We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space company and wants to colonize mars. He also runs a company that just implanted a computer chip into a human brain. And he believes there's a pretty high probability everything is a simulation and we are living inside of it.
But the latest Elon Musk headline-grabbing drama is less something out of sci-fi, and more something pulled from HBO's "Succession."
Elon Musk helped take Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the biggest companies in the world. And his compensation for that was an unprecedentedly large pay package that turned him into the richest person on Earth. But a judge made a decision about that pay package that set off a chain of events resulting in quite possibly the most expensive, highest stakes vote in publicly traded company history.
The ensuing battle over Musk's compensation is not just another wild Elon tale. It's a lesson in how to motivate the people running the biggest companies that – like it or not – are shaping our world. It's a classic economics problem with a very 2024 twist.
I was 19 and attending a Spanish study abroad program in Madrid through the University of Houston, when a stranger approached. I’d been at a restaurant with a large group of friends and acquaintances whining about not being able to call my boyfriend back in Texas, when this young man I hadn’t noticed before leaned toward me.
“I know where you can make a phone call,” he said in Spanish-accented English. His voice was smooth and warm. I didn’t hesitate before gratefully accepting his offer and following him outside. Moments later, as he was driving us too fast and too far out of the city, I knew I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.
When he finally stopped the car, he put a knife to my throat. He spat hideous words in my ear, detailing how he planned to kill and rape me—in that order. What happened next was a blur fueled by my determination not to die. I kicked, slapped, hit, screamed.
Somehow, I got away.
Afterward, I blamed myself for being so stupid, for ignoring my instincts, for putting myself in such a situation. I didn’t know his name. I couldn’t identify his car. I thought, what good would it do to call the police?
Turns out my seemingly strange reaction is common; in the United States, nearly 80 percent of sexual assaults are never reported.
Why do victims of nonsexual violent crimes usually involve authorities while most rape survivors remain silent?
I’m grown now, a novelist and mother of a 21-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old son. The fact that my children are close to the age I was when I was attacked has made me hypervigilant of their safety. That they are young adults in Texas has made me hyperaware of attacks on their rights, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
I was utterly appalled when I read research in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding the number of rape-related pregnancies in the 14 U.S. states with total abortion bans. Since those bans took effect, it’s estimated that more than half a million rapes occurred in those states, yielding almost 65,000 pregnancies.
In Texas alone, the study estimates that roughly 212,000 rapes led to 26,000 pregnancies.
Based on the aforementioned statistic about silence, most of those rapes were never reported. That means, horrifyingly, about 410,785 rapists nationwide got away with their crimes and carried their lives unpunished. Their victims, I’m certain, did not. And I understand why many don’t speak out.
The only person I told about my attack was a friend I’d been with earlier that night. After I’d hitched back to the city, many hours later with a torn shirt, bloodied arms, and a shattered spirit, she said we had to go to the authorities.
I knew I would never forget the feeling of that knife at my throat, but I refused to tell anyone else. Not the police, not the school, not my mother. Nobody. I just wanted to forget about it. Although I escaped with only minor physical injuries, the psychic wounds have endured more than three decades—in part because I tried to pretend nothing had happened.
According to researcher Sandra Caron, one-third of college women who experience sexual assault tell no one, not even one friend. By comparison, a 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization survey estimated that 64 percent of robberies and 81 percent of cases of vehicle theft were reported to police.
Why do victims of nonsexual violent crimes usually involve authorities while most rape survivors remain silent? Caron says most survivors, as I did, blame themselves. Or they feel society will blame them.
Remember then-20-year-old swimmer Brock Allen Turner who was convicted of rape in 2016 after publicly assaulting a woman on the Stanford University campus? His father objected to the proposed six-year sentence, calling it “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”
As a parent, I can perhaps understand—but not excuse—a parent saying something so reprehensible in defense of their child. But what about the judge? Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to only six months, saying, “A prison sentence would have a severe impact.” The judge was more concerned about the perpetrator’s future than the survivor’s.
Such decisions reinforce survivors’ fears about how they will be treated if and when they come forward.
In her testimony, Turner’s victim described the harrowing effects of the attack, and its aftermath. “If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into the sunset while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken,” she wrote. “Nobody wins.”
Author Chris Cander has processed trauma through her fiction. (Paula N. Luu)
Fear of being held responsible for their rape. Fear of losing control of the situation. Fear of not being believed. Fear of getting in trouble. Fear of being labeled. Fear of being abused again. Fear of losing someone. (Yet another grim statistic: Over 90 percent of juvenile victims know the perpetrator.) To many, involving authorities feels like being assaulted twice.
The #MeToo movement that began in 2017 shifted public discourse, at least for a while, and in a recall election, Judge Persky was removed from the bench.
Post-Madrid, I thought I’d successfully hidden the truth from myself, but something as traumatic as that doesn’t magically disappear. It’s the kind of story that lives deep inside your bones.
I turned to athletics to regain a sense of power and safety, specifically competitive bodybuilding and martial arts. Eventually, I began teaching self-defense classes to women and girls, sharing an abbreviated version of my assault. For my students, it’s a useful scaffolding, explaining how violent attacks unfold. For me, it’s made that awful night easier to talk about. Still, until 2021, I hadn’t told anyone the full story.
That year, my 19-year-old daughter was preparing to drive cross-country from her college campus to spend the summer in Texas. I thought about how strong and capable, and yet how vulnerable and exposed, she would be during her trip. I couldn’t stop thinking about the vagaries of violence and victimhood, safety and security, guilt and grief. At that point, she knew some of what had happened to me, but I felt I had to tell her all of it.
Afterward, I decided to deal with the suppressed details of my attack in the most therapeutic way I know: by fictionalizing it. Writing The Young of Other Animals, the book that grew out of this story, helped me let go of the self-blame and shame I’d been carrying.
I wonder whether that healing would’ve started 30 years ago, if I’d talked about it then. And I wonder if I might’ve prevented my assailant from hurting someone else if I’d told police. I’ll never know.
But I do know now that remaining silent doesn’t solve anything.
Half a million rapes in 14 states is too many. More than 212,000 rapes in Texas is too many. Any is too many. At the very least, we must try to make it easier and safer for survivors of sexual violence to come forward, seek help, and begin to heal.
Solar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just how much stronger is it going to get?
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The Power Macintosh G5 was was released in 2003 into a sea of technological challenges and change. What looked like the next great chapter for PowerPC ended up bringing it to an end. I talk about how it all went down and interesting details about the machine along the way. From the 1.6GHz low-end machine to the top-end "G5 Quad". The all-metal accessible case, the water-cooled CPU, 64-bit, OS X, new monitors and a karaoke machine companion product.
A colleague told a story of how he once broke the entire Office division’s ability to check in code because he accidentally checked in a syntax error to the script that is used to verify that your proposed change has satisfied all the pre-submit requirements such as passing static analysis and unit testing.¹
Since the script was now failing, all attempts to check in code were being blocked, including the attempts to fix the script itself!
In order to get things working again, they had to find someone who had access to the console of the machine that runs the validation tests and manually edit the script so that the script repair check-in would pass its own validation.
WASHINGTON—Providing intimate insight into the digestive tracts of some of the most prominent lawmakers in our nation’s history, a new Library of Congress exhibit opening Wednesday features items removed from the stomachs of deceased U.S. senators. “We’re excited for visitors to see the strange and exciting objects…
WESTERVILLE, OH—Following a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a thunderous round of applause from the thousands of ticket holders lined up to be among the first in line for its rides, the long-awaited Elmer’s Super Sticky Glue Park officially opened to the public Wednesday. “Who’s going to ride Paste Mountain today?” said…
Twenty-three sets of fraternal and identical twins graduated from Pollard Middle School in Needham, MA, where they made up 10% of the total class. What do you think?
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I have a weird issue that I need help with. My former coworker, Lulu, joined my company about seven years ago as a relatively inexperienced but enthusiastic junior team member. I trained her on some of her duties and, due to the nature of our jobs, we worked closely together for a time.
All was (mostly) well, but I noticed Lulu’s sensitivity and immaturity about some things, mostly about feeling “left out” of projects that didn’t concern her. Because she would claim to be hurt and disappointed by being left out, our manager began including her in recurring meetings she didn’t need to be in. She’d rarely contribute to these meetings but insist on attending; often, we’d need to move the meeting to accommodate her increasingly messy calendar, which was full of all the meetings she insisted on joining. If we didn’t move the meeting at her request, she’d have an urgent meeting with our boss, complaining that we were going behind her back.
Lulu received a significant promotion a few years into her tenure, and her behavior worsened. In meetings with my team, she’d bring up how being “left out” negatively impacted her work. We’d explain that she didn’t need to worry about the project in question, and then at meetings with our mutual manager present, she’d repeat the whole performance again with more dramatic flair.
She also started claiming ownership of things only tenuously related to her job. At one point, I created a company account on a free software tool for other departments to do work related to a specific project. Lulu complained that due to the nature of the software tool, she should have been consulted before anyone opened the account or used it. In other words, she was very good at borrowing trouble where there wasn’t any and bogging down workflows due to her own hurt feelings and self-importance.
I was supposed to continue working with Lulu, but it was extremely difficult. Several times, I approached her about working collaboratively on new initiatives, but regardless of how I worded the request, she interpreted the conversation as me trying to tell her what to do. Maddeningly, Lulu frequently did tell me how to do my job. The only way to work with her was to give her “approval” power, even when it made no sense. This grated on me because she was very green in many areas of her own job, and not at all knowledgeable about mine. So, eventually, I just avoided working with her whenever possible. Our team performance suffered because of this, but since our boss coddled Lulu there was nothing more to do about it.
A month or so ago, Lulu got another job and resigned. In the days leading up to her departure, she quizzed me intensely on my day-to-day work, asking how I did or approached certain things. This tripped a wire in my brain, and after Lulu left my company, I looked at our internal knowledge center and discovered she’d “checked out” and downloaded several of my own guides, frameworks, and templates.
She is now essentially doing my job at her new company – the same title/type of work, but also literally my job because she’s using all my collateral, which I also suspect she used to get the job in the first place.
The latest development is that she periodically emails me and asks for help. These emails are obsequious in tone and are things she could easily google for herself. I can’t decide if she thinks I’m dumb enough to help her out or if she believes she is so charming that I couldn’t possibly resist her request.
I am torn between pretending I don’t get these emails (or just responding half-heartedly enough that it’s no longer worth her time to even send them) or telling her outright to figure things out for herself. She made my job incredibly difficult for years; I am not inclined to help her.
If this were a movie, you could send her bad advice, which she would then steal, ultimately torpedoing her career due to her own incompetence and underhandedness. You, meanwhile, would get a promotion and also a handsome boyfriend.
This not a movie, so don’t do that. But you definitely don’t need to help or even respond to her emails at all. Just ignore them.
If you feel awkward doing that, the next best thing is to take a long time to respond and then, when you finally do, be vague and unhelpful — or just say, “Sorry, I’m swamped right now and I don’t want to hold you up, so don’t wait on me.”
But really, you could just ignore her. Set her emails to go straight into your trash if you want. You don’t owe this person who made your life difficult, and who apparently stole your work, anything. You definitely don’t owe her help doing her new job.
If you could prove she had stolen your work — or your company’s property, more broadly — and taken it to her next company where she was presenting it as her own, that would be worth tipping off your boss about. Your company might have Feelings about that kind of theft (especially if she’s at a competitor, but even if she’s not), but it doesn’t sound like there’s conclusive enough evidence to go in that direction (even though I agree with you that it looks pretty clear), especially given your boss’s coddling of Lulu.
WASHINGTON—With more than 2 million displaced Palestinians facing the threat of famine, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Monday it had fulfilled its pledge to provide food assistance, throwing a single PowerBar labeled “for Gaza” into the Atlantic Ocean. USAID reportedly alerted the war-torn…
RESTON, VA—A new global report released Monday by the U.S. Geological Survey revealed that every place on earth currently has the wrong amount of water. “New satellite data confirms that every corner of the earth has the incorrect quantity of water,” the report read in part, noting that even though the total amount…
President Joe Biden stated that he will not use his power as commander in chief to lessen the sentence of his son Hunter, who was convicted on felony gun charges and faces up to 25 years in prison. What do you think?
HOUSTON—Exhausted from her 16-hour shift of failing to meet an already very low bar of behavioral norms, local woman Zoe Briers told reporters Tuesday she had made it through another day having strange interactions that made everyone uncomfortable. “From the moment my neighbor said ‘Good morning’ and I just stared at…
Coach USA, which owns Megabus lines connecting New York and New Jersey, filed for bankruptcy following a decline in ridership, with the company owing creditors between $100 and $500 million. What do you think?
In brief: We’re starting to see a few bands of showers move into the Houston region from a ‘potential’ tropical storm in the Southern Gulf of Mexico. However, as we have observed over the last day or two, the threat of sustained heavy rainfall and flooding in the Houston area continues to decrease. We’re still watching things closely over the next 24 hours, but we don’t anticipate major problems in the metro area.
NOAA rain accumulation forecast for now through Thursday night. (Weather Bell)
Airports and severe weather
Let us begin this post with question: My wife is flying into Bush Intercontinental Airport on Wednesday shortly after noon. Do you think her flight will be canceled with the storms?
It turns out this is a trick question! The wife in question is actually my wife. She really is flying into Houston tomorrow. Matt and I frequently receive questions regarding air travel and inclement weather, and I totally get the anxiety. However, neither of us are aviation meteorologists nor pilots. Unfortunately, we don’t have any special expertise or insight into the decision-making at airports that lead to flight stoppages, nor the cancellation of flights. We try to be helpful, but we’re never going to be able to give you the certainty on this issue that readers want. So I’ll give you the same answer I gave my wife: Probably not. Maybe. But probably not.
Before jumping into the post, I want to take care of a couple of housekeeping notes. If you’re wondering how to find us via email, our free app, or social media channels, please find all of those details here. Secondly, while this tropical system is increasingly unlikely to have serious weather consequences for the Houston area, that is not necessarily the case for southern Texas and Mexico. For more information about those sites, please check out The Eyewall. And finally, please find a brief message from our sponsor, Reliant, at the end of this post. Their support helps keep us online, and free for all.
Tuesday evening and Tuesday night
I anticipate that we’ll continue to see on-and-off showers and thunderstorms across the Houston metro area through this evening and during the overnight hours. Based on current model trends and radar activity, some of these showers may be briefly heavy, but we’re not seeing the kind of training storms that will lead to significant or widespread flooding. Some coastal areas may pick up 1 to 3 inches this afternoon and tonight, but most of us will see less than this.
Wednesday
Some time on Wednesday morning, possibly during the pre-dawn hours, more organized storms should move into the Houston area from the coast. Traveling from east to west, some of these showers may bring bursts of intense rainfall, and there could be some street flooding. This is a potential issue for the morning commute, especially for locations along and south of Interstate 10. Due to this potential for street flooding, we are maintaining a Stage 1 flood alert for the Houston region.
By Wednesday afternoon I think shower activity will start to become a bit more sporadic, but the potential for tropical rainfall will remain in place through the evening hours.
Potential Tropical Cyclone 1 will remain in the southern Gulf of Mexico. (National Hurricane Center)
Rest of the week
We’ll transition to a pattern of more scattered showers on Thursday and Friday. Rain chances aren’t going to go away, but I also don’t think we’re going to be at any great risk of flooding. The gusty winds we’re experiencing today should persist into Thursday morning, by which time the “potential tropical cyclone” should move into Mexico.
Needless to say, we’re watching the evolution of these storms closely, and if there’s a change in our thinking we’ll post promptly.
A message from Reliant
Thanks to Eric and Matt for keeping us informed during this week’s tropical system and potential impact. We want to remind readers that Reliant stands ready to support Texans and help prepare. Here are a few things to keep in mind as we move through storm season:
Be prepared in case of an electricity outage. Your utility company (like CenterPoint in the Houston area or AEP for Corpus Christi) maintains the power lines, utility poles and electricity infrastructure necessary to deliver the power you purchase from Reliant to your home. Contact your utility company to report an outage or check the status of the repair.
Check out more preparedness tips and recovery resources at ReliantStormCenter.com. The site provides resources for before, during and after a storm, including preparedness checklists and evacuation routes, weather and power outage updates, flood maps, safety tips and more.
Just like the summer heat, storms are a part of life in Texas, so being prepared is critical. Reliant is proud to power Space City Weather and help bring this important resource to Houstonians and our neighbors.
The Apple IIc, while a great little system, has a great deal of upgrade potential. In a previous blog entry I talked about the Mockingboard 4c, which is one of the most interesting upgrades for the system, but there are other upgrades worth discussing that may not be worthy of a full blog entry. So here are some of my thoughts and review of some other upgrade options for the original IIc.
The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.
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