WASHINGTON—After manually prying his eyelids open to read from a report he had prepared on the matter, a badly swollen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech Tuesday in which he warned that Americans were not eating enough bees. “In our survey of American dietary habits, we were alarmed to find that the vast majority of respondents reported eating fewer than two bees in an average day,” said the wheezing health and human services secretary, who stopped speaking for several seconds to reposition his grossly distended tongue in his mouth before suggesting that breakfast cereals could be fortified with live bees to help address bee deficiency in the broader population. “The human body needs wing nutrients, antennae, and especially stinger venom in order to function properly, but processed foods have many of these essential bee components stripped out, if they were even there to begin with. Powdered bumblebee supplements can help in situations where live bees are hard to come by, though I personally believe Americans should be chomping into a loudly buzzing beehive every morning with breakfast. In fact, I’ve urged President Trump to sign an executive order providing American children with a fresh carton of bees in their school lunch so they can get all the histamines a growing body needs.” Kennedy later returned to the podium with quills sticking out of his face to add that Americans also weren’t eating enough porcupines.
ATLANTA—In a move widely interpreted as an effort to exempt its offerings from health and safety standards, American chain restaurant Arby’s issued a statement Tuesday reclassifying its food as entertainment. “Whether it’s our Classic Beef ’N Cheddar, our Chicken Cordon Bleu, or our famous Jamocha Shake, the menu items at Arby’s are not meant to be construed as edible substances subject to FDA regulation,” said an Arby’s spokesperson, adding that the restaurant was not required to display a disclaimer identifying its sandwiches as entertainment because their non-nourishment status should be obvious to any discerning adult. “When we say, ‘We have the meats,’ that statement is not a legally binding claim of said meats being suitable for human consumption,” she added. “Our offerings are intended to be enjoyed as entertainment in a meal-adjacent format. The Smokehouse Brisket is a commentary on nutrition, not nutrition itself. If a customer chooses to interpret our food as appetizing or digestible, the responsibility for that interpretation lies exclusively with the individual. Obviously, our roast beef wouldn’t be gray if you were supposed to eat it.” The restaurant’s decision follows a court ruling last year in which Arby’s was ordered to pay plaintiffs $47 million after it was found liable for knowingly misrepresenting its cherry turnovers as “dessert.”
The Texas Public Policy Foundation awarded the grant to Schreiner University’s Texas Center, which is led by a historian guiding the state in its social studies revision.
The mayor’s support for a measure limiting HPD coordination with ICE blew up his relationship with a staunch ally. The politically powerful police union will not endorse Whitmire for a second term, according to its president.
As Israel has breached a second ceasefire, this time launching well over 100 missiles at Lebanon in just ten minutes, world leaders has expressed ‘deep concern’ with Israel.
“Hey buddy listen, war crimes are not on ok?” said America while sending over more missiles to replace the ones used to slaughter civilians.
“You said you wanted Iran to share the Strait of Hormuz but they said they won’t do that if you keep indiscriminately bombing everyone.”
“We had a deal and you intentionally broke it. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed”
Reports suggest that if Israel continues to destabilise the entire world, allied nations will consider wagging their finger in disapproval.
The UN has even threatened to put an exclamation mark in their next letter calling for stability.
I recently attended an event where a speaker said that if a manager is evaluating to let go a lower-performing employee, they should ask themselves, “Would I hire them now?” And if the answer is no, then let them go.
I don’t believe in black and white decisions. The presenter probably didn’t think of it that way but it feels that way. What is your take on this?
If you’re trying to decide how to proceed with a low-performing employee, “Would I hire them today, knowing everything I know now?” is a useful question to ask yourself. I don’t agree that “no” should always point immediately to firing them, but it’s a useful question to reflect on. Very often, managers hold on to low performers long past the point that they should, and that type of question can be a way to bring clarity to the situation.
The question I prefer (and it’s discussed more extensively in the book on management I co-authored) is, “If you had a button which, if pushed, would lead to your staff member being replaced instantaneously, without any difficult conversations or the hassles of interviewing and training someone new, would you push it?” Very often, the main thing holding managers back from acting when they need to is not wanting to deal with what they imagine it will entail. Also useful is, “If the person walked into your office and told you she was leaving to take another job, would you feel concern or relief?”
But none of these mean “then you absolutely should fire the person.” They’re all just ways to get clarity on your thinking.
2. My coworker wanted to step back and then changed his mind, but I’m taking his job
I work as a middle manager. My department is fairly large, but most people only report to me for a small percentage of their time (i.e., they work in my department four hours out of their week, and the rest in their primary job).
Last year, my supervisor let me know that my colleague (Alf), who is at the same level but over a different team, was experiencing burnout and wanted to step back. Alf’s team works in an area related to the one I currently supervise, but is actually more aligned with my background and professional interests. There are also three full-time reports in his unit (or four with Alf returning to the team as a regular employee). I have been interested in getting more involved in managing the work of that unit, and my supervisor and I came up with a proposal to combine the two units under me (and dropping some other parts of my job that are not my favorite to ensure I had a reasonable workload). I love managing people and have been told many times that I am good at it and that the organization would be excited for me to be in this new role. I thought things were pretty set to transition this summer.
But now Alf has said that he wants to stay in his current manager role after all. However, our director (my boss’s boss) wants me to take this new role on anyway and for Alf to step down. Alf is a decent manager, but he’s not a big picture thinker, which we need due to massive changes coming in our field. My director feels I am the right person for the job at this moment. Still, I feel extremely awkward about this. I agreed because I was under the impression Alf wanted to step down. I don’t want him to feel like I am stealing his job against his will. To complicate things further, Alf was my supervisor for about seven years before I got my current job.
This is the kind of organization where people stay for their whole careers, so I will likely need to work with Alf for some time. It’s also possible he may continue doing work in one of the two units I oversee. Any advice for how I should approach him? Acknowledge that this is awkward AF? Reassure him I wasn’t trying to steal his job? Let him feel his very understandable feelings for a while before approaching? We are friendly, but don’t talk regularly now that I don’t report to him.
The primary messaging on this really needs to come from your director, who should be transparent with Alf about why this change is happening and what it means for his career there.
Once that’s done, your approach with Alf should be a positive one — you’re excited to work with him, he should let you know what he needs, etc. I would not say anything about it being awkward or reassure him that you weren’t trying to take his job; there’s too much risk that will make things more awkward for him than if you just keep things positive, matter-of-fact, and forward-looking. Give him some time to adjust to the change and operate as if of course he will adjust; if that doesn’t happen, you’ll have to address it at that point, but it’s a kindness to him to move forward without anticipating/assuming weirdness if you can.
3. HR thinks I completed an engagement survey but I didn’t
My organization recently used an outside company to conduct an employee engagement survey. I was on the fence about completing the survey because of how it was handled last year. I opened my unique survey link to click around and read the questions, but never submitted it.
At various points during the survey period, HR sent emails about survey completion by department. I noticed in one of these updates that my department had a 100% completion rate. I’m the head of the department, so I thought perhaps my own survey was not meant to count here and maybe rolled up into leadership instead, but none of the other categories made sense for where my survey would be counted. I assumed my survey results were slated to be yeeted into the abyss and decided not to submit it.
Today, I had a meeting with HR to review the results of the survey. They started the meeting by saying that my team had five people, including me, invited to take the survey and that all five, including me, did so. I didn’t confess that I didn’t because I didn’t want to derail the whole meeting or be slapped on the wrist for not participating, but I couldn’t help thinking that the results cannot possibly be accurate.
Should I have told them? I’m questioning if there are other issues with the survey or its analysis based on my knowledge that what I’m being presented is incorrect. What could have possibly happened?! Is it worth being chided by HR for my delinquency in order to shine a light on problems with the survey process?
Separately, what’s your take on employee engagement surveys? Are they valuable? Do organizations/companies make meaningful changes based on feedback provided in this manner?
As a department head, yeah, I think you should have flagged it. You’re part of the organization’s leadership and if you’re aware of major inaccuracies with the survey, you should say something. It doesn’t need to be a big deal — just, “Are you sure that’s right? I actually didn’t complete mine — happy to talk about why if you want — so I’m concerned that might indicate our numbers are off in other ways.”
And then if they wanted to know why you didn’t complete it, you could have explained the emails saying 100% of your department already had made you assume yours wasn’t being counted and thus wasn’t needed. Or you could have talked about whatever the issues were that made you on the fence about doing it in the first place, if that’s something you were willing to get into.
As for the value of these surveys, they vary widely by company. If your company is a place that welcome dissent and takes feedback seriously, they can be worthwhile. If they’re not, then they usually just breed cynicism and can in some cases make disengagement worse if feedback is solicited but always ignored.
4. My contact’s mentee thinks we’re hiring, but we’re not
A former coworker reached out asking if I’d do an informational interview with someone he’s mentoring who is applying for an open entry-level position in my division to talk about my work and the company. I am, of course, happy to meet with them.
Except I asked around about this position, including to the head of our division, who said she didn’t know what this job posting is because we are not hiring. I’m not sure how it got posted or if it got posted for the wrong division, but we are not hiring for any positions at this time due to budget issues.
I will still meet with this person, and they should probably still apply just to be in our system and perhaps they’d be considered for a real opening in another division. How transparent should I be that my understanding is that we are not actually hiring for this role? The job market is hard enough so I don’t want to give false hope or waste anyone’s time, but I’m also not really authorized to speak on hiring in this way.
There’s nothing wrong with saying, “As far as I know, we’re not currently hiring for this position. Where did you see the posting?” And if you wanted to, you could check with your manager to ask if it’s okay to officially relay that your division isn’t currently hiring; they may be fine with that.
5. What questions should I ask in an interview with a recruiter?
I’m searching for a new job and, after several years out of the interview process, I’ve noticed that many of my first-round interviews are now brief phone screens with HR recruiters rather than conversations with the hiring manager. I know it’s important to ask thoughtful questions at the end of an interview, but recruiters often don’t have deep insight into the day-to-day responsibilities or team dynamics of the role. What kinds of questions are most appropriate and effective to ask in that setting? Is it still important to have questions for recruiters?
Yes, you should still have questions — and most likely, you do have things you’d like them to answer if you think about it!
It’s true that anything nuanced about the job or the team is better saved for the hiring manager, but recruiters will be equipped to answer things about what qualifications and experience are most important for the role, the size and structure of the team, and why the position is open, as well as anything logistical, like the salary, remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office, the likely timeline for making a hire, and what they expect the process to look like.
This week on Lost Terminal: Meg's plan backfires, Lyosha remains unsatisfied, and Arctica has a change of heart. Lost Terminal will return next week! 📓 Free transcript: https://www.patreon.com/posts/155111766/ 🎵 Today's SIGNAL is: https://namtao.bandcamp.com/track/digital-tribe 🦣 Mastodon https://namtao.com/@lostterminal 📝 Tumblr https://lostterminalpod.tumblr.com 🎙️ Recorded using a RODE NT-1 v5 USB in 32-bit float, edited with REAPER on Linux 🙏 CREDITS Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer ❤️ Thank you so much to everyone who supports me, but especially my Patreon Producers: Ada Phillips Kit Mike McCaffrey Jade Felicity Bilkey Stephen McCandless Mike Schneider Catoxis
Yes, there were problems that were so bad that the program was effectively unfixable. The largest category of them were those which took various types of handles and figured out how to convert them to pointers, and then used those pointers to access (and sometimes modify!) the internal implementation details of those objects.¹ Not only did the implementation details change, but the mechanism they used to convert handles to pointers also stopped working because Windows 95 used a 32-bit heap for user interface and graphics objects, whereas Windows 3.1 used a 16-bit heap.
Sometimes the programs were kind enough to do strict version checks to confirm that they were running on a system whose internals they understood. Sometimes their version checks were themselves broken, like one program that assumed that if the Windows version is not 3.0, 3.1, or 2.1, then it must be 2.0!
There were other one-off problems, like programs which detoured APIs in a way that no longer worked, but the ones that dug into operating system internals were by far the most common.
¹ What’s particularly frustrating is the cases where the program did this to access internal implementation details, when the information they wanted was already exposed by a public and supported API.
I run a small healthcare practice and recently had a difficult transition with a long-time employee that I’m trying to learn from.
Sarah worked for me for about five years as our director of business development and marketing lead. During that time, I invested heavily in her development through training, tools, and absorbing the inevitable mistakes that come with someone growing into a role. She worked remotely, set her own schedule, had significant autonomy, and earned well above the market rate. I also referred clients to a small side business she ran.
About six months ago, she told me she had “outgrown” the organization professionally and wanted to change the relationship from employee (W-2) to contractor (1099). I raised some concerns about that transition, which led to an emotional conversation. Shortly afterward, she followed up with an email summarizing the conversation as though I supported the transition.
As we tried to work out the details, it became clear she didn’t fully understand the legal and structural differences between W-2 and 1099 work. Once we started mapping out the contract, she realized that many of the duties she previously handled could not legally remain part of a contractor relationship, meaning the scope and compensation would likely be smaller than she expected. She was upset and accused me of not being supportive.
After a lot of negotiation, we eventually arrived at a contract that met the legal definition of a 1099 relationship, and my company became one of her clients for several marketing services (social media, blog writing, online ads, and outreach).
Almost immediately after the transition, the quality of her work dropped significantly. When I raised concerns about deliverables, she responded by unilaterally removing two services from the agreement. Our contract allowed 30 days’ notice to terminate the agreement but did not allow individual services to be withdrawn while the contract remained active. At that point, I concluded it made more sense to transition to a new marketing firm rather than continue the relationship.
The whole situation has been frustrating because I feel like I lost someone I invested heavily in and tried to support. In hindsight, I also suspect she may not have actually wanted the contractor arrangement once she understood the implications, but by that point the relationship had already shifted.
My questions are:
When a valued employee pushes for a transition from employee to contractor, how should a manager handle that conversation?
Is it generally a mistake to agree to become a client of a former employee to preserve the investment you’ve made in developing that employee?
How do you avoid entirely losing someone you’ve invested in when they push for a change like this?
I’m trying to understand what I could have done differently so I don’t repeat this situation in the future. As a small business, a loss like this is huge. I feel nervous investing in the future, and I can’t shake the feeling I should’ve handled this differently.
The first thing is to accept that you will always lose employees who you invested in eventually, and that’s okay! If you try to stop that from happening at all costs, you can end up making choices that don’t serve the organization well. So first and foremost: be okay with the idea that people will move on and that it’s a natural and unavoidable thing that will happen in running a business.
I say that because it sounds like this all stemmed from you trying to find a way to hold on to Sarah, even if that arrangement didn’t make sense for the business. Instead, when Sarah told you she felt she’d outgrown the organization, it probably would have been better to wish her well and make a clean break.
There are times when converting a valued employee to contractor status can make sense for all parties. If you look at what the employee is proposing and can come up with an arrangement that makes sense for both of you — not just “we’ll agree because we’re desperate to keep them,” but truly makes sense — then great. But you shouldn’t agree just because they suggest it.
In Sarah’s case, it sounds like you were searching for a way to make things work even when you had significant reservations. It would have been okay, and probably better, to turn down the contract conversion — if not at the start, then definitely after your conversations revealed that you were so out of sync on what it should look like. You could do that without it being adversarial; it’s perfectly supportive to say, “I would love to keep working together, but we really need the person doing this work to be an employee. If that can’t be you anymore, I understand.”
You’ve framed this as wanting to figure out how not to lose the investment you’ve made in a good employee. But benefitting from your investment in a good employee doesn’t mean “they stay here forever.” It means your investment pays off in their good work while they’re there and in how their work hopefully sets the next person up for success. It also might pay off in the satisfaction it brings you to work with someone who you’ve seen grow and develop. But they will eventually find other opportunities and move on, and that’s just inherently part of running a business and employing people. You will make better decisions for the business and for yourself when you’re okay with that.
Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.
So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.
Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.
That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.
The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”
You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.
As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:
“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”
Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.
And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.
Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.
So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.
This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.
They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.
The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.
I’m seeking advice on an ADA matter, but I’ve run into a weird issue. It seems these days, most firms have a policy where they simply won’t talk to you about your current employer. I’ve actually been told by multiple firms to “call back when I get fired.” If there is a possibility I’m in the wrong, I’d very much rather know now, before it gets that far.
I suspect this is a result of firms using a contingency model where they only get paid if you win a lawsuit or settlement. That’s great if you already have a case to file (such as being wrongfully fired) but not great if you are still trying to avoid one and just need some advice.
I tried to find a firm that might let me pay a fee for an hour but have not been able to find any. Is there anything else I can do, or am I out of luck? Do employment lawyers just not do advice anymore?
Much of the plaintiff-side employment bar has moved to a contingency model. No termination, no clear damages, no case — at least not one they can monetize. So they screen aggressively. Pre-termination counseling? That’s harder to value, harder to win, and harder to scale.
But that doesn’t mean advice has disappeared. It just means your reader is looking in the wrong places.
First, not every employment lawyer works on contingency. Many — especially management-side lawyers — bill hourly and regularly advise on ADA compliance, accommodations, and interactive process issues. Yes, they typically represent employers. But plenty will consult with individuals on a paid basis. Your reader isn’t asking them to sue anyone, but for guidance.
Second, look beyond “employment litigation” firms. Search for “employment counseling,” “HR compliance,” or even “labor and employment boutique.” Those practices are built around advice, not lawsuits.
Third, consider bar association referral services. They often steer you to lawyers willing to do short, paid consults.
Lawyers still give advice. You just have to find the ones who get paid to prevent problems instead of profit from them.
Content warning for upsetting discussion of sexual abuse of children.
A reader writes:
I spent most of my 20s managing a business, eventually becoming more or less second-in-command. The owner was an older guy in his 60s. He was a bit of a grumpy guy and more conservative than me in many ways, but we overall got along very well. I found that he was generally a fair guy, and we bonded over a few shared interests. I wouldn’t call him a “friend,” but we had a good relationship.
He sold his business in 2020 (he was planning to retire that year anyway and the pandemic moved up the timeline a few months). He and I stayed in loose texting contact until I stopped hearing from him.
A few months ago, an old employee of mine reached out to me with some horrifying news: In 2023, our boss was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for receipt of child pornography.
According to court filings, he had over 84,000 images of child sexual abuse material in his possession, which he amassed after trading images on Russian sites. Many of these images were violent and gruesome in ways that are too horrifying to recount, though he denies looking at the more horrific ones. He started amassing this collection not too long after he retired and moved in 2021. He was arrested later that year and eventually made a plea deal. He’ll be in prison until he’s in his 90s.
His defense team admitted that he has a “criminal interest” in boys between the ages of 11-14ish. This part horrified me, because many of our employees started out as high schoolers. Based on his testimony and my own experiences with him, I’m inclined to believe no human being who ever encountered him was ever in danger and he wasn’t even consciously aware of his attractions until he fell down this awful rabbit hole in his retirement. But I’ll never know, and I don’t know if he will either.
Even though he’s not accused of child abuse himself, the court did acknowledge that his interest in these images keeps the child sex abuse going, something even he agreed with during sentencing.
In the process of this, he got divorced, spent all his capital on a legal defense, lost all of his friends, and will very likely die in federal custody.
Despite the fact that he took part in a horrific trade, and that he had that criminal interest at all, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. It’s easy to see a story like this on the news, think “lock him up and throw away the key,” and move on. It’s harder when it’s someone you know. It’s all his own fault, but it’s sad knowing how he was saving up for retirement and built a business worth selling, only to lose everything. It’s sad knowing that his friends and most of his family have largely abandoned him. It’s sad knowing that if he’s lucky enough to survive prison, he’ll be in his 90s and flat broke.
With that, I come to my ask: should I reach out to him? I’m conflicted on this.
Part of me thinks he’d be embarrassed if I reached out, because only one of our coworkers was reached out to about this so I don’t think he knows I’d know. But part of me thinks about how a guy who did something horrible could probably use a little connection to the outside world, because he’s almost certainly lonely beyond belief. There’s also the fact that sexual interest in children is sometimes the result of abuse, which – and I don’t want to speculate more than this – means he might have been a victim himself.
I’m not asking for judgment on whether he’s a good or a bad person, because he undeniably did a bad thing. But people who do bad things, even horrific things, don’t necessarily deserve to lose all contact with humanity. I have no tolerance for people who produce those images, but I think that a lot of the people who trade and watch them are more sick than dangerous, if that makes any sense.
Should I let him live in ignorance of me knowing that I know, or should I reach out and try to form a human connection and alleviate some of that loneliness – without, obviously, excusing what he did?
This is not really a work question; this is a question about being a human around other humans, some of whom hurt others, and how we deal with people who have committed some of the worst harms against others.
I can’t tell you what you should do.
I am going to point out that there’s a lot of minimizing language in your letter about a man who found sexual gratification by watching children being abused, thousands of them, perhaps violently, and who actively helped to create a market for that abuse.
Is he still a human who could use a connection to the outside world? Yes. Might he have been a victim himself? Maybe. Did he repeatedly choose to do something that causes severe and lasting harm to kids? Yes.
There are people who feel called to work with people who have committed some of the worst crimes possible, to find their humanity and connect with it. Maybe you’re one of them.
But I would get really clear in your head about what’s motivating you and whether you could explain it to someone who’s been a victim of this type of abuse and still come away feeling confident in your stance. If you can, there’s your answer. And if you can’t, I think that’s an answer too.
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:
Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.
Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement.
Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right.
It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers":
Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge.
I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:
I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:
While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:
So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.
This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:
Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.
So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?
After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it:
"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."
Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:
This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext?
Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":
I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.
In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them":
These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.
When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:
At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.
When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:
This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.
Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge
This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:
The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."
First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."
The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."
The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.
Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."
The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them.
The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.
Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."
This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."
I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.
And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know.
"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
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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NEW YORK—In an announcement that left fans of the 2006 original buzzing with excitement, The Devil Wears Prada 2 director David Frankel confirmed Wednesday that actor Adrien Grenier would make a cameo in the film as a corpse on the street. “We’re so pleased to have not just Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep back, but the whole original supporting cast—Stanley Tucci as the charming Nigel, Emily Blunt as the assistant-turned-rival Emily, and Adrien Grenier as a bloated, black-and-blue dead body lying face down in the gutter,” Frankel said following the release of a new trailer in which eagle-eyed fans spotted the rotting corpse of Grenier’s character Nate being stomped on mercilessly in the background of a scene in which Streep and Hathaway’s characters discuss a runway show they have just attended. “Fans of the first movie have been begging to know if Nate would be in the sequel, with many suggesting he’d be perfect as either a cadaver being tossed out of a window or a sack of limbs washing up on the shoreline. It may be a small role, but we think Devil Wears Prada diehards will be very, very pleased.” At press time, movie critics were calling the performance Adrien Grenier’s best in years.
The Laredo Center for the Arts (LCA) was broken into and vandalized the night of Wednesday, April 1, resulting in damage to multiple rooms in the multifloor facility.
Melissa Amici, a board member of the nonprofit organization since 2008 and current Vice President, told Glasstire that the extent of the damage was still being assessed, but includes two artworks in the center’s permanent collection: a framed print by Eric Avery, a San Ygnacio artist, and a sculptural chair by Angelica Raquel, a San Antonio artist originally from Laredo. A painting on glass donated by Andres “Daddy Yonke” Padilla for a recent No Border Wall Coalition auction held at the center was also damaged.
Video stills of damage to the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
As first reported by the LareDOS news website, the perpetrator, Yvette Ibarra, was arrested and is being held by the Laredo Police Department. Ms. Amici said that Ms. Ibarra, with a criminal record extending back to 2022, left incriminating evidence in the form of a piece of paper with her name on it and fingerprints from Sriracha hot sauce, which she had sprayed over walls, countertops, and floors in the center’s kitchen area.
A piece of paper with scribbles and a name used as evidence in the valndalization of the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
Other damaged items include the center’s multipurpose 55-inch large-screen television, archival records of the permanent collection that had been stored in the building’s vault room — currently used as a records office — along with other operational documents, furniture, restroom fixtures, food items, and art supplies.
Ms. Amici said that seeing the damage firsthand while police investigated the scene was “initially really heartbreaking.” She added, “I was literally in tears, and the staff was shocked.”
The center had been set up for its Third Space Thursdays event for local creatives, and was preparing for the Caminarte first Friday downtown Laredo art walk. Both events went on as scheduled.
Artworks in the current exhibition, a Contemporary Art Month group show of San Antonio artists, went untouched, Ms. Amici said. She also expressed relief that artworks in the Art Acquisition Project permanent collection, including works by Cesar Martinez and Ethel Shipton, were not damaged. The center began collecting art formally in 2020, toward the goal of eventually creating a dedicated museum of contemporary art in Laredo, Ms. Amici said.
Luis E. Sanchez, LCA Programming Coordinator, organized a GoFundMe campaign, which so far has raised more than $4,000 of its $6,000 goal. Ms. Amici placed the amount of funds necessary to recover from the incident at $10,000, which includes installing a state-of-the-art security system, replacing a damaged laptop and TV, repairing the artworks if possible, and upgrading insurance on the building.
A damaged artwork by Andres “Daddy Yonke” Padilla at the Laredo Center for the Arts. Courtesy of Melissa Amici
Despite the negativity associated with the break-in and vandalism, Ms. Amici said an upside to the incident has been the outpouring of community support. In a Friday, April 3, social media story, Seyde Garcia, a Laredo resident and Glasstire contributor, called the center “a true pillar of the community.” The Laredo Cultural District posted, “We stand with [the LCA] heartbroken.”
Ms. Amici said, “The support that we’re receiving … has been overwhelming and really inspiring. … I’m proud of the community that I’m a part of, especially proud of our art community and how we’ve banded together.”
Visit the LCA website to learn more about its exhibitions and events programming.
