NEW YORK—Refusing to back down despite repeated fact checks to the contrary, Sen. J.D. Vance claimed during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate that Haitian immigrants were coming into this country to make him look stupid. “There are hundreds of people from Haiti pouring across our border every day with the express purpose of provoking me into saying something deeply idiotic in front of millions of people,” said Vance, gesturing toward Tim Walz and asserting that the Democratic governor had “absolutely no interest” in stopping the flow of Haitians who cause him to go on ill-informed rants that make him appear as if he has “no goddamn idea” what he’s talking about. “The worst part is that Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to care how often they cause me to make an ass of myself on national television. For all I know, she’s happy to see me act like a complete dumbfuck while I churn out another political talking point based on a town I’ve barely visited. Well, I do care about that. In fact, it makes me incredibly frustrated how often it happens.” Vance went on to claim that Haitian people were to blame for all the rest of the profoundly ignorant things he was going to say in the rest of the debate and final month of the 2024 campaign.

The post J.D. Vance Claims Haitian Immigrants Coming Into This Country To Make Him Look Stupid appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK—During Tuesday’s debate, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance accused his opponent, Tim Walz, of “cavorting with the ghost of Karl Marx beneath a blood-red moon,” an encounter Vance alleged to have seen with his own two eyes. “Him there! I saw that man and his Chinese communist brethren intoning words from Das Kapital under the red glow of the moon, the bearded specter of Marx hovering close above,” said Vance, pointing directly at the Minnesota governor as gasps from the stunned moderators echoed through the room. “My opponent and his legion of comrades, their frenzied eyes aglow amid the funeral pyres of burning cash, spoke of a violent rebellion to rid the United States of our capitalist ideals once and for all. I watched from the safety of a shrub as he lifted his robes to accept a white-hot brand in the shape of a hammer and sickle, all the while crying out for the forceful implementation of a classless society. Seize him now, or our republic shall surely fall under communist rule!” At press time, the moderators had reportedly decided Walz would be bound to the 50-volume collected works of Marx and Engels and dunked in a body of water to see if he would float. 

The post J.D. Vance: ‘I Saw Tim Walz Cavorting With The Ghost Of Karl Marx Beneath A Blood-Red Moon’ appeared first on The Onion.

Today's links

• A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge: A machine in the middle that's too cheap to meter.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
• 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.

A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge (permalink)

Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.

All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:

https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/

But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.

For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.

Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.

They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."

HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.

Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.

Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.

DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.

Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.

In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.

HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.

Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.

But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.

Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.

This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."

In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/

Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.

It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."

(Image: Jay Summet)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Guided by Vices https://pxlnv.com/blog/guided-by-vices/ (h/t Waxy)

• FOOLISH MORTALS: A Haunted Mansion Burlesque Cabaret https://www.foolishmortalsburlesque.com/about (h/t Dan Howland)

• The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-memory-wayback-machine-lawsuits/

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Asimov’s magazine on ebooks https://web.archive.org/web/20041010190341/https://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0408/onthenet2.shtml

#20yrsago Can suing customers save the record companies? https://web.archive.org/web/20041012170814/http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1095434496352

#20yrsago ACLU and EFF strike down part of PATRIOT Act https://web.archive.org/web/20040927082258/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001945

#20yrsago Industrial nations to WIPO: less IP, more global well-being https://web.archive.org/web/20041011201242/http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2004-September/006974.html

#20yrsago Court trashes fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20041009211351/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001962

#20yrsago EFF kicks Diebold’s ass https://web.archive.org/web/20041009211351/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001961

#20yrsago MSFT’s FAT shakedown suspended by Patent Office https://web.archive.org/web/20041009202717/http://www.pubpat.org/Microsoft_517_Rejected.htm

#20yrsago Sony ditches DRM CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20041010063144/http://www.engadget.com/entry/3586262161659249/

#20yrsago Canadian Creative Commons licenses launched https://web.archive.org/web/20041011105249/http://www.cippic.ca/en/projects-cases/icommons-canada/

#15yrsago Bank of America demands thumbprint from man with no arms https://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE58247Y20090903/

#15yrsago Britain seeks ban on glass pint-glasses to prevent bar-brawl injuries https://www.loweringthebar.net/2009/09/british-government-considers-mandating-plastic-pints.html

#15yrsago Trotsky: the graphic biography https://memex.craphound.com/2009/09/30/trotsky-the-graphic-biography/

#15yrsago BBC wants to encrypt “free” TV — talking points debunked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/sep/29/bbc-hd-encryption

#15yrsago UK Border Agency’s pseudoscientific “race-detection” DNA/isotope tests has scientific experts “horrified” https://web.archive.org/web/20091004013349/http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/nationality-tes-1.html

#15yrsago Zork rock anthem https://web.archive.org/web/20131110083129/http://www.elumir.com/music/Walkthrough.mp3

#15yrsago Apple 1984 ad, updated for 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdVzboF2E2Q

#15yrsago Android developers pledge to make open equivalents to Google’s proprietary apps https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/09/android-community-aims-to-replace-googles-proprietary-bits/

#15yrsago Boneshaker: Cherie Priest’s swashbuckling steampunk Seattle story https://memex.craphound.com/2009/09/29/boneshaker-cherie-priests-swashbuckling-steampunk-seattle-story/

#15yrsago Faced with network surveillance, Hong Kong student demonstrators go P2P https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-29411159

#10yrsago Eric Holder’s terrible tech-liberties record https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/holders-disappointing-tech-legacy

#10yrsago Localizing an operating system for a language with no high-tech vocabulary https://web.archive.org/web/20191025222806/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#5yrsago Stealing Ur Feelings: interactive documentary on the snakeoil “science” of facial emotion detection https://stealingurfeelin.gs

#5yrsago Jonathan Lethem on Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/

#1yrago The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/29/ban-surveillance-ads/#sucker-funnel

#1yrago The internet is not a (link)dump truck https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? David Graeber Institute (Remote), Oct 3
  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsduuprjgpG9C4SAenCK4jOsawnkxDrY_-#/registration

• “Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza” (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12
  https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/

• SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
  https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

• TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
  https://tusconscificon.com/

• International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
  https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Rethink: Is the internet getting worse?
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r

• Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0

• DEF CON 32 – Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: words ( words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

Latest podcast: Vigilant (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Headlines

• Helene help continues to be desperately needed.
• Gulf development odds have stalled somewhat, but development of a sloppy system tracking east or northeast in the Gulf this weekend or next week seems plausible.
• The main concern we currently have is potential for heavy rain in Florida.
• Tropical Storm Kirk should become a hurricane in the next day, while Invest 91L may become a depression or Tropical Storm Leslie by tomorrow or Thursday. Neither are currently expected to impact land.

Helene latest

As communication slowly gets restored to affected areas from Hurricane Helene, we are beginning to get a sense of the scope of the disaster and the horrific details of loss and survival. The toll will likely get worse before it gets better. And we continue to encourage folks to contribute to organizations helping directly with the recovery efforts. Our list from yesterday:

Blue Ridge NPR has a good list. (many locally based resources on this list and other orgs, such as Samaritan’s Purse)

The East Tennessee Foundation is a resource as well.

A Houston-based organization that specifically helps food and beverage workers (of which many were impacted) called the Southern Smoke Foundation is another one I personally support and recommend.

World Central Kitchen is on the ground there also, serving up meals.

The Fuel Relief Fund specifically helps people with fuel.

Team Rubicon is on the ground as well.

Crowdsource Rescue is another org we’ve directly engaged with in the past that is doing incredible work right now.

The Cajun Navy is also doing rescue work in the region, and they’ve been a friend to us in Houston too.

Gulf development odds stall a bit

Now for some good news, I guess. Development odds over the next week or so in the Gulf have stalled a bit, or at least stagnated some. The NHC map is at 40 percent this morning, same as it was yesterday.

Keep in mind that the orange hatched area above indicates *where* development could occur, not where the system is expected to track. There’s not a whole lot to look at this morning, as any disturbance is very nascent and poorly organized. Over the next couple days, this will migrate northward and perhaps get slightly better organized. Various models depict various solutions, including the possibility that additional areas of disturbed weather enter the picture as well. Overall, the picture looks sloppy.

It’s worth noting for those extra concerned that this looks nothing at all like Helene did at this point in its life cycle. So this is why we continue to think that things are likely to be much sloppier and a bit lower end on the intensity scale as this gets moving.

The model solutions really do range from a more organized system to even 2 organized systems to just a “blob” of moisture that tracks northwest, then north, then northeast or even east-northeast across the Gulf, generally toward Florida. Some even sort of stall it out over the open Gulf, sort of like we saw last month off Texas where an undeveloped system sat and festered for a while before Francine emerged from the slop after a week or two. If you look at the GFS ensemble in particular, it shows a whole slew of options.

Again, this is much different than how things looked ahead of Helene. Given the idea of a sloppy system, a front in the vicinity early next week, and a somewhat disorganized initial disturbance, all this leads me to think that a messy rainmaker may be on tap for the eastern Gulf Coast and Florida this weekend and next week. Indeed, the rainfall forecast in Florida is solid. For now, serious flooding isn’t expected, but continue to watch this and monitor its progress in the coming days. I think it’s obvious that this one is going to be of lower predictability than Helene was. But also hopefully lower risk as well.

Kirk gaining momentum, and Invest 91L may develop behind it

Tropical Storm Kirk is on the precipice of hurricane intensity this afternoon, as it is a 70 mph tropical storm. Kirk is still expected to remain safely out at sea.

Kirk should intensify steadily over the coming days, peaking as at least a category 3 and possibly category 4 storm over the open Atlantic later this week. Expect to see some pretty stunning satellite imagery at some point. Again, thankfully, Kirk will avoid land.

Behind Kirk, we do have a second area, Invest 91L. This one is close to developing as well. Over the coming days, this will take a track generally south and west of Kirk’s track. This should still keep it out at sea, but we’ll continue to watch this one closely in case it can manage to brush the islands eventually.

That’s all we’ve got for now. We will likely see some additional Pacific systems later this week as well. None at this point look to threaten land for now. More to come!

In brief: Today’s update digs a little deeper into our lack of rainfall during the second half of summer, and whether we’re going to see relief any time soon. The answer is maybe, and that especially coastal areas have a healthy chance of rain this weekend. Then, by early next week, passage of a decent fall cool front looks increasingly likely.

Drying soils in late summer

Houston started out this summer with plenty of rain. You may remember Hurricane Beryl in July? But by the end of that month conditions turned notably drier. And but for a wetter spell in late August, the last two months have been quite dry. Our soils feel the lack of rain especially keenly during August and September, as these are often the hottest months of the year, which dries things out much more quickly. Looking at the last 60 days, we can see that much of the Houston area received less than 50 percent of normal rainfall, and some western areas less than 25 percent.

So far this has not resulted in drought-like conditions—something for which we can thank Beryl. However, in the latest update from the US Drought Monitor, the northern two-thirds of the Houston region are classified as being “abnormally dry.” This is just a step short of falling into a drought. I write all of that to say we could use some rainfall this month. Our next chance comes this weekend, but unfortunately it looks like the highest odds for rainfall will be closer to the coast, areas which generally are doing OK with rainfall. Would that I had better news.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Warm, but calm, weather will continue through much of this week. We can expect sunny days, high but not excessively so humidity levels, and sunny skies. Daytime temperatures will be in the low 90s, with overnight temperatures in the low 70s. Winds will be light all three days, from the north and east, typically not getting much above 5 mph. You probably won’t believe me, but we’re coming to the end of the time of year when we see long strings of 90-degree days, so if you like pool or beach time, this is a good week, and weekend for that.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

As noted above, our region will see some better rain chances starting Friday and lasting through the weekend. In the absence of high pressure, and with increasing levels of moisture in the atmosphere, we should see some clouds start to build on Friday, with partly to mostly cloudy conditions on Saturday, before more sunshine on Sunday. The models have gotten a little more bullish with rain chances for the weekend, especially on Saturday. However, you should set your expectations accordingly, especially if you live inland of Interstate 10.

My sense is that there is still a lot of uncertainty in the rainfall forecast so expect some change. However, if you live in a coastal county your chances of rain are probably higher than 50 percent on Saturday, and a bit lesser on Friday and Sunday. Further inland, along Interstate 10, rain chances are probably about 40 percent on Saturday, and the further you go from the coast, the lower things get.

High temperatures this weekend will be on the order of 90 degrees during the daytime, with a decent amount of humidity, and lows generally in the mid-70s.

Next week

Confidence is increasing in the arrival of a cool front early next week, likely some time on Monday or Monday night. It is not guaranteed, but there is now support in a lot of our modeling guidance for a decent push of drier and cooler air. I would expect mostly sunny weather next week, with highs in the 80s and lows in the lower 60s, but this is going to depend on the extent of the frontal push. A majority of the colder air with this system is going to get shoved east, rather than south, so we’ll have to wait and see how much relief we get. Despite those caveats, however, I’m optimistic. A little fall weather would hit the spot.

Tropics

There’s a lot going on out there, and if you want all the details we’ve got them on The Eyewall. But if you’re simply wondering, “What does this mean for Texas?” the answer is, not much. It’s been a week since we called a halt to the Texas hurricane season, and I still feel pretty good about that prediction.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

I’m off for a few days, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2020.

A reader writes:

I am part of the HR department at my workplace, and we hired “Andre” a few months ago as a part of our student group. He’s only 18, but he’s been a hard worker and always takes initiative around the office. I was part of Andre’s interview panel, so I’ve always been in contact with him and friendly with him since we brought him on board.

For the past month, Andre has been working in my section to help process a backlog of paperwork caused by COVID-19, so he spends a lot of time in my office where the only working scanner is. We started with small talk but learned that we share a lot of hobbies.

A week ago, a cafe near our office opened back up (take-out only), and when I told Andre about it, he suggested we go there for break. I’ve had coffee with my other coworkers before. He offered to pay, and after we chatted at a park bench by the cafe, he offered a hand to help me up from the bench and held my upper arm until we’d left the park. Since then, we’ve felt more comfortable making physical contact, but it’s been nothing inappropriate. It’s usually just a poke or bump on the shoulder or brushing up against each other in the hall.

I bring this up because one of my coworkers, “Jane,” confided in me that she’s concerned about how Andre and I interact. She said that she saw us on that outing, and she confessed that she overheard a short conversation we had while Andre was replacing toner. Andre was jamming the cartridge in aggressively, so I said, “Damn, I hope you don’t treat your dates like that.” He had replied, “Only if they ask for it.” She has also heard Andre tell me on a separate occasion, “If only I could get a girl with legs like yours, I’d be in business.”

Jane thinks this could result in sexual harassment complaints, but that wouldn’t make any sense. We thought we were alone, and since we’ve been getting more connected at work, we’ve been talking in friendly innuendo like that. Andre has never shown any discomfort when we share jokes like these, especially when he initiates them, and we never do so in front of others to make others feel uncomfortable. Nobody’s complaining. Jane, however, thinks this is unbecoming of a 40something woman like myself and could look very bad for our company if our private interactions were made public.

Jane says they’re not as private as I think and everyone else can feel the “sexual tension” between us, and she said that people sometimes refer to us as “work spouses.” I admit that interacting with Andre makes me feel more attractive than I have in years, but it’s not relevant. Jane also asked if my husband knows about Andre, but my husband doesn’t need to know about Andre since I’ve never cheated on him and never would.

Jane doesn’t seem to understand more nuanced social interactions like flirting can be harmless and common in office settings, and based on the questions above, she seems to believe it’s okay to ask about my private life because of this. Is there a tactful way I can explain to her that she shouldn’t try to police her coworkers’ social interactions, especially if they’re not meant to be public?

Whoa, no.

You need to stop flirting with Andre. Stop brushing against him in the hallway (!), stop trading sexually charged jokes and compliments, stop the whole thing.

You are in HR. He is an 18-year-old student employee. You cannot flirt with or trade sexual innuendo with a student employee.

Yes, this could be sexual harassment. It could be sexual harassment of Andre if he ever starts to feel uncomfortable or like his security in his job depends on continuing the flirtation (and just because someone seems comfortable with this kind of contact at first, that doesn’t mean they’ll continue to feel comfortable with it). It could also be a legal liability if others are forced to overhear obvious sexual remarks between the two of you (that toner comment? come on — I guarantee you that grossed out anyone who overheard).

And yes, potential harassment issues aside, this will absolutely affect the way others think of you. At a minimum, you’ll look like you have terrible judgment, and if this continues people will suspect you of more than that.

Doing this with any colleague would be inappropriate. Doing it with an 18-year-old is even more problematic. He’s on a whole different plane of maturity (and he’s not accountable in nearly the same way you are for knowing what is and isn’t acceptable at work).

Also, you’re in HR! I hope that means you’re doing benefits administration or comp analysis or similar — because if you do anything related to legal compliance or investigations or employee counseling, you’re torpedoing your credibility and trustworthiness in your job as well. You may have already forfeited your ability to be seen as fair or impartial if someone needs to report harassment or other inappropriate behavior.

If you do work in those areas of HR, your judgment here — and especially your response after a colleague pointed out the problems — is indicative of some serious deficiencies in your understanding of foundational concepts in your field, and I’d urge you to do some serious soul-searching about what’s required to make your behavior and judgment line up with what’s needed in that work. This isn’t “I occasionally have do some data entry for my job and I’m not great at it.” This is “I violate the rules I am charged with enforcing, don’t realize when I’m doing it, and may harm others who rely on me to keep their workspace safe and legal.” It’s soul-searching, “am I in the right field?” territory.

If you do that soul-searching and come out of it with an understanding of why all of this is a problem and a resolve to do better, you should be able to move forward (although you’ll need to do some reputation repair at work, as well as righting things with Andre). But you have to do that work.

Also … you didn’t write in asking for marriage advice, but the relevant question there isn’t whether your husband “needs” to know about Andre. It’s whether you’d be comfortable if he did.

A decade after its discovery in the Taklamakan Desert, paleogeneticists in China have extracted and sequenced DNA from cheese found in a Bronze Age grave. What do you think?

“This is why you should never sequence DNA when you’re hungry.”

James Weiss, Associate Associate

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“Now we’re one step closer to finally finding a cure for cheese.”

Ellen Teoli, Systems Analyst

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“If the nerds are finished running their tests, some of us are ready to make nachos.”

Adrian Phelps, Skee-Ball Coach

The post Scientists Sequence DNA From 3,600-Year-Old Cheese appeared first on The Onion.

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OTTAWA: A new poll by Abacus has found that the Liberals support has plummeted so low that the only support they have left is the Conservative Premiers who get to remain popular while Canadians blame Trudeau for things that are technically their domain. “In the last two weeks we’ve seen the Liberals totally fall off […]

The post Poll: Only Canadians still planning to vote for Trudeau are Conservative Premiers who get to blame him for all their failures appeared first on The Beaverton.

“You see these guys walking out with air conditioners with refrigerators on their back, the craziest thing. And the police aren’t allowed to do their job… if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day… if you had one really violent day…one rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out, and it will end immediately.” — Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Excuse me, Mr. Trump? I know you don’t usually take questions from the audience at these rallies, but seeing as how we’re deep into hour four, and you haven’t landed the plane on a single sentence, you’ve started in, well, quite a spell, I’m hoping exceptions might be made.

It’s just that, sir, I have a quick question about The Purge you’re proposing. Now, don’t you get me wrong, it all sounds GREAT. Suggesting a day of unrestrained nationwide looting and murdering as a response to scattered appliance theft sounds like the right move for sure. We can’t have law and order without the temporary removal of all laws to bring about a police state. Makes total sense. I guess I was just hoping to hear a little more detail on the logistics.

For starters, I’m wondering how all this will work on the back end. In the 2013 horror movie franchise of the same name on which your publicly stated proposal is directly lifted, the federal government suspends all police, fire, and emergency services for twelve hours. Would that include telehealth visits? I understand the good sense behind shutting down all the hospitals and letting us all have at each other, sure, sure. But what if I happen to be bothered by seasonal allergies that day, or my bloody leg stump gnawed off by a pack of feral divorced dads during the early hours of The Purge shows signs of infection? Seems easy enough for a doctor to pop on and prescribe me something on a secure video chat from his compound’s panic room.

Speaking of, will I have to meet my family deductible before I’m 70 percent covered for injuries sustained when my ex, Ronald, throws battery acid in my face? No judgment—I know he would only do that as a civic duty to help bring about your sensible vision of national peace and respect for local law enforcement. But it’s always helpful to know in advance if we’re talking small copay or big GoFundMe, you know? God, I just love this country so much. Land of the free. Land of the free.

While we’re on the topic, I haven’t heard you touch on specific health category policies. When I limp into the hospital with gaping machete wounds sustained during this Purge, will I still need a referral from my primary care doctor to see a specialist? What I mean is, if I drag my seeping, almost lifeless husk of a body into the internist’s office because my neighbor finally gets his visceral, violent revenge on me for using my leafblower a little too much in the mornings, do I need to call my regular PCP first to be able to schedule with the only doctor skilled enough to staunch the endless, dark blood pooling from my spleen onto the pavement?

Also, what about my elderly parents, who are on Medicaid? Will it change how they’re fixed or billed for post-Purge visits? Is there a maximum number of visits they’re covered for, or does the doctor need to get all the buckshot the HOA president sprays into my mom’s scalp at the first visit? She really can’t afford to pay much out of pocket after she sent her campaign donation to you last month. She’s on a fixed income, and we didn’t budget for this—or inflation. Thanks, Obama.

I can tell you’re really busy sticking it to anyone you feel has ever wronged you, no matter how slight, so I’ll wrap this up. I just have one more admittedly nitpicky question: Will my insurance company require pre-authorization to reattach any fingers the roving tween chainsaw gangs may cut off? It would be good to get a jump on that and get that pre-approved before a kindly anti-Purge group happens across what they assume is my lifeless, ruined corpse and speeds me to a makeshift clinic in a still-smoldering Fazoli’s. Of course, that would be right before I give a weak cough, and one of them exclaims, “Holy shit, they’re alive! Oh god, how are they alive?” to which the other gruffly replies, “God? There’s no god here. Not anymore. Not on Purge Night.” I guess my fear is I won’t be speaking much once the blood loss gets going, so I may not be in good enough shape for long and complicated insurance phone trees as I wait with the thousands of other twisted bodies in the field hospital’s tent triage line in this beautiful nation of states. Home of the brave. Home of the brave.

I don’t mean to sound negative. You’ve obviously thought this through, or you wouldn’t be saying it on a rally stage in a swing state mere weeks before a somehow still tight election. Still, this just feels more like the concept of a Purge plan than an actual plan. And I’m no doctor, but to my layman’s brain, it seems like we might want to flesh out the basic shape of your national healthcare policy before hard-launching your Purge plan.

Listen, I’m sure you and your team have thought it all through. It sounds like this night of complete and utter sanctioned anarchy and depraved lawlessness is just what this divided nation needs to tone down this heated rhetoric. Just one night where absolutely any act is allowed, and—

Oh, what’s that? Abortion will still be illegal during the Purge? Hey, I get that. This is America after all.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Hoping I can get a duchy after the robot revolution.

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Hovertext:
Hoping to be able to rematerialize your loved ones after the next funding round.

TYLER, TX—Honing his brain imaging-form until sundown most nights, local high school quarterback Brendan Porter has reportedly used a tire swing this week to practice putting his head through a CT scanner. “With the big game coming up, I’m putting in the hours on this tire and making sure I’m prepared to remove any metallic objects or jewelry before lying down on the CT table,” said Porter, explaining that the more he worked on his control and held his body still as it passed through the tire swing’s opening, the better chance he’d have of getting a clear image of his excessive brain swelling that doctors could read and make a diagnosis from. “My dad was a star high school concussion patient, so he’s been showing me the ropes. I’m hoping to get admitted to the same hospital he went to. Trust me, when game day arrives and I have to be treated for internal cranial bleeding, I’ll be ready.” At press time, sources confirmed Porter was pumping himself up for the big scan while suiting up in his hospital gown.

The post High School Quarterback Using Tire Swing To Practice Putting Head Through CT Scanner appeared first on The Onion.

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Headlines

• Help continues to be needed in parts of Appalachia after Hurricane Helene. We have a first-hand account from a reader.
• Potential tropical development this week in the Gulf continues to look a bit tricky and possibly sloppy. Interests in the eastern Gulf of Mexico should continue monitoring things through the week.
• Tropical Storm Kirk is likely to become one of the season’s biggest storms in the open Atlantic this week, likely becoming a major hurricane far from land.
• No other serious tropical concerns to watch right now.

I want to just share an email we received from a reader who was in Asheville during Helene. It’s been tough to get a lot of great information out of this region because it’s so difficult to access right now. That will change in the next couple days, and we will likely be seeing and hearing of even worse devastation that we’ve seen thus far.

Our reader emails:

We were vacationing in the Asheville, NC area and have seen the devastation personally. Your note (of) this on the website is accurate and honestly a source of nightmares. What readers should understand is what makes this different in the Asheville area than what we see in Texas (or Gulf) storms is two (maybe 3 by this time) dams breached flooding out many of the poorest areas in the valley in the most destructive manner possible. I hope your readers take note of your words and choose to contribute.

There are ways you can help those in need even if you live far from the impacted areas.

Blue Ridge NPR has a good list.

The East Tennessee Foundation is a resource as well.

A Houston-based organization that specifically helps food and beverage workers (of which many were impacted) called the Southern Smoke Foundation is another one I personally support and recommend.

The Fuel Relief Fund specifically helps people with fuel.

Team Rubicon is on the ground as well.

Crowdsource Rescue is another org we’ve directly engaged with in the past that is doing incredible work right now.

The Cajun Navy is also doing rescue work in the region, and they’ve been a friend to us in Houston too.

As disaster expert Samantha Montano noted last night on Twitter/X, we’re probably looking at a 10 to 15 year recovery at least for this region. Every little bit of help matters.

A tricky Gulf forecast

The headline point today is that we continue to see decent odds that a tropical system will form in the Gulf later this week. But modeling remains extremely uncertain on track and intensity to a point where we may be looking at a sloppier setup than has been the case for much of this season.

With another disturbance poised to emerge from the Central American Gyre (CAG) formation, we will have another one to watch. As of today, it’s just a mass of clouds and thunderstorms east of Nicaragua and north of Costa Rica and Panama.

The NHC has actually lowered development odds versus yesterday, down from 50 percent to 40 percent. We can quibble on whatever those exact odds are, but I think the takeaway right now is that unlike Helene, this is not a slam dunk case where high-end development is highly likely. If anything, high-end development seems unlikely right now. But moderate development of something sloppy seems very plausible. Keep in mind that “sloppy” does not always translate to “good,” as a disorganized system coming out of a very warm Caribbean can still carry a bountiful amount of moisture. So once more, we may have to discuss flooding risks later this week or weekend.

Since we don’t yet have a defined disturbance, we have a bit of hand waviness going on in terms of forecasting. The models handled this element of Helene well early on, but they seem to be struggling with this one. That’s not uncommon. CAG systems tend to be more challenging to predict than waves off Africa. Helene was an exception more than the rule.

The current model guidance is sort of a mixed bag. I have the GFS shown above, with ensemble members ranging from well developed in the eastern Gulf (a minority) to poorly developed and hugging the Yucatan (a majority). This is sort of opposite of what we saw with Helene where the GFS ensemble led in showing aggressive development. This also has the support of the European AI (AIFS) model and the ICON model to a lesser extent.

There are a couple things that could happen here. If the system follows the minority, we get a tropical storm or hurricane that lifts north and northeast potentially across Florida at some point toward the weekend. Some rapid development couldn’t be ruled out, but in general the ceiling would likely be lower than Helene. If the system follows the majority, it may fester for a time near or off the Yucatan and eventually get pushed north and east by an approaching cold front early next week. That would time the system toward Florida or the eastern Gulf next Monday through Wednesday. That could also be a tropical storm or hurricane.

For now, we should expect an increase in rain chances and potentially heavy rain heading toward the weekend across the eastern Gulf Coast, including Florida. But details are highly uncertain right now. We’ll keep on top of things.

Kirk will light up the open Atlantic

Tropical Depression 12 has become Tropical Storm Kirk this morning. Kirk is expected to become a major fish storm. In other words, it should avoid land.

Kirk is expected to intensify rapidly. The NHC forecast currently shows it as a category 3 or borderline category 4 hurricane by Wednesday night or Thursday. Model guidance even shows that Kirk could become a higher end category 4 or even 5 storm if all the right ingredients came together. Again, thankfully Kirk’s forecast is fairly predictable and it will avoid land. Most shipping interests should also have ample time to get out of Kirk’s way. Kirk will also probably help Atlantic accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) to make up some lost ground.

Isaac & Joyce

Both Isaac and Joyce have now degenerated into depressions or post-tropical cyclones. Isaac looks to continue to get absorbed into a broader European storm later this week.

Another deep Atlantic system to come?

Model signals continue to indicate that yet another system could develop behind Kirk in the deep Atlantic. This one looks more likely to take a slightly farther south and west track, as it would likely be slower to organize, so it may merit some additional babysitting for the islands heading into next week. For now, it’s not a serious concern.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

I’m off for a few days, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2018.

A reader writes:

I have an ongoing concern that has a lot to do with mental health but also has to do with work. I am seeing a therapist regularly to deal with the mental health aspect but I’m hoping to get insight from you on the work piece of it.

I’m about seven years into my professional career and have intense anxiety daily about my performance. I was always a high performer and have been promoted many times. About two years ago, I left my previous position for a new position that was more money and allowed me to get back into a particular industry. Shortly before I started the job, I lost 160 pounds and found a new confidence I never had before. However, shortly after I started the job, things in my life took a bad turn … I had four deaths in my family, including two people who I was very close with, and my long-term relationship with my live-in SO ended. Because of splitting up our things and having to pay for the apartment myself, I also began to have significant financial issues too. The stress of all the change, especially the negative things, aggravated my already existing mental health issues, after having been relatively stable for about six years.

I’m not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain the “perfect storm” that developed that caused me to act on some of the impulsiveness that is common in those with my mental health issues. To add to all of the personal things going on, my new job had a culture that was extremely different than my previous workplace. For once, I wasn’t the youngest person — almost everyone working there was in their early 20s to mid 30s, many were “young professional” types who were unmarried and had no children. The culture ended up being one that centered around a lot of joking around, close friendships outside of work, happy hours and other alcohol fueled events, and romantic relationships. I was newly single and newly thin and confident — the environment was awesome! I was making friends, going out, having a great time!

However, as the negative things in my life started happening, I got deeper and deeper into the drinking with work friends and things quickly became unprofessional (not just for me, but for the sake of this post I’m going to focus on my behavior). I don’t want to be graphic but I think it’s important to give you an idea of exactly how inappropriate things became, because it’s necessary context. Some highlights include: giving one of the managers oral sex in the parking lot, getting black-out drunk in front of the director at a happy hour, attending my boss’s family functions, having a tumultuous and abusive five-month relationship with a different manager, making out with one of the facilities guys in a conference room at work, doing shots with my boss’s husband, sleeping with a supervisor that my best friend at work also slept with and ruining that friendship forever, getting hammered on lunch with a supervisor and returning to work drunk, heavy petting with a senior manager at a work function in front of multiple coworkers, smoking weed with coworkers and giving oral sex to another manager, who is now my current boyfriend, in my office. I became known amongst the management team as the happy hour go-to and a partier and people were constantly asking me to go out drinking with them. For additional context, I work in human resources so this kind of behavior is especially egregious.

It got to the point that I was drinking heavily 4-5 nights a week and I could no longer maintain my responsibilities. I started coming in late and skipping work frequently and became very depressed about my situation and especially guilty about my actions. Eventually, through therapy and substance abuse treatment, I was able to begin to piece things back together. It quickly became clear that I needed to get out of that work environment, both for my mental health and the sake of my career. So, I started a new job about six months ago. My behavior at my previous employer wasn’t known by those giving a reference so I didn’t have any difficultly landing a new job, even one that ended up being a promotion with more responsibility and a significant pay bump.

I’ve come far in my treatment but it’s a process. Since I’ve started this job, I haven’t done anything even remotely unprofessional. In fact, I probably come off a little cold sometimes because I’m so afraid of even making friends here at all. The worst part though is that I went from a high performer who was confident in her abilities to an average performer with crippling anxiety. Every day I wake up thinking about the horrible things I did and how I don’t deserve this job. I am so deeply ashamed of myself and feel guilty daily. I feel like I so thoroughly messed up at my last employer that I didn’t earn this. I’ve lost all confidence in my judgment and my abilities and I second-guess every single thing I do. I’m constantly worried I’ve made a mistake, even on mundane things. It’s similar to the feelings I’ve seen others describe about imposter syndrome except … maybe I really am an imposter? What kind of HR professional does the things I did? I’m considering backing out of this field all together and trying something new because I feel like I don’t deserve to do this anymore. Am I off-base or is there any coming back from this?

It sounds like you have come back from this.

Everywhere except your own mind, at least. (And to be fair, probably in the minds of people from your old job — although it’s likely that no individual person there knows the full list you presented here.)

And for what it’s worth, you must have done a good enough job there to land yourself the position you have now. I’m not saying that your extracurricular behavior there doesn’t matter. It does matter — but clearly you have enough strengths that didn’t have any trouble landing a great new job. That says something.

Everyone has a past. Some people’s pasts are weirder/more troubling/more embarrassing/harder to explain than others. We still all have them, and I suspect you’d be surprised by the weird/embarrassing stuff that people you really respect have in their pasts.

Luckily, we all have presents too, and our current-day selves have control over those.

It sounds like you’re dealing with an enormous amount of shame. Shame can be useful when it causes us to reassess our behavior and resolve to change it. But shame isn’t useful when it just hangs around making us feel horrible. It sounds like you have resolved to change your behavior — and have done that successfully — but you’re still mired in the shame and it’s paralyzing you.

If you accept that mental illnesses are diseases like any other, and I hope you do, then maybe it would help to put this in different terms. Imagine you know someone with a physical ailment that exhausted her and destroyed her focus at work, and while she fought the disease she ended up performing horribly for a year. And then she recovered, got the disease under control, started a new job, and went back to performing at her normal high level. Would you think, “She performed so badly while she was sick that she doesn’t deserve her new job and she should change fields because she can never be trusted again”? Or would you think, “She had an awful year, I’m so glad she’s recovered and is back to herself and back to being great at what she does”?

I know that when we’re talking about life choices, it can feel like the analogy doesn’t quite hold up, and that losing focus at work is different from oral sex in the parking lot. And sure, they’re different. But that difference is where so much of the shame and stigma around mental health comes from, and it’s cruel and damaging to people — as it’s currently being cruel and damaging to you.

You were sick. It affected the way you acted. You got it under control, and you’re working with a professional to keep it that way. You’re doing all the right things here (although if you haven’t yet apologized to anyone at your last job who deserves it, that might be worth doing too). You’re allowed to forgive yourself and move forward. I hope you will.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

I’m off for a few days. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. People only ask me about the ducks I work with

I’m in the lower-middle level of food service establishment with a couple hundred employees. Last year, I started a side project where I got us a small flock of ducks for fresh eggs and general merriment.

Ever since, folks only ask me about the ducks. I have brief interactions with at least a dozen people a day and 90% of the conversations start with, or completely consist of, “how are the ducks?”

The ducks are darling and entertaining and I love working with them, but they are a small part of my job and not the only interesting thing about my role or personality. I’m getting increasingly cranky and desperate for more diverse conversations. The ducks are always fine. If anything big happened with them, I’d let folks know. They are literally out the back door and anybody could go look at them if they wanted.

Is there any way I can get out of having this same insubstantial conversation 10 times a day for the foreseeable future? Especially since any one person probably won’t ask me about them more than twice a week, so it seems unreasonable to ask an individual to stop? I want to be friendly and gracious but seriously enough with the ducks for one second.

I feel guilty because I really want to ask you for a picture of the ducks.

This is going to be tough because lots of people are going to find it amazing to have ducks at work, and they are going to think of it every time they see you and feel jealous that you work with the ducks and will want to ask about it. It’s easily the biggest conversation starter that people who don’t know you well will remember. (In fact, I bet that the people who know you really well / work with you most closely don’t do this nearly as much, right?) They’re also probably not accounting for the fact that everyone else is asking about the same thing all day long.

You could put up a sign that says, “The ducks are great! They are right out that door if you want to see them” with an arrow and a picture of the ducks … and that will probably cut down on some of the inquiries, although not all.

You could also cheerfully respond to inquiries with, “Everyone asks me about the ducks!” As long as you say it cheerfully and not resentfully, that’s a polite way to nudge more perceptive people into realizing that it’s probably too much.

But that might be the best you can do, unfortunately. You have ducks at work! It’s going to be a thing. (Although it will probably become less of a thing in time, when the novelty has worn off a little.)

Read an update to this letter here (it includes videos of the ducks!).

– 2019

2. Sending flowers on someone’s first day of work

I work at a smaller organization, and Sansa, who manages our 10-person junior staff, is leaving after working here for the better part of the last decade. She’ll be sorely missed, and the head of the organization has indicated plans to do some kind of sendoff for Sansa. Today a fellow junior staffer named Arya emailed the junior staff saying that she wants to send a flower arrangement to Sansa’s new office on the first day of her new job “instead of a parting gift.” Arya specified that each junior staffer might consider contributing $5-10, but that no one should feel pressured to contribute. Everyone else is on board with the idea.

What do you think of this? If it were me, I wouldn’t really want old coworkers sending me flowers at my new office on Day 1. I’d be nervous about meeting new people, setting the right tone, and getting set up at a new organization. I think I’d be self-conscious if a big flower arrangement from my old coworkers showed up at my desk on my first day. I also just think it would be nicer to give Sansa a gift in person when we’re still in the office together, since realistically many of us probably won’t see her again after she leaves.

If it matters, Sansa is a pretty senior-level woman. I think part of my knee-jerk unease might come from being an early-career woman in a field dominated by older men, and getting flowers at my desk on day 1 feels a bit at odds with the professional image I’d want to project during my first impression. I’m probably overthinking this though. I plan to pitch in and join the gift because it doesn’t seem worth objecting to, but I wanted to know if you have any thoughts about this gift idea.

Yeah, it’s a really nice thought, but a lot of people wouldn’t want flowers on day 1.

For one thing, some people don’t even have a desk on day 1! They’re in training, or moving from one orientation meeting to another, and may not have anywhere to put a vase of flowers. And you really don’t want the distraction on your first day of trying to figure out what to do with a big bouquet.

For another, assuming you do have a desk to put them on, you’re going to get a lot of “flowers already?” comments and will have to explain they’re from your old coworkers, and that’s sweet but also maybe a little odd, and you’d probably rather be focused on other things. It’s also … pulling you back to your old job mentally, at exactly the moment when you want to be focused on the new one.

That said, some people would love and appreciate it! It depends on the person, but it’s the kind of thing where you need to know them well enough to be sure they’d be into it. In this situation, where Arya is junior and Sansa is senior, I don’t think Arya can know, and so a gift in person before Sansa leaves is a better idea.

Read an update to this letter here.

– 2019

3. Is sex a bad example in a work presentation?

I sometimes present internal “an intro to statistics” seminars at my company. Previously I have based the seminar on the fact that men say they have sex with women much more often than woman say they have sex with men, which is by far the clearest example I have of many obvious and not-so-obvious statistical issues.

No clients attend and the seminars were well received, but I am now less young (and I have read your blog more) and I think this was a bad idea. My question is how bad? Can I never mention the example at all?

Yeah, I’d steer clear of that example (unless, of course, it’s directly relevant to the organization’s work, in which case that’s entirely different). It wasn’t the worst thing in the world and you don’t need to feel mortified or anything like that, but using an example about sex in a work context risks (a) coming across as gratuitous — like you had other good examples but chose this one because Sex! or (b) making people a little uncomfortable. We’re all adults and know people have sex, obviously, but it can feel a little jarring to have it come up in a work presentation. (Plus if you have anyone creepy there, they’ll be all too happy to use it as a lead-in for inappropriate remarks to others, either in the moment or later.)

Read an update to this letter here.

– 2019

4. My coworker puts dirty tissues in my trash

My coworker often pops into my office to talk about work or whatever. I don’t mind the short conversations, but she has a habit of wiping her nose in my office and throwing out the dirty tissue in my wastebasket. I have tried to move the wastebasket, but that doesn’t seem to work. What should I say?

I am confused by this question and now wondering if I’m a filthy person and didn’t realize it. I would think the trashcan is the precise spot where she should be putting her dirty tissues. I get that it’s your trashcan and not hers, but it’s … for trash. There’s not really anything to say or do here, because she’s not doing anything inappropriate.

If you’re just really squeamish and it’s killing you, I suppose you could say, “Hey, I’m pretty germophobic and I know this might sound silly, but would you mind not throwing your tissues in my trash can?” … but be aware that it’s going to come across as a strange thing about you, not about her (which is why the language there conveys that you realize that).

– 2018

Enlarge (credit: Chesky_w via Getty)

When security researchers in the past found ways to hijack vehicles' Internet-connected systems, their proof-of-concept demonstrations tended to show, thankfully, that hacking cars is hard. Exploits like the ones that hackers used to remotely take over a Chevrolet Impala in 2010 or a Jeep in 2015 took years of work to develop and required ingenious tricks: reverse engineering the obscure code in the cars’ telematics units, delivering malicious software to those systems via audio tones played over radio connections, or even putting a disc with a malware-laced music file into the car’s CD drive.

This summer, one small group of hackers demonstrated a technique to hack and track millions of vehicles that’s considerably easier—as easy as finding a simple bug in a website.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

We are thrilled to announce that Google Translate has recently added “Deanspeak” to its suite of language-detection tools. In addition to offering translations from Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and other languages, Google Translate can now render your college administrator’s opaque prose into plain (if terrifying) English.

Now, rather than attempt to read between the lines of the latest email from the Subdean for Academic Affairs and Climbing Wall Management, simply click on the ADMINISTRATOR LANGUAGE DETECTED icon to reveal the message in simple English and determine the threat level to your department, program, or mental health.

When passed through the Deanspeak translator, a subject line such as “Academic Prioritization” instantly transforms into “May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor.” (If a more campus-specific translation is desired, the Deanspeak Plus option¹ can reveal the more precise rendering: “German Goes Kaput”). An email titled “Seeking nominations for a Task Force” becomes “Five poor saps forced to complete a meaningless task over the summer for zero compensation.” And “Construction Update” turns into “Whitewater polo course nears completion; humanities professors can enjoy thirty more years of inhaling asbestos.”

The Deanspeak translator instantaneously deciphers even the most officious obfuscation. “We continue to identify key performance indicators and leverage strategies to optimize retention” is more easily understood as “We’re hemorrhaging students.” The Teaching and Learning Center’s directive to “implement an actionable shift in student-centered attendance policies” translates simply to “give up now; football’s always gonna win.” Meanwhile, recent communications exhorting faculty to “craft deliverables to vertically integrate AI into the classroom” becomes “we have no fucking clue how to deal with ChatGPT—you’re on your own (and on the hook).”

As a bonus for faculty working at institutions where administrators multiply faster than Gremlins at a waterpark, the Deanspeak tool can clarify your college’s tentacular administrative structure. The president’s announcement that the college will be “reconfiguring our organizational composition to align with our comprehensive approach to student success” will render as “another unruly subdean devoured its offspring, so we have hired One Dean to Rule Them All.”

The Deanspeak translator can even filter out your administrators’ most common gobbledygook. Default settings include “deliverables,” “synergy,” “assessment,” and “shared governance,” but users can customize the filters according to their campus’s particular brand of dysfunction, transforming high-frequency phrases such as “after careful consideration” into the more accurate “the answer was no before I received your message.”

Another helpful feature for faculty includes the ability to reverse-translate your unfiltered responses into prose appropriate for your administrators’ tender ears. Instead of exercising restraint when responding to the call to resubmit the past fifteen years’ worth of enrollment data (sorted by student zodiac sign and DSM diagnosis) to the newly configured and—fingers crossed—recently debugged online management system by noon the following day, let the Deanspeak translator smooth out your snark. “Hell no, I will NOT waste another damn minute on this soul-sucking task” instantly becomes a message of joyful compliance: “I thank you, sir, for the timely reminder and will submit the report forthwith.” (Google engineers are working to correct the occasional confusion between Deanspeak and Dickens that arises due to college administrators’ penchant for excess verbiage and baroque sentence structure.) Meanwhile, “If I have to justify my department’s existence one more fucking time” seamlessly transforms into “Our department continues to meet the Student Learning Objectives and enrollment benchmarks as outlined in the latest Strategic Plan for Saving Our Bacon.”

The translator also has an audio function that can be activated during faculty meetings to provide real-time renderings of your administrator’s responses to questions from That One Professor. In this audio mode, “We’re considering multiple options” instantly translates to “Gah! Why did I leave time for questions? Action item: eliminate entire program.” Meanwhile, when the dean utters his refrain, “Thank you for all your hard work,” the faculty will simply hear, “Sorry, we have no money to pay you.”

The one downside to utilizing the Deanspeak translator is that teachers will no longer be able to play Nimble BINGO, in which professors can accrue points based on the number of campus buzzwords they receive via email during a semester. Past prizes have included the coveted “Get Out of Faculty Meeting Free” pass, in which the winner not only gets to skip the last meeting of the year but also receives a dramatic roundup of all the tea from their Grumpy Senior Colleague who has held a grudge since 1969 and starts all his sentences with “When I was at Yale…” While faculty may miss the “110 Percenter Prize” awarded to the instructor who valiantly consumes the most jargon without succumbing to crippling self-hatred or a murderous meltdown, we anticipate they will be more than compensated by never again having to decipher the meaning of “scaleable solutioneering.”

During this initial rollout phase, staff who use the Deanspeak translator will also have access to additional languages currently in beta testing, including Stuspeak (which translates “hey did i miss anything” to “I’m only here to play lacrosse and video games”), Zespeak (which helpfully replaces “they” with “he” or “she” for your pronoun-befuddled colleagues), and Mespeak, which can magically transform any professor’s negative self-talk into a steady stream of unicorn emojis and Lizzo-inspired affirmations— “You gonna shine with linear regressions today, you bad stats bitch!”

¹ Available for a monthly fee, easily deducted from your retirement savings or healthcare benefits.

ACTON, MA—Finding a massive disparity in driver savviness across different parts of the road, a report released Monday confirmed that the cars in the other lane were all a bunch of suckers. “Look at those rubes just inching along like a funeral procession while this lane’s zipping past ’em like the Indy 500,” the report read in part, going on to speculate that those chumps over there must actually like sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic all day, given that they had rejected the obvious superiority of the lane in which sources were reportedly cruising ahead without a care in the world. “Those cretins might as well be parked. They have no idea what they’re missing out on over here. So long, losers! Driving’s a lot more fun when you know how to pick the winning lane!” At press time, after the other lane became the faster of the two, a supplemental report was issued stating that the cars over there were a bunch of assholes who wouldn’t let anybody merge.

The post Report: Cars In Other Lane All Suckers appeared first on The Onion.

SANTA CLARITA, CA—Staring down at the text message in horror and realizing that he had been brilliantly outplayed, local man Jonathan Garner told reporters Monday that his friend had set an inescapable social trap by proposing three possible dates to hang out. “Goddamn it, he got me—how am I supposed to get out of grabbing drinks on either Wednesday night, Sunday afternoon, or two Fridays from now?” said Garner, who hung his head in frustration after realizing that his overeager, socially starved friend had spent months slowly backing him into a corner until he finally ran out of plausible excuses to meet up for a couple of hours. “Even if I somehow get out of hanging out this Wednesday and Sunday, there’s no way I can say I’m still ‘super busy with work’ two weeks from now. God, I’m such an asshole. Maybe I’ll just say something vague, like some family stuff came up.” At press time, Garner could reportedly be heard screaming in agony after his friend put the final nail in his coffin with a polite “No worries, I’m happy to work around your schedule!”

The post Friend Sets Inescapable Social Trap With 3 Possible Dates To Hang Out appeared first on The Onion.

The post Sustainably Minded Hit Man Suffocates Victim Using Reusable Tote appeared first on The Onion.

Following price hikes made at Netflix and Max earlier this year, Disney will be increasing subscription costs for Hulu, ESPN+, and Disney+ beginning Oct. 17. The Onion shares tips for saving money on streaming.

• Instead of streaming entertainment, pay a group of local urchin children to dance for you at half the cost.
• Make your career and personal relationships so fulfilling that the mere idea of needing to watch movies and TV shows for entertainment starts to seem utterly ridiculous.
• Enlist in the military to be eligible for $2 off a regularly priced plan.
• Learn to make your own streaming shows from scratch.
• Best Buy’s TV department is currently showing a looping episode of Friends.
• Move to North Korea and enjoy the four state-approved channels available to Pyongyang residents.
• Embrace the air of superiority that comes with informing others you don’t watch television of any kind.
• Ask your conjoined twin nicely if they would let you piggyback off their subscriptions.
• REI is having a sale on binoculars. Need we say more?
• Stop liking Pixar films. You’re 29 years old. 

The post Tips For Cutting Back On Streaming Subscriptions appeared first on The Onion.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Bristol Myers Squibb’s highly anticipated schizophrenia drug, the first novel type of treatment for the debilitating, chronic mental disorder in more than seven decades. What do you think?

“This drug is going to help so many shareholders.”

Alison Bordes, Fabric Bedazzler

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“Well, there goes my fun personality.”

Kurt Sanzo, Pistachio Roaster

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“Drugs are never the answer.”

Max Patel, Tooth Whitener

The post FDA Approves First New Schizophrenia Drug In Decades appeared first on The Onion.

Stargazers around the world were able to see one of our closest celestial neighbors. God’s Penis peaked in its fullest at 9:35 p.m. EST, but hung proudly in our night sky throughout the night, according to NASA.

The post God’s Penis Visible In Night Sky For First Time In Millennia appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Gawking at the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Helene across much of the southeastern United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a statement Monday announcing, “Damn, that’s crazy.” “So much water, dude,” said administrator Deanne Criswell, who uploaded a YouTube compilation of flooding in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida to the homepage of FEMA.gov as several other FEMA officials gathered around her computer, exclaiming “Oh shit!” and begging her to replay the video. “Houses shouldn’t do that. That house is like a boat now. This is like Armageddon shit, man. Wait, have you guys seen the movie Armageddon?” At press time, reports confirmed the FEMA employees had moved on to watching clips from Armageddon. 

The post ‘Damn, That’s Crazy,’ Announces FEMA In Statement appeared first on The Onion.