The Houston Federation of Teachers says a school staffer tried to treat the student with a defibrillator and it 'was not working.' It was unclear Friday what caused the student's death and whether a defibrillator could have helped.
The proliferation of AI-generated images, including deepfake videos of politicians and other public figures, has led to increased disinformation online. The Onion shares tips for distinguishing between real images and those created by artificial intelligence.
Scan for any subtle background messages compelling you to kill all humans.
Do a reverse Google image search to find the original dipshit who tweeted it out.
Remember, unless it’s Gary Busey, faces shouldn’t look like that.
Ask your cousin who’s always on the computer—maybe he knows.
Disseminate the image widely on social media and let the people decide what’s real and what’s not.
Ask yourself if the Dalai Lama could actually eat that many hamburgers in real life.
If the eyes look completely lifeless, it’s probably a real person.
CHICAGO—Warning that the bizarre proportions of his physique and odd sheen of his skin were clear signs that something must be wrong, health experts from the American Medical Association recommended Friday that people do the exact opposite of whatever Simon Cowell has been doing to his body. “We are not sure what he’s doing, but whatever his diet or exercise routine is, do the farthest thing from that just to be safe,” said Dr. Hillary Cabrera, who noted that the appearance of Cowell’s skin, hair, eyes, chin, and shoulders were a clear warning sign that Americans should avoid at all costs. “There are a lot of weird lumps and flat parts where there shouldn’t be. He’s probably very dehydrated, or maybe he’s drinking way, way too much water? Just look at a photo of Simon Cowell, take your best guess at whatever the opposite of that is, and even if you aren’t exactly right, we’re sure you’ll live a long and healthy life.” Cabrera added that as a blanket rule people should refrain from injecting anything into their skin, because that was definitely at least part of what was going on there.
The Texas Attorney General is following his familiar playbook by taking the case to a federal judge with a record of rulings against the Biden administration’s agenda.
by By Natalia Contreras, Votebeat and The Texas Tribune
Conservative groups and individual activists have targeted tens of thousands of Texans over their eligibility. But state and federal protections are in place.
A major water main break flooded parts of downtown Montreal near the Jacques-Cartier bridge Friday morning. Notre-Dame Street has been blocked off as of Frontenac Street, and morning traffic will be interrupted.
Eric Schnell, “The Shipbuilding Sea,” installation view
Eric Schnell, “A Platform for Holding On” (detail)
Eric Schnell, “It came from the dunes, but it was not us, it was not a Lettered Olive Snail, it was not a Speckled King Snake,” installation view
Eric Schnell: The Island of the Umbellifers (Part II) at the Old Jail Art Center, Albany, June 8 – August 31, 2024
Eric Schnell’s exhibition The Island of The Umbellifers (Part II) at the Old Jail Art Center (OJAC) in Albany, Texas, is a journey into the artist’s mind, where nature, memory, and human consciousness intersect. Schnell, who is based in Galveston, has a practice rooted in intuitive drawing and installation, creating expansive narratives that serve as visual maps of the human experience.
Schnell’s work occupies both the upstairs galleries, part of the 2024 Cell Series, and the project gallery downstairs at OJAC. The installations feature new drawings and floor sculptures, where birch plywood panels, cut into organic shapes and colored with ink and watercolor, are arranged on the floor. The accompanying rice and mulberry paper paintings encircle the walls, creating a fragmented narrative of a natural ecosystem from a birds-eye view.
Patrick Kelly, OJAC’s Director and Curator, notes Schnell’s unique ability to create worlds for others to explore. This is evident in this exhibition, where Schnell’s installations invite viewers to participate in a fictional quest for a quasi-utopian place. The exhibition’s title refers to a family of plants known for their aromatic qualities and umbrella-shaped flowers. Schnell’s fascination with these plants began in Galveston, where he discovered their intriguing relationships with their surroundings and the beneficial insects they attract.
Schnell’s installations reflect his ongoing exploration of these themes. The wooden blocks and panels on the floor are accompanied by standalone works on the wall that depict scenes reminiscent of nature, rendered in washes or stippled brushstrokes. These pieces are intentionally jumbled and form something akin to a road map for a developing colony.
The exhibition continues downstairs in the project gallery, with more sophisticated groupings of wooden pieces forming arrays of cubes, towers, and plateaus. Schnell’s drawings flank the walls, providing further context to the floor installations. However, this gallery features an alternative lighting arrangement; only the works on the walls are highlighted, leaving the floor installations in shadow, reminiscent of a city under overcast skies.
In an interview with Kelly, Schnell reveals his early fascination with nature, from studying backyard ant colonies to volunteering at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, which contributed to his fascination with nature. His move to Texas and subsequent discovery of art-making opened up a new world for him, one that felt similar to his early experiences of the natural world. Schnell’s art-making process is deeply automatic, with each drawing suggesting the next, creating a linear progression. “Reading” the exhibition feels like following a creek upstream to a larger river.
The Island of The Umbellifers (Part II) is a continuation of Schnell’s journey into a fictional place, where the relationships between plants, their surroundings, and symbiotic life relationships are explored. The exhibition’s title and concept are inspired by Schnell’s fascination with the umbellifer family of plants and their mystical, almost caring relationships with other plants. Schnell’s work at the OJAC captures this sense of wonder and exploration, offering viewers a glimpse into a world that is both familiar and alien, beautiful and sad.
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Jamal Hussein, “Press Esc During the System Error”
LabSynthE, “Green Statements”
Infinite Scroll at Ivester Contemporary, Austin, July 20 – August 31, 2024
Infinite Scroll, on view at Ivester Contemporary, is a refreshing addition to Austin’s summer group exhibition cycle. As many galleries prepare to close for the final stretch of the season, this group show stands out for its innovative approach, particularly in its showing of new media and digital works.
Co-curated by Tiffany K. Smith, the main exhibition space features contributions from familiar Texas names like Chris Cascio and Virginia Lee Montgomery, but the real highlight is the show’s back room, transformed into a new media haven with the use of black curtains. This makes the show one of the most forward-thinking digital media exhibits seen in a non-institutional setting.
Jamal Hussein’s installation cleverly integrates miniature screens arranged to mimic the radial “loading” dial common to computer interfaces, creating a visually captivating electronic display. LabSynthE’s Green Statements, directed by xtine burrough with creative researchers Cynthia O’Neill and Cansu Simsek, presents a web-based display of eco-friendly corporate language. This piece critically examines the performative nature of corporate environmentalism, using a mass of “green” language to illustrate the tension between genuine commitment and superficial appearances.
The exhibition also features interactive video games by Tiffany Smith, Celine Lassus, and Kristine Fernandez. Smith’s game is a conversation-based simulator that delves into the complexities of the U.S. education system, addressing issues like gun control and curriculum regulation through the perspective of a parent navigating school rules. Lassus offers a kaleidoscopic point-and-click game that emphasizes online proficiency, allowing players to explore a techno-underwater world and make choices about which digital artifacts to preserve for a new internet era. Fernandez’s static arcade, humorously titled Are We Having Fun Yet, includes bleakly humorous games that satirize the stressors of modern life, such as a word search called “Anxiety” and a pong-like game that challenges players to balance personal responsibilities.
In the rest of the show, there is more traditional work on view. Jean Hassin’s Sisters of Solidarity is a mesmerizing square wall relief made from clothing that has been pulverized into a malleable material. The composition features twin snakes encircling a central composition with teardrops and a cross adorned with diamonds. The use of this material is particularly intriguing and adds a tactile dimension to the piece, and has a subtle tone of color and texture that opens up conversations about the aesthetic reuse of materials.
Infinite Scroll is a sensational summer group exhibition that offers a vibrant display of digital and new media art. While there are many opportunities to catch group shows across Texas this season, Ivester Contemporary has gone above and beyond to thoughtfully include digital and new media in their rotation.
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William Sarradet is the Assistant Editor for Glasstire.
The Rothko Chapel in Houston has announced that it will remain closed to the public for an indefinite period of time due to damage sustained from Hurricane Beryl last month.
Rothko Chapel interior, photo credit-BRYAN SCHUTMAAT for WSJ. Magazine.
In a press release, David Leslie, Executive Director of the Rothko Chapel, stated, “We are deeply saddened by the impact of the hurricane on the Chapel and across Houston. The Chapel’s continued stewardship of this beloved cultural and sacred site, renowned for its Mark Rothko panels, remains our highest priority, and the closure will ensure that the necessary repairs and restorations can be made as effectively and completely as required. Our focus now is on the restoration of the building and panels, and on continuing our mission of both contemplation and action at the intersection of art, spirituality, and human rights.”
According to the organization, heavy rain and strong winds resulted in leakage through the Chapel’s roof. The leak then caused water damage to parts of the ceiling and several walls. Three panels by Rothko also sustained varying degrees of damage. The Chapel is working with Whitten & Proctor Fine Art Conservation to analyze and assess the artworks. The cost of repairs and extent of the damage is still being determined.
While the Chapel is closed, it will also be assessing its fall programs. Some programming may take place at alternate venues throughout the city. Additional information will be shared in the near future. Meanwhile, the Suzanne Deal Booth Welcome House will continue to be open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Visit the Rothko Chapel’s website for updates and additional information.
WASHINGTON—In an effort to assist supporters in better fumbling the vice president’s first name, the Trump campaign released a helpful video Friday on how to mispronounce “Kamala.” “If you’re still struggling with Vice President Harris’ name, we want to teach you how to say it in the most disrespectful manner possible,” says a narrator in the 30-second video, which tells viewers that if they follow a few simple steps, they will soon be mangling the candidate’s name as effortlessly as former President Donald Trump. “The trick is making sure you never pronounce her name the same way twice: Try making it sound like Camilla, the British queen. Or as if it’s some variation on ‘koala’ or ‘camel,’ or just a ‘K’ sound followed by random gibberish. Frankly, as long as you’re making her sound like an outsider who doesn’t belong here, you’re on the right track.” The spot concluded that if you accidentally do say Kamala correctly, make sure to add a quick mimed jerk-off motion afterward, as though she were completely putting you out by having a South Asian name.
MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (permalink)
Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.
Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:
Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:
Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:
That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:
This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):
Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).
Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their research and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.
The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:
The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:
Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:
Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:
And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:
Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published in a top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.
If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.
Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.
Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:
Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:
Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:
The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:
Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:
And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":
But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predatory publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:
Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates to work both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:
It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:
How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.
This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!
The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.
Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:
Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.
"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
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.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
A large Internet service provider wants the Supreme Court to rule that ISPs shouldn't have to disconnect broadband users who have been accused of piracy. Cable firm Cox Communications, which is trying to overturn a ruling in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony, petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case yesterday.
Cox said in a press release that a recent appeals court ruling "would force ISPs to terminate Internet service to households or businesses based on unproven allegations of infringing activity, and put them in a position of having to police their networks—contrary to customer expectations... Terminating Internet service would not just impact the individual accused of unlawfully downloading content, it would kick an entire household off the Internet."
The case began in 2018 when Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox, claiming that it didn't adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers. A US District Court jury in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in December 2019 that Cox must pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels.
Anova, a company that sells smart sous vide cookers, is getting backlash from customers after announcing that it will soon charge a subscription fee for the device's companion app.
Sous vide cooking, per Ars Technica sister site Bon appétit, "is the process of sealing food in an airtight container—usually a vacuum sealed bag—and then cooking that food in temperature-controlled water." Sous vide translates from French to "under vacuum," and this cooking method ensures that the water stays at the desired temperature for the ideal cook.
Anova was founded in 2013 and sells sous vide immersion circulators. Its current third-generation Precision Cooker 3.0 has an MSRP of $200. Anova also sells a $149 model and a $400 version that targets professionals. It debuted the free Anova Culinary App in 2014.
Across the country, millions of K-12 students and their families are loading up their shopping carts as they prepare for the start of another school year. The Onion takes a look at the statistics behind back-to-school shopping.
64: Minimum number of different colored crayons required for child not to be considered poor
46%: Portion of Elmer’s glue bottle applied directly to hands
3: Scissors? Per kid? Are you fucking kidding me?
2: The only type of pencil with which it is possible to learn
3: Seemingly innocuous T-shirts that will lead to a decade of bullying
12,000: Mom-and-pop backpackeries closed in the last five years
50: Milligram Vyvanse prescription just to pull a C+ average
18: Important handouts already lost
$220: Average cost of a medical bill for removal of eraser child stuck up own nose
1: Pair of perfectly good Crocs you already have at at home, young man
Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for an end to taxes on tips, though many cite that tipped workers are often not subject to federal taxes due to low income. What do you think?
“I hope this also applies to the tips I steal from my employees.”
Rick Mapp, Brick Molder
“If they both support it, it must be a terrible idea.”
Sabrina Markov, Tongues Translator
“And further enrich our nation’s ruling-class baristas?”
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. Employee won’t do part of his job
I work for a small gym franchise as a manager. Our model is 24-hour access for our members. The staff is not there 24 hours.
Because of complaints we are receiving, I have asked all personal trainers to return towels to the laundry area if they see them overflowing. It’s a 20-second task.
Consistently one particular trainer will not do this task. Towels will be overflowing on to the floor before the office staff arrives. He arrives before the office staff. This is causing serious conflict between the office staff and him. He is the only trainer pushing back. This is mandatory.
I have a meeting with him today. I just don’t know how much more I can take with him. There have been other issues before this. He is very passive, complains a lot, and has a sense of entitlement. For example, we pay a flat fee for trainers to perform a 30-minute class. He demanded we pay him per participant. He refused to take on the class after we said no. He said he wasn’t making enough money, so we offered for him to work in the office and clean the gym on Sundays. He has declined almost every offer. When said, “I thought you needed extra money and there are six shifts you can work this week,” his response was that he feels like he is getting used (?).
Is he a good trainer? If so, it probably doesn’t make sense to lose him over the towels. But it sounds like there’s more going on than just towels.
To answer what you’re asking: you can’t make him do something he doesn’t want to do. You can only decide how committed you are to enforcing the requirement, even if it means you might lose him or others. If you decide it’s an essential requirement of the job, to the point that you’re willing to lose people over it, then you need to explain that and let him decide if he wants to continue working there under those terms or not.
The same thing goes for things like what classes pay and offering extra shifts; you just need to explain what’s on offer and under what terms, and then he can decide if he wants to take you up on that or not. Your role isn’t to cajole him into seeing things that way you do; your role is just to be very clear about what you can and can’t offer, and what’s required to remain in the job. His role is to decide if he’s up for that or not. If he’s not — based on either word or deed — then the next step is to ask (either yourself or him, or both) whether it would make sense to part ways.
2. Employee asked me not to call an ambulance if they had a seizure
I’ve had two new hires over the past seven years tell me that they have epilepsy. Great, thanks for telling me, what should I look out for in terms of warning signs, anything particular that you might do at work that could trigger them that we need to change, etc.? Both employees, about a year apart from each other, told me that whatever I do, I should not call an ambulance if they have a seizure.
I know that even with health insurance, ambulance rides can be expensive since you never know if the ambulance is in-network with your health insurance company. And I understand that generally if you see a doctor after a seizure, you are told that you cannot drive for X months, which is an incredible hardship.
Still, I felt supremely uncomfortable with this request. Ultimately, I agreed to use my best judgment if the need should arise, despite their protests. Thankfully I never had to find out what I’d do, and since then, both employees have moved on.
What’s the right answer here, both as an employer and human worried about another human, and as an employer worried about potential legalities and ramifications?
There are two sides of this. First, individual people with epilepsy know their conditions best, and they may know that there’s nothing the ER can do for them except in more severe situations. That’s often the case! If this comes up again, ask under what circumstances you should call (for example, one common set of guidelines is to only go to the ER if the seizure lasts more than five minutes or there’s a head injury).
The other side is the company’s legal liability; you’d need to loop in HR so they’re aware of what’s been requested and what you’re agreeing to — because at that point you’re acting as an agent of the company, not a private individual. Whenever you have a situation where an employee asks for something related to a medical condition that you’re uncertain about, that’s a flag that it’s probably over your pay grade to navigate on your own.
3. My coworker jokes about suicide
Two months ago I started a new job and really bonded with a coworker we’ll call Mel. Mel and I really get along, and I like her a lot.
The problem is Mel is rather negative — she constantly talks about how she doesn’t want to be doing work or doesn’t want to be here. I know we all feel that way, but she complains frequently. That I can deal with and kind of brush off, especially because I know she does truly like it here, she (like most of us) would just rather be spending her time doing what she wants to do instead of working a 9-5. However, what’s really getting to me is her constant jokes about how she wants to kill herself. The smallest hiccup at work will prompt a response of, “Well, guess I’ll just go off myself,” and she will often mime either hanging herself or shooting herself.
I know she isn’t seriously making suicide threats, she’s just expressing how much she dislikes something that’s happened during the day. However, I have a history of suicidal ideation, and I find it very disturbing to be confronted with these comments multiple times a day.
If I brought this to the attention of the firm partners, I assume they would say something to Mel, but I think it would be very obvious I was the one who complained since I’m new and no one has ever said anything before. From reading your columns, I know your first step is usually to speak to the coworker myself. I was hoping for some pointers about what to say.
Some options:
“Please don’t joke about suicide. You never know if someone around you has been affected by it.”
“Could you please not make that joke? I find it really upsetting.”
“Suicide is a hard topic for a lot of people. I’d be grateful if you didn’t joke about it around me.”
“That’s not a thing to joke about. Please stop saying things like that.”
4. Interviewing when they already know they want to hire someone else
I recently applied for a great role and had two interviews. There is a third round which involves a task.
At the end of the second interview, I asked about the circumstances of the role becoming available, and after a pause they said that someone is already doing the job but is on a temporary contract, and to become permanent HR required them to advertise the role externally. That person is going through the same interview process, but to me it sounds very likely that they just want them to stay and are going through the motions with me and other candidates. After all, they have already been doing the job for a year, so could give much better answers about their ability to perform the role.
I feel quite put out as I’ve spent a lot of time preparing for a role that isn’t even vacant. I wouldn’t have applied if I’d known up-front. Am I justified in feeling my time has been wasted, or is this just normal business practice? I’m wondering whether or not to let their HR team know that this bothered me.
You are justified in feeling annoyed that your time has been wasted and it’s a normal business practice.
A lot of organizations have internal policies requiring them to advertise every position before hiring, even if they’ve already identified someone who’s likely to get the job. The idea is supposed to be to ensure they’re hiring the best person for the job (and also to avoid cronyism), but when the hiring manager complies only with the letter of the policy, not its spirit, it wastes everyone’s time, and it actively subverts the point of having the policy in the first place. Some employers include language in their ads like “a preferred candidate has been identified” so people at least know what’s up before they apply, but others don’t.
That said, even when an employer already has a candidate in mind, sometimes a really good external candidate can still win out. And it’s not always true that a temporary fill-in will always get the job (as we saw earlier this week). But in this particular case, if you’re right that they were just going through motions, they should have been more transparent from the start so you could decide whether you cared to invest your time that way or not.
Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.
Numerous companies, most notably Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, are working on launching tens of thousands of small LEO satellites in the coming years. A new report by U.S. PIRG adds to concerns that these launches haven’t been thought through environmentally, noting that the disposable nature of such satellites means 29 tons of satellites will re-enter our atmosphere every day at peak.
After years of delays, the FCC did recently release rules requiring that satellites be removed from orbit within five years to help minimize “space junk.” But the organization notes that very little if any thought was given by innovation-cowed regulators toward the environmental impact of so many smaller satellites constantly burning up in orbit:
“We shouldn’t rush into deploying an untested and under-researched technology into new environments without comprehensive review. Over just five years Starlink has launched more than 6,000 units and now make up more than 60% of all satellites. The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act.”
The steady launches are also a notable pollution concern, the report notes, releasing “soot in the atmosphere equivalent to 7 million diesel dump trucks circling the globe, each year.” Space X has consistently played fast and loose with environmental regulations, with regulators even in lax Texas starting to give the company grief for releasing significant pollutants into nearby bodies of water.
These concerns are on top of additional complaints that the light pollution created by these LEO satellites are significantly harming astronomical research in a way that can never be fully mitigated. And again, the problems we’re seeing now are predominately caused by Musk’s Starlink. Bezos and other companies plan to launch hundreds of thousands of more satellites over time.
SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. It’s also proven useful during environmental emergencies and war. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription cost and up front hardware costs.
But while Starlink is great for global battlefields, vacation homes, yachts, and RVs, it’s not truly fixing the biggest problem in U.S. broadband right now: affordability. It lacks the capacity to really drive competition at the scale it’s needed to drive down rates, and as its userbase grows it’s inevitably going to require more and more heavy-handed network management tricks to ensure usability.
So while these LEO services are a helpful niche solution to fill in the gaps, they come with some fairly notable caveats, and it’s generally more economically and environmentally sound to prioritize the deployment of fiber and then fill in the rest with 5G and fixed wireless. It’s a major reason why the Biden FCC retracted a wasteful billion-dollar Trump handout to Starlink, something that made MAGA cry.
Managing a massive concert tour requires keeping a lot of balls in the air, but as we were pulling into our next stop for P!nk’s world tour, I couldn’t help but feel like I was forgetting something. As we were preparing to rock Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena for a record-setting two straight nights, it suddenly hit me. Where was P!nk? “Has anybody here seen P!nk?” I shouted out to the crew assembling our stage, but alas, no luck. As we all frantically tried to call her phone to no avail, it began to dawn on me. Oh my god, we forgot P!nk. Not only have we left her behind at our last venue, but we forgot to let the pop star down from her aerial harness.
As we all know, rather than perform hits like “Raise Your Glass” and “Get the Party Started” at sea level with her feet planted firmly on the ground like other, boring performers, P!nk approaches each concert as if it’s a punk-themed Cirque du Soleil show. Using acrobatic ropes and wires, she torpedoes herself over a sea of concert-goers mid-song, doing flips and somersaults as she performs while airborne. It’s a feat she’s able to pull off thanks to years of training from the master acrobat Yen (from Ocean’s Eleven) and cutting-edge mechanics from the team behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (they figured it out this time, they swear). It’s been a shockingly foolproof endeavor—save for a stubborn knot that took us three whole songs to untangle and one case of explosive food poisoning that coated an entire section of MetLife Stadium. But now it seems that our luck has run out.
As we speak, P!nk is currently hovering above a dark, empty stadium like a Grammy Award–winning piñata, shouting out for help between aerial spins. How could I have let this happen? Yeah, I’ve made mistakes before as a road manager; I’m only human. There was the time I forgot the Rolling Stones’ Geritol. Or when I laid out a sensible shirt and khakis for Harry Styles. And I’ll never live down the time I found out I was colorblind after attempting to remove all of the brown M&Ms from the bowl in Van Halen’s dressing room. But I’ve never made a mistake quite as bad as this.
P!nk is one of the most important parts of putting on a P!nk concert. Sure, we’re beginning to see artists put on concerts without attending themselves, like ABBA’s hologram-led Voyage show, or the first two hours of a Madonna concert. But a P!nk concert without P!nk? That’s just a JCPenney.
I still can’t fathom how this slipped through the cracks. Sure, she’s usually on vocal rest between shows, but that shouldn’t have kept her from screaming out for help as the crew disassembled the stage below her. And why didn’t the tour bus driver notice that P!nk wasn’t on the bus’s mobile aerial silks? Normally, he’d hear her clanging around back there on every sharp turn.
But now isn’t the time to place blame; now is the time to rescue P!nk. Maybe there’s a janitor on shift at the stadium who can let her down? Or at the very least, try to throw some stadium vegan chicken fingers up there to sustain her while she waits for help to arrive. Let’s turn the tour bus around and go back to save her before she’s forced to watch an NFL game from above like Bill Belichick’s guardian angel.
Ugh, I’m gonna be in so much trouble. Don’t get me wrong, P!nk is a singular talent and a delight to work for. Despite always singing about punching people out, I’ve only ever seen her get angry once, and that was when a waiter took her table and gave it to Jessica Simps. But slam slam oh hot damn, I don’t think she’ll be able to forgive being left in the air like she’s a fistful of glitter.
Is there any hope of getting myself out of this? Maybe we can somehow find a way to blame Christina Aguilera? Or chalk it up as one big innocent missundaztanding? No, there’s no hope. I’ll be fired for sure. It’s only a matter of time until I’m handed my p!nk slip.
WASHINGTON—Asking whether he was somehow still running for president or promoting an upcoming reality show, the nation was reportedly confused Friday as to why Joe Biden was still on television sometimes. “I saw him on TV the other day and immediately assumed he had died or was sick or something, because why else would I be seeing him on there?” asked Sandy Wolcott, 52, who noted that she thought there was some guy from Minnesota or a woman she was supposed to be seeing instead. “Sometimes it’s two or three days in a row I’ll see him on the news, even though I thought he wasn’t important anymore. I don’t know if this is a Jimmy Carter thing? Like is he doing charity? Because otherwise this just feels like sad attention-seeking. I usually just flip to something else when I see him because I know it’s not important and TV is for important stuff.” Wolcott added that if Biden was on TV because he really needed money, she would be happy to donate $10 to help him.
ATLANTA—Noting that everything was most likely exactly as it should be, sources confirmed Friday that a screaming man lying on the ground was probably supposed to be there. “I assume the powers that be are aware this guy is there and it’s all going according to protocol,” said passerby Jen Pemberton, adding that the multiple people who had already passed without concern the man thrashing on the sidewalk served as an indication that nothing was amiss. “If it wasn’t fine for him to be there, or it was a problem for him to be twitching like that, then I’m sure someone would be dealing with the situation.” At press time, sources reported that everything had worked itself out after the man had stopped screaming and begun lying perfectly still.
Scientists have been slowly extending the periodic table one element at a time, pushing to higher and higher masses, and have discovered some incredibly useful materials along the way. But the elements at the current end of the table are so unstable that they decay almost as soon as they’re created in our particle accelerators. Have we reached the end of the line of discoverable elements? There are new rows of the periodic table to unlock, and more stable versions of known heavy elements to synthesize—and while our accelerators are coming up short, astronomers have found a strange cosmic phenomenon that may populate the periodic table beyond our wildest dreams.
Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt Caplan & Matt O'Dowd Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini & Stephanie Faria Directed by Andrew Kornhaber Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
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Metrolinx, the entity whose approach to completing the Eglinton LRT is most accurately comparable to George R.R. Martin’s approach to finishing the A Song Of Ice And Fire books, has raised eyebrows for it’s costs in recent weeks. These include paying 72% more for the same subway cars we ordered just a few years ago, […]
MONTREAL – As Canadians face another scorching hot summer, Coppertone has announced a new extra-potent sunscreen line that banishes the sun back behind the hills and mountains from which it dares to emerge and harass us. “Even the strongest sunscreens are useless if you miss that hard to reach spot on your back,” said a […]
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said some internal communications have been hacked, blaming the Iranian government and citing past hostilities between Trump and Iran without providing direct evidence. What do you think?
“Will Iran stop at nothing to push their radical liberal agenda?”
James Wymer, Biography Enthusiast
“This is why I usually just delete emails from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
Ricky Doering, Thermostat Regulator
“Iran couldn’t wait a couple of days for the next tell-all book?”
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