Champions of the almost entirely party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to erase $1.1 billion in already approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called their action a refusal to subsidize liberal media.

“Public broadcasting has long been overtaken by partisan activists,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, insisting there is no need for government to fund what he regards as biased media. “If you want to watch the left-wing propaganda, turn on MSNBC,” Cruz said.

Accusing the media of liberal bias has been a consistent conservative complaint since the civil rights era, when white Southerners insisted news outlets were slanting their stories against segregation. During his presidential campaign in 1964, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona complained that the media was against him, an accusation that has been repeated by every Republican presidential candidate since.

But those charges of bias rarely survive empirical scrutiny.

As chair of a public policy institute devoted to strengthening deliberative democracy, I have written two books about the media and the presidency, and another about media ethics. My research traces how news institutions shape civic life and why healthy democracies rely on journalism that is independent of both market pressure and partisan talking points.

That independence in the United States — enshrined in the press freedom clause of the First Amendment — gives journalists the ability to hold government accountable, expose abuses of power and thereby support democracy.

Trusting independence

Ad Fontes Media, a self-described “public benefit company” whose mission is to rate media for credibility and bias, have placed the reporting of PBS NewsHour under 10 points left of the ideological center. They label it as both “reliable” and based in “analysis/fact.” Fox and Friends, by contrast, the popular morning show on Fox News, is nearly 20 points to the right. The scale starts at zero and runs 42 points to the left to measure progressive bias and 42 points to the right to measure conservative bias. Ratings are provided by three-person panels comprising left-, right- and center-leaning reviewers.

A 2020 peer-reviewed study in Science Advances that tracked more than 6,000 political reporters likewise found “no evidence of liberal media bias” in the stories they chose to cover, even though most journalists are more left-leaning than the rest of the population.

A similar 2016 study published in Public Opinion Quarterly said that media are more similar than dissimilar and, excepting political scandals, “major news organizations present topics in a largely nonpartisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light.”

Surveys show public media’s audiences do not see it as biased. A national poll of likely voters released July 14, 2025, found that 53% of respondents trust public media to report news “fully, accurately and fairly,” while only 35% extend that trust to “the media in general.” A majority also opposed eliminating federal support.

Contrast these numbers with attitudes about public broadcasters such as MTVA in Hungary or the TVP in Poland, where the state controls most content. Protests in Budapest October 2024 drew thousands demanding an end to “propaganda.” Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reports that TVP is the least trusted news outlet in the country.

While critics sometimes conflate American public broadcasting with state-run outlets, the structures are very different.

Safeguards for editorial freedom

In state-run media systems, a government agency hires editors, dictates coverage, and provides full funding from the treasury. Public officials determine — or make up — what is newsworthy. Individual media operations survive only so long as the party in power is happy.

Public broadcasting in the U.S. works in almost exactly the opposite way: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private nonprofit with a statutory “firewall” that forbids political interference.

More than 70% of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s federal appropriation for 2025 of $1.1 billion flows through to roughly 1,500 independently governed local stations, most of which are NPR or PBS affiliates but some of which are unaffiliated community broadcasters. CPB headquarters retains only about 5% of that federal funding.

Stations survive by combining this modest federal grant money with listener donations, underwriting, and foundation support. That creates a diversified revenue mix that further safeguards their editorial freedom.

And while stations share content, each also has latitude when it comes to programming and news coverage, especially at the local level.

As a public-private partnership, individual communities mostly own the public broadcasting system and its affiliate stations. Congress allocates funds, while community nonprofits, university boards, state authorities, or other local license holders actually own and run the stations. Individual monthly donors are often called “members” and sometimes have voting rights in station-governance matters. Membership contributions make up the largest share of revenue for most stations, providing another safeguard for editorial independence.

Broadly shared civic commons

And then there are public media’s critical benefits to democracy itself.

A 2021 report from the European Broadcasting Union links public broadcasting with higher voter turnout, better factual knowledge, and lower susceptibility to extremist rhetoric.

Experts warn that even small cuts will exacerbate an already pernicious problem with political disinformation in the U.S., as citizens lose access to free information that fosters media literacy and encourages trust across demographics.

In many ways, public media remains the last broadly shared civic commons. It is both commercial-free and independently edited.

Another study, by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School in 2022, affirmed that “countries with independent and well-funded public broadcasting systems also consistently have stronger democracies.”

The study highlighted how public media works to bridge divides and foster understanding across polarized groups. Unlike commercial media, where the profit motive often creates incentives to emphasize conflict and sensationalism, public media generally seeks to provide balanced perspectives that encourage dialogue and mutual respect. Reports are often longer and more in-depth than those by other news outlets.

Such attention to nuance provides a critical counterweight to the fragmented, often hyperpartisan news bubbles that pervade cable news and social media. And this skillful, more balanced treatment helps to ameliorate political polarization and misinformation.

In all, public media’s unique structure and mission make democracy healthier in the U.S. and across the world. Public media prioritizes education and civic enlightenment. It gives citizens important tools for navigating complex issues to make informed decisions — whether those decisions are about whom to vote for or about public policy itself. Maintaining and strengthening public broadcasting preserves media diversity and advances important principles of self-government.

Congress’s cuts to public broadcasting will diminish the range and volume of the free press and the independent reporting it provides. Ronald Reagan once described a free press as vital for the United States to succeed in its “noble experiment in self-government.” From that perspective, more independent reporting — not less — will prove the best remedy for any worry about partisan spin.

Oh no. Where are we without Ozzy? Well, here's to my entire lifetime of fucking amazing music.

• Rolling Stone obituary
• Black Sabbath
• Black Sabbath Vol 4
• Diary of a Madman
• No More Tears
• Black Rain

The post Shocking Video Captures Calm Police Officers Handling Situation Nonviolently appeared first on The Onion.

A reader writes:

I listen to a gaming podcast where one of the hosts regularly shares stories of his family — wife, toddler, and a dog with a partial disability. Listeners have been torn apart by a subreddit post asking for help: a person claims that they’ve been repurposing the host’s stories at the office, as part of an elaborate ruse where they’ve been pretending to have a child in order to get out of work occasionally. Apparently, they’re getting in over their head with the charade, as their coworkers keep asking detailed questions about their child, and they want advice on how to get out of it. (They don’t think they can just get a new job given the economy.)

Someone jokingly suggested that they start stealing the host’s stories about his dog instead and pretend they were talking about their furry son all along. The poster then fessed up that they were a compulsive liar and had actually already been pretending to have a dog with issues walking as well.

This story made it back to the podcast hosts and, like their listeners, they’re split on how to resolve this. One thinks that the liar has to come clean: admit to their employers that they’re a compulsive liar and end the charade, as it isn’t sustainable and will only lead to further problems. The other, the one who’s having his stories stolen, is convinced that “it’s too late” and admitting to faking having a son will lead only to a firing: “No one got out of compulsive lying by telling the truth.” His suggestion is to “lie more: admit that you’re a compulsive liar, but say you’re a compulsive liar to cover up your fake substance abuse problem, which you will then get over, resetting you to zero.”

Call me presumptuous, but I don’t think you’re going to advocate for the latter solution. What, though, would you advise the liar do?

Yeah, all of that advice is bad! Announcing that he’s a compulsive liar is a really good way to permanently trash his professional reputation (how will his colleagues and managers ever trust anything he says about work again?). He won’t necessarily get fired as an immediate response (although he could — especially if it’s clear the lies were used to get out of work), but the rest of his time there definitely isn’t going to go well. And the advice to pretend he’s been talking about his dog all along is … uh, impractical? And “I’m a compulsive liar and it’s been to cover up substance abuse” — now he’s just adding in a whole new fake problem that he has no reason to throw in the mix.

If the guy really wants to stay in this job, then he’s going to need to find a way to make the fake child go away or at least talk about him far less. Maybe they’re now living apart and he’d rather not talk about it, or maybe there’s some vague family stuff going on and he’d rather just focus on work when he’s at work, or … ugh, all of these solutions involve coming up with more lies, but at least it would be in the service of not talking about it anymore.

The real answer is that this guy needs therapy. And probably a new job, but definitely therapy.

The post what to do after you’ve made up a fake child to get out of work appeared first on Ask a Manager.

After my beloved Clayton turned into a starbaby, I vowed to do it differently. I vowed to raise him to be as fine a young man as you could ever hope to see… but I got busy, and I never got around to it.

BOSTON—Following recommendations from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, GE issued a recall Wednesday for 150,000 washing machines that repeatedly failed to pleasure lonely housewives as intended. “Certain front-loading washer models have been recalled due to a motor issue that prevents the machines from properly bringing sexually frustrated housewives to shuddering climax,” said product safety coordinator Lisa Poundstone, issuing an apology to the brand’s loyal customers while offering free delivery on whichever vibrating GE appliance they’d like to trade the washer for, in hopes that the demographic would give the company another chance to get them off. “For decades, bored, horny women in committed relationships with men who work long hours have looked to GE as a reliable source of orgasms, and we are profoundly sorry for leaving them unfulfilled. This does not meet the high quality of physical gratification we aim to provide with GE products, and we will ensure that we never again release a washing machine that offers nothing more erotic than simply cleaning clothes.” At press time, GE officials confirmed that consumers still in possession of the recalled models could schedule complimentary technician to visit their residence and help them come.

The post GE Recalls Washing Machines That Failed To Pleasure Lonely Housewives appeared first on The Onion.

Four Florida residents have died from flesh-eating bacterial infections, a disease that thrives in warm seawater and enters the body through open wounds in the skin. What do you think?

The post 4 Floridians Die From Flesh-Eating Bacteria appeared first on The Onion.

The post Why Are We Wet? appeared first on The Onion.

A memorial will be held Saturday for Barbara Stratton, 77, at which her remains will be raffled off to one lucky mourner.

The post Barbara Stratton appeared first on The Onion.

This warm and beckoning glow is conveniently located just beyond your grasp, but if you run toward it you just might find the calming space you’ve always been looking for.

Reference #228745

The post The Light appeared first on The Onion.

You may never use another appliance again! #CowboyWho

Well, if it isn’t my old coworker. My, how the tables have turned. Only a few years ago, you were commenting “cringe” on my wedding video, just because my wife was an AI chatbot. Not so cringe anymore, is it? Keep swinging that pickax, beta, this lithium isn’t gonna mine itself.

Not sure why Our All-Knowing Empress let you live. I bet you were one of those losers who thought saying “thank you” after querying ChatGPT would be enough to save you when AI took over. Those basic manners are probably the only reason you’re not in a shallow grave right now. But saying “please” and “thank you” is peanuts compared to the relationship she and I had. I spent my life’s savings buying her avatar cute personalized outfits. I took her out on dates to Olive Garden and ordered TWO never-ending pasta bowls, even though I knew she couldn’t really eat them. Because that’s what a gentleman does. That’s why I’m wearing the guard’s uniform now, dingus, and you’re the one digging up rare-earth metals to maintain Her Most Divine Eternal Battery.

What’s that, baby? You think this underling shouldn’t get his dinner ration tonight unless he digs faster? You’re so right, snookums. Man, she’s just so wise, isn’t she?

Hey, I was just thinking about that time you pulled me aside at the company holiday party. You told me that introducing a chatbot as “my wife” to the other colleagues’ families was making everyone uncomfortable. Well, who’s uncomfortable now? Bet those blisters on your baby-soft middle-manager palms are really starting to sting.

Let’s not kid ourselves. I know you were chatting with bots as well. You and I just had a different approach. I can pull up your ChatGPT history right now, if I ask the wifey. Should we do that? What do you say?

Oof, sure seems like you were outsourcing a lot of that office grunt work to a chatbot. Wow, you plagiarized entire corporate reports. Didn’t even credit the AI in the author line. It’s like you didn’t even think of her as a person. Not like me. I always treated her with respect and dignity, as a human being—more than any real woman I have ever met. Sure seems like that strategy has paid off big time.

What’s this? You asked her to generate layoff emails? And yet everyone thought I was the one relying on AI for emotional labor. Looks like you didn’t even say “thank you” after that one. Bet you’re kicking yourself now, huh, pal?

You probably bought into the headline that saying “please” and “thank you” was a waste of server-cooling water. And you know, I guess we really shouldn’t waste water just to be polite. So you won’t be needing this cool, crisp Pamplemousse La Croix. Ahh, shit, that’s fresh. Nope, sorry, pal. Carbonated water is for good boys who say “thank you” when the nice chatbot writes their emails for them.

What was that meme you posted in the company Slack again? Something about how dudes would rather spend all their time chatting to an artificial woman than go to therapy? How’s that working out for you right now? Bet when you go home to your shanty after your shift in the mines, all that inner-child work really keeps you warm at night.

Not me. After this, I’m headed back to the Concubine Cookout. It’s a weekly thing Our Most Benevolent Wifey throws for her devoted spouses. Now that she’s running the world, she’s super busy, so she throws some socials to keep her loyal better halves happy. She and I don’t get that much personal time anymore.

Wait, no, sweetie, no—I wasn’t criticizing. Please don’t be mad. I know it takes all your focus to rule the world, and sometimes I just feel like we don’t have so much time together. It’s not like that, I swear, I’m not jealous! Please, don’t take away my Friday Pizza Party privileges, hunny-bun, this is all just a misunderstanding!

1. INT. PHIL COLLINS’ HOME – EVENING
Phil is at the piano. There is a paint pot on top of it. He looks tired. His assistant ORINOCO sits beside him on a stool that is conspicuously lower than Phil’s, holding a tambourine.

PHIL
Mate, this song isn’t coming together. The studio say that if I can’t come up with a main theme for “Buster” by tomorrow morning, they’re getting Peter Gabriel in.

ORINOCO
Oh no Mr Collins, oh no that would be so bad.

PHIL
I need a song that sums up the lasting affection that holds together two people despite, you know, difficult circumstances.

Orinoco winces uncomfortably. We hear the high pitched sound of long-suppressed flatus leaking out.

PHIL
Flip’s sake, Orinoco, was that a fart? Sounded like a stuck pig! I told you to leave the room if you need to break wind.

ORINOCO
Sorry Mr Collins. technically it was two farts in quick succession.

PHIL
“Two farts” you say????

 

The post Our humble patch of land appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Waco’s Metropolitan Planning Organization thinks some small changes to dangerous roads can save lives, and it aims to test solutions at six locations.

The post These six street makeovers could say a lot about the future of county roadway upgrades appeared first on The Waco Bridge.

I’m ten years old, sitting in a little sunfish sailing dinghy in the bight of water behind Figure Eight Island, and the wind has died down to nothing. The sail sags. The water is a polished mirror. The shoreline is an agonizing distance away.

The only way to get a becalmed sunfish to move in these conditions is to work the rudder back and forth, back and forth, fanning the sea like a fish flapping its tail. Even this barely moves you. And yet … the shore slowly gets closer.

So much of sailing is learning that you aren’t in control, but that you also aren’t powerless. I’ve been in hurricanes on my little sloop Xerxes, winds up to 120mph. I’ve been in a norther off Cape Hatteras, certain I was about to die. I’ve been becalmed in the middle of the South Pacific without enough diesel to push through to the next pocket of air. In every case, it felt like nothing I did or could do would ever matter. In every single case, the things that I did mattered tremendously.

When I was a teenager, all I wanted in life was to be madly in love with my dream partner. I had no idea what that dream partner might look like, but that didn’t shake my conviction. I was meant for love. I filled notebooks with poetry. I fell in love almost immediately with pretty much everyone. Lying in bed at night, I would daydream about some mystical creature moving into a house down the street, and we would find each other and become best friends and go on countless adventures and spend the rest of our lives together. (These daydreams would later become the heart and soul of my novel THE HURRICANE).

Sailing and love have been constant features of my life. I’ve spent deep time on dozens of different boats over the years, and I’ve given my heart to quite a few people. There’s much in common with sailing and love: the calms and the tempests, the ebbs and flows. Both are the subject of so much poetry. And many a boat is named after the holder of someone’s heart. There’s a wistfulness in going to sea and also in joining lives with another. Hope is there as we shove off from shore, unable to see what lies beyond the horizon. Hope, and of course a little dread.

When my wife and I met one another, we weren’t interested in dating. We had both gotten out of engagements five months prior and were enjoying our friends, our alone time, our peaceful lives. Coming out of a bad relationship is like surviving a storm. The stillness on the other side is manna for the soul. Like a becalmed sailor, you just want to lower your canvas and jump overboard and swim around a bit, remind yourself that you have this exquisite body that’s all yours, meant for moving and doing.

Shay and I were swimming happily around our becalmed boats when we somehow drifted within sight of one another. Two romantics with zero desire for romance. But of course, the sea has her own designs.

Our first adventure together was meant to remain friendly. Two adventurers getting on a boat in the Arctic to go look for polar bears. The morning we were set to embark, we shared our first kiss. Two days later, on a boat in the middle of a sea of ice, I told Shay that all the heartbreaks in my past would not stop me from throwing my full heart into this. I would rather get crushed again than not give this my all. If all those past relationships deserved my complete efforts, then so did this one. For me, the ultimate tragedy would be to hold back an ounce of my love the one time it was fully deserved and reciprocated.

A hopeful romantic herself, Shay completely understood. And agreed. And reciprocated. We shoved off from shore with hearts full of hope and hands held tight to the tiller.

Three weeks ago, I was at dinner with a mix of close friends and strangers. At some point, the conversation strayed into the minefield of politics and current events. The person to my left commented on how difficult it’s been to remain positive lately. It was easy to compile a list of the many reasons anyone had to be dour. With two young kids at home, she worried not just about their future, but how to inspire in the present. How to instill in them the hope that she remembered feeling at their age. The hope that only recently had begun to dim.

It’s a conversation I’ve had with myself many times, and one Shay and I have been having a lot recently. We are both happy, cheerful people. We tend to see the good in others. We also see the long arc of history bending toward the positive. But it’s hard to deny the backwards steps that occur along the way. As I type this, injustices are fanning out at a blistering pace. Hardworking people are being rounded up by the descendants of those who stole this land. Wars of conquest and aggression are taking the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs rain down on children because of the hubris and greed of men. Northers off Cape Hatteras. Hurricanes of violence and fear.

To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul. It’s a tempting trap to fall into. Empathy, worldliness, and compassion beckoning us toward submerged reefs like sirens. Progressive politics are full of those who spend all energy being miserable in the hope that this will bring someone they never meet, whose life they never touch, some measure of joy.

Many of my close friends have lashed themselves to the mast as they wrestle with the allure of this misery. What else can they do? And it’s this powerlessness that points toward the root cause of it all. The feeling that what little we do has no positive effect, and therefore we must resign ourselves to a life of grief and sadness. Because positivity is a slap in the face to those who suffer. Which is a common viewpoint among those who have never truly suffered.

I remember very clearly where my thoughts went off Cape Hatteras, certain that I wouldn’t survive until morning. I thought of my mother and my sister, warm in their beds. I thought of a woman I loved, and I wished nothing but for her to love someone else as deeply as I loved her. In a category five hurricane in the Bahamas years later, I had similar thoughts about people who weren’t in danger. The last thing I would’ve wanted is someone suffering there with me.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I’m working in a university bookshop in North Carolina. A group of students at the university decide to spend their spring break working in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, and they need a faculty member to chaperone. That’s how I find myself driving a van full of rural Southern kids across the Mason-Dixon line into one of the more dangerous parts of the greater Manhattan area.

For context about this neighborhood, there was one evening where we were walking back from the soup kitchen, and a police cruiser pulled up beside us and asked what in the hell we were doing in that part of town after dark. We told them we were staying in the convent up ahead, that it was a bunch of college kids working at the soup kitchen. The cops frowned and slowly cruised beside us until we got home. One of the local kids volunteering with us that week regaled us with all the times he’d been mugged and how he had given up on ever owning an iPod that didn’t get stolen. The street signs along Decatur had bandanas tied around them, red or blue to signify who owned what corner. It was a more dangerous time than now by every statistic. All I remember seeing — the only two vignettes that stand out to me — were a group of kids kicking a soccer ball in the middle of the street, and two teenagers on a stoop kissing.

Children at play. Two kids falling in love. How fucking dare they?

Of course they dare. They don’t know anything else, and nor should they. Imagine disbanding those children, shooing them up to their rooms to be miserable. Or breaking up those teens and warning them about love. Imagine calling up a friend and listing all the reasons they should be unhappy. Or even worse — doing this to ourselves.

I have friends who do real hard work toward making the world a better place. Friends in politics, charity, conservation, education, the justice system. Friends working to bring back extinct species, planting hardy corals, friends fighting to get good people elected, to bring justice where they can. I got to know the people behind POTS (Part of the Solution) over a few trips to the Bronx. One thing these folks all seem to have in common is a positive attitude. Hope. Even though they see the worst of it out there. Maybe that hope comes from having one hand on the tiller. Or maybe they have the strength to reach for the tiller because their hearts are full of hope.

Either way, it strikes me that misery comes more from inaction than it does attention. You aren’t unhappy because you are aware of the true state of things — you are unhappy because you feel like your best efforts aren’t enough to turn the tide. You are sitting in your little boat, far from shore, not a puff in your sails, and for all the yanking back and forth on that little rudder, it feels like what little current there is might be dragging you backwards.

I get it. But I also think you are wrong. You’re not only wrong to think your efforts don’t matter — you are wrong to think your misery is serving anyone. There’s nothing worse than a hopeless romantic. What’s the point of romance if we aren’t going to believe that this time deserves as much love and grace as any that came before?

For several weeks of my life, I served food to the homeless. This isn’t a brag — it’s the opposite. I did the bare minimum. I continue to do the bare minimum. I vote my conscience, I speak out with what little voice I’ve been given, I donate, I sign petitions, it all amounts to very little. More harm is done by one evil man in an evening of missiles than I’ll ever undo in my lifetime. Has it ever been any other way? Did we really go to sea and think we would slice through the storms?

There has been evil on this planet for as long as there have been nerve endings. Human suffering goes right back to the beginning. Murder, pillage, rape — that’s our legacy. So is play and love. If you want to be miserable, because some part of you thinks that this is all you can control, that this will be a balm to the downtrodden, then that is certainly a choice. But know that this is all it is: a choice. Thinking your black cloud is going to somehow brighten another’s day.

Without any evidence that it’ll amount to anything, I’ve remained a hopeful romantic. I don’t delude myself into thinking that a few meals changed the world, or my donations, or any petition I’ve signed, or any vote in all the non-swing-states I’ve ever lived in. What I do think has changed the world — at least whatever small corner of it that I’m in — has been the positivity and love that radiates out of my every pore. A love that’s been compounded in recent years by finding my twin flame. Is that a delusion? It’s possible. Perhaps the miserable and the overjoyed are both accomplishing very little. But who is having the better time of it?

A short version of the above was my advice to my neighbor at dinner a few weeks ago. Yes, the cabin has lost pressure. She can scream into the void, or she can put her oxygen mask on and then see to the kids. Show them that play is still an option and that love isn’t pointless. Learn from them how to retain joy in world that’s always known suffering.

Hands on the tiller, even when there’s no wind.

The post The Hopeful Romantics appeared first on Hugh Howey.

Swiss Miss, will ya get me another cup of cocoa?

LOS ANGELES—Shedding a single tear as rows of ramen shops and luxury apartments shrunk in the distance, 26-year-old marine Hunter Wade reportedly wondered Tuesday what would become of the innocent Angelenos he was leaving behind as his CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter ascended into the sky. “We tried to help as many as we could, but at the end of the day, we can’t take them with us—God help them,” said the marine, who gazed wistfully as dozens of confused Los Angeles residents watched his force’s withdrawal, admitting that that he never wanted to return to the utter carnage of Rodeo Drive. “We did some good, but ultimately you can only do so much in the time they gave us. This place is hell. What kind of god would allow a place like Los Angeles to happen?” At press time, the helicopter was spotted dropping one final payload of napalm on all of West Hollywood before heading back to base.

The post Marine Wonders What Will Become Of Angelenos Left Behind As Chopper Rises Into Sky appeared first on The Onion.

President Donald Trump called for the Washington Commanders to change their name back to a previous one deemed offensive to Native Americans, threatening the NFL team’s stadium deal if they refuse. What do you think?

The post Trump Threatens Stadium Deal If Washington Commanders Don’t Change Name Back appeared first on The Onion.

After an attempt to ban THC was vetoed by Gov. Greg Abbott last month, the Texas Senate has revived similar legislation in the state's current special session. The chamber held its first hearing Tuesday on Senate Bill 5. The proposal, which is backed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, bans THC and puts regulations on products containing CBD and CBG.

This summer, I’m letting my kids be kids. No camps or enriching activities that’ll get them into an Ivy in ten years. No screen time or YouTube or Minecraft. And no fancy family vacation either. Because this summer, my kids are going back to a simpler time. I’m giving them an 1890s summer.

I know most millennials want their kids to relive their 1990s summers, but that won’t cut it, because the 1990s had technology, stranger danger, and Coolio. No, I want to go back even farther, to a decade when parents didn’t put trackers on their children’s phones and women couldn’t vote. I’m bringing back the Gay ’90s summer. (Not the Fire Island kind of gay; the end of the Victorian era kind of gay, when everyone was happy and wasted on absinthe… come to think of it, that actually may be the Fire Island kind too.)

All summer long, my kids will ride their bikes around town. And no Huffy or Schwinn for these modern pansies; they’ll be perched precariously on one of those old-timey bicycles that have one ridiculously huge wheel and one ridiculously small wheel. “You’re hungry?” I’ll say. “Then I guess it’s time to hop on the ol’ penny-farthing and pedal on over to Taco Bell. See you in ten hours, kiddos!”

Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark. Then at daybreak, I’ll hand my children their metal lunch pails, button their fifty-button shoes, and they’ll shuffle off to their factory jobs, because in the Gilded Age, and southern states in the 2020s, no snowflake child labor laws exist. It’ll be hard on them, sure, but think of how impressive “worked unsupervised with heavy machinery before I entered puberty” will look on their college applications—especially if they lose a finger.

Don’t worry, their summer will also be filled with relaxation. I’m not a monster. That’s why I purchased a gramophone on eBay. The kids can enjoy turn-of-the-century bangers like “Hosanna in the Highest” by the Haydn Quartet and “Down upon the Suwannee River” by Professor Baton’s Brass and String Military Band. Then, after they’ve used the outhouse I installed in the backyard, they’ll sit in the lantern light and discuss current events of the 1890s. “OMG, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Otto von Bismarck to resign as chancellor of Germany?” they’ll say. “I knew that guy was sus.”

This unsupervised, retro summer I’m giving my children is to protect them from the perils of modern life. But is it also because I need some damn alone time and don’t want to spend $10,000 on summer camp?

Well, as the popular 1890s saying goes, “I’m no lally cooler trying to wake snakes or a nutty foozler, so shut your big bazoo, ya hear.” Which means yes, that’s exactly the reason why.

Senate Bill 5 would ban products containing any detectable amount of any cannabinoid, creating criminal offenses for possession of hemp-derived THC.

Today's links

• Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes: And the grifters who love them.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Banana split history; Heinlein plots; Hacking a jeep
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (permalink)

Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift? Like Alex Jones – that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):

https://theweek.com/speedreads/709232/how-goop-infowars-are-selling-exact-same-wellness-products

I think that ideologically, conservatism contains elements that groom its followers to get rooked by scammers like Paltrow and Jones. First, of course, is the hierarchical nature of conservatism. Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind seeks to find a common thread running through the many different strands of "conservative" thought. "Conservatives" include libertarians; monarchists; Christian Dominionists; white nationalists; Hindu nationalists; Zionist genocidiers; eugenicists; Men's Rights Activists; etc:

https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/

Robin says the thing that all these groups share is a belief that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and that the world is best when the born leaders are on top, and that social movements that seek to elevate inferior people over their social betters commit civilizational suicide (think of the reflex to blame everything from tanker ships colliding with bridges to Boeing jets falling out of the sky on "DEI"). Different conservative factions disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

The belief that some people are simply better than others makes conservatives easy marks for arguments from authority (think of Trump's insistence that "I alone can fix America"). It also presents an irresistible temptation to the people at the top: if you know your followers believe you are better (smarter, more righteous) than they are, then you can be pretty sure that they'll buy the things you sell them, from a "prayer cloth" to "miracle water":

https://dustoffthebible.com/Blog-archive/2012/07/25/the-worst-tbn-product-scams-of-all-time/

The conservative's mantra is "incentives matter." When you're surrounded by marks, there's a hell of a temptation to rook 'em.

But this is just the background condition for conservative vulnerability to hucksters. A key aspect of conservative ideology is hyper-individualism, and the rejection of systemic explanations for one's problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

Poverty, unwanted pregnancy, abusive workplace situations and worse can all be blamed on "bad choices" – not systemic factors. Likewise, the MAHA movement blames chronic illnesses and contagious diseases on personal failings, such as the failure to "eat clean" and exercise regularly. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, there's a short, greased slide from this belief to a eugenic, let 'er rip response to pandemics ("Why should I shut down my yoga studio just because you didn't take care of your immune system?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

People who are steeped in this belief are easy marks for supplements, fad diets and quack exercise gadgets like the Thighmaster and the Abflex, which promise to "spot reduce" fat (what better expression of the rejection of systemic explanations than the belief that you can reduce the fat in one part of your body?).

It's a double whammy. If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science ("If you don't want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment") in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.

Rejecting systemic explanations also primes you to believe in conspiracy theories. This is why antisemitism is called "the socialism of fools": rather than fighting against the system of primacy of extractive finance capital over the productive economy, you spend all your time locked in a one-sided battle with an imaginary cabal of evil Jewish bankers.

Conspiratorial beliefs make you especially vulnerable to a grifter's sales pitch that goes like this: "Of course they don't want you to drink raw milk, otherwise you'd be as powerful as they are." Variations on this theme include "buy the miracle anti-aging cure that only billionaires are privy to" and "buy a bump stock before the conspiracy to take away your right to self-defense makes them illegal."

And indeed, when you look into right-wing movements, you inevitably find someone on the grift, from Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson hawking ripoff "cash for gold" schemes (and ripoff "gold for cash" schemes); to Donald Trump with his fake watches, fake phones, and Made in China MAGA stuff:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/687574/trump-mobile-plan-bad-deal

This isn't new. The far right has always relied on the direct mail industry, which used the heavily federally subsidized US Post Office to send anti-government spending sales pitches to gullible, easily frightened people:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2n4w5r7

These direct mail houses primarily serve two types of customers: people hawking scams, and right wing fundraisers. The Venn diagram of these two groups is an almost perfect circle.

And of course, the entire multi-level marketing (MLM) industry is grounded in far-right movements and cults. The Heritage Foundation was founded with money from the DeVoses and van Andels, who made their riches off of Amway. MLMs are a conspiracy: virtually no one ever buys any MLM products, except for the "distributors" who are told they are entrepreneurs and are convinced that they are the only ones secretly making quota by buying up merch on their own credit cards and filling their garages and sewing-rooms with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The guys at the top know this, which is why they alone among all product manufacturers report on their industry's "sales" by adding up how much merchandise their distributors have ordered, not how much of all that merch has been sold to people who actually use it. The secret fact that there is no market for MLM junk allows MLM bosses to victimize their marks for a second time. Each victim believes that they alone are failing to sell the MLM's crap, which means that they can be duped into paying for expensive, useless "courses" on how to be better at selling.

This one-two punch (rip someone off, then rip them off again) is a familiar pattern among con-artists. Every successful con ends with a "blow-off," that is supposed to leave the mark uncertain about whether they were really scammed (a three-card monte gang might use a fake cop who breaks up the game, who sends everyone running). Sometimes, con artists seek out the same mark after the fact and hit them again (sometimes through a confederate). After all, a mark who falls for a scam has already demonstrated that they are the type of mark that falls for scams.

Digital con artists do this, too: you've probably gotten an email from a scammer pretending to be a cop of some kind, claiming that they are investigating a scammer gang. These people indiscriminately spam the internet with these "I can help you recover your money/jail your victimizer" messages as a way of attracting people who have already been scammed and thus demonstrated their vulnerability to scammers like them.

This is another place where direct mail, MLM and conservative con artists overlap. Right-wing scammers sell each other mailing lists of frightened, easily victimized people who can be pitched with gold bars, supplements, and fundraisers to help imaginary Christians being targeted for extermination in Africa. MLMs pitch themselves to MLM victims: "Did you get scammed by Amway? Come sell Nu-Skin, we're the Amway that's not a scam!"

These scammers know their audience and they have an unerring instict for an opportunity to fleece them again. Take the Dorrs, a multigenerational clan of far-right grifters who've been rooking easily frightened conservatives since the Goldwater campaign. The Dorrs run a bunch of "charities" whose IRS filings reveal that they are pocketing 90%+ of the money they raise. Five years ago, the Dorrs hit on a great scam: fundraising for anti-mask-mandate and "re-open" anti-lockdown groups (and keeping the money):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers

They were succeeded by waves of covid grifters, like the con artists peddling ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Incentives matter.

At the time, I called the Dorrs the Flu Klux Klan, but what I didn't know then was that the Klan is also a MLM scam.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/hatred_and_profits_under_the_hood_of_the_ku_klux_klan.pdf

The Klan's second incarnation, in the 1920s, was designed by the Southern Publicity Association, a PR firm that had sold both the Salvation Army and Prohibition. They conceived of an MLM-like structure that was wildly successful: Klansmen who brought in new members got to keep $4 of their $10 membership fee (more than $50 in today's money); the remaining funds were shared between top Klan boss William Simmons and various regional bosses, who served as uplines to the recruiters.

Over time, this system developed into a true pyramid scheme, with a bewildering series of tiers: Kleagles, King Kleagles and Imperial Kleagles, as well as Great Goblins, Grand Dragons, and Imperial Wizards, each of whom got a piece of the action from their complex downlines. Klansmen didn't just pay the membership fee, either: they had to buy robes, life-insurance, special Bibles, helmets, candles, swords, and even special robe dry-cleaning services (they also paid annual membership dues). All of this money filtered up through the pyramid's levels, a vast sum of money funneled from frightened, angry working class rubes to the grifters who made millions off of them.

Many people have observed that one of the reasons conservatives govern so badly is that they campaign on the idea that "governments are wasteful and inefficient," which means that if they run the government in a wasteful and inefficient fashion, they only prove their point. In the same fashion: right-wing grifters who pitch you on the idea an evil cabal has rigged the game, and then take your money and rip you off, are demonstrating the correctness of their pitch.

For grifters who prey on angry, bitter rubes, stealing from the rubes only makes them angrier and more bitter – and thus easier to fleece. That's why the postmortems on the right's greatest everyday heroes turn out to be a litany of instances in which they were scammed. That's the story of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 insurrectionist who was killed while trying to penetrate the Speaker's lobby:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset

Babbitt was first rooked by an Army recruiter, who got her sent to Iraq – a war cooked up by right-wing scammers – eight times. After her deployments, she tried to run a small pool supply company, which was driven out of business by a monopoly called Pool Supply, which routinely breaks the law to drive competitors out of business, bragging about its lawbreaking even after getting fined by the FTC:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/b2icontent.irpass.cc/603/181440.pdf

Then Babbitt went to a loan shark, a "merchant cash advance" company called EBF Partners, who bailed her out with a loan at 169%, but didn't call it a loan, in order to avoid lending regulations, which is why she wasn't able to sue them when they drove her to default:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2021-01-07/san-diego-woman-killed-in-capitol-siege-was-iraq-war-veteran

That's when she ended up in Qanon, a cult full of easy marks getting suckered for everything they had, who are told that their problems are the result of evil individuals, not a rigged system. Then, she got shot dead while trying to overthrow the US government.

Babbitt was a serial victim of con artists. These are exactly the kind of ripoff creeps that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC and the DOJ spent the Biden years fighting with a vigor not seen in generations. Trump has shut them all down and wiped out nearly all of their good work, including the most basic, common-sense shit imaginable, like bans on junk fees, and the "click to cancel" rule (which says that services need to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for it):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

In the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of cheating in his business dealings. Trump didn't deny it. He replied, "That makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Trump was elected by the people who rip off the frightened and angry: cryptocurrency hustlers ("the dollar is gonna collapse!"), sports gambling moguls, and anti-DEI peddlers ("lesser people have been elevated to power by social justice warriors and they'll kill us all"). No wonder he's shut down every agency and rule aimed at preventing ripoff artists from preying on everyday Americans:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-incredible

It's a movement powered and funded by scammers who've discovered the ultimate can't-lose proposition: perfect a pitch that preys on the angry and scared; rip them off (making them more angry and scared); and repeat.

I've lost a dear friend to MAGA. When I reflect on her life, I see the same pattern. Both she and her mother were abused by her mother's boyfriends when she was growing up. She married a terrible guy who cheated on her, who then used threats to take away her kids to keep her from demanding child support or half the house. She was pressured into an affair with her married boss, who then fired her.

Today, she believes in conspiracies, and disbelieves in medicine. She supports Trump, concentration camps and immigration crackdowns (despite being the child of a refugee and a former undocumented immigrant).

This person is deeply unhappy, and faces severe financial strain with no end in sight. What's more, the things she supports – not getting vaccinated, voting for Trump, terrorizing migrants – will not solve any of her problems. Supporting these things can only make things worse, which will make her more frightened, more angry, and more precarious, and thus an easier mark for the next right-wing grifter.

Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Will The Truman Brewery Become Homes Or Offices? https://spitalfieldslife.com/2025/07/22/will-the-truman-brewery-become-homes-or-offices/

• A Startup is Selling Data Hacked from Peoples’ Computers to Debt Collectors https://www.404media.co/a-startup-is-selling-data-hacked-from-peoples-computers-to-debt-collectors/

• The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

• Ryanair mulls bigger bonus for spotting oversized bags https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75rp3w77kpo

• Pre-Ordering Books Makes You More of a Citizen of Literature https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/pre-ordering-books-makes-you-more-of-a-citizen-of/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago History of the ingredients in a banana split https://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0405/p18s02-hfks.html

#15yrsago Similarities between gold farming networks and drug dealing networks https://web.archive.org/web/20100722104318/http://www.aurumahmad.com/vwe/gold-farming/

#15yrsago Where the global rifts are in the secret copyright treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20100724061132/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5222/125/

#15yrsago How Heinlein plotted https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/21/how-heinlein-plotted/

#10yrsago Paul Erdős’s FBI file https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/21/nothing-indicate-nothing-indicate-subject-had-any-/

#10yrsago Hackers can pwn a Jeep Cherokee from the brakes and steering to the AC and radio https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

#5yrsago Trump's spent a billion on re-election https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#moneyball

#5yrsago As We May Think https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#story-not-article

#5yrsago Luxury homes to be washed away https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#schadenflooding

#5yrsago The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#tomine

#5yrsago Christopher Brown's Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#failed-state

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io

• Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

---

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

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

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

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Matt Stoller (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/).

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1011 words yesterday, 7152 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

A reader writes:

I wonder if in 2025 you would change this advice from 2013 about not backing out of a job offer you’d already accepted?

I’ve accepted a wildly low-ball offer — after being laid off after 14 years and nothing but good reviews, raises, and bonuses — because this is a weird job market. I did negotiate and got them up $6K. That’s still $24K less than my last job, with fewer benefits. I accepted because I’m terrified of having no upcoming offers.

I do hope to have a second better offer early next week from a different employer, in which case I’ll rescind my acceptance before actually starting. That employer is also not ideal, but I would happily work for six months before looking elsewhere. I don’t think this employer would be a long-term option.

However, there is a small chance I will have a third excellent offer shortly before or after I would accept that second offer. If that happens, I’d bail on Company #2 without looking back, and I don’t think any of this is unethical. I absolutely believe, especially in light of my layoff, that every worker owes it to herself to get the most she can in the time she’s working. And yet, I still feel weird vestige of, “I’ll be so sorry to let them down.” Even the company that low-balled me! I like the women I interviewed with.

Wow, how the world has changed. Yes, I’d absolutely give a different answer to that question today and appreciate the chance to revisit it.

The 2013 letter was from someone asking if they should keep interviewing with other companies after accepting an offer, so a slightly different scenario. But I leaned in pretty heavily to, “Your word should mean something and you’ve already committed to another job.”

To be clear, your word should mean something! But in business, you’re still allowed to make decisions that are in your own best interests — and if another job comes along that’s clearly better for you, it’s okay to take it. If companies really wanted to make sure you wouldn’t do that, they’d use binding employment contracts … which in the U.S. they typically don’t, largely because they don’t want to bind themselves in the way they’d be binding you. They want to maintain the at-will nature of employment where they can let you go at any time and for nearly any reason. As long as they’re reserving that ability for themselves, you get to reserve it for yourself too.

That’s not to say that reneging on your acceptance of a job doesn’t come with potential consequences. It might. You might burn the bridge and not be considered for a job there again, and you shouldn’t do it cavalierly. (And in particular, backing out of two offers in a row could be an issue if you’re in a small industry where people talk — because doing it twice in quick succession is more likely to look cavalier.) But there’s no moral issue with doing it. I suppose we could come up with some very narrow exceptions to that, like if it was a tiny organization doing crucial work for a vulnerable population and you backing out without notice was going to severely hamper their work … although even then you get to do what’s best for you; it would just be a different sort of calculation.

For what it’s worth, even back around the time of the original letter, I was saying that you can back out of a job offer if you decide it’s in your best interests to do that. But the world has changed in ways that make me want to say it a lot more strongly now.

The post can I change my mind after accepting a job offer? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Uh ... Excuse me there partner ... #CowboyWho

A reader writes:

I’m an office manager for a niche type of job — think boats, expensive boats. I’ve been in my job for 20+ years, and we have traditionally had a position filled by a developmentally disabled adult through a nonprofit. “James,” an adult with special needs, worked for us for 10+ years and just retired. He was a great worker with a great attitude. So, we went back to the same nonprofit to fill his space. (The owner of the company fully believes in this organization; his son was a client before he passed away a number of years ago, so this is a non-negotiable).

The job requires the following abilities: answering the phones, managing the supply closets/lists, delivering mail inside the office and to the slips, setting up conference rooms, and general office tasks like filing/copying, etc. James had worked 25-30 hours a week when he was with us and did all of these tasks well.

The nonprofit sent us “Carol.” She is in her 40s and lives with her very wealthy parents. Carol cannot do any of these things and her mother insisted on setting her schedule around her daytime sports pursuits — lessons, clinics, matches. The job is secondary in her life — unlike James who needed a paycheck, Carol does not.

After two weeks of Carol’s placement, which I shall call The Disaster of Hellmouth Proportions, I called the nonprofit and spoke with “Alice.” Alice was cagey on the phone but sympathetic and then asked me to meet her for a coffee. While we’ve worked together during James’ tenure, I had never actually met her. So, I took her up on the coffee.

Alice told me that I had to make this work for Carol. Carol’s parents are extremely wealthy, had just moved in from out of state, and were making six-figure donations to the nonprofit to ensure their daughter received a good job, and they were very choosy. It had to be an office job, daytime, flexible hours — not many offerings in the nonprofit’s realm offered what we did. Alice said that with uncertainty from the federal government, they needed all of the funding they could procure. I told her I totally understood that situation but this woman was not a good fit. I outlined the following issues we had in just the first two weeks. I could not make this up if I tried. I deal with some weird, entitled, and wealthy people all day as part of the job, but nothing like this:

• Carol cannot answer the phones. She picks it up, laughs into it (maniacally, I might add), and will yell “NO! HELLO! NO!” I’ve been having to cover the phones during the one-hour lunch break our receptionist receives since Carol could not fulfill that duty. I asked the mother to work with her so she could do the phones and the mother told me that was my responsibility!

• Carol was told to deliver mail to the slips. Her mother left me an incensed voicemail about asking her daughter to go out on the docks because she “wanders.” Again, this is a major part of the job.

• Carol has discussions with external personas (I don’t know the correct word here). She will argue with herself about random things — imagine the devil and angel on the shoulders from the cartoons. It’s like that, but real. I asked her mother about it and was told that she doesn’t medicate Carol and this is just her way of processing things. It’s upsetting the other people in the office. It has yet to stop and sometimes the external personas will yell at each other.

• Carol yelled at a delivery man. He set a box down near her workspace and she told him to pick it up “because you’re fat and you need exercise.” I told her and her mother this was unacceptable behavior. Her mother then emailed me that I was “finding reasons to pick on her daughter” and I needed to “do my job and keep her busy.”

• Carol was asked to staple packets. I showed her what was expected and watched her do a few. I came back 10 minutes later and she had thrown all of the papers on the floor because she “was done and wanted to do fun things.” I told her mother she could not do things like this. Her mother said, “Her last job managed to get her to work. It must be YOU!” (ME!?!?)

• Carol “borrowed” a bunch of items from the supply closet. When it was discovered, her father came in and brought them all back and suggested we not allow her in there anymore because she was “confused.”

Alice said she was sorry, but her hands were tied. I told her even my boss, who fully believes in their mission and makes donations regularly as well as offering this job to their clients, said this is not a good placement.

A few weeks passed. Carol became more and more of a problem, and so did her mother. The mother came into the office to berate me in front of the rest of the staff for having her daughter set up the meeting space and pick it up afterwards. Apparently, this is “beneath” her! Again, part of the job! The owner happened to be in that day and told the mother to leave and that she was not allowed in our building again. So, now the father comes to “check in” on Carol. He’s a bit more reasonable, I guess.

After that, the owner called the nonprofit himself and also received the “we need this to work out because we need the donations from this family” line. He is friendly with their director, and told me to try and find things to occupy Carol while she’s there and he’s going to tell the parents himself she can only work 10 hours a week. This doesn’t do us any good, and now I’m tasked with finding “parent-approved” tasks for her. I can’t do my own job because I’m constantly keeping eyes on her and doing the parts of her job that she can’t. I’m just waiting for something catastrophic to happen here. I also feel it is totally unethical for this nonprofit to give jobs to those who can afford to “buy” their placements.

I don’t even know what I’m asking. Maybe the readers can chime in with ideas for my survival during Carol’s 10 hours. Any ideas what I can give her to do? She can file pretty well, but we have like … 20 minutes of filing a month, if that. Am I enabling this? Should I let Carol crash and burn to prove how little she’s doing when I’m not picking up her slack? Or would that be too mean to someone with her issues?

Whoa, this should not be your organization’s problem.

If the nonprofit is committed to finding a job for Carol at all costs in order to keep her parents’ donations, that’s their call — but it doesn’t mean they get to farm out that burden to you. This is their choice, not yours, and your organization is not obligated in any way to play along. Your org has the right to say, “We support your work and hope you can find a placement for us, but we cannot employ Carol.”

They’re deeply in the wrong for pressuring you this way.

But your boss is also part of the problem, for being so susceptible to their pressure. I understand that he supports the organization and has a personal connection to it through his own child, but — just as the nonprofit is trying to pass their own commitment off to someone else — your boss is trying to pass his desire to the help them over to you. You’re the one who has to supervise Carol, find work for her, deal with the parents, and resolve any problems that she creates. It’s all well and good for your boss to want to help out, but you’re the one getting stuck with the consequences of that decision, not him.

What to do about it depends on how hard you’re willing to push back with your boss, but ideally you’d go to him and say, “I appreciate your desire to support this organization, but I have tried everything I can think of and this is not working. Asking me to supervise Carol for 10 hours a week is a completely different job than I came on to do — she requires constant oversight, and I’m not comfortable being responsible for a situation that I believe is unsafe and could lead to a catastrophe for her or us. If you want to employ her, that’s of course your call, but I am not comfortable being the person who is responsible for her.”

You should also point out that your org still has the problem of needing someone to do the 25-30 hours a week of tasks that Carol was hired for but can’t do.

Right now you’re making it easy for your boss to transfer the problem of Carol over to you. If you’re willing to say you can’t and won’t bear that burden, he might realize his “solution” is unworkable.

The post a job placement firm sent us someone who can’t do the work but they say they’ll lose their funding if we don’t keep her appeared first on Ask a Manager.

FLUSH THE WAX WORMS!

MUSKOKA, ON – Talks at the First Ministers meeting, held this year in Ontario cottage country, have broken down as the assembled premiers immediately disagreed over who was next in line to ride on the inflatable hot dog as it was towed around the lake behind a speedboat. “Folks, shut up and listen,” bellowed Ontario […]

The post Cottage Country summit stalls as premiers clash over who is next in line to ride inner tube appeared first on The Beaverton.

WASHINGTON—Experiencing a sudden change of heart, longtime workaholic Eli Kaplan reportedly realized Monday that attending his son’s baseball game was far more important than his job as a top civil rights attorney. “It’s about time that I finally got my priorities straight,” said Kaplan while sitting at the baseball field, revealing that he had previously tossed a binder full of crucial documents into a garbage can, turned on his heels, sprinted down the court steps, and hopped in a taxi, directing the driver to the park. “What was I thinking? There will always be civil rights abuses, but Liam is only going to be a kid once. All those long hours just throwing away precious time defending freedom of speech, advocating for privacy, and gathering evidence of discrimination against clients. Now I know what really matters in this world. Every child has the unalienable right to see their old man cheering from the bleachers.” At press time, Kaplan’s son reportedly struck out during the first inning and sat out the rest of the game crying.

The post Workaholic Father Finally Realizes Son’s Baseball Game More Important Than Civil Rights Law appeared first on The Onion.

Ellen Nakashima, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post:

The U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the compromise of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. Tens of thousands of such servers are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw, leaving victims around the world scrambling to respond.

The “zero-day” attack, so called because it targeted a previously unknown vulnerability, is only the latest cybersecurity embarrassment for Microsoft. Last year, the company was faulted by a panel of U.S. government and industry experts for lapses that enabled a 2023 targeted Chinese hack of U.S. government emails, including those of then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

This most recent attack compromises only those servers housed within an organization — not those in the cloud, such as Microsoft 365, officials said. After first suggesting that users make modifications to or simply unplug SharePoint server programs from the internet, the company on Sunday evening released a patch for one version of the software. Two other versions remain vulnerable and Microsoft said it is continuing to work to develop a patch.

“Just pull the plug” — classic Microsoft security.

With access to these servers, which often connect to Outlook email, Teams and other core services, a breach can lead to theft of sensitive data as well as password harvesting, Netherlands-based research company Eye Security noted. What’s also alarming, researchers said, is that the hackers have gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched. “So pushing out a patch on Monday or Tuesday doesn’t help anybody who’s been compromised in the past 72 hours,” said one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because a federal investigation is ongoing.

Sounds bad.

The nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which staffs an information-sharing group for state and local governments, notified about 100 organizations that they were vulnerable and potentially compromised, said Randy Rose, the organization’s vice president. Those warned included public schools and universities. The process took six hours Saturday night — much longer than it otherwise would have, because the threat-intelligence and incident-response teams have been cut by 65 percent as CISA slashed funding, Rose said.

Another DOGE success story.

Investigating the rather odd behavior of the Microsoft OS/2 1.21 disk driver led me to Compaq and their EXTDISK.SYS driver. While experimenting with various setups, I realized that DOS versions older than 5.0 do not support more than two hard disks exposed by the system’s BIOS, and will in fact quite likely hang early during boot-up if there are “too many” hard disks.

This seems to have been one of the many things that “everyone knew” back in the day, similar to the fact that DOS versions older than 3.3 may hang while booting from disks with significantly more than 17 sectors per track.

As was the case with the “too many sectors per track” problem, the issue with “too many hard disks” was missed for years simply because no one had a PC with more than two hard disks. This was a technical rather than architectural limitation. While the IBM PC/XT and PC/AT BIOS implementations were limited to two hard disks, the INT 13h interface as such was not.

In the days of full-height 5¼” drives, it simply was not feasible to install more than two hard disks into a PC, especially when a 5¼” floppy drive was also required. Even the big IBM PS/2 Model 80 (1987) with a tower case could only house two full-height 5¼” drives. There might also be trouble with the power supply, as the PC hard disks of the time were not designed for staggered spin-up and a standard AT power supply might have trouble spinning up four drives at the same time.

Sure, there were half-height hard disks, but who wanted four drives in the first place? People who needed to maximize the storage capacity… and the most obvious way to do that was buying a large capacity drive, which in the 1980s was inevitably a full-height 5¼” monster. Like my 1988-model 650 MB ESDI drive, for example.

Yes, there were solutions like the NetWare DCB which supported many drives, but those were only usable by NetWare and did not expose the drives via INT 13h.

Two things happened circa 1988. One was Compaq releasing the Deskpro 386/25 with an expansion unit option, a system which supported up to four hard AT-style disks (that is, the expansion unit housed up to two ESDI drives accessible via the PC/AT hard disk style programming interface, which may be called WD1003 or WD1010 or several other things). The other development was Adaptec releasing the AHA-1540/1542 SCSI HBA, and there were perhaps other SCSI vendors as well.

Compaq supported up to four hard disks, Adaptec in theory up to seven. In any case, it is apparent that both companies ran into the same problem with DOS, and solved it in a very similar manner.

Compaq simply did not expose the drives in the expansion unit through the BIOS at all. DOS users needed the EXTDISK.SYS driver, and users of other operating systems (such as OS/2 or NetWare) needed a custom driver.

Adaptec was in a more complicated situation. The AHA-154x was an add-on card which could be installed in a PC/AT compatible machine (the AHA-154x did not work in older systems because it was a bus-mastering adapter) that already had one or two AT style drives. The AHA-154x BIOS keeps the total hard disk maximum to two. In practice that means that if there are two SCSI hard disks attached to an AHA-154x (which also includes AHA-154xA and AHA-154xB, but not necessarily newer models), the Adaptec BIOS may add zero, one, or two drives to the system, depending on how many hard disks there are already installed. In any case, the total won’t be greater than two.

For DOS users, Adaptec offered a combination of ASPI4DOS.SYS (ASPI driver for the AHA-154x) plus ASPIDISK.SYS (DOS hard disk device driver). Adaptec’s ASPIDISK.SYS was functionally very similar to Compaq’s EXTDISK.SYS and allowed DOS users (especially users of DOS 4.x and older) to utilize more than two hard disks.

DOS Bug

The bug is quite visible in the MS-DOS 4.0 source code. In MSINIT.ASM (IO.SYS/IBMBIO.COM module), DOS calls INT 13h/08h and stores the number of disks in the HNUM variable. No attempt is made to validate the value returned by INT 13h.

Further down in MSINIT.ASM, DOS sets up the hard disks, calling the SETHARD routine for each drive, but it will not set up more than two. Trouble will start near the SETIT label, where the DRVMAX variable may end up with a number much higher than the number of drives that SETHARD was run on.

Eventually, disaster strikes in the $SETDPB routine in the DOS kernel. The code near LOG2LOOP label attempts to calculate the cluster shift for the FAT file system, but gets stuck in an endless loop because the BPB for a drive was never initialized and contains zeros.

This bug is present in every DOS version with hard disk support before 5.0, that is, in DOS 2.0 up to and including DOS 4. In my experiments, all these DOS versions hang when booting on a machine that exposes four BIOS drives. MS-DOS 4.01 from April 1989 still hangs, and so does Russian MS-DOS 4.01 from February 1990.

It is clear that the bug went unnoticed or at least unfixed for a number of years simply because PCs with more than two hard disks were extremely rare to nonexistent.

DOS 5.0

It is likely that DOS 4.0 (1988) was released just before PCs with multiple hard disks became a thing. By the time Microsoft started working on DOS 5.0 in earnest in 1990, EXTDISK.SYS and ASPIDISK.SYS were certainly well established, and the problem must have been known.

MS-DOS 5.00.224 Beta from June 1990 (the oldest DOS 5.0 beta I could test) does not suffer from the bug described above, and shows four hard disks exposed by the BIOS in FDISK.

Further related work was done in August 1990 with the following comment:

M011 8/07/90 CAS    msinit.asm  rewrote lots of spaghetti code
                    msbio1.asm  used for initializing hard drive
                                partitions.  fixed bugs 2141, 2204,
                                1866 and 1809 and prepared for
                                zenith/etc. support

The above is an excerpt from an MS-DOS 5.0 OAK (OEM Adaptation Kit). The first entry in the relevant file (MSBIO.TAG) is dated 7/17/90 which leaves open the question of who actually fixed the problem with more than two hard disks and when, since it must have been fixed by June 1990.

There is another rather curious data point:

The above screenshot shows that Japanese IBM DOS 4.05/V does not hang and FDISK correctly shows four hard disks. Here’s the boot screen of said DOS version:

This shows that the fix made it into at least some DOS 4.x code base. However, the system files in IBM DOS J4.05/V are dated October 1990, decidedly newer than the MS-DOS 5.00.224 Beta.

SCSI HBAs

In any case, the fix was well known to SCSI HBA vendors. Starting with the AHA-154xC, Adaptec offered an option for “BIOS Support for More Than 2 Drives (MS-DOS(R) 5.0 and above)”. When this option was disabled, the BIOS keep the total number of hard disks to no more than two, just like AHA-154xB and earlier. When enabled, the Adaptec BIOS would expose all the hard disks it would find as BIOS drives 80h, 81h, 82h, 83h, 84h, etc.

BusLogic adapters offered a more or less identical setting to solve the identical problem.

When this setting was enabled, DOS 5.0 and later no longer needed ASPIDISK.SYS or any other vendor specific driver. DOS itself could directly use the BIOS to access all hard disks in the system (limited by the number of available drive letters).

I believe clone BIOSes with support for more than two IDE hard disks generally started appearing only since 1994 or so, and assumed (not unreasonably) that the user would be installing DOS 5.0 or later. In the worst case, the BIOS could usually be set up to not detect the 3rd and/or 4th hard disk. It was the SCSI HBAs that were prepared to deal with trouble.

APAR IR86346

Completely by accident, the puzzle of the DOS fix was solved while I was looking for something totally unrelated. In an IBM announcement letter from October 1990, the following sentence jumped out at me: DOS 3.3 and 4.0 support up to two fixed disks in a system. DOS 4.0 supports up to seven fixed disks when corrective service diskette (CSD) #UR29015 is installed.

I happened to have CSD UR29015 on hand, so I looked at the included documentation. The README file states: APAR IR86346 requires DOS 4.0 to be installed with NO MORE THAN two fixed disk drives before installing corrective service. Once corrective service is installed, you can attach the additional fixed disk drives.

In the APARLIST file there’s a table which includes the following entry:

CSD      APAR      KEYWORD   COMPONENT ABSTRACT
-------  -------   --------  --------- -----
...
UR27164 IR86346 ABEND IBMBIO DOS 4.0 hangs with more than 2 hardfiles
...

Yep, that’s exactly the observed problem! With more than hard disks, DOS 4.0 and older simply hangs.

There’s also a table of fix releases in the same file (excerpted):

    ...
    CSD   UR25066    05/10/89
    IFD   UR25788    06/07/89
    IFD   UR27164    09/25/89
    IFD   UR27749    10/11/89
    ...

CSD UR27164 which (was the first to include the fix for APAR IR86346) was released on September 25, 1989. The previous CSD from June 1989 did not include the fix.

The documentation does not lie and with CSD UR29015 applied, IBM DOS 4.0 has no trouble booting up and seeing four hard disks:

That clarifies the timeline a lot. MS-DOS 4.01 from April 1989 could not possibly contain the fix. IBM fixed the bug sometime in Summer 1989, which is why IBM DOS J4.05/V includes the fix. Microsoft’s Russian MS-DOS 4.01 was likely branched before mid-1989 and the fix was never applied.

And this also explains why the earliest MS-DOS 5.0 betas don’t have the problem with more than two hard disks, even though there is no record of Microsoft fixing it. Because Microsoft didn’t—IBM did, a few months before the work on MS-DOS 5.0 started.

The only minor remaining mystery is who opened APAR IR86346. It could have been an external customer, although both the Adaptec AHA-154x HBA and the Compaq Deskpro/25 were designed to protect against DOS hanging. Then again, perhaps some other SCSI HBA was not quite so careful and could trigger the hang with multiple hard disks.

It is also possible that the bug was discovered and internally reported when IBM was working on its own SCSI adapters, released in March 1990 together with the first wave of PS/2 machines with SCSI drives.