OTTAWA – Hear ye hear ye fine citizens of British North America and allow your hearts to be elated. After a long hiatus in London, England, esteemed Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, OC, has announced he has made the gracious decision to return to Upper Canada and offer his personal hand in […]
The post Hear ye, hear ye! Governor from England returns to Upper Canada to restore the Dominion appeared first on The Beaverton.
WASHINGTON—Declining to attend any event or go anywhere at all until 2030, former first lady Michelle Obama confirmed Thursday that she would be skipping the rest of the decade. “I’ve decided to just go ahead and excuse myself for the rest of the 2020s,” said Obama, speaking to reporters through an intercom by the front door of her home in D.C.’s historic Kalorama neighborhood. “If Barack wants to go to this or that event, he is of course free to do so—but me? Hell no. I can’t take another second of this shit. I won’t be making any appearances, public or private. No, no, no. Fuck that.” Reached for further comment, Obama acknowledged she had already inked a multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix to make a documentary about her life “sitting on [her] ass reading a book” for the next several years.
The post Michelle Obama Confirms She Will Skip Rest Of Decade appeared first on The Onion.
LOS ANGELES—In a chaotic scene that saw young people screaming and ducking for cover in the moments after the hip-hop star was served from a passing vehicle, witnesses confirmed Thursday morning that Kendrick Lamar had been hit with a drive-by summons outside an L.A. nightclub. “It all happened so fast—one minute Kendrick was standing around talking with his friends, and the next he was on the ground with a stack of papers covering his chest,” said club owner Mark Rogers, noting that when they saw its tinted window rolling down, Lamar’s bodyguards dove in front of the black Escalade that delivered the documents, but they were unable to prevent the “Not Like Us” rapper from receiving the notice to appear in court. “I always get a bad feeling when I see rappers hanging around my club with highly paid lawyers, because it seems like the lawsuits and countersuits could break out at any moment. I just wish they could make music in peace without fear of legal action.” At press time, security was said to have been tightened outside Drake’s Toronto mansion following reports that attorneys from a white-shoe law firm had been spotted in the neighborhood.
The post Kendrick Lamar Hit With Drive-By Summons Outside L.A. Nightclub appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
Let’s talk about malicious compliance — times when someone purposely exposed the absurdity of a rule by doing exactly what they were told to do. For example:
“I had a boss who needed to know via email every. single. time. we stepped away from our computers (we were all fully remote). So I decided to comply 100% with her request. I told her when I’m using the restroom, that I had to put cream in my coffee, that I’m going to put on a sweater because I’m cold, I’m about to open my living room blinds, you get the point. Others did that too and after like two weeks, she said we no longer have to notify her unless it’s going to be over 15 minutes.”
• • •
“I worked for a company that insisted we wear our teal-colored polo shirts at all times. They only did up to a Large. I am NOT a Large, I am a short, hairy, fat, apple-shaped stud muffin (male). OK, be like that. So I wore the one they got me. The squeamish can stop reading now. Basically the stretchy fabric stretched and showed the spare tires, it didn’t cover the bottom of my belly, my moobs were prominent, and it even had chest hair poking through the fabric.
Finishing work that very day, I was asked not to wear it and to wear my usual shirt.”
• • •
“I work in engineering and had a program manager, Todd, who had risen through the ranks on his ‘business savvy,’ which turned out to mean ‘bullying every young engineer on his team and relentlessly cutting corners on quality.’
He came by my desk on Tuesday and asked me to run a test by Friday. Not only would this have been a crazy workload, but it was logistically impossible – the required parts to run the test wouldn’t show up for a week. (Think like, running a test of how quickly a car can stop … without installing the brake pads.) Todd sends me an email that says, ‘I think of you as someone who is committed to the success of our project, and I would hate to change that impression. Unfortunately, that is not a delay we can absorb. I have you penciled into this meeting with [Big Boss] on Monday to report the results of the completed test.’
So I’m like, okay, you know what? Fuck you, Todd. I confirm via email that he wants me to run the test without brake pads and he says yes. I bust ass to run the test without brake pads on Friday and of course it fails miserably. I send a picture of the literal debris to him on the same email chain and go immediately to happy hour.
Monday morning I come in to an angry ‘we need to get to the bottom of this failure’ email from Todd. I ignore it. Straight to the meeting with the big boss. I’m like, ‘Hey guys, I’m so sorry but I haven’t had time to pull together a slide deck since the test was just run on Friday afternoon. I do have some pictures and schedule updates to share, so Todd do you mind actually pulling up that email chain?’ I explain what happened in the most neutral way possible. Big boss is immediately like … ‘Wait, WTF, why didn’t we wait for the brake pads and do this right?’ I respond that decision was direction from the program rather than a technical decision, so Todd would be better positioned to speak to it.
Sweet revenge. He never asked me to cut corners again, and ended up leaving ‘for another opportunity’ like six weeks later.”
• • •
Share your stories of malicious compliance — your own or other people’s — in the comment section!
LOS ANGELES—Saying such individuals posed a threat to the safety and security of all city residents, the Los Angeles Police Department announced Thursday that it had arrested everyone who lost their home in the ongoing wildfires. “In the interest of maintaining public order, I have instructed my officers to round up any suspicious person whose domicile was recently destroyed in the fires,” said LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell, stressing that his units had already detained “thousands of such indigent characters” in neighborhoods ravaged by the Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst wildfires. “Just because your dwelling has been reduced to smoldering ash does not give you the excuse to make other residents feel unsafe by begging for water or clothing. It drives down property value, and frankly, it’s unsightly to have someone going around in their charred rags and asking for handouts. Enough is enough. For any stragglers still out there, we are demanding you clear out of public places tonight, or the department will be forced to take more drastic action.” McDonnell also announced a massive overnight raid on what he called the “illegal shantytowns” erected by the Red Cross.
The post LAPD Arrests Everyone Who Lost Home In Fire appeared first on The Onion.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a major right-wing pivot, including adding Trump ally Dana White to the company’s board and agreeing to cohost an inauguration reception. Here are the other changes Zuckerberg is implementing to make the tech company more MAGA-friendly.
12,000% more AI-generated images of a muscular Elon Musk shaking hands with John Wayne
Lowering the age minimum on Facebook Dating to 9
Allowing open carry in the Meta food court
Banning immigrants from stealing Americans’ hard-earned Instagram likes
Letting Don Jr. join any expectant mothers Facebook group he wants, no questions asked
Adding two-way mirrors to all women’s bathrooms
More Instagram ads for tactical flashlights and divorce lawyers
Encouraging more diverse perspectives on which races are inferior
Restoring Confederate monuments that were taken down from Meta headquarters in 2021
The post How Mark Zuckerberg Is Making Meta More MAGA-Friendly appeared first on The Onion.
January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets
This year’s LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO (the 19th!) casts an archival gaze on the lives of San Franciscans and Bay residents. Drawn from over 400 newly scanned archival films plus a few old favorites, this year’s film revels in the textures and activities of everyday life, labor and celebration, replaying known and unknown historical moments, daylighting lost and found infrastructures, revealing the scars of settlement and pointing to more hopeful futures. Highlights include intimate views of the Mission District, recently discovered BART films, coverage of Western Addition redevelopment and displacement, and much more. Almost all of the footage has not been shown before.
As always, the audience makes the soundtrack. Please come prepared to raise your voices; identify places, people and events; and ask questions of others in the audience.
By attending, you’ll directly contribute to supporting the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger will be presenting as per usual. Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of truly special evening!
Doors open at 6:30 pm. Film starts at 7:30 PM
No one will be turned away due to lack of funds!
January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets
Bill Delzell is trying to track down who took thousands of high-quality photos in the late 1960s in San Francisco and left the vast collection abandoned in a storage unit. The images include protests of the Vietnam War, the music scene with Jerry Garcia, and young people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In.
A commercial photographer himself, Delzell became interested in the mystery two years ago. Today, he is championing an effort to identify the person behind the camera and share the work broadly, including providing public access to the collection through the Internet Archive. He launched a Kickstarter campaign, “Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed” to help uncover clues and locate the photographer. Photographs shared on social media have attracted over 1.5 million views and the Kickstarter effort is advancing to its $49,000 goal. “It’s been quite a ride,” he said. “I think of myself as an advocate for this unknown photographer.”
So far, about 5,700 photos from 1966 to 1970 on black-and-white film and color slides have been developed ; another 75 rolls of 35mm film remain unprocessed. The images were discovered in the 1980s and passed hands through several dealers before Delzell was introduced to them through a friend.
“After turning a few pages in the collection, I had this overwhelming sense of loss,” said Delzell, 67, who worked as a photographer for over 30 years in San Francisco and now runs SpeakLocal.org, a nonprofit in Sacramento. “The idea that a person could devote five years of their life capturing so much of such an iconic era, and then to have become separated from it … my mind was spinning. I left with an awareness of the importance of the collection and preoccupied with how we could reconnect the photographer with their work.”
Now, his dream is to raise enough money to complete the restoration and uncover the mystery of the gifted photographer. The images would be of great value to educators, he said, teaching about that tumultuous time in American history.
“There is historical significance of the work,” Delzell said, who went to protests in the 1960s with his activist parents. “The idea of a community coming together to search for the identity of this individual, as well as individuals in the photograph, is what appeals to me. We’re still at a time where a lot of the people in those images are alive, and they can share their stories.”
Resources
– Kickstarter campaign: Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed
– Reddit: /WhoShotMe
Delzell has involved young people through his nonprofit organization dedicated to project-based learning. They are helping to scan the images and create a database through paid internships or school credit. The aim is to develop an interactive tool, and perhaps a book or documentary about the photos and quest for the photographer.
Once the work is shared with backers, Delzell wants it to be available to all on the Internet Archive. His plan is to preserve the collection and make it accessible with the public interest in mind.
Delzell credits the enthusiastic response to the project to the phenomenal era when the photos were taken.
“If you think about any moment in the history of humankind, there’s probably never been a time that has had such a transformational impact on culture as the 60s,” he said. “To be able to dive into 8,000 images – all captured through the eye of one individual – is unique. Educators can add the images to their curriculum when they’re talking about subjects like the Civil Rights movement or the Summer of Love or the counterculture movement. It just really represents a great opportunity.”
The post Donut Pillow Shit For Smothering appeared first on The Onion.
1. You own music in so many formats that your collection could be housed in an audio museum.
2. Back in your day, people feared measles more than the vaccine that prevents it.
3. You were too young to go to the first Woodstock and too old to deal with Woodstock ’99.
4. You’ve lived through several waves of feminism, and they’ve culminated in two women who were among the most qualified candidates in US presidential history losing to the same misogynistic con artist.
5. You remember when even the cheapest chocolate candy bars actually tasted like chocolate.
6. The “millennial whoop” sets your teeth on edge—and at your age, you can’t afford to lose any more enamel.
7. You are on more medications than your eighty-nine-year-old mother, whose suspicions during your teen years that you were on drugs have finally panned out.
8. The lyric “I want to fuck you like an animal” hits differently when you realize that Trent Reznor, like you, is turning sixty.
9. A hill you will die on is that Doug Emhoff is smoking hot. Maybe not “Michael Hutchence in the 1980s” hot, but close.
10. Every time you hit a horrific elder milestone—like discovering several dark, coarse, postmenopausal chin hairs—you hear in your head the Twilight Zone theme music just as Samantha Baker did when she encountered her semi-clad grandparents in Sixteen Candles.
11. Back in your day, people feared polio more than the vaccine that prevents it.
12. You had trouble believing that so many Gen-Xers could have voted for Trump until you remembered all those pop-collared douchebros and shoulder-padded mean girls you and your punk crowd in college avoided.
13. Whatever the hell has been going on with your neck for the past decade is now just a straight-up, motherfucking ET situation.
14. After spending your twenties (and let’s face it, some of your thirties) running around after assholes with guitars and great hair, you finally understand that nice is sexy—and are in awe of people like Gwen Walz who figured this out decades ago.
15. Your feelings about Auto-Tune now help you to understand why your mother referred to the Clash as “that racket,” as in, “Turn down that racket!”
16. After losing your job to “downsizing” a year ago, you have a newfound empathy for Harry Dean Stanton’s character in Pretty in Pink.
17. You’ve lived long enough to see the biggest stains on the Kennedy name go from philandering and manslaughter to vaccine denial and a weird fascination with roadkill.
18. You sit up late at night watching vintage episodes of 120 Minutes and thinking that maybe you’d be more attracted to men these days if they still pouffed their forelocks with gobs of mousse.
19. You don’t really get Taylor Swift. No, not even that album she did with the guy from the National. You only admit this to the kind of people who, like you, saw Fugazi play on the roof of an abandoned warehouse in 1988.
20. You now have as many Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton T-shirts as you do vintage REM ones, and you will wear them until the architects of Project 2025 peel them from your cold, dead body.
21. You have seen only a rare few mentions in the news that the oldest Gen-Xers are turning sixty this year, which is both the least surprising and most Gen-X thing ever.
In brief: Today’s post delves into the uncertainty around the potential for snow early next week, as well as just how cold things will get. The reality is, in Houston, one just cannot confidently forecast snow nearly a week out. As for temperatures, we appear to be trending away from extreme cold, which is a good thing.
Whenever there’s the possibility of snow in Houston, people lose their minds. Some people are absolutely giddy at the rare prospect of snow. Others fear what it will do to Houston’s unprepared drivers and untreated roads. Kids anticipate the rarest of all gifts in Houston, a ‘snow’ day.
Here’s the reality from a forecaster’s standpoint. Yes, there is an increasing possibility of snow or sleet beginning next Monday night and Tuesday, but this is still nearly six days away. This means our confidence in forecasting any wintry precipitation remains very low. There is probably about a 50-50 chance we see some kind of wintry mix, so set your expectations accordingly. Our confidence in the forecast will increase as we get closer.
We’re seeing fairly widespread, light showers this morning, and these will continue for most of the day. The showers are more numerous south of Interstate 10, closer to the source of moisture. None of this rain is likely to turn heavy, so mostly the will just be a cold, light rain. With mostly cloudy skies, expect high temperatures in the low 50s. Temperatures tonight will drop to about 40 degrees, with clearing skies.
NICE DAY ALERT! This will be a mostly sunny day day with high temperatures in the low 60s. Honestly, looking ahead at the forecast, this is probably going to be the nicest day outside for quite awhile. Lows on Thursday night will drop into the lower 60s.
We’ll see some blue skies on Friday morning, maybe, but then clouds will start top build. Temperatures will approach 70 degrees during the afternoon hours, with modestly increasing humidity levels. There will be a slight chance of some showers on Friday night, but these now look to be mostly light instead of anything threatening. Lows on Friday night will likely only drop into the upper 50s.
This will be a partly sunny day, with highs in the low 60s ahead of a strong cold front. A few showers and thunderstorms may be possible just ahead of the front as it moves through, but for many people this could be a dry passage. I expect the front to reach central Houston by around noon, and push off the coast shortly afterward. We may hold on to temperatures in the 50s for a few hours after the front passes, but as the sun sets and northwesterly winds blow, much drier and colder air will be pushing in. Lows on Saturday night will drop into the 30s.
You read that right, marathon runners. I now expect start-line temperatures in Houston to be in the vicinity of the mid-30s. We don’t need to worry about precipitation, fortunately, and skies should be mostly clear. What I’m watching mostly closely is winds. Right now they’re likely to be out of the north at 10 to 15 mph. The trend in gusts has been slightly lower, so for now I’d anticipate gusting up to about 25 mph. That is certainly no picnic, but it beats 30 or 35 mph. The bottom line is that if you’re running, I recommend bundling up. I’ll be wearing my warmer gloves for this one. Highs on Sunday will reach the mid- to upper-40s most likely before a possible freeze on Sunday night.
The forecast models have, in recent runs, backed off some of the extreme cold anticipated for next week. The caveat at the beginning of this post about snow uncertainty still applies to temperatures as well. But at this point I would expect most of Houston to experience a light freeze on Monday morning, with partly sunny skies. Highs will only reach 40 degrees. So if you’re participating or watching a parade, please dress warmly.
Beginning Monday evening, through Wednesday morning, is when the Houston region will experience the best chance of a wintry mix and coldest temperatures.
We’ll start with temperatures. At this point I think we’ll probably bottom out on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. For Houston, the likely range of temperatures on these mornings is probably 25 to 30 degrees, with a hard freeze possible for inland areas, and the immediate coast possibly remaining just above freezing. High temperatures through Wednesday will likely be on the order of 40 degrees. Again we’ll have to fine-tune the temperature forecast as we get closer.
With regard to precipitation, we’ll start to see an influx of moisture beginning later on Monday and Monday night, and this will bring a modest chance of precipitation on Monday night, Tuesday, and Tuesday night. With the colder air this brings the possibility of snow (most likely at this time), sleet, or freezing rain into the forecast. Because slight temperature differences in the atmosphere will determine the type of precipitation, we just cannot make a call on whether it will snow, sleet, or rain in Houston during the first half of next week. But it’s a distinct possibility, along with some mobility issues on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. We’ll be watching all of this closely over the weekend for you, with regular updates.
A warming trend begins Thursday.
NEOSHO, MO—Confused by the sudden directive to “neutralize any threats” to the leader of the popular kitchen appliance brand, corporate security officer Tim Mulrooney was reportedly unsure Wednesday why he had been assigned to guard the CEO of Crock-Pot. “A person from the company called in a panic last week and said the CEO needed to ‘beef up’ his security detail, but when we asked what sorts of threats he was facing, they just kept saying he’d ‘made a lot of enemies lately’ and wouldn’t elaborate,” said Mulrooney, who reported for duty in the lobby of the company’s small headquarters in rural Missouri along with 12 equally confounded members of the slow-cooker executive’s newly enhanced security detail. “I guess I’d be mad if my Crock-Pot overheated and burned my chili or something, but I can’t see getting angry enough to plot an assassination attempt. But oh well, whatever makes him feel safe. We get paid either way.” At press time, sources confirmed Mulrooney and his entire security detail were dead after a katana-wielding assassin rappelled down from the office’s ceiling in a surprise attack.
The post Corporate Security Detail Not Sure Why They Guarding Crock-Pot CEO appeared first on The Onion.
President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, appeared for questioning on Capitol Hill in a public confirmation hearing in which Democrats interrogated allegations of illicit and inappropriate conduct and a long history of public commentary deriding women, minorities, and people with opposing political views. What do you think?
“Listen, you can be extremely unqualified, or you can be a sex offender, but not both.”
Warren Pauley, Ringtone Composer
“He should write them all thank-you emails afterwards. That always helps me.”
Stefan Reed, Regulations Officer
“Clearly he’s not fit for the Defense Department if he can’t even manage a simple cover-up.”
Gina Palermo, Jingle Approver
The post Pete Hegseth Faces Difficult Confirmation Hearing appeared first on The Onion.
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.
No, really.
What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."
One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.
Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.
You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.
Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."
We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.
Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.
Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?
There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/
There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies
We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.
Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply
There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:
I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"
This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.
We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.
Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:
Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.
That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:
It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/
And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:
https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/
Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial
When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:
In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.
We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.
After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.
If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.
This month, I'm serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
It's a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.
Here's part one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing
Part two:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom
Part three:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve
Part four:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery
And now, onto part five!
“You gentlemen must have customers who do accounting,” I said. “They know your systems. They know accounts. Why not use someone you already have a relationship with? Someone from the family, as you put it?” I loved solving puzzles; it was what made me both a programmer and an accountant. I had flipped into puzzle-solving mode, and was looking for loose ends where I could begin the untangling process.
The three men looked at each other, then away. This wasn’t a question they wanted to answer.
“When it comes to our customers,” the rabbi said, “we want them to feel . . . safe. We don’t want them to think that the business is being distracted by foolish disputes.”
“We don’t want them to be tempted to take sides,” Father Marek said, and I thought he was being a lot more honest than the rabbi. I could imagine that plenty of people would choose three young, pious women over these three old, feuding, rich clerics.
I could tell that the bishop and the rabbi both resented Father Marek’s answer and were barely keeping themselves from telling him so because they both knew it would make the situation even worse. That was okay. I had the lay of the land.
“I think I understand.” They shifted, looked at each other, at me. They were worried. They thought I might say no. They didn’t have a plan B. “It certainly presents a fascinating technical challenge. My only concern is that it sounds very time-consuming and I have a lot of work right now, honestly. Some days, I feel it’s more than I can handle.” I enjoyed watching that land, seeing their incipient panic. These three weren’t so tough. After all, they’d been made fools of by three cloistered, sheltered young women around my age.
“The job is well-compensated,” Bishop Clarke said. He smiled. All those teeth. “After all, the alternative is a costly, drawn-out lawsuit, and even if we win, all it will accomplish is a shutdown of CF. If you can help us bring them into the Fidelity Computing family, we’ll not only save the lawyer bills, we’ll all make more money. We’re prepared to pay to make that happen.”
“I normally bill my freelance work at twenty-five dollars an hour.” It was a breathtaking sum and I’d had to practice saying it into a mirror so I wouldn’t look ashamed when I named it. I watched them freeze up and do some mental math, contemplating how long it would take to review the documents on ten boxes’ worth of floppy disks.
Bishop Clarke’s smile strained wider, looking like it might be hurting his face. “That’s a very reasonable rate, but we had something else in mind—we thought we might align all of our incentives by offering you a share of the bounty of a successful outcome.”
I regretted coming. What a waste of time. I was only twenty-one years old, but I knew better than to sign up for a commission. Who did they think I was, one of the rubes they got to sell printer paper for them in return for a dollar on every box sold? I almost walked out. I didn’t, though. I had to hear this.
“Could you explain how that would work?”
“You get twenty-five percent,” Father Marek said, staring hard at me. “A quarter of their projected annual revenue, based on the figures you pull out of those files.” He nodded minutely at the tower of floppy disks, not taking his eyes off mine. “Our sales are already down a thousand dollars a month. You figure out how much they’re making every month, figure out how much they’re growing every month, multiply it by twelve, and then divide it by four, and send us an invoice.”
“No matter how much it comes to?”
“No matter how much it comes to,” he said. “Like you said, it’s a lot of work.”
I mulled this over. There was a catch. What was it? I got a hunch.
“No matter what the outcome?” I asked.
They looked at each other. “No,” Rabbi Finkel said. “No, the deal is for a portion of a satisfactory outcome. If your work makes us money, then you make money.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The rabbi smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find the information we’re looking for,” he said. “We know they’ve broken the law and we know the evidence will be in all those files.”
“But if I can’t find it, or if it’s not enough to convince them to settle and sell?”
“You get nothing,” Father Marek snapped. “Nothing. We win, you win. We lose, you lose.”
I decided I liked him the best of the three. He wasn’t trying to hide who he was or what the situation was. He made it clear he didn’t think much of me, but at least he thought enough of me to give it to me straight. I got the impression that Bishop Clarke would knife me in the heart without losing that amazing smile, and that Rabbi Finkel would murmur reassurances as he gave it a twist. Not Father Marek. He’d give me an honest snarl as he did it.
I had been ready to do it a minute before. Now I was ready to walk. My short time in the Bay Area had made it clear that I wasn’t going to get stock options in the next Apple Inc. just because I kept their books, nor was I going to be able to command giant amounts of money just for showing up and creating the foundations of some hot company’s big product, like Art.
But if there’s one thing I’d learned from accounting, it was that companies didn’t pay you if they didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen—Reverend Sirs—but I think this won’t work out. There’s just too many ways this could go wrong. I could do my job perfectly, put hundreds of hours of work into it, and you could fail to accomplish your merger due to factors beyond my control.”
Their faces turned to stone. They glared at me. The rabbi opened his mouth to say something, but Father Marek silenced him with a pointed throat-clearing. Bishop Clarke turned on his smile. Father Marek gathered up his notepad and put his pen in his breast pocket and slowly climbed to his feet. He was taller—far taller than I’d guessed. He had legs like a cricket’s, they just kept unfolding. I had to force myself not to flinch as he shifted toward me.
“Marty,” the bishop said, “I completely understand, really I do. But there’s no need to give up hope. We’re reasonable people. Perhaps you would like to make a counteroffer?”
I nearly left. But for a moment there, I’d felt close to the dream of Silicon Valley—the riches, the fame, the power to change so many lives. “What about . . .” The rabbi and the bishop leaned forward. Father Marek perched on his long legs and folded his arms. “What about my hourly rate, or twenty-five percent of whatever I make for you, whichever is greatest?”
“What about whatever is least?” the bishop fired back. His smile never wavered.
Taking On the Biggest Problems and the Biggest Companies https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-13-qa-taking-on-biggest-problems-companies-jonathan-kanter-interview/
DNA Lounge: Wherein I want to know how you advertise your events https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2025/01/13.html
#15yrsago Candy-ass vice-principal calls the bomb squad over an 11-year-old’s science project, recommends counselling for the student https://web.archive.org/web/20100117141404/http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jan/15/students-evacuated-school-chollas-view/
#15yrsago Electrosensitives tortured by a radio tower that had been switched off for six weeks https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html
#15yrsago US to Costa Rica: you want sugar markets? We want maximal copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20100118132004/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4697/125/
#15yrsago Charities that AT&T donated to support AT&T’s anti-Net-Neutrality position at the FCC https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/why-the-kankakee-county-farm-bureau-hates-net-neutrality/
#10yrsago Vox received no threats for supporting Charlie Hedbo, many threats for covering Islamophobia https://vimeo.com/116582567
#10yrsago Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/
#5yrsago McMansion Hell awards its annual prize for the best gingerbread McMansion! https://mcmansionhell.com/post/190275299846/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2019-mcgingerbread
#5yrsago Rating the 30 most evil tech companies https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/against-the-cult-of-apple.html
#5yrsago Security expert offers hacking advice to students whose campuses have implemented pervasive wireless surveillance https://gizmodo.com/how-to-hypothetically-hack-your-schools-surveillance-1840680142
#5yrsago Kentucky’s Whitefield Academy expels student for wearing a rainbow shirt in a Facebook photo https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/15/rainbowcakewhitefieldacademy/
#1yrago Sympathy for the spammer https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow
Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing
Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989
Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779
Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419
Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/
Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189
DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Lost Dollar Business Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLGgMQfFCk
Elon Musk’s Move Into Politics: Yanis Varoufakis and Cory Doctorow on Fighting Billionaire Control
https://www.youtube.com/live/I0kvjNh7czM
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 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, 2025
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels Chapter One https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/01/10/picks-and-shovels-chapter-one/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Our HR person helped her mom get hired in secret
I work for a small company of 12 people, led by two partners. In the hierarchy of the company, I am the next tier down from the partners. We are not large enough to have an HR department, so our accountant, “Jan,” operates as the HR person as well as office manager.
We have been looking to hire an executive assistant for the company’s partners and Jan has been in charge of placing the ads, screening the resumes, and doing initial interviews. Jan also attended the interviews with the partners and candidates. An interview was set up with a candidate, but Jan was unable to attend as she was out sick. About a week later, we received an email that this candidate had been hired. We later found out through the rumor mill that this new employee is Jan’s mother and that partners did not know about it until after the offer was made. So far, nothing official regarding their relationship has been shared with the office. Neither Jan nor her mother mentioned at any point in the process that they are mother and daughter. I do know that Partner 1 was not pleased that this information was kept from him, but has the mindset that they need someone in the position, so they are just going to go with it and said that if it doesn’t work out, it’s going to be awkward when Jan has to let her mother go.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t know where to begin! I won’t be working directly with Jan’s mother so it probably won’t affect me much one way or another, but part of the job is to help out with accounting, so Jan could potentially be supervising her own mother in some capacity. Our employee handbook does have a small section on employing family members, saying they can’t supervise each other. To me, this brings up serious questions about nepotism and ethics and what appears to be a conscious effort from both of them to conceal this information from the partners.
I have some standing to let both partners know that the optics surrounding this look pretty bad and I worry that this blatant display of poor judgement does not bode well for the future. I guess I know this is really bad, and am interested in your take on the situation.
Yeah, that’s a massive problem. It would be a bad idea to hire someone’s mom to work closely with them under most circumstances, and doubly so if the daughter is the HR person*. (Is she really going to handle complaints about her mom impartially? And even if she is, are people likely to believe they can safely raise complaints about her mom?) But the fact that they both went out of their way to hide the relationship — and it’s not believable that in a small office where Jan was involved with the hiring she wouldn’t think to mention that one of the interviewees was her mom — makes it much, much worse; it shows that they’re willing to to subvert professional norms and transparency in order to advance their own agenda, which is the exact opposite of what you’d need if you have two relatives working together.
By all means, let the partners know that the secrecy and nepotism look terrible (from anyone, but especially from your HR person). But it sounds like this is going forward regardless, so I’d brace for the dumpster fire.
* In an office of 12, “accountant who handles HR on the side because someone has to” usually means things like benefits administration, not substantive employee relations work (including things like investigations of things like discrimination or harassment) … but your mention that Jan is the one who would end up firing her mom indicates that Jan’s HR role may be bigger than is typical with this set-up, which makes this worse.
2. Coworker is identifying herself as a psychologist when she’s not
I work at an outpatient mental health clinic as a case manager. My coworkers and I are all on a team of case managers that don’t require any degrees or certifications. If you want to move up to become a therapist or clinical supervisor, you need your masters in counseling, clinical psych, or a PH.D.
When I was collecting mail for my clients, I started noticing an influx of mail for my coworker, which I found strange. The mail was coming from several different banks and I started noticing it showed her full name, along with the title “clinical psychologist” and business owner.
I looked into it and saw that she is advertising herself online as a business owner as a clinical psychologist and takes client appointments at our address. Most of the mail is coming from several different banks so I am thinking (although unsure) that she may be receiving business loans or something of the sort identifying herself as a clinical psychologist who runs her own business. The other thing is I also found her on several websites advertising herself as a “mental health counselor” and either a Psy.D, PH.D, or clinical therapist on yellow pages, white pages, and for one insurance company with her name and our business address. It shows our address on one and on another it shows her as a psychologist for her previous job.
Do I submit all of this to HR? Do I let it go and mind my own business?
Are you sure she’s not a clinical psychologist? It’s possible she has credentials you don’t know about.
Otherwise, though, the potential for harm to patients and your clinic’s reputation is high enough that yes, flag it for HR and let them decide if there’s any action they need to take. You can frame it as, “There may be an explanation for this that I’m not privy to, but it alarmed me enough that I wanted to bring it to your attention in case it’s something you’d want to know.”
3. Handshakes and sweaty palms
I’ve had abnormally sweaty hands my whole life. I don’t know exactly when or how the excess sweat will start or what triggers it; sometimes it happens when I’m nervous, but sometimes I am merely existing. It does not seem to be correlated to temperature or how many layers I am wearing.
Usually this doesn’t cause me more than some minor inconveniences, but I had a situation the other day that I’m afraid will repeat itself, especially as I get older and more into the workforce. I was meeting a professor for the first time, and as I was leaving, she held out her hand for me to shake. Not knowing how to decline, I shook it, even though my hands were sweaty. She immediately wiped her hand on her pant leg, and I realized what I’d done. In the future, how would you recommend I deal with this situation? Sometimes when people try to high-five me and my hands are sweaty, I fist-bump them instead, but it seems inappropriate to offer a fist-bump when someone offers me a handshake.
Can you discreetly wipe your hands on your pants first, especially when you’re in a situation where you know a handshake might be coming (like any time you’re meeting someone new)? If you’re worried it’s noticeable that you’re patting your pants, say, “Sorry, my hand is damp!” (That could mean you just washed them, for all anyone knows.) There’s also the option of just confidently and cheerfully saying, “I’ve switched to fist bumps since Covid!” You won’t be the only one.
There are also medical treatments available if it’s something that really bothers you and you want to go that route.
4. I don’t know how to respond to this job rejection feedback
I’m a mid-career professional in tech who got laid off a few months ago. I’ve been applying and interviewing for similar roles ever since, but a couple of recent rejections have somehow gotten me really depressed and demoralized.
Both positions seemed like a good fit, and I was able to develop a good rapport with the hiring managers during each respective interview. However, the feedback I received was:
1. I didn’t have enough experience with a specific kind of document that’s relevant to my industry but not readily shared unless you need access for a specific reason, as it contains quite a bit of confidential client data (none of the projects I worked on required me to access that level of data, so I never had access to this document).
2. A well-liked former employee expressed interest in the position after I’d been scheduled for an interview, so the company went with them.
I know these are relatively normal things to hear when interviewing (and it’s not the first time I’ve heard them either), but I don’t know how I can make myself a better candidate for these kinds of roles with this kind of feedback. At least if it had been something like a lack of technical skill, that would still be something actionable that I can work on.
I have more interviews in the pipeline, but I find myself anticipating rejection for similar reasons as I’m preparing, and I’m starting if it’s time to just quit this industry altogether and pivot to a different career/industry. Do you have any advice on how to stay motivated during a slump like this?
Not all feedback is actionable, or needs to be. Sometimes it’s just an explanation or context.
It you’re regularly hearing that you need experience with the kind of document from #1, that could be a sign that you’ve got to find a way to get that experience in order to be a serious contender for these jobs. But if you have no reason to believe it’s a widespread requirement (like hearing that from multiple interviewers or seeing it in most of the ads you’re interested in), there’s nothing much you have to conclude here (other than if you do get the opportunity to work with that document in the future, you should take it).
The second item — they hired someone already well-known to them — is just a thing that happens, and not anything you need to respond differently to.
For what it’s worth, you won’t always get useful feedback, or any feedback, when you’re job-searching, and it’s not a sign of failure if don’t. You’re much more likely to get useful feedback from mentors and people working in the field you’re applying in.
5. Employees aren’t paid for short bathroom or coffee breaks
This happened last year, and has nothing to do with me, but it struck me as odd, so I thought I’d ask for your take on it.
I work in the legal field. In the course of an online conversation about billing, someone commented that the staff at their firm are W2 employees, but don’t clock in/out and they only get paid for the time they bill. They clarified that any time spent not working on a case, such as lunch or bathroom visits, is unpaid.
I’ve worked at various law firms, but I’ve never heard of anything like this. Admittedly, I’m no expert on employment law, but this sounds like they’re being paid per project (i.e., they spend four hours working on the John Doe case, so they get paid for four hours of work, but the 10 minutes they take to run to the restroom or get a cup of water before starting the next project isn’t paid), which does not seem very W2-ish. Is this a common practice that I’ve just never encountered before, or is this as weird as it seems?
Surprise! It’s yet another law firm violating employment laws. If they’re W2 employees, not independent contractors, they’re legally required to be paid for all the time they’re expected to be at work, even if that includes down time in between projects (it’s called “engaged to wait”). Moreover, federal law requires that short breaks of 20 minutes or less be treated as paid time.
U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned as the Republican president-elect prepares to return to the White House. What do you think?
“Now we’ll never know who tried to overturn the 2020 election.”
Sam Obiero, Systems Analyst
“I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of whoever he is.”
Toni Casterline, Chandelier Artisan
“I hope he has another enemy lined up.”
Lucas Megge, Water Appraiser
The post Special Counsel Jack Smith Resigns appeared first on The Onion.
This is really a note to myself on how to do an emergency power reset. This is a desperation troubleshooting step if you find that the laptop won’t charge. One of my colleagues ran into this problem, and some Web searching suggested that there was a BIOS update for it, but unfortunately, the BIOS updater refuses to run unless the machine is on AC power, so they found themselves in a Catch-22.
For Lenovo laptops, look on the bottom for a small pinhole near the power connector. This is the power supply reset button. Unplug the laptop from all power sources, then insert a paper clip (or similar tool) into the hole and press the recessed button for 15 seconds.
For HP laptops and Dell laptops, there is a similar emergency reset procedure: With the laptop disconnected from all power sources, press and hold the power button for 15 to 20 seconds.
Acer figured, “¿Por qué no los dos?” They have both an emergency reset pinhole and a power button 15-second reset.
The post Emergency power resets on Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Acer laptops appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Remember, Microspeak is not necessarily jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know if you work at Microsoft.
At the end of a meeting, the meeting organizer might ask if there are any walk-on topics. These are topics that weren’t on the agenda but which an attendee may wish to bring up for the group to discuss.
For me, the mystery is why the adverbial preposition is “on”.
A “walk-in” is a customer who walks into an establishment without an appointment. This sounds like what we have here: A topic that just shows up at the meeting without an appointment (being on the agenda).
A “walk-up” is a service window available to pedestrians, who can just walk up to the window and obtain service.
A “walk-on” is a sports term for a student who joins a school sports team without an invitation. In the United States, some school sports are operated as quasi-professional operations, and schools invite or even recruit students to enroll in their school so that they can be placed on the sports team. But any student who wants to join the sports team can just show up and try to make the team.
My guess is that the metaphor at work here is the sports one: This topic was never invited to the meeting, but it showed up in the hopes that it’s good enough to be added to the agenda.
The post Microspeak: The walk-on topic appeared first on The Old New Thing.
In brief: The initial release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a widespread recognition of the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. We’ve been watching these developments closely, both in the broader public context as well as in weather modeling. For the sake of transparency, here’s how we plan to use AI now and in the future.
As artificial intelligence plays an increasingly prominent role in society, I want to clarify what this means for Space City Weather now, and in the future. The central message I wish to convey is that Space City is, and always will be the creative product of human beings. What is written and forecast here is done by people. At the same time, Matt and I are not burying our heads in the sand. As technology changes, we embrace that which improves our ability to forecast the weather and communicate that information.
For example, I started in newspaper journalism more than 25 years ago. At the beginning of my career, printed newspapers still largely set the news agenda. But in 2005, while still at the Houston Chronicle, I started blogging. With the arrival of hurricanes Katrina and Rita that summer, I soon realized the power of immediate communication on the Internet, the value of sharing links to credible information, and the hunger of people for this change. In the two decades since, I have made the majority of my living writing for online publications, without a paywall. This is one reason why I am so committed to keeping Space City Weather free and open to all. We started as a web site, grew on social media, and now many of you are reading this on an app. I cannot foresee where things will be in 10 years, but wherever people want to read Space City Weather, we will be there.
Artificial intelligence has been lumbering along in the background for several years, but it has really broken through recently with large language models such as ChatGPT. These artificial intelligence systems can be quite good at some tasks. One of these turns out to be forecasting the weather. There are repositories of meteorological data that go back more than 50 years that can be used to ‘train’ designated models for weather prediction. There are now about 10 major groups out there developing AI-based models, and some of them have gotten quite good. Further improvements are likely.
Traditional weather models, which are based on complex physical equations, attempt to simulate the atmosphere and crunch through those equations to predict what will happen next. These physics-based models have gotten steadily better over the years, especially because of more powerful supercomputers and sophisticated tools to ingest more real-world weather conditions (i.e. the temperature at 10,000 feet above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean) into the model before it is run. AI-based models perform none of these physical computations. They can, therefore, be run incredibly quickly, on fairly simple computers.
Matt and I have been following the output of AI-based weather models for more than a year now, and they definitely have their strengths. Such models are quite good at three- and five-day forecasts to the point where they sometimes outperform physics-based models at tasks such as hurricane tracks. They also have their weaknesses. For example, AI-based models are not (yet) good at high-resolution modeling and predicting the development of thunderstorms. So no, we still won’t be able to tell you whether it’s going to rain at your house at 3 pm on some days.
The bottom line is that we are using AI-based modeling tools as a part of our forecasts here at Space City Weather. They’re not a panacea, but they are another tool in our arsenal that runs the gamut from hand-drawn isobar maps to sophisticated models on supercomputers. I suspect they will be an even more useful tool over the next five years. But that is where our use of artificial intelligence will end. We have not, nor will we use any AI-based service for the writing of our forecasts. Very occasionally we may use an AI-based illustration, but if we do it will be clearly labeled as such.
We want you to know that at Space City Weather our commitment is to show up every day and make each forecast with our best effort, without influence or intervention from anyone else. We don’t win them all. Humans are fallible. But you can rest assured that they are honest mistakes rather than AI-induced hallucinations.
— Eric Berger, January 2025
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I’ve done my fair share of job interviews, but not in the past five years or so. In early August, I applied for a manager-level role at a local nonprofit that fits exactly within my professional experience and personal interests. Almost four months after the application deadline, I finally got an email back, telling me that instead of doing a traditional first-round interview, they were asking all candidates to fill out a questionnaire.
The questionnaire is about 40 questions, 30 of which require paragraph-level responses and span the usual “describe an experience that illustrates how you adapted to feedback” to my experience in specific tools/frameworks to “what [my] initial priorities and strategies” would be if hired. I included my copy of just the long-answer questions below. I estimate this would take at least three hours to do if it was a verbal interview, and potentially 10 hours to type out. And … they gave us a week to complete it.
Based on the wording of the email, I suspect they haven’t winnowed down their application pool at all yet, so I may be dismissed out of hand for not yet completing my degree. To me, this feels extremely inappropriate and borderline egregious – and not to their benefit, either! Surely it is more work to review pages and pages of responses rather than the resume and cover letter candidates submitted already, and many strong candidates will have already gotten a job or won’t think it’s worthwhile to invest all this time in an application without ever even talking to an interviewer.
Should I bother replying to ask whether my application meets their basic requirements? Should I not invest too much time in the survey, and assume I will be one of the few who even reply at all? I love the work of this nonprofit and have several friends-of-friends who work there already, and I’m baffled by what feels like a clear misstep from an organization that prioritizes equity and accessibility.
The questionnaire:
Please answer each question thoughtfully, as your responses will help us learn more about your experience and suitability for the role. This will serve as the first round of our interview process. Selected candidates will receive an email invitation for a second-round interview following our review of the responses.
1. What specifically interests you about working at ___? Can you share what attracts you to ___’s mission and values?
2. What do you know about ___’s work and why are you excited about the possibility of joining our team?
3. If you were hired, what are your initial priorities and strategies for strengthening our evaluation and learning capacity?
4. Can you describe your experience designing and implementing comprehensive evaluation plans, including data collection, analysis, and reporting?
5. What evaluation frameworks or theories have you applied in your work? How have they influenced your approach to designing and conducting evaluations?
6. Can you discuss a specific evaluation project where you used a particular framework or theory to inform your methodology?
7. What data collection methods are you proficient in (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations)? How do you ensure data quality and reliability?
8. Have you conducted asset-based community development assessments or similar evaluations? If so, please describe your experience and the impact of your work.
9. How do you incorporate asset-based approaches into your evaluation practice to highlight community strengths and resources?
10. If so, could you provide an example of how you have used this approach in your work?
11. Can you describe your experience as a Principal Investigator or lead on a federally funded research grant, such as NSF or NEA?
12. Have you been involved in the development and submission of proposals for other major funding agencies, such as NIH, DOE, or private foundations?
13. What specific challenges and opportunities did you encounter in securing and managing these grants?
14. Can you discuss your experience in managing budgets and financial reporting for federally funded projects? How did you balance the demands of grant writing, research, and project management responsibilities?
15. What strategies do you use to stay updated on current funding opportunities and trends in your field?
16. What specific MERL tools and techniques are you familiar with?
17. How would you approach training staff on the principles and practices of monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL)?
18. How would you ensure that staff are using MERL to inform program decisions and improve outcomes?
19. Can you share an experience that exemplifies your ability to take initiative?
20. Can you share an experience that demonstrates your ability to collaborate effectively?
21. Can you describe an experience that illustrates how you adapted to feedback?
22. Can you give an example of an experience where you asked insightful questions to achieve better outcomes?
23. Can you share an experience of how you’ve worked effectively in fluctuating or chaotic situations?
24. Can you provide examples of how you have incorporated principles of inclusivity and intersectionality into your evaluation designs and data collection methods?
25. How do you ensure that your evaluations are culturally responsive and address the unique needs and experiences of diverse populations? What strategies do you use to identify and mitigate potential biases in your research and evaluation practices?
26. Have you managed anyone previously? What is your leadership style?
27. Can you describe a challenging experience you’ve had with a previous supervisor? What made working with them difficult for you?
28. Can you share an experience with a previous supervisor who brought out the best in you? What qualities made them an effective leader in your eyes?
29. What is your superpower?
30. What questions do you have going forward?
This is so ridiculous that it’s practically offensive.
Frankly, most of these questions on their own would be inappropriate to assign as a writing project before the employer had done any screening of the applicant pool. (I’d exclude questions 1 and 2 from that, since those would be fine to ask people to address in their cover letters. Although those are basically the same question and, as if they weren’t already abusing your time enough, they apparently want you to answer it twice.)
It is not reasonable to ask people to invest this much time in an application process before the organization has done any screening of its own (so that people know their candidacy at least has some promise) and before candidates have had a chance to ask their own questions to determine if the job even makes sense for them to pursue.
And this is indeed a huge amount of time to ask for. This would be an unusually long list of questions even for an in-person interview! To expect people to spend time writing out answers to all of them — something that takes most people far longer than answering questions out loud in a conversation — no.
I’m sure the organization believes this will save time on their side — since they can review people’s answers on their own schedule rather than having to set aside time to talk with people — but it’s incredibly disrespectful of their applicants’’ time.
Moreover, it’s setting them up to lose their strongest candidates, since people with other options are really unlikely to bother putting in the time to do this.
It’s also a really bad sign about how the organization is managed overall. I’d bet money that if you talk to those friends-of-friends who work there, you’ll hear horror stories that have nothing to do with hiring.
As for what you should do … I’d respond that you’re not able to spend the multiple hours it would take to complete the questionnaire, especially without having a chance to ask your own questions yet to determine if the job is even a match. You could add, “This is surprising choice from an organization that prioritizes equity and accessibility.”
That will probably take you out of the running, and that is an outcome I’d be comfortable with.
You might also talk to the friends-of-friends who work there and ask what’s up with this; you might hear something interesting (like maybe that it’s a new system they’re trying out and no one else is playing along either), but more importantly they should take your feedback back to whoever decided to hire this way.
If anyone needed a reminder, last week’s news from Meta coupled with Musk’s continued efforts to deploy Twitter to strengthen the European radical right showed once again that having a social media ecosystem that is largely beholden to the whims of American billionaires is a terrible situation to be in.
Against this dystopian backdrop, this week is off to a better start with announcements of two parallel efforts for building a better social media infrastructure that is less prone to corporate capture:
Both initiatives aim at the same problem: Ensuring that the underlying infrastructures powering social media services are run as public services that are resistant to capture from companies or individuals. They represent attempts to safeguard nascent public digital infrastructures for a new generation of social media services. It is telling that both initiatives highlight the crucial role of institutions and governance—not just funding—in ensuring the longevity and resilience of public digital infrastructure. These efforts, while ambitious, come at relatively small costs compared to the immense value they offer in safeguarding our digital public space.
At first look, Bluesky and Mastodon look very similar. Both are often referred to as “Twitter alternatives.” On closer inspection, they serve rather different needs: Mastodon addresses the need for social networking within and among smaller communities of like-minded users, while Bluesky seeks to re-create the digital global town square that Twitter once provided.
Mastodon, built on the ActivityPub protocol, has been around for much longer and saw significant user growth in the immediate aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It currently has 10M users (of which 1M are active). Around 9000 Mastodon servers are federated with each other, but each has its own community rules. As a service, Mastodon facilitates conversation within communities and seems to prioritize it over growth. This is also the result of an architecture of the core product that does not include algorithmic recommendations. Mastodon has grown from a grassroots open-source project stewarded by Eugen Rochko, with relatively little means (including funding from the EU’s Next Generation Internet Initiative).
Bluesky, on the other hand, is a venture-funded startup that was spun out of Twitter after Musk acquired the service. It has seen significant user growth in the last few months. It currently has 27M users (there are no publicly available numbers on active users). While Bluesky runs on the open AT protocol that allows for decentralization, it operates as a centralized service in practice.
Being significantly larger than Mastodon, Bluesky accommodates a much broader diversity of discussion topics and viewpoints, resulting in a more global and diverse platform with some similarities with the “old” Twitter. This includes the use of recommendation algorithms, which are implemented in a decentralized fashion, allowing users to pick and choose algorithms based on their preferences.
Both services are built on open and decentralized protocols. In theory, this protects against the capture of the services by private interests. In practice, the AT protocol is currently owned by the same venture-backed company that operates the Bluesky service. In the case of Mastodon, the protocol itself is a W3C recommended standard, but there have been concerns about core IP related to the core Mastodon software stack being owned by Rothko. Yesterday’s announcement by Mastodon addresses these concerns by transferring “ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization.” According to the announcement, the new entity will be “European” and will become the sole owner of the Mastodon GmbH for-profit that will continue to run the service. While the details of the new entity are still unclear, this is a welcomed move that should ensure that Mastodon will remain true to its founding ethos of being a public service. This move addresses the danger of a powerful project steward becoming unaccountable to the community, as we have seen recently with WordPress.
In the case of Bluesky, the issue is different. Here, a group of concerned outsiders is trying to establish the conditions for the underlying protocol to be independent of the venture-funded startup running Bluesky. The danger they are trying to avert is that of having the same company in charge of both the service and the protocol. In such a situation, the open protocol can no longer act as an assurance against corporate capture. The Free Our Feeds campaign seeks to raise money to establish an independent foundation that, in time, can take over ownership of the AT protocol. In a first step, the campaign, backed by public interest technologists, including Mozilla’s current leadership and Wikimedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, but also has support from the Green MEP Alexandra Geese, is trying to raise $4 million to set up the foundation. This is an ambitious goal (at the time of writing, it had raised $28,000). Still, the last few months have clearly shown that we need a different approach to social media that is based on public digital infrastructure as an enabler of genuine public digital spaces. Or, as Robin Berjon, one of the initiators of the campaign and a project custodian, phrases it:
This is the moment to reclaim social media. As we did with the creation of public roads and shared spaces in our towns, we must invest in digital infrastructure that operates under a social contract — benefiting everyone, not just the few.
You can contribute to the Free Our Feeds fundraiser and/or support Mastodon via these links:
Free our feeds Donate to Mastodon
Open Future is active on Bluesky and Mastodon. In December 2024, we stopped using X/Twitter as a communication channel.
Hovertext:
At least she holds back how the heat death is pointless and without meaning!
HOUSTON—Coming to terms with its diminished status after thousands of years as a venerated deity commanding pure devotion, the sun admitted this week that it was unsure what it had to do to get humans to worship it again. “Last year I tried this huge total eclipse, and that didn’t do shit,” the sun said via a series of violent solar flares translated by NASA astronomer Wayne Stern, who noted the yellow dwarf star’s displeasure that it no longer received sacrificial offerings of human virgins or even herd animals. “How can I make it any more glaringly obvious that I am an omnipotent force deserving of unwavering loyalty? I’m the largest object in the sky. I am life and I am death. I am creator and destroyer. I am the motherfucking sun. How can there be any doubt that I am God?” On Monday evening, the sun announced it had officially given up after thousands of humans stepped out into the backyard to admire a particularly neat full moon.
The post Sun Unsure What It Has To Do To Get Humans To Worship It Again appeared first on The Onion.
MINNEAPOLIS—After months of declining sales at the retail chain, experts confirmed Tuesday that Target was losing market share due to more Americans opting to forgo all earthly possessions. “While Target used to have a loyal customer base that would leave the store laden with everything from cosmetics to home decor, millions of U.S. shoppers are now switching over to giving up worldly goods all together,” said Edward Jones analyst Yvonne Carr, who explained that Target’s plunging stock prices were due in large part to customers realizing they did not need material possessions to be happy. “They’ve unfortunately realized that satisfaction is not found through ceramic mugs and storage bins. Boots and slippers were flying off the shelves a year ago, but now customers would rather cast off all their possessions and wander barefoot into the wilderness. If Target doesn’t make some major changes fast, its customers might never return to society.” At press time, Carr acknowledged that bath mats were still selling well.
The post Target Losing Market Share As More Americans Opt To Forgo All Earthly Possessions appeared first on The Onion.
“Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of ‘culturally neutered’ companies that have sought to distance themselves from ‘masculine energy,’ adding that it’s good if a culture ‘celebrates the aggression a bit more.’” — Financial Review
HR now stands for “Hims Repository.”
Intra-office communication shall address recipient with one of the following: Bro, Bro-han, Brocephus, Brocifer, Dawg, or Bro-Dawg
Fluoride in the office water has been replaced with a compound of Red Bull and beef jerky.
All job candidates must show proficiency in Excel, PowerPoint, and Hot or Not.
Press releases containing the typo “pubic relations” will no longer be corrected.
Beginning Monday, all transphobic posts on Facebook and Instagram will be “pre-liked.”
Twenty percent of all cans of complimentary seltzer and sparkling water will be aggressively shaken, ensuring they will explode in the opener’s face.
Casual Fridays will be replaced with Novelty T-Shirt Fridays. Acceptable shirts include, but are not necessarily limited to:
Year-end bonuses will be distributed exclusively in the form of Call of Duty XP.
Emotional support puppies will be replaced with emotional support cockfighting.
The committee for protecting workplace culture and preventing harassment will be replaced by a recording that says, “What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke?”
All employees are instructed to establish at least one burner account (Facebook or Insta) dedicated to highlighting the various qualities of manliness possessed by Mark Zuckerberg. Example posts might include:
All executives will keep their current titles except “Head of Global Affairs,” because, come on, we all know that’s really Gary, amirite?
Under no circumstance will anyone named Chad be hired. Stacys may be hired on a provisional basis, provided they prove willing to date a male co-worker at least two degrees of hotness below them.
Recognizing that the company name has a regrettably feminine suffix (and almost rhymes with “beta”), we will soon be rebranding it as “Meat.”
