Cowboy Who?

Thirty stations must figure out how to make up for the loss of at least $17.7 million in federal funding that came at the direction of the president without wearing out supporters.

The radio station launched a last-ditch fundraising campaign to save the station, after cuts from both Baylor University and Congress.

President Trump says "I think we've got him".

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

1. No one in my company will give direct feedback

I joined my current firm almost two years ago. It was an industry switch post-masters degree. The firm is well-regarded, albeit fast-paced and challenging.

After joining, I learned that they have a truly bizarre approach to feedback: you don’t give feedback to people directly, you tell their manager. About six months in, someone went to my manager to say they felt I was not as communicative about a deliverable as they wanted. She never said anything to me when I was working on the deliverable, just took the deliverable when I handed it off (on time), said it looked good, and moved on. At the time, my manager told me that if it kept coming back as feedback it would affect my performance review. Then it happened again this spring. I was, as I understood, supporting content creation for a program (per my manager’s guidance). Then the program leads complained to her that they wanted me to create structure and be more of a PM for them and I wasn’t doing that. But they had never discussed this with me directly so I had no idea that they were looking for that from me. My manager, again, made me feel like I had to make up for weak performance, and didn’t acknowledge that she’d given me conflicting guidance.

In both cases, I was emphatic to my manager that she please tell people I want direct feedback (and I mean it!). In one case, the person did schedule time to speak with me 1:1 and we clarified what she wanted. In another, the person told my manager they did, but they didn’t. (Both are two levels above my seniority in org hierarchy).

It’s really hard to feel secure if people want me to make a change but won’t tell me directly, particularly when they’re in a senior position. I’ve taken to sending emails outlining discussions to cover myself if someone’s feedback doesn’t align with what we’ve discussed and I kick off collaborative work with a “ways of working” discussion for the whole team to indicate how they want to get feedback. But I can’t read minds. And now when I work with these people, I’m afraid that they’re sitting in silent judgement of my performance and I won’t know until later.

I’ve talked with colleagues with different managers who have experienced similar things (totally blindsided by negative performance reviews or just being told so-and-so doesn’t like their work) and it just seems to be a part of how people operate here, particularly senior employees. I am looking to leave because I’m burned out and leadership shared that layoffs weren’t out of the question, but in the meantime how do I stay sane and keep up my confidence?

Yeah, that’s a weird culture. One thing you can do is to ask people explicitly while a project is still ongoing whether they’re getting everything they need from you and whether there’s anything it would help for you to do differently. That’s more likely to elicit direction from them than just telling them at the outset that you want feedback or holding “ways of working” discussions. Just go to people as the work is progressing to check in and ask if there’s something more or different that would help from you. They still may not tell you in this weird culture, but you’re more likely to hear it with that approach … and then if criticism does come up later on, it better positions you to tell your manager that you directly asked the person mid-project whether they wanted you to do anything differently.

2. I have to do a 30/60/90 day plan because I took a screenshot of myself during a meeting

I received a written warning today from my supervisor for taking a screenshot of myself during a recorded zoom. I will admit it was dumb of me but the only reason I believe it rose to the level of a write-up is because a senior VP saw it. I figured it would be a Mortification Week story for next year vs a step on a PIP. Alas, I was wrong.

I have been asked to come up with a 30/60/90 day plan to “prevent behavior like this from happening again.” I just don’t know how to write one that would be quantifiable. I can guarantee I will be extremely careful on recorded zooms from now on, but besides that I’m not sure. Any considerations as I write up this plan?

I asked the supervisor (who hadn’t watched the video at the time of the write-up) about the reasoning, and he said it was because it was disrespectful to the coworker who was talking. I am happy to own my boneheaded move, but the punishment didn’t seem to fit the crime. I suspect this was my team’s leadership being able to say they did something or to continue the paper trail.

I had an annual review last month with this same supervisor that was positive. It’s possible they wouldn’t mind me leaving on my own, based on some other things that have occurred in the last month, but nobody has come out and said that. I am actively applying for jobs since I can tell this is not a long-term fit.

This is a wild overreaction! I can’t see how taking a screenshot of yourself during a zoom is a big deal at all, but even if it was somehow disruptive, the appropriate way to handle it would be to tell you not to take screenshots of yourself during meetings again. If they thought there was a larger issue about you not being engaged or not paying attention, they could talk to you about that too.

But a 30/60/90 day plan for this? That’s absurd. 30/60/90 day plans make sense when you’re working on learning new skills or working toward specific achievements. They make no sense for “don’t take screenshots of myself during meetings.” What could you possibly say for day 60 that would be different from day 30?

Is there any chance there’s more to this, like it’s part of a pattern of you seeming checked out, and so they’re looking for something to address that larger picture? That’s the only way this would make sense.

If not, though, then as for what to say in it, write it around being engaged and focused and ensuring that speakers have your full attention. Include monthly check-ins with your manager for feedback on how things are going.

But your manager is deeply ridiculous.

3. My boss wants more women on our team — and is flat-out rejecting men

My team at work is very male. My boss has about a dozen reports, only one of whom is female, and he wants to fix that balance, which seems reasonable to me. That being said, we’ve struggled to hire more women. We’ve had several women reject offers recently and one man accept an offer, skewing the balance even more. It’s not a great situation, and I agree with my boss that we should try to improve it.

The tricky part comes with referrals. I’ve referred several qualified candidates for roles on our team, nearly all of whom are male — the industry skews male and these are the people who have reached out to me. However, when I flag the applications to my boss, he very explicitly states that he will pass on them because he wants more women on the team. I want a more diverse team too, but rejecting candidates without screening them based on their sex seems ethically wrong and potentially a legal liability. What’s the right approach here?

It’s not just potentially a legal liability; it’s flat-out illegal. Federal law is very clear that employers cannot take sex into consideration in hiring. They can undertake efforts to build a more diverse candidate pool (for example, attending “women in X industry” events, advertising jobs in places women are likely to see them, even including language in ads like “we’re working to support women in X industry and encourage you to apply even if you’re not a traditional candidate for the role”), but they cannot factor sex into any individual hiring decision. Your boss is breaking the law when he says he’s passing on candidates because they’re not women.

Can you point that out to him? Ideally you’d say very matter-of-factly, “I looked into this more, and we cannot legally take sex into consideration when considering candidates. We can do things to try to get more women to apply, like XYZ, but federal law is really clear that we can’t reject people based on sex (or race, or any other protected characteristic), and we could get into trouble if we do that.”

4. My severance payments stop if I get a new job

I was laid off yesterday after 14 years due my company’s largest client discontinuing our services. I’m to get 14 weeks of severance, one for each year, payable over 14 weeks on the normal payroll schedule. My severance agreement states that if I get employment of any kind before my severance is fully paid out, I must notify the company, at which time they will send me a lump sum of 50% of the remaining severance, then nothing else.

This sucks, right? If I take a temp job to get some extra cash, I lose a ton of money. I know severance is not something a company is required to do at all, but the only other time I’ve been laid off there were no employment conditions attached to severance.

Yeah, it sucks. The majority of severance agreements pay you without regard to when you find new employment (in part because it’s in exchange for you signing a general release of any legal claims, and plus on a practical level it’s pretty difficult to monitor and enforce anyway). But when employers do condition continued payouts on you not having a new job, typically it’s triggered by “comparable employment” and not a low-paying or temp job. It’s worth reading the agreement carefully to make sure there aren’t caveats like that in there.

5. Who should initiate a LinkedIn request?

This is a small question but in a chain of command, is there a preferred direction for LinkedIn connection requests to flow? I don’t initiate connection requests for people who are in my reporting structure because I don’t want them to feel obligated to connect with their boss. On the flip side, I get anxious about connecting with people more senior than me so I often don’t initiate those connections either. I don’t feel this dilemma connecting with colleagues from other departments or other organizations. Outside of occasionally messaging a colleague, I am not an active user of LinkedIn anyway so I’m probably really overthinking this.

I do think you’re overthinking it, but I can understand why; whenever you have power dynamics involved in something, it can feel fraught. But this particular thing doesn’t need to be fraught: if you want to connect with someone on LinkedIn, go ahead and send them a connection request. Someone who really doesn’t want to be connected to their boss can ignore the request … but it’s a business networking site so it’s not a faux pas for you to initiate it.

The post no one in my company will give direct feedback, boss won’t hire men, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

The disagreement about county spending came weeks after Hidalgo was censured following a chaotic commissioners court meeting and tense discussions about her proposed tax rate hike to continue funding early childcare programs.

In our news wrap Wednesday, the Trump administration appealed a judge's decision to let Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook stay on the job as she challenges her dismissal, three former FBI officials are suing over their firings, an immigration arrest in New York boiled over into a confrontation with protestors and French demonstrators clashed with police in the latest challenge to Macron.

It was an ominous series of firsts for the world’s largest military alliance. For the first time in NATO history, alliance airplanes engaged enemy targets in allied airspace, and for the first time since Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, NATO opened fire on Russian drones. Nick Schifrin discussed more with Poland's foreign minister.

Now ... this brings me to something very dear to my heart. A particular segment in all television show that warms my body, tingling toes to tingling top of head, and that is, of course, you guessed it, the television commercial. #CowboyWho

The 80386 HLT instruction tells the CPU to stop executing instructions until a hardware interrupt occurs. This was traditionally the instruction performed by the operating system when it had no work to do, allowing the CPU to go into a low-power mode. (In modern times, operating systems use other instructions like MWAIT to go into even lower power modes when they have nothing to do, but those fancy instructions didn’t exist in 1995.)

A while ago, I discussed how Windows 95 intentionally did not use the HLT instruction when idle because there were multiple models of laptop which locked up unrecoverably when the CPU executed a HLT instruction. People wrote aftermarket components that performed HLT instructions on behalf of Windows 95 to get low-CPU behavior, with the added notation “I can’t believe Windows 95 is so stupid that it doesn’t have this feature built-in.”

I guess these people never got bug reports from customers saying “I installed your custom program, and now my laptop freezes up as soon as it boots. How do I uninstall it if my laptop freezes up at boot?”

And that’s the problem: The failure mode is a brick.

Windows 95 could have added detection for the systems that froze up on HLT instructions, but since there were many such systems, the risk was that by the time Windows 95 shipped, not all affected systems would have been identified. The fact that many systems were affected means that this was not an isolated case. We’re probably seeing the tip of a very fragmented iceberg.

Since the failure mode is a system that is unusable, the cost of a false negative was far too high. We just had to remove the HLT.

The post Why didn’t Windows 95 simply special-case the laptops that locked up when it executed the <CODE>HLT</CODE> instruction? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

It is common for Microsoft buildings to assign nicknames to meeting rooms to make them easier to remember. Instead of “We will be in room 1728” you can say “We will be in the Magellan room.”

The new Microsoft Building 3 has a series of meeting rooms labeled 1.3A through 1.3E. (The number 1.3 means “first floor, zone 3.”) These meeting rooms also have nicknames, because some people remember nicknames better than arbitrary strings of letters and digits.

Unfortunately, whoever came up with the names chose them to increase confusion rather than reduce it.¹

I was invited to a meeting in a room nicknamed Currant. I naturally went to room C, because Currant starts with C.

Meeting room Currant is not C. It is meeting room D.

In fact, there are two meeting rooms whose nicknames begin with the letter C: Currant and Cascara. Is Cascara room C? No, Cascara is room E.

My recommendation to people who come up with names for meeting rooms: Either align the first letter of the nickname with the room designation or choose a nickname whose first letter does not match any room designation. But if you choose a nickname that begins with a letter that matches a meeting room designation, it had better be the nickname for that room.

In this example, either the nicknames for rooms 1.3A through 1.3E should begin with A through E, respectively, or none of the nicknames should begin with the letters A through E at all.

¹ When I expressed this complaint to a colleague, he said that his wife worked on the architectural design for Building 3. In the plans, the meeting rooms just have the room numbers. The names were presumably concocted by people in the Real Estate and Facilities department.

The post A suggestion to people who assign nicknames to meeting rooms appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A customer observed that the documentation for version resources describes strings like CompanyName and ProductName as “required”. But they found that if they omitted those strings, nothing bad seemed to happen. Furthermore, if they created an installer for their program, the installer allowed them to omit the company name. So how required can it be? If it’s actually required, why does the installer let you omit it?

The term “required” here is not a technical requirement in the sense of “a program that does not provide this information is invalid”. Rather, it is a “very strong recommended in order to be a good citizen.”

Programs that read version information expect to find a company name and product name, and if you don’t have one, they may not be happy about it.

For example, a low-stakes consequence of not providing the information is that in places where system would normally show the name of an app (for example, labels for grouped taskbar items), your app shows up with no name. Or a usage report shows usage attributed to an untitled program.

A consequence with slightly higher stakes is user confusion, like a dialog box that says “The program   has stopped working. If this problem persists, contact   for support.” Since you didn’t provide a program name or company name, the insertions into the error string are blank, and the result is a confusing error message.

A much higher stakes consequence is application compatibility. The application compatibility system uses various signals to identify apps that require compatibility accommodations. The file’s version resource is one of those signals, since that contains the application version number, as well as information to help distinguish which of several apps this autorun.exe executable belongs to. If you don’t provide these additional identifying details, the application compatibility system has to rely on other signals to identify your program, and those other signals are naturally less reliable than just seeing the value Contoso Corporation right there in the CompanyName string.

If there is a false negative, then the compatibility accommodation will not be activated for your program, and your program may not run reliably or as intended. Even worse, a false positive means that the compatibility accommodation will be activated for other programs by mistake, and that might impair those other programs and prevent them from running as intended. So now you have two programs that don’t work: Yours and the program that the compatibility accommodation was mistakenly applied to.

So please set your CompanyName, ProductName and other “required” field. It makes everybody’s lives much easier (and in the case of compatibility accommodations, that includes your program).

The post The documentation says that CompanyName version information is required, but my program seems to work without it, so how required is it? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In times of fraying international relationships, the idea of positive exchange between nations can feel hopeful. It is in that spirit of hopefulness that MASS, a collectively run nonprofit gallery in Austin, collaborated with the Cobertizo Art Residency in Jilotepec, Mexico, for their first partnership, Ni de aquí ni de allá, which translates to Neither from here nor from there. Four Texas artists and four artists from Mexico were selected through an open call to participate in a four-week residency at Cobertizo, culminating in an exhibition at MASS Gallery. The selected Texas artists were: Chandrika Metivier, Gilberto Rocha, Haydee Alonso, and Irene June Chau. The four artists from Mexico were: Valentina Guerrero Marín, Pablo Tut, Martín Estrada Márquez, and Carolina Bollaín y Goitia. 

I was interested in the outcome of this hopeful Texas-Mexico exchange, and curious about what work would come out of focused time with citizens from two neighboring countries, whose leaders are navigating fraught dynamics. The show at MASS was densely packed with art, and video work dominated the mix. The strongest piece to come out of the residency was by Valentina Guerrero Marín, whose video La Anunciación transfixed me. It was located in a dark room off to the side of the main gallery, with a single-channel video projected onto an angled screen. Cushions to recline on were scattered about, and curtains over the entrance helped muffle the noise from the crowds on opening night. The room was a comforting cocoon, quiet and contemplative, which matched the feeling of the video. 

La Anunciación is a video of clouds moving through the sky, with subtitles and a voiceover layered throughout. The intense blue of the sky was startling, and the overall effect was meditative. I couldn’t remember the last time I spent so long watching and thinking about the sky. The voiceover consisted of short action statements, but then the narrator declined to take any action in response to it. Multiple scenarios were repeated, then slightly varied, and the rhythm picked up as the video went on. The sheer contrariness of the narration, combined with occasional changes in speed and rhythm, like letting the frame freeze on one shot for a few seconds, kept surprising and delighting me. The disembodied voice suited the continuous images of clouds floating by — not being able to see anyone in the video put me even more into the alternate reality of laying and watching the clouds, perhaps hearing a friend’s voice in my ear. Guerrero Marín’s other work was a suite of pencil drawings of clouds and two short videos playing on a monitor. The graphite drawings were technically detailed and delicate in feel, but the real star was La Anunciación. 

Gil Rocha showed small, brightly colored, texture-heavy sculptural assemblages installed in a line on the wall. I found his pieces that used multiple strips of material layered onto the surface most engaging. These horizontal bands tied in nicely with an adjacent wall work, a woven serape by Carolina Bollaín y Goitia. With rich bands of progressively darker shades of green, the horizontal weaving was interrupted periodically by holes. The intentional openings formed a random pattern throughout the serape. Some small stones were also woven into the piece, forming raised sections and implying weight. In her statement, the artist noted that the bumps reminded her of constellations, but they made me think about skin and how it accumulates scars as we walk through the world. I would have loved it if the work had incorporated even more holes or larger stones, so that their weight would make the fabric sag in places.

Irene June Chau and Martín Estrada Márquez had sculptural pieces with corresponding videos documenting their performances with the objects. I had trouble getting into both video works and preferred the artists’ sculptures. Estrada Márquez’s video was playing on a small box TV, set on the ground behind the sculptural installation. The size of the TV made it hard to see, and I struggled with clearly reading the subtitles. I couldn’t figure out the correlation between the somewhat outdated mode of technology and the work itself. The sculptural installation consisted of a figure from the waist up, placed on the floor of the gallery, clothed in a camo jacket, with its face covered by white fabric with a star sewn onto it. One of the figure’s hands held multiple flags, each made of white fabric with a single navy blue star, referencing the Texas Lone Star. It felt foreboding and a little threatening.

Irene June Chau’s installation was in the corner, spanning two walls; it was a burst of wonderfully bright color. The sculpture was woven from red tarp and Taiwanese materials such as grocery string and ghost money, which is paper money burned in order to give ancestors funds in their afterlife to purchase goods. This weaving picked up the threads nicely from Rocha’s striped assemblages and Bollaín y Goitia’s woven serape. I liked the tension in the way it was displayed, with two portions of it stretched across a corner and one portion stretched up towards the ceiling. It kept the opening in the weaving roughly at eye level and the tautness of it let me see all the various woven materials. I found the video that went with this piece difficult to watch in its entirety. Too much time was spent on the performance set up, such as the artist applying paint to their face. I was eager to see the part where the artist was in the boat on the water. Chau’s story was compelling, but the shots weren’t poetic enough to keep my attention. 

Chandrika Metivier also showed documentation of a performance, as well as a map of Mexico made from cut vines from their garden. I found the performance documentation to be much more interesting — in it the artist takes turns sitting on either seat of a two-person settee, talking about cultural identities from two different viewpoints of people the artist interviewed. The script was hung on a clipboard on the wall. Some of the things Metivier said in the video about Mexican identity were shocking. 

While the script Metivier performed corresponded exactly with statements made by the people they interviewed, more context around the structure of this type of performance, known as verbatim-theatre, would have been helpful for the audience. Without reading the wall text, it was hard to realize that the artist was quoting people. I also would have been interested in seeing original documentation footage of the artist interviewing the subjects, rather than the artist performing the subjects’ words. The vines’ depiction of the Mexico map was too literal for me. While I understand the idea, I wish that there was more surprise or unexpectedness in the physical form itself. Perhaps the vines could have been layered more, or the line quality formed with the vines could shift throughout the map, so that the material object could be interesting as a sculpture and not just as an idea. 

Pablo Tut showed a group of drawings and paintings that consisted of Spiderman as an agent of resistance, jumping in to help a person caught by ICE, helping someone break out of a jail, and other moments of action against oppression. The seven paintings were each made on individual canvases cut into irregular shapes that followed the shape of the scene depicted, and layered on top of each other to create one large piece. I enjoyed the way things were stacked, especially when the paintings overlapped and interacted, like the moment where a horse’s foot came over a canvas depicting a train. Perhaps because of my subconscious expectation of a comic book I had trouble making out what was happening in some of the scenes. I wished there were more scenes and that the piece expanded to roughly twice its current size. I felt that more scenes would have helped me understand the overall narrative. 

While I wanted to keep the focus of this article on the work in the show, it would be remiss if I didn’t mention the eighth artist. Haydee Alonso, who was part of the cohort as a Texas artist, chose to withdraw from the show due to ethical concerns. I spoke with Alonso about her decision, and she shared that an incident at Cobertizo had led to a schism between the resident artists. For the sake of transparency, she requested that her withdrawal be made visible in the gallery with the following label and a link to her statement: “Haydee Alonso – Withdrawn. The artist has chosen not to participate.” Read her statement here. 

While some press material noted Alonso’s decision to withdraw from the show, her name was notably absent on the promotional flyer and her request for the label was declined. If I hadn’t known ahead of time about her withdrawal, I wouldn’t have realized that an artist was missing from the show.

Overall, there was a lot of experimentation in the works with varying levels of success. As much as I applaud international exchange and dialogue, it seemed like this particular venture did not quite fulfill its promise. It is particularly ironic considering the broader background in which this took place, in which the U.S. is increasingly at odds with its neighbors, struggling to find common ground despite a long history of partnership.

 

Ni de aquí, ni de allá is on view through September 20, 2025 at MASS Gallery in Austin.

The post A Hopeful Exchange with Ambiguous Results: MASS x Cobertizo appeared first on Glasstire.

Can this marriage be saved?

MOSCOW – After Russian drones were intercepted inside Polish airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement assuring the world that no evil person throughout history has ever attempted to invade the sovereignty of Poland. “I know this seems like a deliberate attempt by an imperial power to violate Polish borders,” Putin noted, “but I […]

The post Putin assures world no one evil has ever tried to invade Poland appeared first on The Beaverton.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Anyone complaining about my delineations should decide they are not in fact a self and so no email need be sent to correct me.

Today's News:

A collection of personal notes penned for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday offers a portrait of the convicted child sex offender through crude drawings, images and messages filled with sexual content or innuendo.

Authorities say three teens were critically wounded in a shooting Wednesday at a suburban Denver high school, including the suspected shooter.

Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force — rallying the right on a college campus, this time Utah Valley University. The event was kicking off a planned series of Kirk college appearances from Colorado to Virginia dubbed “The American Comeback Tour.”

A reader writes:

I recently made a hire for a mid-level job in my organization, and hired someone I was extremely excited about. We clicked in his interview and I had some warm personal recommendations. His experience in our field was light, and there were a few red flags in the application process, but I felt that he was teachable and worth taking a chance on.

Four months later, I can conclude I was disastrously wrong. He has struggled to grasp the material of the job, to arrive at work on time (with a few near no-shows thrown in for good measure), to demonstrate professional courtesy to colleagues, and to pick up on company culture. We are nearing the point of termination. The problem is, I feel responsible for getting this guy into this mess by hiring him despite the red flags and relative lack of experience, almost a sense of “you break it, you bought it.” I know the professional world doesn’t operate like that, but I wonder what your perspective is after all these years.

It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what you saw in the hiring process that made you want to take a chance on him, and exactly what red flags you were seeing in the process too.

If you hired him because you liked him on a personal level (or he reminded you of yourself or similar), that’s a common type of bias that leads to bad hiring decisions and which managers really need to be mindful of. It also tends to be heavily linked to demographics that shouldn’t influence hiring decisions, like race and age. If you think, in retrospect, that that was part of it, the lesson to take forward is the importance of assessing candidates against on a clear list of must-have’s for the work, so you can’t easily be sidetracked by personally liking someone.

On the other hand, if you hired him because, although he didn’t have experience doing the work, you saw genuine evidence in his history that he’d excel at it, and you had reason to believe you could coach him on the parts he didn’t know, that might be more reasonable. It still might not have been the right decision, if other candidates were objectively stronger — but sometimes trying this out and getting it wrong is how you get better at hiring. And of course, sometimes it works! If your bet had paid off, this would all look different in hindsight.

All that said, I do think there’s an obligation to tell someone when you’re putting them in that situation — to explain where they’re going to have a learning curve and how you’re prepared to support them, with the caveat that they’ll need to work to learn XYZ — so they can make an informed decision for themselves about whether it’s a risk they want to take on.

The post I took a chance on an under-qualified candidate and it’s not working out appeared first on Ask a Manager.

QUEEN’S PARK – Ontario Premier Doug Ford is telling unemployed young job seekers to “Look harder” for label manufacturing companies that they can inherit, or failing that, a lifetime’s worth of backroom conservative political connections. Less than a week after Stats Canada reported Ontario shed 26,000 jobs in August — the most of any province […]

The post Doug Ford tells young job seekers “try inheriting your daddy’s sticker factory” appeared first on The Beaverton.

Last year, the federal government was poised to ban non-compete agreements for most U.S. workers, saying they stifle wages. However, right before that change in the law was supposed to take effect in September 2023, a judge in Texas blocked the rule, saying the agency lacked the authority to issue it, and it’s been in limbo ever since.

Last Friday, the FTC announced it will end its appeals of the case, which ends all the remaining litigation over the rule … and means the proposed noncompete rule is null and void.

Non-competes still remain banned in California, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, and 11 more states and Washington, D.C. prohibit them for hourly wage workers or workers below a salary threshold. Targeted cases could also challenge specific noncompetes — but the federal protection a lot of people were excited to get is now dead.

The post non-compete agreements aren’t illegal after all appeared first on Ask a Manager.

#Rowen #Mai #RoninWarriors

✨ French CanCan 10 years anniversary ✨

Today makes it 10 years since I posted the French Can Can on my Tumblr account and many of you discovered me with it and kept supporting me since. I want to thank you all for your support and love, it makes me so happy to know I can be appreciated this much for my Flipnote animations.

Onward for 10 more years or even more !

Je pense que beaucoup d'entre vous m'ont découvert avec l'animation du French Can Can il y'a 10 ans lorsque je l'ai posté sur Tumblr?
Votre soutien n'a cessé de grandir depuis et je vous suis très reconnaissant, merci pour tout ! Vos messages, les commentaires marrants ! J'ai hâte de poursuivre et de continuer à poster autant que je le puisse pour votre divertissement !

LONDON—Admitting complete ignorance as to the mysterious origins of the creatures, the Association of Tennis Professionals revealed to reporters Wednesday that they weren’t entirely sure where ball boys came from. “People always assume the ball boys are our employees, but for as long as I can remember, they just show up on tournament days on their own,” said association chairman Andrea Gaudenzi, referring to the hundreds of anonymous, semi-feral members of the ATP Tour’s ball crew, who he noted were seemingly incapable of human speech and instead communicated with one another through a language of high-pitched chirps as they frantically retrieved tennis balls. “We’re pretty sure they live in a network of tunnels beneath the courts—you can hear them skittering around down there after the sun sets. But we truly have no idea who trains them or gives them those matching uniforms. They just show up and know exactly what to do.” Gaudenzi then warned against getting in the way of the ball boys when they’re doing their job, as they won’t hesitate to bite.

The post ATP Reveals They’re Not Sure Where Ball Boys Come From appeared first on The Onion.

OTTAWA – Pierre Poilievre is demanding the TFW program be scrapped, in order for him to ride a wave of public resentment over immigrant labour into the Prime Minister’s office before quietly reinstating the program to benefit his corporate donors. “I am calling on Prime Minister Carney to eliminate the Temporary Foreign Worker program, despite […]

The post Poilievre demands Carney scrap Temporary Foreign Worker program so Conservatives can quietly reinstate it appeared first on The Beaverton.

EDMONTON – With training camp about a week away and no sign of Connor McDavid signing an extension anytime soon, Oilers fan and visibly shaking from head to toe human being Malcolm Serrano insists he isn’t worried about it. “These things take time. I’m sure Connor is just trying to figure out how much of […]

The post Visibly trembling Oilers fan insists he’s not worried about McDavid contract situation appeared first on The Beaverton.

Kennedy’s Volcano Lair, D.C. – Robert Kennedy Jr. has shocked the scientific community after firing the entire vaccine board and replacing them with Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Doctor Doom, and Dr. Evil. “There has been no connection made between vaccines and living,” stated Kennedy. “But there have been studies showing a link between reality television […]

The post RFK Jr.’s new vaccine board includes Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Doctor Doom and Dr. Evil appeared first on The Beaverton.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – After journalists revealed that President Trump wrote a birthday message to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reading, “I sure enjoyed the sex crimes you did, fellow sex crime enjoyer,” analysts argued that the shocking news would be a blow to Democrats. “Trump denied this message exists, and now that it’s been proven […]

The post Pundits predict Trump’s “Thank you for being my pedophile friend” letter will hurt Democrats somehow appeared first on The Beaverton.