required the same levels when it signed with a new lab, Averhealth, in 2019. 

But the child welfare agency noticed conflicting results between its tests and those ordered by law enforcement agencies, according to public records. Some individuals who tested positive for a drug with one agency tested negative with another.

In November 2020, at the urging of its new lab, the agency raised its levels. Communications between the agency and Averhealth show both were concerned that low cutoffs might not be “forensically defensible” due to “uncertainty around environmental exposure.”

“Current levels … are scientifically unsupportable,” Michigan’s child welfare agency wrote in a memo about the change.

In a statement, Averhealth, the lab that processed Herrera’s tests, said the mismatch in results  that concerned Michigan administrators “in no way calls into question the accuracy or reliability” of its testing. “Inconsistencies occurred when different types of tests were conducted (saliva or hair) or when the individual was tested days later,” the company said, noting that “different types of testing have different limitations.” The company said its test results “simply attest to whether a drug is present in a specimen and, if so, in what quantity. It is left to the courts to decide what, if any consequences, follow.”

In Herrera’s case, the lab said, low-level cocaine positives “likely represent ingestion of cocaine” and that “passive exposure as an explanation is highly doubtful.” The company also pointed out that Herrera had several high-level positive tests for methamphetamine in the fall of 2020, nine months after the court took away her unsupervised parenting time. 

Herrera admits she’s relapsed at times. But she also says that being labeled a cocaine user early on in her case, when she says she wasn’t using, derailed her recovery. Herrera believes it set her up to fail by creating an adversarial relationship with her caseworker and judge. “I wasn’t grateful about what they were doing to me,” she says.

Herrera’s parental rights were terminated in 2021, less than a year after Michigan raised its cutoff levels for cocaine in saliva. In denying Herrera’s appeal, a judge cited her refusal to participate in further drug tests, additional failed tests when she did comply, and her lack of housing and income, among other things.

When Herrera was told she could never again see her kids, she said, she was devastated and relapsed again. “Fuck it, if they say I’m an addict, then I’ll numb the pain.”

“I think about my kids every single day,” she said. “It’s affected me completely.”

Even after raising its cutoffs, Michigan’s levels were still far lower than those used for federal workers. The state declined to comment, but a memo stated that officials considered the federal levels inappropriate because they “do not assess the impacts of how those substances may affect a person’s behavior” or “how that use may impact child safety.”

Drug testing policy experts say it’s not possible for any test, no matter the cutoff level, to reliably predict child safety.

“A drug test doesn’t tell you if a person has a substance use disorder, if they are in recovery, or whether a child is safe,” said Nancy K. Young, executive director of Children and Family Futures, which consults for child welfare agencies, and co-author of a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration policy paper on drug testing for child welfare agencies. Young said administrators should consider test results as “just one data point” and rely more on “casework and a relationship with the family” to determine whether a child is safe and well.

Graphics Notes

For codeine, meth and cocaine graphics, the cutoff for federal workers is from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing Programs.

Codeine Graphic: Kaitlin was tested at Virtua Voorhees Hospital in New Jersey. Source for the Department of Defense cutoff is an agency press release, and sources for test results and hospital cutoff are court records.

Meth Graphic: Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services data is from the agency’s 2023 invitation for bids. Orange County Social Services Agency data is from the agency’s 2021-2024 contract with its drug testing provider. Utah Division of Child and Family Services data is taken from an individual’s drug test results from 2022. Georgia Division of Family and Children Services data is from an individual’s drug test results from 2020. 

Cocaine Graphic: Cutoffs are the level at which each organization considers the presence of cocaine in saliva to be confirmed by mass spectrometry (gas or liquid chromatography). Ng/ml is nanograms per milliliter. The cocaine cutoff levels used by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services for testing in saliva are drawn from public records, including contracts, communications between the agency and its labs, and agency employee emails obtained via a public records request.  Marie Herrera provided ProPublica with her test results.

The post Her Parenting Time Was Restricted After a Positive Drug Test. By Federal Standards, It Would’ve Been Negative. appeared first on ProPublica.

The push by four Dallas-area suburbs to exit the multi-city partnership comes as state transportation officials have said the state needs more public transit, not less.

The son of the late former Gov. Mark White had hoped to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott by running as a moderate, but failed to raise enough money to be competitive.

OTTAWA – With millions returning to work after the holidays, Kentucky bourbon is out and Canadian spirits are in as the choice for Canada’s alcoholics who cannot help but drink on the job. Since U.S. President Donald Trump launched his tariff war in 2025, openly musing about making Canada “the 51st state”, Canada’s problem drinkers […]

The post Canadian alcoholics reject Kentucky bourbon for getting drunk at work appeared first on The Beaverton.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
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Today's News:

A reader writes:

A few weeks ago, our HR manager, Cara, brought in a photo of her dog’s adorable litter of puppies and everybody appropriately ooh’d and ahh’d all over them. Now that the puppies are old enough to be adopted, she’s started to put the bite on everybody in the office, and after a few other employees were winnowed away for various reasons (apartment building doesn’t allow pets, just had a new baby, etc.), she seems to have focused her attention on me.

Backstory time, I grew up in a house with a mother who … it’s probably most accurate to say she compulsively hoarded pets … and growing up having to take care of up to 10 dogs at one time has thrown cold water on my desire to have another dog for the foreseeable future, especially an hyperactive, high-maintenance puppy.

I’ve politely declined up until now, but Cara persists, dismissing my refusals by using most of the same lines I’ve heard from my mom about having kids: “Oh, you get used to that,” “You’ll change your mind,” “It’s different when it’s your own,” and of course, “But look how cute!” It’s getting to the point it’s how she opens every single conversation we have: “Hey! I’ve got three left. Have you changed your mind yet or do you still not want one?”

I’ve stood firm, but things are happening that are making me start to get a little tin-foil-hatty. A while back, I commented on the cute puppy on a coworker’s birthday card and she looked all confused and said, “Wait, I thought you were the one who didn’t like dogs.” I casually asked around a little, and while I can’t be positive, I’m getting the impression Cara has started telling people that my not wanting to adopt one of her puppies right now is because I hate dogs and having me adopt one to guilt-trip me into proving I don’t.

I don’t know exactly what to do here since, being head of HR, she’s normally who I’d go to for something like this, and I’m really starting to feel like I’m being bullied into adopting a puppy I do not want. Is there some way to remedy this?

The good news is that Cara cannot in fact bully you into adopting a puppy. You can simply continue to say no, and you will not find yourself living with a puppy.

But what she’s doing is obnoxious! It would be obnoxious from any colleague, but it’s particularly obnoxious from the head of HR, who ideally would have enough awareness of power dynamics and internal relationships that it would stop her from haranguing employees to take puppies off her hands.

You could continue doing what you’ve been doing — politely reiterating your refusal when Cara raises the topic — but frankly, it sounds incredibly annoying that she continues to bring it up over and over.

So a different option would be to say, the next time she raises it, “Can I ask you a favor? Please take me at my word — I am not available to adopt a puppy, and that’s not going to change. I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop asking.” If she continues after a clear “you need to stop,” she’s just making herself look weird, not you. And in fact, if she does continue after that, feel free to say, “It’s making me really uncomfortable that you aren’t respecting my answer on this” (or “it’s really weird that you keep pressuring me about this after I asked you to stop” or whatever formulation feels natural to you).

It’s okay to call it out! She is being weird. It’s okay for your reaction to make that clear.

And if Cara is telling people you don’t like dogs … I’m not sure it really matters. Plenty of people don’t like dogs, at least not enough to adopt one. If the topic comes up with a coworker, feel free to set the record straight — “I like dogs but I don’t want to adopt one and she’s being really weird about continually pushing me to take one of her puppies anyway” — but unless she’s going around telling people that she spotted you kicking puppies in the park, it’s not a big deal if people think you’re not a dog lover.

If it’s really bothering you, though, feel free to strategically complain about it to a couple of coworkers who you have good rapport with — “Is Cara giving you a hard sell on taking one of her puppies? I’ve told her a bunch of times that I like dogs but I’m not interested in adopting one, and she’s being really weird about pressuring me anyway.” This is a normal thing to share with coworkers because what Cara is doing is so odd and annoying; it’s a perfectly reasonable topic that you might vent about, and sharing that a few times might make you feel better as far as correcting the record goes.

But there’s no world where this needs to end with you adopting a puppy to prove anything to your office.

The post head of HR is waging a pressure campaign to make me adopt a puppy appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Today's links

• A world without people: AI is a promise to wire the boss's toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Adding exclusive rights make economies weaker; Bloggers after the collapse; Why the media can't figure out Wikipedia; Who are these sf legends?; Anne Frank is in the public domain; Hollywood's MP in Canada; Piketty on Piketty; Vanilla ISIS; India throws out Facebook's astroturf emails; Google unionizes; "The Data Detective"; Breaking Apple ][+ DRM.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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A world without people (permalink)

To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

This is what it means for Elon Musk to dismiss the people who disagree with him as "NPCs"; in some important sense, he doesn't think other people exist. It's a very ketamine-coded way to move through the world:

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-elon-musk-and-npcs

Solipsism is a very difficult belief to maintain. No matter how sociopathic you are, there's always going to be a part of you that craves the approval, love and attention of others. That craving is a nagging reminder that other people do, in fact, exist. This creates the very weird insistence on the part of the ultra-rich that they are actually philanthropists. Thus, the very weird spectacle of corporate raiders – responsible for tens of thousands of job losses – describing themselves as "job creators," and funding whole economic subdisciplines dedicated to shoring up this absurd claim ("The search for a superior moral justification for selfishness" -JK Galbraith):

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html

Trying to squeeze this claim through an ever-narrowing credibility aperture forces it into some extremely weird shapes. Take "Effective Altruism," the belief that you should make as much money as possible by working in the most exploitative and destructive fields you can find, in order to fund a program to improve the lives of 53 trillion hypothetical artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years:

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-long-run-future

Effective Altruism, "job creators" (and other claims to billionaireism as a force for good in the world) show just how much work it takes to maintain the belief that other people don't exist. The ruling classes are haunted by this knowledge, and as more and more wealth accumulates in the hands of fewer and fewer people, those eminently guillotineable plutes need to perform increasingly complex mental gymnastics to keep from confronting the reality of other people.

Corporate bosses have near-total control over the lives of their workers, who might number in the hundreds of thousands. But they also know, in their secret hearts, that they don't really control their businesses. If Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stops showing up for work, the company will continue to hum along, not missing a beat. But if all of Amazon's drivers or warehouse workers walk off the job, the company will grind to a halt. If they never come back, the company might never be able to restart, unable to recover the process knowledge that walks out the door with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Andy Jassy wants to think that he's in Amazon's driver's seat, but is haunted by the undeniable reality that Amazon is really in the hands of its lowest-paid, most abused workers. Andy Jassy isn't driving Amazon – he's stuck in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering-wheel toy.

Enter AI.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

Your boss is an easy mark for these AI swindlers, because your boss dreams of a world without workers, because that's a world where bosses are driving the bus.

The Hollywood writers' strike was precipitated by studio bosses' fantasy of a world without writers – a world where studio bosses don't have to be satisfied with giving harebrained notes to writers who don't bother to disguise their contempt for their bosses' shitty ideas. In a world of AI scripts, the boss decides what kind of movie to make, and a chatbot shits out a script to order, without ever telling the boss that the idea stinks.

The fact that this is an unshootable turkey of a script is of secondary importance. The most important thing is the boss's all-consuming need to avoid ego-shattering conflicts with people who actually know how to do things, who gain power thanks to that knowledge, and who use that power to imply (or state outright) that you're a fucking dunce.

Same goes for the Hollywood actors' strike, and the continued project of cloning actors in software and puppeteering them via chatbot: it's the fantasy of a movie without actors, actors who tell you that the scenario you've spun is an incoherent mess, who insist that their expertise in an art you don't understand and can't perform yourself entitles them to challenge your ideas.

AI is solipsism, the fantasy of a world without people.

Bosses keep pushing the idea that AI can replace doctors and (especially) nurses. Health bosses – increasingly likely to be a giant private equity fund – want to cut care in order to direct more money to the hospital's shareholders. They want to stop paying exterminators and allow their hospitals to fill up with thousands of bats:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

They want to stop paying for clean needles at dialysis clinics and transmit blood-borne chronic illnesses to immunocompromised, sick patients:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

They want to use algorithmic death panels to eject sick patients from their beds before they can sit up, walk or, you know, survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

The problem is that nurses and doctors are professionals, and that means – by definition – that they follow a professional code of ethics that requires them to refuse their bosses' orders when those orders are bad for patients.

The same goes for shrinks of all kinds – psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and counselors. They are legally and professionally required to put patients' mental health ahead of commercial imperatives. That's a big problem for any boss who wants to swap out in-person counseling for dial-a-doc shrink-on-demand services delivered via videoconference that serve up a new therapist every time the patient dials in, chasing the lowest wages around the country or the globe. The mania for "AI therapists" isn't driven by efficiency or by our societal mental health crisis – it's driven by the fantasy of mental health counseling without counselors (who insist on minimum standards for patient care):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

Capitalism is a single-criterion optimization: it organizes itself around the accumulation of capital, to the exclusion of all other criteria:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59821b9ff14aa110e16b69c0/t/686621934eb5b7060da1cdaf/1751523732570/Aaron+Benanav%2C+Beyond+Capitalism+1%2C+NLR+153%2C+May+June+2025.pdf

This means that capitalism is forever locked in a conflict with professionalism, since professionalism is a system that upholds a code of conduct before all other priorities, including capital accumulation. Professional ethics are, quite simply, bad for business.

That's why bosses fantasize so furiously about pushing AI into professional situations – it's the fantasy of a profession without professionals. AI schoolteachers mean "education without educators," which means that there's no organized group of trained and trusted professionals telling you that chatbot slop, high-stakes testing, and standardized curriculum will fail students. This is true no matter how much money you stand to make by replacing the skilled craft process of teaching with automation.

Professions are infamously resistant to automation, unlike, say, manufacturing. This means that the cost of professional services steadily increases, relative to the cost of manufactured goods.

The labor, energy, materials and time it took to travel from New York to Vienna have plummeted since the 18th century – but the number of hours it takes a Viennese string quartet to perform Mozart's String Quartet No 1 is the same today as it was in 1773 – about half an hour.

The cost of producing a chalkboard has crashed over the past two centuries – but the number of hours it takes a math teacher to show a classroom full of ten year olds how to do long division has hardly budged.

The cost of producing a scalpel is lower today than at any time in history, but the duration of an appendectomy has only decreased a little over the past century.

Economists have a name for this: they call it "cost disease." The fact that automation makes professional services (proportionally) more expensive over time isn't an indictment of professionalism, it's a testament to the power of automation for manufacturing. Bosses (should) know this, but they constantly bemoan the cost of professional services, as though the numerator (teaching, healthcare, screenwriting) is going up, when it's actually a shrinking denominator (automated manufacturing processes) that's increasing the relative price.

The AI fantasy is a fantasy of dismantling the professions and replacing them with pliable chatbots who can be optimized for profits and thus cure cost disease for once and for all, and if that comes at the expense of the value that society derives from professional activities, that's a small price to pay for finally clearing the most stubborn barrier to capital accumulation.

Last year, Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE fired or forced out a critical mass of government scientists, even as they gutted funding to research programs at the country's universities. You'd think that this would be a barrier to making scientific breakthroughs in America, but not according to Trump. He's promised that America will produce annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, without scientists, by asking a chatbot to shit out paradigm-shattering scientific leaps on demand:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/trump-spent-2025-attacking-science-that-could-set-back-his-genesis-mission/

The problem is that while AIs can shit out sentences that seem to qualify as scientific breakthroughs, they can't actually do science. Take Google's claim that its Deepmind product had advanced material science by 800 years, "discovering 2.2 million structures." It turns out that these "discoveries" are useless – in that they constitute trivial variations on known materials, and/or have no uses, and/or can only exist at absolute zero:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

But the fact that a chatbot can't do science isn't important to Trump – or at least, not as important as all the other things a chatbot won't do. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to stare at an eclipse. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't tell Trump that trans people exist. A chatbot won't tell Trump that the climate emergency is real. A chatbot will agree with Trump when he says that offshore wind kills whales and that Tylenol causes autism.

For Trump, the fantasy of science without scientists is more important than whether any science happens.

America needs science, but for Trump – a billionaire solipsist – America is a country populated by people who mostly don't really exist.

That's true of tech bosses, too. After all, they were the original suckers for Effective Altruism and the fantasy of a world without people. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg announced that the average person has three friends, but wants 15 friends, and that he would solve this with chatbots?

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mark-zuckerberg-on-ai-friendships_l_681a4bf3e4b0c2b15d96851d

Sure, we all dunked on him for being such an unlikable fucking Martian that he doesn't understand what a "friend" is. But I don't think that's what's actually going on there: it's not that Zuck doesn't understand what friends are; it's that he treats your friendships as problems to be solved.

Your friends' behavior determines how much money Zuck can make. When your friends arrange their interactions with you in a way that increases how much time you spend on his platforms, Zuckerberg maximizes the number of ads he gets to show you and thus how much money he can make. The fact that your friends stubbornly refuse to help him maximize his capital accumulation is a problem, and the solution to that problem is chatbots, which can be instructed to relate to you in ways that are optimized for increasing Zuck's wealth.

For Zuck, chatbots are a fantasy of a social network without socializing.

It's not just users that tech bosses fantasize about replacing with AI, though – they really want to get rid of coders. Computer programmers aren't (formally) a profession, but they are quite powerful, and have a cultural norm of criticizing their bosses' stupid ideas:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech bosses are completely dependent on coders, who know how to do things they don't know how to do, and aren't shy about letting them know it. That's why tech bosses are so quick to equate "writing code" with "software engineering" (the latter being a discipline that requires consideration of upstream, downstream and adjacent processes while prioritizing legibility and maintainability by future generations of engineers). A chatbot can produce software routines that perform some well-scoped task, but one thing they can't do is maintain the wide, deep "context window" at the heart of software engineering – a linear increase in a chatbot's context window results in a geometric increase in the amount of computation the chatbot has to perform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

But the fact that chatbots will produce technical debt at scale is less important to tech bosses than the fact that a chatbot will do what you tell it without giving the boss any lip. For tech bosses, chatbots are the fantasy of a coding shop without any coders.

This is a bad joke, literally. When I worked in a shop, we used to sarcastically say, "Retail would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." We were unknowingly reprising Brecht, whose "Die Lösung" contains the immortal line, "Would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"

Billionaires don't see the humor. For them, AI is a chance to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the firm's drive-train, and make movies without writers or actors, factories without workers, hospitals without nurses, schools without teachers, science without scientists, code shops without coders, social media without socializing, and yes, even retail without the fucking customers.

Billionaires love the idea of "Universal Basic Income." For them, this is the apotheosis of the AI fantasy of a world without people. In this fantasy, the boss's toy steering wheel is steering the firm. Business consists of a boss and a computer that turns the boss's ideas into products. Who will consume these products? You will, thanks to UBI – the government will continue to exist in this fantasy, but for the sole purpose of creating new money and dispersing it to you, so that you can turn it over to billionaires who singlehandedly direct all of society's functions.

Billionaires love UBI for the same reason they love charter schools. In the AI UBI fantasy, everyone who's not a billionaire has been replaced with a chatbot, and our only job is to receive government vouchers that we hand over to billionaire grifters who run the institutions that used to be under democratic control. We no longer vote with our ballots – only with our wallets, and in the wallet election, we only get the ballots that billionaires decide we deserve, and can only direct them between choices that are as meaningless as "Mac vs Windows" or "Coke vs Pepsi."

A world optimized for capital accumulation.

It's a world without people.

(Image: Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Necrosecurity https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/opan-2020-0104/html

• 'Tis the Season to Ensh*ttify the ACM Digital Library https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~tpkelly/grinch.html

• US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/

• How Screen-Time Limits Fail and What Matters More https://www.owenkellogg.com/p/how-screen-time-limits-fail-and-what?hide_intro_popup=true

• KdK (Kinetik der Kontinua) part 1: Introduction https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/kdk-kinetik-der-kontinua-part-1-introduction

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian Member of Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20060217022615/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1060

#20yrsago IKEA stores make great babysitters, soup-kitchens https://web.archive.org/web/20061107014101/http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,392850,00.html

#20yrsago Deaf geek mods implant-firmware so he can enjoy music again https://web.archive.org/web/20060110053839/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/bolero_pr.html

#20yrsago Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/04/study-best-place-to-advertise-to-teens-is-in-game/

#20yrsago Misbehavior in Second Life game punished by exile to “the corn field” https://web.archive.org/web/20060209002925/http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/

#20yrsago Florida may sue Sony, too https://web.archive.org/web/20060109130626/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004292.php

#20yrsago CEO of Neuros to Congress: If you plug the A-Hole, we’re out of biz https://web.archive.org/web/20060106045933/https://open.neurostechnology.com/files/dtcsa.html

#20yrsago Click-fraud explained https://web.archive.org/web/20060103050629/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud_pr.html

#20yrsago Canadian MP imports US’s worst copyright AND dirty campaign financing https://web.archive.org/web/20060624204919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1058&Itemid=89&nsub=

#20yrsago EU study: more exclusive rights = worse economy https://www.ft.com/content/99610a50-7bb2-11da-ab8e-0000779e2340

#20yrsago Online fundraiser for mom being sued by the RIAA https://web.archive.org/web/20060604021749/http://www.p2pnet.net/goliath/

#20yrsago Sf story: Internet collapses, bloggers become homeless https://web.archive.org/web/20060105051729/https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/pdf0602.htm

#20yrsago Weinberger: Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right https://web.archive.org/web/20060104032042/https://hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-dec29-05.html#wikipedia

#10yrsago Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft https://medium.com/backchannel/i-moved-to-linux-and-it-s-even-better-than-i-expected-9f2dcac3f8fb#.3vhxku71i

#10yrsago Understand: The esoteric criminal sentencing that mobilized Oregon’s Cowliphate https://web.archive.org/web/20220621233456/https://www.popehat.com/2016/01/04/what-happened-in-the-hammond-sentencing-in-oregon-a-lawsplainer/

#10yrsago Thomas Piketty on Thomas Piketty https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/capital-predistribution-and-redistribution/

#10yrsago TPP vs Canada: a parade of horribles https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/the-trouble-with-the-tpp-day-1-u-s-blocks-balancing-objectives/

#10yrsago Vanilla ISIS needs snacks https://web.archive.org/web/20160222182431/https://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/oregon-terrorists-dont-plan-siege-very-well-put-out-plea-for-snacks-and-supplies–ZJglh9sRjx

#10yrsago T-Mobile’s “Binge On” is just throttling for all video https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies

#10yrsago Help identify the science fiction legends in these thrift-scored pix of the 1956 Worldcon https://www.flickr.com/photos/slomuse/sets/72157662390340119

#10yrsago India’s telcoms regulator says it will ignore Facebook’s astroturf army https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/Consultation-paper-is-not-an-opinion-poll-TRAI-chairman/article60523944.ece

#10yrsago Anne Frank’s diary is in the public domain; editors aren’t co-authors https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/1/10698254/anne-frank-diary-free-download-copyright-dispute

#10yrsago Armed domestic terrorists take over federal building, but it’s OK, they’re white https://web.archive.org/web/20060103094308/https://www.opb.org/

#10yrsago Paypal rolls out the welcome mat for hackers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authentication-still-the-norm/

#10yrsago Hong Kong’s dissident publishing workers are disappearing, possibly kidnapped to mainland https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/01/03/hong-kong-unsettled-strange-case-missing-booksellers/78226448/

#10yrsago Breaking the DRM on the 1982 Apple ][+ port of Burger Time https://ia801207.us.archive.org/14/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/BurgerTime

#5yrsago The Data Detective https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

#5yrsago Google's unionizing https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#awu

#5yrsago Ad-tech is a bezzle https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

• Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "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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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.

---

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SANTA FE, NM—A set of billowing curtains signaling that they had arrived moments too late, staff from Penguin Random House reportedly broke down George R.R. Martin’s door Monday as the writer escaped through a bathroom window. “George, George, come back—we don’t want to hurt you! We just want to talk!” said executive editor Anne Groell, who ran to the shoe-print-marked windowsill where she caught a glimpse of the fleeing Game Of Thrones author’s flapping black button-up shirt just before he disappeared into the trees. “Editorial assistants, fan out! Don’t let him get away! He’s a fast one, but he won’t get far on foot. He’ll need to stop for comic books eventually.” At press time, sources confirmed Groell had grabbed a fisherman’s cap that fell near the window and given it to her German shepherd to sniff.

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DANBURY, CT—Emphasizing the local parish’s dedication to serving its most vulnerable community members, St. Mary’s Catholic Church announced Tuesday that it was opening its doors to any single mothers in need of judgment. “Times are tough right now, but we want divorcées and unwed moms to know they can rely on the church to cast doubt on their way of life,” said parish administrator Dianne Barry, explaining that priests and nuns would be available around the clock to provide a disapproving “hmmm,” a raised eyebrow, or a critical sneer to any single mothers struggling to get by. “Regardless of your background or whether you’re rich or poor, this is a safe space where you can come to find out everything that’s wrong with you. We have plenty of snide comments to hand out, and our staff is specially trained to disparage you for driving men away and raising your children in sin. Our goal is to judge thousands of unmarried mothers this season.” St. Mary’s also announced that the new program would not interfere with its regularly scheduled judgment of childless women.

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In brief: In this morning’s post we dig into our region’s very warm start to winter, which will continue this week. We probably will set more record highs. The post then explains why this is probably not the end of winter.

Who killed Jack Frost?

The month of December ended up 4.0 degrees above normal, and so far January is running much higher than what we typically experience at this time of year. We’ve already set one record high temperature this year (84 degrees, on Friday). This week will be no different, with record highs on Tuesday (80 degrees), Wednesday (81 degrees) and Thursday (79 degrees) all in play. Perhaps Friday as well, we will see.

By that point we will be nearly one half of the way into climatological winter, which spans from December through February. So is it just going to be super-warm weather all the way? I don’t think so. At the risk of being wrong (a hazard of the job!) I think that after a strong-ish front arrives late Friday or early Saturday of this week, we will fall into a cooler pattern for awhile. By this I mean days in the 60s and nights in the 40s. There are some hints of perhaps even colder weather toward the end of January, but who knows, really.

The bottom line is that we still have nearly eight weeks until March 1, and a lot can happen weather wise. So yes, this week is going to be unseasonably warm, just like a lot of December. But after that? We shall see.

Monday

Temperatures this morning have fallen to about 50 degrees across the metro area, which is the coldest we are going to get until at least next Saturday, but still warmer than is typical for January. Mostly cloudy skies this morning will give way to plenty of sunshine this afternoon, and this will allow high temperatures to push into the upper 70s for most locations. Winds will shift to come from the south over the course of the day. Lows tonight will drop into the low- to mid-60s.

Tuesday and Wednesday

These look to be the warmest days of the week, with mostly sunny skies and highs in the low- to mid-80s. One sobering note is that our all-time record high temperature for both the month of December and January is 85 degrees. That is potentially in play on Wednesday. With higher dewpoints (and humidity) we may also see some patchy fog on most mornings this week, including these days. Lows will again be in the 60s.

Thursday and Friday

A disturbance will precede the passage of a cold front late this week, and this will lead to the potential for some light showers on Thursday and Friday. I know we need rain, but unfortunately this frontal passage is unlikely to deliver on that score. Both of these days will have about a 20 or 30 percent chance of rain, but accumulations look slight. Daily highs will probably be in the vicinity of 80 degrees, with increased cloud cover. There will be plenty of humidity. That should change some time on Friday night as a robust front sweeps through.

Saturday and Sunday

The weekend looks decidedly cooler. I think highs on both days will reach the lower 60s, but this will depend on the amount of sunshine after the front. I think Saturday will see a fair amount, but Sunday could be partly cloudy, at least. I did a deeper dive yesterday into conditions for the Houston Marathon on Sunday, January 11, and that forecast more or less holds. If anything we’ve trended a bit cooler, with start line temperatures edging toward the lower 40s. Rain chances are low to non-existent, and my expectation is for fairly light winds. So all in all, pretty ideal for a long run.

Next week

We may slowly warm up some later next week, but we are still likely to remain in the 60s on most days, with drier air and cool, if not cold nights. Unfortunately I don’t see any real rainmakers in the next 10 to 15 days.

A reader writes:

My department just called all us middle managers into a session to discuss our sickness “issue.” Some context: We live in a country where permanent employees of any level at any company all get unlimited sick days at full pay for a year (with a handful of caveats). Funnily enough, the sickness rate here isn’t particularly high: the average local worker takes three days off for sickness per year.

Our company has been through a painful year-long layoff process, which coincided with record-breaking profits, the launch of completely new product lines, and somewhat absurd expectations. Oh, and team celebration budgets were cut in the meantime. Our department frankly hit it out of the park: Our department alone is more profitable than our next two biggest competitors combined. We are about 15% above target, and have been for around three years. Yet this wasn’t enough to protect many of our strongest performers from layoffs because “their roles could be done from a cheaper country.”

Combined with fact that a huge number of us work way beyond the 40 hours a week in our job descriptions — and the fact that overtime is, very legally, unpaid — our sickness rates are way above the national average. (Fun fact: my VP was convinced that the reason we work so much overtime is because we can’t prioritize. When I went to him with a list of tasks we had to do, a recommendation on what order to do them in, and the corresponding minimal deadline extensions we’d need, he just said, “No, get it all done. You’re making me feel blocked.”) We’re currently at 26 sick days per employee per year!

So, most of us think the cause for this is pretty obvious. Our HR department and leadership see it a bit differently, though. And now to the meeting.

Alison, it was like they had read your blog for the past 10 years and done the exact opposite of what you advise when teams are burning out. Some of the highlights:

• They started the talk by saying, “Illness costs us too much money” and ended by saying, “Let’s bring the price down of sick leave together.” Incidentally, the price of sickness in our department is well below the amount by which we exceeded our targets this year.

• They said we should insist our employees phone us in the morning (on our personal cells; none of us have company phones or desk phones) and tell us when they can’t come in for the day instead of sending a Slack message (we’re very much Slack-first at my company so the request is really out of touch) and if they have a flu or migraine, we should recommend that they come back to work after lunch if they feel a bit better so they “don’t lose a day of productivity.” I pointed out the power differential between manager and worker that makes a “suggestion” feel like pressure even if not intended, and they said, “Well, they’re putting pressure on everyone else when they’re sick.”

• They told us we should be calling sick employees every two days to ask if they’re feeling better and what they plan to do to get better. When we pointed out how invasive that’s likely to feel, they said, “It’s completely normal. You’d do that with a family member, right? That’s what you should be doing here, too.”

• They said we should always ask them if they’ve seen a doctor for any ailment. When someone pointed out that not everyone has a family doctor, let alone goes to them for every migraine, they said, “See? To me, that’s a clear sign that they’re not even trying to take care of their own health.”

• They acknowledged that most illnesses in our department were related to burnout. Their solution is for us to “normalize talking about mental health” with our employees in our team meetings.

• When we pointed out that none of us thought this would actually make our employees less sick, they shared a “resource package” with us. This package was basically instructions on how to log sick days in our HR tool so HR can better track it, a link to a mental health app, and the phone number for our employee assistance program (current wait time: four to six months). We asked if they were planning on addressing the obvious root cause of our burnout problem, and they said, “That’s confidential.”

I already know that everything they’ve asked us to do is totally legal. And they’re not going to change their minds. And we have already pushed back. They’ve made clear they’re not budging, and that they’ll be checking much more closely to make sure we’re doing everything they’ve told us to do.

So … I guess my question is, knowing that this is just the way it’s going to be and that I won’t be able to recognize my employees with more money or less absurd deadlines, how do I enforce policies like “normalize talking about mental health” and “providing resource packages” and “asking them if they’ve gone to the doctor about every little ailment” and “caring for them like a family member” in a way that is minimally compliant, ideally actually helpful, and in a best case scenario makes clear without my needing to say it that I fundamentally disagree with HR’s master plan to reduce the time my people spend sick by making them feel like thieves for using sick leave?

Your company is run by loons.

I particularly like their assertion that you should be calling sick family members every two days to ask what they plan to do to get better. I intend to implement that in my own family right away, and I will update you later in the year to let you know whether it led to total or only partial estrangement.

Anyway, can you just … not comply? Would they know? Most of what they’re asking you to do would happen outside their view, and they wouldn’t really know whether you were harassing the crap out of sick employees by phone (especially since you don’t have company phones so they really have no way of tracking it!) or suggesting people come back in the afternoon after a morning out with the flu (!) or inquiring into their doctor visits. They said they’ll be checking but, practically speaking, how? Are they going to follow up with your employees to ask whether you suggested they see a doctor for every migraine? (And if so, okay, tell your employees that’s what’s going on and so their answer to that question should always be yes. When your management is this out of their gourd, you don’t have a duty of loyalty to hide it from your team. If anything, you have a duty of loyalty to tell your team.)

But I’m also curious what would happen if you just all stopped overworking yourselves so much. Yes, they’re pilling work on you and so you’re all working massive overtime to get it all done, but what would happen if you just … didn’t? What would happen if you held firm on saying things like, “We can do X and Y by next week, but that means Z won’t happen until the following week and W will have to be back-burnered indefinitely?” And if they respond by telling you no, it all has to happen faster, if you simply said, “Realistically, we don’t have the staffing to do that, so here’s how we’re prioritizing things and let me know if you want these ordered differently”? Because the thing is, you presumably are setting some boundaries already, whether you think about it that way or not — you’re presumably building people’s need to go home and sleep into your project timelines and would hold firm if they tried to get you to work 24/7 — so this is just a question of drawing the line in a different place.

Obviously there’s a danger that they’ll fire some or all of you if you do that, so you need to have a realistic sense of how much capital and leverage you have (as well as how willing you are to take that risk), but very, very, very often when people are being overworked to the point of needing 26 sick days a year, there’s actually more room than they realize for them to set different boundaries; they’ve just been assuming they can’t.

Also, though — and I know this easier said than done — you all should be working on leaving, because this company is wildly dysfunctional, it’s literally making your team members sick, and they sound very likely to lay any of you off tomorrow if they find a profitable way to do it.

The post my company wants us to harass overworked employees into taking less sick leave appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. An abusive volunteer is holding our website hostage

I am no longer a mere VP — I have been elected president! A short summary of my previous letters: I’m on the board of a small organization and we’re all volunteers. There were issues with our webmaster and our website, but the previous president wasn’t wanting to muck around with the site. I understand his reasons but I disagreed with him about it.

At our 2024 convention, the (now former) president announced that he was not running for reelection and that I was running for president. The webmaster pulled me aside after this and told me that he was planning to retire, that he’d identified someone to take over the role from him, and that he was anticipating being able to step down in December 2026. Yes, 2026. As in, 18 months from when we were having this conversation.

Flash forward to October. The webmaster sent me an email reiterating what he’d told me at our convention. I replied back agreeing with a lot of the points that he’d made and then continued on to say that having one webmaster was a single point of failure, we couldn’t rely on always having tech-savvy members with the desire and time to maintain the website, and my plans for how I wanted to change things. This … did not go down well. I think the summary of the months-long conversation is: while I definitely made some missteps, the only outcome he was willing to accept was what he’d already decided, and since that was never going to happen, we were pretty much doomed to be at loggerheads about it all.

I officially took office in January and as part of my president’s message included an acknowledgement of the work that he’d done over the years and then a description of what I wanted to make happen and a call for volunteers. And holy shit, did they deliver! I ended up with a fantastic group of volunteers, one of whom had retired recently and has a ton of project management experience. She took the reins and our first meeting was March 2025.

I am blown away by how talented and dedicated this group is and I am even more blown away by all the things that went into this site. We have an official privacy policy now! Legal disclaimers! Members can update their own privacy information! The site itself is GORGEOUS and we launched it right at the beginning of July, just before our yearly convention. I’m a little worried that we’re still borderline single point of failure on the technical side, but I’ve been assured that the team is good to go. When we launched, we did so with what we felt was the minimum viable product and we’ve been adding functionality, features, made some changes/improvements, all that good stuff, since July. Right now, we’re working on updating our directory in accordance with our new privacy policy. (Ooo, exciting!)

The former webmaster and the new web team, we’ve all reached a sort of détente with each other. And, ya know, given how everything went down, I’ll take it. Are we all going to be the best of friends? Probably not, but I think we all can either treat each other with respect or just nicely ignore the other person’s existence, and I’m good with that.

So all’s well that ends well! Now I just need to get started on my project for this year, but since it’s actually an idea from one of my VPs, I think I’ll just start poking at him to get it up and running.

2. Does board member’s comment mean I’m about to get a big raise? (#2 at the link)

To start, I think I need to be more transparent about what the original conversation was. The board member’s cryptic line about waiting for review season was, “You know I’m on the budget committee and we just approved raises for next year, so talk to me after your review. Don’t quote me on it, but I think there’s a new number in front of it if I remember correctly.” Which is why I spiraled about what that number could be and how much of the information was accurate.

Anyway, I ended up receiving a 10% raise, and due to some organizational restructuring since, I’m being fast-tracked to higher leadership soon too.

I don’t think I’ll be buying a house, but an apartment with in-unit laundry and off-street parking is in my near future!

Thanks to you and your readers for your thoughtful advice.

3. My employee is in remote limbo and it’s impacting her work

After reading through the feedback and comments I came to the realization that where Jane works was not the main issue. For those that are curious, she was able to work out a hybrid arrangement with HR.

The main issue is Jane’s work. The quality is inconsistent and I often have to hold her hand more than necessary for someone at her level. Over the summer another team member, Sam, who is two levels below Jane, shared his project work in a meeting. I was blown away by his thoroughness and analysis. That sealed the deal for me. I had an honest conversation with Jane about areas she needs to improve on and gave her an action plan to get on track. Our checkin on her progress is scheduled for after the holidays.

4. A group of coworkers are pushing for our in-office breakfasts to be vegan

The situation fizzled out eventually. People in charge of the breakfast responded that their priority is bringing people together, which means accomodating a wide variety of dietary needs, and the current lack of demand and overstock of the vegan breakfast options goes against the attempts to minimize food waste. The vegan group endorsing the request complained a bit but did not get a buy-in from the majority. The breakfast setup stays the same.

The post updates: the volunteer holding a website hostage, the vegan breakfasts, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors.

I wonder what she wanted?

PALO ALTO, CA—Shouting over the sound of the alarm as it blared through the headquarters of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, panicked xAI technicians were reportedly throwing levers Monday in a frantic effort to find the one controlling Grok’s pedophilia. “Come on, everybody, it’s got to be here!” said xAI engineer Matthew Fedorov, who ran down a row of flashing control panels as he searched for the lever that would stop the AI-powered chatbot from creating sexualized images of minors. “No, not that one. That’s just making it talk like a pirate. It’s still expressing a sexual interest in children, though. No, not the MechaHitler one either. Wait, I think I found it, but it’s stuck! Someone get over here and help me pull!” At press time, sources confirmed horrified employees were slowly backing away after they had accidentally broken off Grok’s pedophilia lever while the controls were set to serial-predator mode.

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Misinformation concerning menopause abounds. The Onion’s health experts examine the myths versus the facts. 

MYTH: Hot flashes are the first sign of menopause.

FACT: Sharing an AI image of a golden retriever with angel wings is the first sign of menopause. 

MYTH: Going through menopause is a miserable experience.

FACT: Many women actually enjoy the opportunity to try a bunch of new drugs.

MYTH: All of a woman’s eggs are gone by the time she hits 50.

FACT: You can typically guilt your eggs into staying longer by telling them how empty the house feels.

MYTH: Menopause marks the permanent end of a woman’s period.

FACT: Most women regain their periods upon arriving in hell.

MYTH: Perimenopause symptoms can begin in your 30s.

FACT: You need to take a deep breath and drink a glass of water.

MYTH: After menopause, women cannot become pregnant.

FACT: Scientists know very little about the nascent field of women’s health.

The post Menopause: Myth Vs. Fact appeared first on The Onion.