Today's links

• Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2003, 2013, 2018, 2022
• Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA (permalink)

If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931463/ifttt-amazon-alexa-applets-ending-support-integration-automation

Amazon can do this because the Alexa's operating system sits behind a cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that it's literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.

This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them. This is prime directive of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA. The ability to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed an update that killed the feature:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/

That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out it was a starter-pistol. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a "security update" there's a damned good chance that the "update" is designed to block you from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance without any warning or intervention on your part. That's what Adobe did last year, when it literally stole the colors from your Photoshop files, in history's SaaSiest heist caper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

And yet, when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's most often as part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a John Deere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Today, Deere's PR minions are pitching search-and-replace versions of this story about Israeli tractors that Hamas is said to have looted, which were also remotely bricked.

But the main use of this remote killswitch isn't confounding war-looters: it's preventing farmers from fixing their own tractors without paying rent to John Deere. An even bigger omission from this narrative is the fact that John Deere is objectively Very Bad At Security, which means that the world's fleet of critical agricultural equipment is one breach away from being rendered permanently inert:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

There are plenty of good and honorable people working at big companies, from Adobe to Apple to Deere to Tesla to Amazon. But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.

Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer. Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.

Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers. An HP rep once told me that they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so that printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists that its ability to push iOS updates that revoke functionality is about keeping mobile users safe – not monopolizing repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let them add valuable functionality to their products. Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."

These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits without the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that you could bypass, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone. Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates – and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.

Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "Local first" computing is possible, and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" – the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about accessibility and IoT gadgets. Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."

But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."

Like the problem with the "bionic eyes" that Second Sight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see – it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical – it's commercial.

We're meant to believe that no bionic eye company could survive unless they devise their assistive technology such that it fails catastrophically if the business goes under. But it turns out that a bionic eye company can't survive even if they are allowed to do this.

Even if you believe Milton Friedman's Big Lie that a company is legally obligated to "maximize shareholder value," not even Friedman says that you are legally obligated to maximize companies' shareholder value. The fact that a company can make more money by defrauding you by revoking or bricking the things you buy from them doesn't oblige you to stand up for their right to do this.

Indeed, all of this conduct is arguably illegal, under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits "unfair and deceptive business practices":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

"No one should ever use a smart speaker" lacks nuance. "Anyone who uses a smart speaker should be insulated from unilateral revocations by the manufacturer, both through legal restrictions that bind the manufacturer, and legal rights that empower others to modify our devices to help us," is a much better formulation.

It's only in the land of the Darth Vader MBA that the deal is "take it or leave it." In a good world, we should be able to take the parts that work, and throw away the parts that don't.

(Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com, Sam Howzit; CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• UK Set to Reject Big Tech Call for Antitrust Appeals Route https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-24/uk-is-set-to-reject-big-tech-call-for-antitrust-appeals-route (h/t Naked Capitalism)

• The best books on Chokepoint Capitalism https://fivebooks.com/best-books/chokepoint-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Art for Money https://www.holloway.com/b/art-for-money (h/t Julian Bleeker)

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Wired runs a balanced Broadcast Flag story — last week to fight the proposal https://www.wired.com/2003/11/fcc-moves-to-stifle-tv-piracy/

#20yrsago 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/us/libertarians-pursue-new-political-goal-state-of-their-own.html

#10yrsago HOWTO protect yourself from Internet surveillance, EFF edition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/ten-steps-against-surveillance

#10yrsago D&D with toddlers https://web.archive.org/web/20131107181349/http://gygaxmagazine.com/selected-content/dming-for-your-toddler/

#5yrsago Steve Mnuchin stole Cesar Sayoc’s house https://theintercept.com/2018/10/26/cesar-sayoc-foreclosure-steven-mnuchin/

#5yrsago The Copyright Office’s DMCA-defanging is nice, but man, there are: So. Many. Hoops to jump through https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-dmca-exemption-petitions-tinkering-echos-and-repairing-appliances-new

#5yrsago Chicagoans can actually play “Machine Learning President,” the election RPG https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/25/18010142/machine-learning-president-2020-election-larp

#5yrsago China Telecom has been using poisoned internet routes to suck up massive amounts of US and Canadian internet traffic https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=mca

#5yrsago Using science to fine-tune your fake blood recipe https://www.wired.com/story/water-flour-syrup-dye-mastering-the-elements-of-fake-blood/

#1yrago Uline's billions fund voter suppression https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/26/boxed-in/#bircher-jr

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

• The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024

• Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

• Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

• Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Microincentives and Enshittification https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/23/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Upcoming appearances:

• The Internet Con at the Internet Archive (virtual), Oct 31
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-the-internet-con-tickets-730939137637

• Hackaday Supercon, Nov 4 (Pasadena)
  https://hackaday.io/superconference/

• The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187

• The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 7
  https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023

Recent appearances:

• A Drink with Cory Doctorow (The Idler)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAnnk3vef00

• Equity Mates Investing podcast
  https://open.spotify.com/show/2ZzAxuxFmQ1U78pL3RMxns

• Economics and Other Science Fictions (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/103-debt-discussion-2-economics-and-other-science-fictions-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books:

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

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

• The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

(Final Medium column: "The internet’s original sin" https://doctorow.medium.com/the-internets-original-sin-c16a8d0256a8?sk=e4c58c0a5739f0bc79860390ae874232)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Can I regularly take PTO for a crafting social group?

I understand that vacation time is part of my compensation package and I need to take time off, but would it be considered unprofessional/immature to take PTO every other Friday afternoon to go to a recurring social gathering? I know that it is my earned time but cannot shake the feeling that going to a purely social crafting group on Friday afternoons, during the work day, might be seen as less appropriate than. say, taking the whole day off or taking my cat to the vet. I can’t exactly put my finger on why it feels wrong. Or other than just not mentioning the reason, is there a way to frame it that sounds less frivolous?

I am not necessarily worried about my direct boss/coworkers since they would encourage me to take some me time, but I am already seen as quirky (energetic with a decent Funko Pop! collection but am good at what I do) and would hate to tip the scales to unprofessional/immature outside of my team. My life outside of work is pretty nonexistent so I am trying to find ways to fulfill myself, since taking a day off without anything planned is the worst (since I could use that to catch up on my backlog), which results in me never taking time off to recoup from the burn out that is oh so real.

My only concern would be whether the recurring nature of it will make you harder to schedule with. Like if the only time everyone has free for a meeting is one of the days you’re going to be out, are people going to be annoyed if they know it’s because every other Friday you’re crafting? Same thing if you’re in a job where most people around you are harried and the nature of their work means they couldn’t do that — in which case you still could, but it might be wiser to be more circumspect about what that time is for.

But if none of those things are the case, or if you make it clear you’ll be flexible if it ever poses scheduling challenges, I think you’re fine. Even so, if you want to be vague about it, you could say you’re involved in a community group that meets then, or you’ve carved out that time for a hobby — you don’t need to say “crafting social group” from the get-go.

2. A “glitch” stripped us of hundreds of hours of PTO

We were recently informed that for the last 28 months (since May 2021), the system that records our timecards, PTO, pay stubs, and other financial information had a “glitch” that incorrectly allocated more vacation time per pay period than was in the benefits guide. Leadership just found this out and are working to get the updated balances out to all staff.

For the past couple of years, leadership has waived the max vacation carryover rule and has repeatedly asked people to spend down their hours. People have saved PTO for honeymoons, to care for their children outside of school hours, and to supplement sick time for family emergencies and parental leave and were relying on this number to be accurate. Former staff members have come and gone and been paid out for these extra hours in that time. But now staff are finding themselves with negative balances, since the updated calculations are reducing totals by up to 200 hours per person. If you leave before your balance is over 0, you have to pay back the organization. If we had left before the error was fixed, we would not have been affected. It feels like the employees are being punished for staying, for a mistake that’s not ours and for trusting the system and the team in charge of it. What can we leverage to push back on this? Is there a way we can propose a different solution to leadership that wouldn’t penalize the team for this error?

Well, this is horrible.

It’s one thing to do this if the errors were very small and very short-lived — like just one paycheck and just a few hours of time. But it’s really awful to do it when we’re talking about years of miscalculations and people are losing 200 hours (!!) of the time they thought they had saved — that’s five weeks (!!). As you point out, people made decisions based on the numbers the company provided — and they had every reason to assume that the PTO calculations that had been showing in their records for the last two and a half years were correct. This is the company’s error, and the only ethical way to handle it is for the company to take the hit, let people have the balances they’ve been telling them they had, and just start calculating correctly from this point forward. Hell, not just ethical, but practical — because otherwise they’re going to destroy people’s morale, and that’s going to affect how hard people are willing to work for them, how interested they are in other offers, etc. And no one is going to trust a single thing this company tells them again.

As for what you can do, you could talk to an employment lawyer in your state about whether you have any legal recourse. Depending on exactly how those “glitched” balances were presented to you, it’s possible the company created a legal obligation on their side, given the length of time this was happening — but you’d need a lawyer in your state to tell you for sure. If that’s not fruitful, your best bet is to band together with coworkers and push back hard, insisting the company honor the vacation balances it supplied you with for multiple years in a row and that people relied on. They may or may not cave, but a concerted, organized push from a large group of you could pay off.

3. Should I organize a low-pressure gift collection for an employee?

I’m the manager of a team and one of my reports is getting married next month. I want to organize a gift collection to send a wedding gift, but I don’t want people to feel pressured to participate! (I’ve read your many posts on gift-giving and fully agree that gifts should flow downwards, but this is more sideways/diagonal?)

Is it fine if I organize this myself? If so, any suggested language so people feel very comfortable opting out if they choose (especially since there is that manager-report power dynamic)?

Or should I find someone else to organize this? But then how to ensure that that person doesn’t feel pressured either?

Am I overthinking this? Most likely!

If their manager organizes a gift collection, people will feel pressured to participate; it’s just how power dynamics go. There will be less pressure if if a coworker organizes it, but there will still be pressure … and pressuring people to spend their own money at work just isn’t a good thing.

It’s better if this kind of thing is paid for by the organization itself. If that’s not an option, I’d urge you to just circulate a card instead. In addition to the pressure to give money, this sort of thing can be fraught in other ways — Cecil organizes a gift when Valentina gets married because they’re friends but seven months later no one thinks to organize a gift for Jane, who feels hurt and demoralized at the difference in treatment … or Cecil feels frustrated that he’s always asked to donate for colleagues’ weddings but no one recognizes his own non-marriage major life events … and on and on. You’re much better off sticking with either cards across the board or gifts from the organization itself.

4. Should I tell my employee I’m going to leave soon?

I manage a small office that is part of a larger corporation. We have the only office in the state, although the company heads are only about two hours away. While I haven’t even been employed by them for six months, I have noticed quite a few red flags: many people in leadership roles are leaving (including the VP who hired me) and unobtainable metrics set in place. I believe this office is being set up to fail (I know firsthand that my one remaining employee, “Gina,” was put on a PIP with the hopes she would fail, but to their surprise she came out stronger), so I’ve been looking for a way out.

Well, it happened. I just received my offer letter for a position less than a mile from my home, at the same salary, and in a field I am more comfortable in. It is still in the pending stage due to background and drug tests (no worries there), so it will probably be at least two weeks before I can hand in my notice.

I’m holding a “training day” on Friday and I would love to make sure that Gina has every tool for success. Should I give her a hint as to why I’m doing this? I also want to let her know because I think there’s a good chance that this office may close in a few months without any other employees there (they can’t hurry up and hire … the process to hire me took three months and that was nearly a year after the last manager left!).

In hindsight, I probably should have never taken this job to begin with, but now I’m attached to my employee. Can I tell her that she may want to work on her resume? She has no desire to change roles into my position.

Even though you’re not expecting any problems with the background check or drug test, things happen — positions get put on hold, offers get revoked, things end up taking much longer than anyone thought …

If you tell Gina now, you’ll be taking the risk that she’ll say something to someone else that ends up complicating things for you, and then it’s possible the firm offer won’t show up, or won’t show up on the schedule you’re expecting. So it’s really a judgment call. It sounds like Gina has reason to be more loyal to you than to the rest of the organization, but you never know what stray remark someone might make that can then blow back on you. So you’ve got to decide if that’s a risk you’re comfortable with.

For what it’s worth, though, if you do get the firm offer two weeks from now, that small amount of time is unlikely to make a significant difference when it comes to warning Gina. I think you could simply wait to tell her until it’s final, without either of you losing much for having waited.

TORONTO – In an effort to assuage concerns regarding the long overdue Eglinton Crosstown LRT, Premier Doug Ford has announced a cautiously optimistic opening date of 2236. “I’m very pleased to finally give Torontonians something to look forward to with respect to this ongoing infrastructure project. Now we can all breathe easier knowing that there […]

The post Just to be cautious, Ontario announces Eglinton LRT will be open by the year 2236 appeared first on The Beaverton.

OTTAWA – With Conservative Premiers now freely using S. 33 to overrule any court ruling getting in the way of their agenda the federal government has announced plans to rename The Charter Of Rights & Freedoms to The Charter Of Long-Term Goals & General Guidelines “Now that the landmark Charter we have been celebrating and […]

The post Charter Of Rights & Freedoms renamed Charter Of Long-Term Goals & General Guidelines appeared first on The Beaverton.

CROPSEYVILLE, NY—Frantically searching the internet for ideas, local man Jared Walker told reporters Thursday he always waits until the last minute to decide what he’ll end up sitting alone in his house dressed up as for Halloween. “Every year I tell myself I’m going to get an earlier start putting together the…

Read more...

After struggling to coalesce around a new House speaker for more than three weeks following the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, Republicans have confirmed Mike Johnson of Louisiana in the role. The Onion looks at the key moments of the GOP speakership debacle.

Read more...

WASHINGTON—Following weeks of uncertainty as a leaderless U.S. House of Representatives failed to reach a consensus, the dust finally settled Wednesday as Mike Johnson was officially named house speaker, president, pope, supreme court justice, U.N. secretary general, Dalai Lama, and conductor of the Vienna…

Read more...

WASHINGTON—Claiming the new House speaker to be one of their nearest and dearest colleagues, oil and gas lobbyists told reporters Thursday they would be happy to fill in the rest of the nation on who Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson is. “Mike is just an incredibly humble guy, so the public might not be aware that he’s an…

Read more...

PASADENA, CA—Neurotically drafting and revising the perfect opening line in her head, local single woman Vivian Court reportedly worked up the courage Thursday to strike up a conversation with a cute guy she spotted at the other end of the horse costume. “Oh my God, okay, he’s right there in the back part, so it’s the…

Read more...

WASHINGTON—Saying civilian casualties were the “price of waging a war” and that so far the price had not been high enough, President Biden spoke to reporters Thursday about the conflict in Gaza and expressed doubts that enough Palestinians had died. “I have no confidence that the death toll provided by the Hamas-run…

Read more...

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

At the end of each year, I publish a slew of “where are they now” updates from people whose questions I answered here in the past. In past years we’ve had several hundred each December and it’s been magnificent.

If you’ve had your question answered here in the past, please email me an update and let us know how your situation turned out. Did you take the advice? Did you not take the advice? What happened? How’s your situation now?  (Don’t post your updates here though; email them to me.)

Note: Your update doesn’t have to be positive or big to be worth submitting. We want to hear them all, even if you don’t think yours is that interesting.

And if there’s anyone you especially want to hear an update from, mention it here and I’ll reach out to those people directly.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’m interviewing for a job at a smaller company in my field. The company is interested in a niche secondary specialty of mine. They don’t engage in some of the traditional silo-ing of people in my job function but actually let us be in meetings with clients, I’d be managing freelancers from the jump in a way that would help me move my career forward, and the powers that be also intend for me to create my own department and processes in the long run. This is all very appealing.

During the interview, I was told that the last person in this position left because he didn’t want to grow the department. But when I tracked him down on LinkedIn, he told me he was fired with no reason or warning about a month ago.

Normally, I’d assume this is a huge red flag, but this guy seems like kind of a crank, from my brief conversation with him. He told me he’d worked at the company for two whole years … but his own LinkedIn profile made it clear he’d been there for 1.5 years. He insisted that the motivation behind letting him go was his asking for a raise … but the number he asked for is within the range I was told about in my interview, so the company is clearly fine with paying it — just not to him. He angrily told me the position was at-will employment … but that’s all positions in our field in the U.S. He also said he felt betrayed that he only got a week of severance … but that’s honestly more generous than most companies in our field would be with a person who had only been there a year and a half.

He then asked me to submit his resume to my current employer, even though I explained that my recommendation doesn’t carry a lot of weight. The resume in question was full of obvious errors, which is strange given that our field is a type of editing work, and the second page was all information that felt irrelevant at best and like an overshare at worst — including that he’d been on a men’s volleyball team in college but the team was terrible.

I don’t really know what the next step is. Can I admit that I spoke to the guy and ask my interviewer what happened to get a better idea of how likely I am to be suddenly fired in this position? (But I don’t want to get him in trouble for talking with me.) Do I assume this guy was secretly fired for a good reason, since he honestly seems kind of off?

My advice: try hard to find other connections to the company through your network so that you have more than this one person’s opinion to go on.

A lot of what you’re seeing from this guy raises flags about him, not the company. Some of it is just neutral (like saying he’d been there for two years when his LinkedIn makes it look like 1.5 years — people round up, especially in casual conversations; that’s not a big deal). But the rest doesn’t make him look like the most reliable source — not a monster or anything, just not someone whose input you want to put a ton of weight on.

Don’t tell your interviewer that you spoke with the former employee, at least not without permission. He presumably figured he was talking to you in confidence and was more candid than he would have been if he knew what he said would make its way back to the company (which he might be relying on for references in the future). People will stop being candid with fellow networkers if they have to worry what they say will be repeated back to their employers.

Maybe they did fire him with no warning. Maybe he did something egregious enough to warrant it (and the employer is giving you a vague cover story to protect his privacy) or maybe he was warned and felt blindsided when it happened anyway, which isn’t uncommon. Or sure, maybe this employer fires good employees for no reason and with no warning — but there are so many other possibilities that you can’t really know for sure.

What you can do, though, is to keep gathering data. Lean on your network to try to find other people who have worked there and can add to the data you’ve already gathered. You can also ask to talk one-on-one with people on the team and then ask them about the culture, how they get feedback, how transparently things operate, what the manager is like, and whether they feel treated fairly and are happy there. The more data points you have, the better able you will be to decide if there’s anything to worry about or not.

One-sentence summary

Scroll to the bottom for a couple notes on current weather, but in today’s post, I want to try to make some sense of what just happened in Mexico this week.

Otis’s catastrophic rapid intensification: What happened?

In general, I think Eric did a good job yesterday sort of conveying the general shock many of us in the meteorology community had with regard to Hurricane Otis. The word “unprecedented” gets tossed around a little too fast and loose these days, but truly, this was without any real precedent in Acapulco. And it was with only slight precedent anywhere in terms of how quickly it intensified.

Otis was the textbook definition of rapid intensification (RI), going from a 50 mph tropical storm on Monday evening to a 165 mph category 5 hurricane last night. Look at the change in Otis between Sunday evening and Tuesday evening, 48 hours apart. You can see the intensification chart to the right of the satellite loop. Through about mid-morning on Tuesday, everything was going basically as you’d expect for a modest hurricane with Otis. It may have been tracking toward a category 2 type landfall, or even a category 3 type landfall in a worst case, if you assumed the general rules of RI in this region.

Much like an onion, there are layers to this story that are important. First, take it from one of the more seasoned hurricane hunters, this was not what they expected when they flew their mission on Tuesday.

And this was before Otis had peaked. The typical satellite-derived intensity values often used to “proxy” intensity of storms that are far away from reconnaissance flights failed in this case to grasp how intense Otis was. In other words, Otis intensified so quickly that it basically outran the ability to measure how intense it actually was.

Here was the raw model output for Otis from Tuesday morning. This is what general weather forecasters would use to assess what the models assume will happen with a storm’s wind forecast. The dashed line is what actually occurred.

None of the best, most reliable tropical modeling had Otis as a hurricane, let alone a category 5 storm. To put it bluntly, this was an absolutely catastrophic forecast failure.

Even the National Hurricane Center by late Tuesday morning had it at 90 mph making landfall, well above any forecast data, and they concluded in their discussion that it seemed reasonable to potentially see further intensification adjustments before landfall. So even in the worst case scenario, the NHC forecast would have still been off by probably two categories less than 18 hours before landfall. And this was using strong meteorological analysis to bias correct the models upward too. And to their credit, they had it at 140 mph by the late afternoon advisory.

Interestingly, one of the tools we use to forecast the probability that a storm will rapidly intensify, SHIPS guidance, failed also. Early on Tuesday morning it only showed about a 2-3x above normal chance that the storm would intensify from a 50 mph tropical storm to a 100-125 mph hurricane. Yes, that is above climatology, but it’s not exactly anything impressive given what we’ve seen in recent years.

By Tuesday afternoon, those odds had increased to 5-9x above normal. But even this only showed 2x above normal odds that we’d get to 140 mph+. There were finally some hints available by mid to late morning on Tuesday, but nothing that would have offered a meaningful forecast improvement over what the NHC had (which called for 20-30 mph of intensification over 12-24 hours).

So the first question is, why did Otis do what it did? Probably a combination of a couple things. First, Otis was placed ideally in an environment that facilitated constructive wind shear. When we discuss wind shear it’s usually referenced in a negative sense; wind shear inhibits and destroys storms. Well, in occasional cases, as we’ve witnessed in the Gulf with Ian, Delta, Zeta, among many other storms in recent years, the wind shear can actually be constructive and help ‘vent’ the system. In this case, Otis was optimally placed in the right entrance region of the jet stream.

Storms are aided in intensification when placed in the left front or right rear (entrance) of the jet stream. Why? In that portion of the jet stream, the winds aloft diverge, meaning they either are moving in opposite directions or stronger wind is diverging away from weaker wind. Upper level divergence leads to rising air. Rising air is necessary for storms to form and maintain, and thus surface pressures tend to fall in this region of the jet stream as well.

Otis wasn’t exactly square in the middle of the right entrance region, but it was there. Additionally, Otis tracked right over an area of 31°C sea surface temperatures.

This rich warm water did not hurt matters at all.

So how did every reliable model we use miss this? That’s for graduate students and researchers to answer in the coming years, because I have no formal idea. There was something about Otis that models just could not capture and translate to RI. Human forecasters, recognizing the setup were able to mitigate some but not all of the underforecast issue. Otis’s smaller size may have also contributed. My hunch is also that if Otis had tracked, say 30-40 miles east or west of where it was, it would not have gone off to the races like this. It was simply perfectly placed to optimize intensification.

A less sexy explanation? Otis was almost unprecedented in the historical record. Only Hurricane Patricia in the Pacific in 2015 had a greater rate of RI than Otis. And in the modern era no massive storm has hit Acapulco.

Unprecedented outcomes are just that, and if the historical record has only one other remotely comparable event in this region, it becomes tough to expect that modeling can “capture” the concept that this would occur in this environment.

It feels like this was a combination of bad luck, bad timing, and bad placement. And it just so happened that a metropolitan area with over 1 million people was in the way.

It’s easy to sit here and pontificate about this or to say that weather forecasts are often wrong. But the thing is, they’re not. They’re often right. With hurricanes, forecasting has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 20 to 30 years. Perfect? No, but often more than acceptable. A failure like this shocks us because we aren’t actually used to forecast failures of this magnitude anymore! 100 years ago? Sure, this was fairly routine. But in the 2020s, we have standards and expectations for weather forecasts, and clearly this was a shock to the system. Busts like this remind us that it’s an imperfect business and there is still much work to do. The work to be done to understand Otis will take time, but we will certainly see many research papers in the coming years.

Weather update: Tammy, Texas rain, and continued wintry weather north

Just a quick punch list of items we’ll be watching over the next few days.

Hurricane Tammy’s final advisory was issued this morning, as it has transitioned into an extratropical entity, or something akin to a strong nor’easter. It will meander east of Bermuda for a few days, and there is some chance this could reacquire tropical characteristics at some point. It won’t go quietly, but hopefully any impacts to Bermuda are minimal.

Flash flooding concerns will be in the forecast in the southern Plains over the next few days, meandering from Texas into Arkansas. Generally 3 to 5 inches of rain is possible in spots. But higher amounts are a virtual certainty. South of Dallas, the 24 hour rainfall totals in Hood and Somervell Counties are estimated to be close to 10 inches.

Numerous flash flood warnings are posted in North Texas and Hill Country this morning as heavy rain falls and spreads south and east.

Snow will continue in the northern tier. Over a foot fell in Helena, Montana, with snow spreading into North Dakota. Snow should wind down tonight from west to east.

The hazards map from the Weather Prediction Center is lit up for days 3 to 7 with cold infiltrating from Canada this weekend in the North, the aforementioned heavy rain in mid-Mississippi Valley, and frost and freeze risk from near the Permian Basin and southern New Mexico across to the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. We’ll have more tomorrow!

Good morning. Houston faces four more warm days before take out first deep dive into much cooler weather. How cold? Well, most of the Houston region will likely dip into the low- to mid-40s at some point next week, and a few outlying areas might actually see the upper 30s. So yes, it’s going to be sweater weather. Halloween, as well, looks breezy and cool with temperatures of perhaps 50 degrees by the time kids start knocking on doors.

Thursday

The story for today is rainfall, or at least its potential. An upper-level disturbance will produce a mass of showers and thunderstorms to the northwest of Houston that will slowly sag down toward the area today. These storms should reach the College Station area by around noon, and push into the central Houston area later this afternoon and evening. It’s worth noting that, as they push into Houston, the showers will be losing their oomph. So if you live inland of Highway 59/Interstate 69, you have a pretty good chance of picking up 0.5 to 1.5 inch of rain between now and Friday morning, with higher isolated totals beneath heavier showers. Areas further to the southeast, particularly closer to the coast, should see substantially less rain.

Otherwise, expect partly sunny skies today, with highs in the mid-80s. Winds will be out of the south at about 10 mph, and gusts up to 20 mph. Rain chances should end late this evening, and almost certainly before midnight. Lows tonight will drop only into the mid-70s.

Friday

This will be another warm, humid day with highs in the mid-80s. We’ll again see a mix of sunshine and clouds. Rain chances will not be as high as Thursday, but we’re still going to see at least a smattering of showers, if not more. I’d peg rain chances at about 40 percent, with lesser accumulations than Thursday.

Saturday and Sunday

The weekend should see continued warm and humid weather, with two days of partly to mostly sunny skies and highs in the mid-80s. Both days will have a low chance of rain, perhaps 20 percent. All eyes, meteorologically at least, will be on the forthcoming front. But at this point it probably won’t reach the Houston metro area until late Sunday evening, perhaps crossing through downtown around midnight, give or take a few hours. We’ll likely see some showers will the front, and drier and cooler air almost immediately after its passage.

Next week

High temperatures on Monday are likely to be in the 50s, area-wide, so bundle those kids up as they head off to school. Add on to this mostly cloudy skies and blustery northerly winds, with the possibility of some scattered showers, and it’s going to feel downright chilly. Lows Monday night will drop into the upper-40s, probably.

So what about Halloween? I think it will be another partly to mostly cloudy day with highs in the 50s—perhaps even in the low 50s. There may be a few lingering showers, but I think skies will dry up before it is time to trick-or-treat. It’s possible that a reinforcing front drives low temperatures into the lower 40s by Wednesday or Thursday morning, but the forecast is starting to get fuzzy by then. We should start to warm up heading into next weekend.

EVANSTON, IL—Tossing and turning to no avail, local man Sam King was seen squirming around Thursday as his wife placed him in a Halloween costume against his will. “Be a big boy and put it on,” wife Bridget King said as she tried to wrestle her husband into an adorable pumpkin costume ahead of a Halloween party, her…

Read more...

BOSTON—Verbally confronting the seasonal gourd before becoming physical, local boyfriend Trevor Landis reportedly punched a jack-o’-lantern Thursday for smiling at his girlfriend. “What the hell do you think you’re doing—can’t you see she’s with me?” said Landis, getting right in the carved-on face of the pumpkin…

Read more...

Read more...

LEWISTON, ME—In the hours following a violent rampage in Maine in which a lone attacker killed at least 16 individuals and injured numerous others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Wednesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from …

Read more...

The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site:

The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper.

As the article explains, one of the important uses of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is to compare Web pages as they are updated over time. It allows the differences between the original and later versions of a page to be identified. In particular, this feature can be used to spot changes in news stories that have been made without any accompanying editorial notes, so-called stealth edits. Here’s why that has been awkward for The New York Times:

The Times has, in the past, faced public criticisms over some of its stealth edits. In a notorious 2016 incident, the paper revised an article about then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., so drastically after publication — changing the tone from one of praise to skepticism — that it came in for a round of opprobrium from other outlets as well as the Times’s own public editor. The blogger who first noticed the revisions and set off the firestorm demonstrated the changes by using the Wayback Machine.

More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed “death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”

This is not something that serious newspapers should do. If they make changes, they should flag them up so that people can see what has changed. This is also an opportunity for them to justify changing the text. Stealth edits suggest that there was no good reason for changing things, other than trying to cover up a blunder or infelicity in the original version.

However much The New York Times – or any other newspaper or magazine – may dislike being shown up in this way, it is absolutely vital for the public to know when changes have been made. Without the Internet Archive or similar sites that preserve the original and updated copies of texts, the idea of a trustworthy text for an article no longer exists. This, in its turn, robs such articles of their historical value, since there is no way to guarantee that the text won’t change again, and without notice. The Internet Archive is not only providing a valuable service to the public by making any changes visible, it is actually helping newspapers by encouraging them to be honest and transparent about their changes. It would seem that The New York Times has a problem with that, which is a pity.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to WalledCulture, where it is noted that the site is funded in part by the Kahle/Austin Foundation, created by the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Remember when conspiracy theories were all about who was doing it with Sasquatch?

Read more...

WASHINGTON—Explaining why the United States would not call on Israel to end its continuous airstrikes on Palestinian civilians, the White House warned Wednesday that a ceasefire in Gaza would only serve to benefit humanity. “We know there are voices across the world calling for a ceasefire, but what everyone needs to…

Read more...

Joe Harding, a former Florida lawmaker who sponsored the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for defrauding the government of $150,000 in pandemic aid. What do you think?

Read more...

Fellow parents,

I am so angry and drunk right now that I am shaking. This evening, our young son spent several unsupervised hours trick-or-treating while my husband and I got plastered at the Schroeder’s adults-only Halloween party.

Upon arriving home, we found him bawling his eyes out over his disappointing candy haul. Apparently, while the other neighborhood children received chocolate bars, quarters, and popcorn balls, my son, for some reason, received rocks. As in multiple rocks, from multiple houses.

One rock? Okay, fine. But every house in the neighborhood? This was obviously a coordinated effort to humiliate our family.

To think, as we were sipping gin fizzes, bobbing for apples, and sipping mai tais, you were all conspiring to fill our son’s empty pillowcase with pebbles and igneous stones. Shame on you.

To top it all off, our five-year-old daughter missed out on tricks or treats altogether after being coerced by that boy with an unhealthy attachment to his blanket to spend the whole night in a pumpkin patch. Without a coat on, mind you!

While I am obviously disappointed, I am also baffled as to why a group of adults have decided to single out my son. Is it his alopecia? Revenge for the time he cost us the Little League championship after a line drive somehow knocked all his clothes off?

Or were you all picking on him for his ratty, hole-ridden ghost costume? It’s not his fault he doesn’t have the dexterity of the other eight-year-olds.

Perhaps we should have assisted him rather than letting the boy go nuts with my extra-sharp stationery scissors. But I was nursing a hangover.

Then, to top it off, some girls used the back of his head as a model for a jack-o-lantern. Is his noggin especially pumpkin-shaped? Sure, but did they have to draw on him with a permanent marker? Absolutely not.

Look, none of us are perfect parents. Many of us are simply far too busy earning a living or being trapped in loveless and unfulfilling 1950s marriages to spend any time with our children. Heck, I hardly speak to my kids outside of a few sporadic and incoherent honks. But I thought we adults had an understanding. The kids are granted free rein of the neighborhood, and we all pretend like we aren’t freaked out by the sentient birds and beagles that are capable of playing ice hockey.

But now? All bets are off. Perhaps I’ll no longer look the other way regarding the Van Pelt girl practicing psychiatry without a license (her advice has not been at all helpful with my severe melancholia, by the way). And whoever are the parents of the boy they call “Pigpen”? Expect a visit from CPS.

None of your kids better invite themselves over for our family’s traditional jelly bean and popcorn Thanksgiving feast this year.

— Mrs. Brown

MAR-A-LAGO, FL—Repeatedly emphasizing how far the country had fallen since he had been removed from office, former President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that during his presidency, America only had white citizens. “When I was in the White House, every single American had blonde hair, blue eyes, and porcelain skin,”…

Read more...