The Nobel-prize winning economist Simon Kuznets once analyzed the world's economies this way — he said there are four kinds of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan... and Argentina.
If you want to understand what happens when inflation really goes off the rails, go to Argentina. Annual inflation there, over the past year, was 124 percent. Argentina's currency, the peso, is collapsing, its poverty rate is above 40 percent, and the country may be on the verge of electing a far right Libertarian president who promises to replace the peso with the dollar. Even in a country that is already deeply familiar with economic chaos, this is dramatic.
In this episode, we travel to Argentina to try to understand: what is it like to live in an economy that's on the edge? With the help of our tango dancer guide, we meet all kinds of people who are living through record inflation and political upheaval. Because even as Argentina's economy tanks, its annual Mundial de Tango – the biggest tango competition in the world – that show is still on.
This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Erika Beras. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from James Sneed. It was engineered by Maggie Luthar, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Molly Messick. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
In a summer of record-high temperatures, things just kept getting hotter for Maverick County and its firefighters.
Maverick County, on the Texas-Mexico border west of San Antonio, has a population about the same as San Marcos spread over an area about the size of Rhode Island. The Eagle Pass Fire Department is the only professional fire company and emergency medical service provider in the county.
For several months, with the help of a state grant initially intended for equipment purchases but partially redirected to overtime, the department was able to keep 21 to 24 firefighter EMTs on duty per shift. With the grant ending in August, however, those numbers were due to fall to 15 to 17— to cover three stations and operate three fire trucks and five ambulances.
The National Fire Protection Association recommends four firefighters per fire truck, and ambulances need at a minimum one driver and one medic. About 85 percent of the 10,000 or so calls the department responds to each year are for medical care.
With the reduced staffing, “it was hectic because there were multiple calls and you’re getting slammed on the EMS side,” Fire Department Captain Manuel Roman told the Texas Observer. “You always ran the risk that if a fire broke out you wouldn’t have enough personnel to respond.”
The Eagle Pass city budget includes money to hire six additional firefighters in the fall, but they won’t be fully certified in both firefighting and emergency medical services for a year.
Assistant Fire Chief Rodolfo Cardona said he’s confident that a new state grant will help fill the personnel gap. He said he’s been told the new grant will likely come through Operation Lone Star, Governor Greg Abbott’s controversial border security initiative.
“Oh man, when that grant ends, and if it’s not renewed, I think we’ll feel even more of a strain,” firefighter EMT William Dorsey said in August. “Not only are we running our typical number of calls tending to the city, [but] we have the additional calls from [the Texas Department of Public Safety] and Border Patrol.”
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Firefighter EMT Rodrigo Pineda listens as a patient tells him
about her medical history. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas ObserverFrom left to right, firefighter EMTs Rudy Castillon, Alfonso Garcia-ZuaZua, and Israel Sanchez walk through the apparatus bay. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas ObserverFrom left to right, firefighter EMTs Harish Garcia, Jose Garza, Luis Huerta, and Pedro Olivares transport a disoriented woman to the hospital. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas ObserverFirefighter EMT Harrish Garcia performs chest compressions on a girl who drowned while crossing the Rio Grande. She was declared dead at the hospital. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas ObserverGarcia, left, and trainee Marco Lopez wait for team members to return to the ambulance bay. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas ObserverJose Escamilla looks out the window of an ambulance on its way to the hospital with a patient. One of the department’s newest hires, he was certified then only as an emergency medical technician, not a firefighter, and only allowed to respond to EMS calls. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for Texas Observer
The Canadian Walk for Veterans, a countrywide event which seeks to raise awareness about the challenges facing military personnel, got underway at 9:30 a.m., as participants made their way along a five kilometre loop on the city’s South Glenmore Park Pathway.
On Saturday, Parks Foundation celebrated the official opening of the Brawn Family Foundation Rotary Park, Alberta’s first park dedicated to enhancing mental health.
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
Apple fucked us on right to repair (again) (permalink)
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
Why does Apple hate repair so much? It's not that they want to poison our water and bodies with microplastics; it's not that they want to hasten the day our coastal cities drown; it's not that they relish the human misery that accompanies every gram of conflict mineral. They aren't sadists. They're merely sociopathically greedy.
Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple:
So Apple does everything it can to monopolize repair. Not just because this lets the company gouge you on routine service, but because it lets them decide when your phone is beyond repair, so they can offer you a trade-in, ensuring both that you buy a new device and that the device you buy is another Apple.
There are so many tactics Apple gets to use to sabotage repair. For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on the subassemblies in its devices. This allows the company to enlist US Customs to seize and destroy refurbished parts that are harvested from dead phones by workers in the Pacific Rim:
Of course, the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That's why Apple's so-called "recycling" program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs:
Shredding parts and cooking up bogus trademark claims is just for starters, though. For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
DMCA 1201 is an "anti-circumvention" law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control." That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some Digital Rights Management (DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal – even if the thing itself is perfectly legal.
When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories. In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country.
But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products – or even subassemblies in their products – in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III.
Welcome to Act III.
Today, it costs about a quarter to add a system-on-a-chip to even the tiniest parts. These SOCs can run DRM. Here's how that DRM works: when you put a new part in a device, the SOC and the device's main controller communicate with one another. They perform a cryptographic protocol: the part says, "Here's my serial number," and then the main controller prompts the user to enter a manufacturer-supplied secret code, and the master controller sends a signed version of this to the part, and the part and the system then recognize each other.
This process has many names, but because it was first used in the automotive sector, it's widely known as VIN-Locking (VIN stands for "vehicle identification number," the unique number given to every car by its manufacturer). VIN-locking is used by automakers to block independent mechanics from repairing your car; even if they use the manufacturer's own parts, the parts and the engine will refuse to work together until the manufacturer's rep keys in the unlock code:
VIN locking is everywhere. It's how John Deere stops farmers from fixing their own tractors – something farmers have done literally since tractors were invented:
It's in ventilators. Like mobile phones, ventilators are a grotesquely monopolized sector, controlled by a single company Medtronic, whose biggest claim to fame is effecting the world's largest tax inversion in order to manufacture the appearance that it is an Irish company and therefore largely untaxable. Medtronic used the resulting windfall to gobble up most of its competitors.
During lockdown, as hospitals scrambled to keep their desperately needed supply of ventilators running, Medtronic's VIN-locking became a lethal impediment. Med-techs who used donor parts from one ventilator to keep another running – say, transplanting a screen – couldn't get the device to recognize the part because all the world's civilian aircraft were grounded, meaning Medtronic's technicians couldn't swan into their hospitals to type in the unlock code and charge them hundreds of dollars.
The saving grace was an anonymous, former Medtronic repair tech, who built pirate boxes to generate unlock codes, using any housing they could lay hands on to use as a case: guitar pedals, clock radios, etc. This tech shipped these gadgets around the world, observing strict anonymity, because Article 6 of the EUCD also bans circumvention:
Of course, Apple is a huge fan of VIN-locking. In phones, VIN-locking is usually called "serializing" or "parts-pairing," but it's the same thing: a tiny subassembly gets its own microcontroller whose sole purpose is to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget. Parts-pairing lets Apple block repairs even when the technician uses new, Apple parts – but it also lets Apple block refurb parts and third party parts.
For many years, Apple was the senior partner and leading voice in blocking state Right to Repair bills, which it killed by the dozen, leading a coalition of monopolists, from Wahl (who boobytrap their hair-clippers with springs that cause their heads to irreversibly decompose if you try to sharpen them at home) to John Deere (who reinvented tenant farming by making farmers tenants of their tractors, rather than their land).
But Apple's opposition to repair eventually became a problem for the company. It's bad optics, and both Apple customers and Apple employees are volubly displeased with the company's ecocidal conduct. But of course, Apple's management and shareholders hate repair and want to block it as much as possible.
But Apple knows how to Think Differently. It came up with a way to eat its cake and have it, too. The company embarked on a program of visibly supporting right to repair, while working behind the scenes to sabotage it.
Last year, Apple announced a repair program. It was hilarious. If you wanted to swap your phone's battery, all you had to do was let Apple put a $1200 hold on your credit card, and then wait while the company shipped you 80 pounds' worth of specialized tools, packed in two special Pelican cases:
Then, you swapped your battery, but you weren't done! After your battery was installed, you had to conference in an authorized Apple tech who would tell you what code to type into a laptop you tethered to the phone in order to pair it with your phone. Then all you had to do was lug those two 40-pound Pelican cases to a shipping depot and wait for Apple to take the hold off your card (less the $120 in parts and fees).
By contrast, independent repair outfits like iFixit will sell you all the tools you need to do your own battery swap – including the battery! for $32. The whole kit fits in a padded envelope:
But while Apple was able to make a showy announcement of its repair program and then hide the malicious compliance inside those giant Pelican cases, sabotaging right to repair legislation is a lot harder.
Not that they didn't try. When New York State passed the first general electronics right-to-repair bill in the country, someone convinced New York Governor Kathy Hochul to neuter it with last-minute modifications:
But that kind of trick only works once. When California's right to repair bill was introduced, it was clear that it was gonna pass. Rather than get run over by that train, Apple got on board, supporting the legislation, which passed unanimously:
But Apple got the last laugh. Because while California's bill contains many useful clauses for the independent repair shops that keep your gadgets out of a landfill, it's a state law, and DMCA 1201 is federal. A state law can't simply legalize the conduct federal law prohibits. California's right to repair bill is a banger, but it has a weak spot: parts-pairing, the scourge of repair techs:
Every generation of Apple devices does more parts-pairing than the previous one, and the current models are so infested with paired parts as to be effectively unrepairable, except by Apple. It's so bad that iFixit has dropped its repairability score for the iPhone 14 from a 7 ("recommend") to a 4 (do not recommend):
Parts-pairing is bullshit, and Apple are scum for using it, but they're hardly unique. Parts-pairing is at the core of the fuckery of inkjet printer companies, who use it to fence out third-party ink, so they can charge $9,600/gallon for ink that costs pennies to make:
But if turning phones into e-waste to eke out another billion-dollar stock buyback is indefensible, stranding people with disabilities for months at a time while they await repairs is so obviously wicked that the conscience recoils. That's why it was so great when Colorado passed the nation's first wheelchair right to repair bill last year:
But it can't be the end. When Bill Clinton signed DMCA 1201 into law 25 years ago, he loaded a gun and put it on the nation's mantlepiece and now it's Act III and we're all getting sprayed with bullets. Everything from ovens to insulin pumps, thermostats to lightbulbs, has used DMCA 1201 to limit repair, modification and improvement.
Congress needs to rid us of this scourge, to let us bring back all the benefits of interoperability. I explain how this all came to be – and what we should do about it – in my new Verso Books title, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
"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
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.
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.
This theoretical physicist and mathematician drops a new video several times a month, dispensing her dry wit and pithy wisdom to a loyal fan base of nerds across the internet.
NASA's Osiris-REx mission has successfully returned a pristine sample of asteroid back to Earth. This cupful-or-so of space rock could shed light on the solar system's origins.
GATLINBURG, TN—Having assessed the evidence in the couple’s wedding photos, sources reported Monday that local man Kevin Butryn appeared to have locked down his marriage proposal to wife Sandra Lewis just as his hair loss was becoming noticeable. “Whoa, check out that receding hairline! He just made it in by the skin…
Republicans are denouncing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to loosen the Senate’s informal dress code, claiming that allowing casual clothing on the Senate floor disrespects the institution they serve. What do you think?
NASA's first effort to retrieve samples from an asteroid will send a capsule that contains extraterrestrial pebbles and dust plunging towards a Utah desert on Sunday.
(Image credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
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 tell an employee who calls in sick at the last minute to find their own coverage?
I know that you always advocate for the employer to find coverage when an employee is sick. But what about when it’s always at the last second?
I own a cafe and people have to be there at 6:30 in the morning. When people text me the night before that they are not feeling well, I have no problem calling around to see if anyone can cover it. I’m talking about when people call at 6:25 in the morning to tell me that they don’t feel well, and should they still come in if they’re throwing up/have a fever? (Magic words in the food service industry.) My opinion is, if you’re calling me at 6:25 in the morning, you knew that you were sick for quite some time, and you’re probably just lying in bed thinking, “Ugh, I don’t want to get up.” So now I have to continue doing my job, plus your job. I don’t have time to call six people to see if they can cover for you. Can I tell people that’s their responsibility?
No, you should not. It’s not reasonable to expect someone who’s sick and probably needs to go back to bed to start making phone calls. Moreover, finding coverage is work! I realize it’s common in food service to treat it as if it’s not and to expect people to do that labor unpaid, but any time someone is spending their time in service of their employer and engaging in action they wouldn’t be taking otherwise, that’s actual work and they should be compensated for it. And in this case, your employee is too sick to do that work and so it falls to you or someone you designate to take on that task instead.
That said, you can certainly ask people to alert you as early as possible if they’re sick. They might be waiting until just before 6:30 because they don’t think you’d want to be contacted at, say, 5 am … so ask them to text as early as they know they won’t be coming in, in case they haven’t thought that part of it through.
2. My manager invited half of us to a party at her house and excluded the rest of us
My supervisor invited two employees to a party at her house this weekend. I overheard (it’s important that I overheard) her invite one, and I texted my other coworkers to ask if they thought that was appropriate (to legitimately get a gut check). That’s when I found out she’d also invited another coworker.
One of the invited coworkers told her I was upset and that I felt it was inappropriate. So I was called to my great-grandboss’s office to “clear the air.”
The meeting determined that she’s allowed to invite some of her direct reports to her house for a party and not all of them. Out of four employees, she invited two and excluded two, and my leadership thinks that’s fine and said we can’t do anything about it because it’s a private event.
Further, my boss stated that I was causing toxicity by asking my coworkers about this. So: the supervisor who is showing favoritism isn’t causing the toxic environment, but the employee who asks about it is? Is this as nuts as I think it is?
Yes, this is wildly off-base. You are right and they are wrong.
Managers have a professional obligation not to show obvious social favoritism, like by inviting half their employees to a party at their house and excluding the others (also by not vacationing with an employee, dating an employee, having sleepovers with an employee, and on and on). People who don’t want that restriction on their social relationships at work shouldn’t accept management roles.
Your employer is 100% wrong that they can’t do anything about it because it’s a private event; they have the authority and the standing to tell a manager in their employ that she cannot show this sort of favoritism and still remain a manager there. The fact that they’re unwilling to is deeply problematic … and the fact that they’re blaming you for raising it is even more so.
3. Therapists and work advice
I, like many professionals, suffer from a mental illness. It’s well controlled with medication and therapy. Still, tough times at work exacerbate it, and I have often found myself discussing work issues with my therapist.
I’m sure the work advice my past therapists have given is what they think will be best for my mental health … but I’m not sure they’ve always understood the professional ramifications of their recommendations. It sucks to say it, but sometimes a temporary, limited sacrifice in one area of life (like a mild knock to my mental health during a stint with a bad boss or company) might set me up for long-term benefits that are worth it to me (a stable, decently paid, and fulfilling career path). It might make me feel better to pour my heart out to my boss and coworkers when I’m struggling — until I got fired for crossing professional boundaries! Then I would feel a lot worse than before. I would rather understand the trade-offs up-front so I can own the outcome, whatever I choose.
It’s awesome that we’re seeing a societal shift away from stigmatizing mental illness and are more willing to believe someone struggling with mental health can be a productive, even high-performing employee. But sometimes I worry that many therapists don’t fully understand that 1) that shift still hasn’t reached a lot of people, 2) some people will exploit any sign of “weakness” to get ahead, and 3) the contractual relationships and power dynamics in a business environment mean that you can’t or shouldn’t deal with your colleagues the way you should with your friends and loved ones. I wonder if therapists themselves have a unique working environment that might color their responses.
I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t seek out therapy if they need it! It’s been a huge help in my life. But are there common pieces of work advice that you hear from some therapists that you wish came with a few more your-mileage-may-vary qualifiers?
Oh yes. Some therapists give advice for handling things at work that might be great in non-work relationships without accounting for the dynamics in professional ones (and which in some cases could cause real professional harm). That’s not true of all therapists by any means, but when it does happen, the two big categories seem to be: (1) trying to destigmatize mental health issues without accounting for the level of medical privacy that’s appropriate at work, or not accounting for the reality that sharing mental health challenges can have professional ramifications (it shouldn’t! but it still does, far too often) and (2) not fully understanding the power dynamics and political realities of many workplaces, possibly because their own work environments are very different from the ones their patients are in.
Some examples that comes to mind from letters here: the therapist who told a patient to start highlighting issues with their work that their boss wasn’t concerned about in order to “break the silence” around imposter syndrome (including things like responding to being called a “perfect employee” with “I don’t feel perfect because of the issue with my work from last Thursday”). In the comments on that letter, we also heard about a therapist who “suggested simple conversations without acknowledging that politics could exist and those conversations weren’t as simple as she maintained” … and someone else reported, “It’s nice that my therapist thinks I so special that my employer should let me work three days a week if I want to, but she has no idea whether it’s a reasonable request.” Those are pretty typical of what we hear about when we hear about bad work advice from therapists.
4. Contacting a hiring manager directly to get around an automated requirement
My stepdaughter will finish her master’s program in December and is currently applying to full-time jobs for once she graduates. However, she’s been blocked from applying to her “dream job” and wants to contact a manager in the company directly in order to avoid using their hiring portal.
Here’s what happened: earlier this year, she applied to an internship with Big Multinational Company and had to take a logic test as part of their application process. However, she failed the logic test. When she tried to reapply and attempt the test again, she received an automated message that because she failed the test, she cannot reapply for any roles with them for 12 months. Now, after a successful internship with a different company, she’s found a full-time role that she would be perfect for with BMC — but her application was blocked, again, due to the failed logic test.
She considers that she’s gained significant new knowledge and experience from her current internship, so she deserves another chance. She found the hiring manager for her dream role at BMC on LinkedIn and wants to send a direct message in order to get around the block that’s been put on her applications on their job portal.
I think this is a terrible idea, but my husband (her dad) says she should do it because she has nothing to lose, so why not try? She’s in a big, generic field, so it’s probably unlikely that “word will get around” or anything like that. I feel confident that this won’t work, but it’s true that I can’t really think of any negative consequences. What should she do?
She can certainly try. If she’s a really strong candidate otherwise, the hiring manager might be willing to consider her — and hiring managers often have the ability to bypass some hiring portal requirements for a candidate they really want (although not always, and it’s less likely at a big multinational company). If she’s not an unusually strong candidate, though, it’s very unlikely that the hiring manager would do that … and they’re definitely not going to do it just because she’s had an internship since originally taking the test. (Presumably most people who failed the test have other work experiences afterward too, and that doesn’t get the 12-month wait waived.)
Either way, her dad is right that she has nothing to lose by trying it so she might as well if she feels strongly about it.
Someone should, however, try to steer her away from the “deserves another chance” thinking — which isn’t really a thing in hiring — as well as the whole idea of a dream job.
PragerU, an education nonprofit with a large online following, has recently been in the spotlight after its videos were approved for use in Florida, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire public schools. The Onion tells you everything you need to know about PragerU.
CARMEL, IN—Struggling to keep a straight face while addressing the Republican candidate, snickering teen angels reportedly appeared before Mike Pence Friday to tell him it was totally God’s will that he keep running for president. “God told us to tell you that He needs you to be commander-in-chief, so it’s super…
Research is in many ways a subject of debate. Ideas are presented with evidence and through repetition and discussion they are tested and examined. Every discovery or methodology in science is subject to inquiry, dissection and disagreement because that is at the very core, the point of the scientific method. There are few constants (even mathematical constants are the subject of much debate) and even fewer unanimous agreements.
One exception to this is that scientifically water is obviously the best lab liquid.
Now I don’t make that claim lightly. To give anything the lofty award of best in state of matter is quite an accolade so obviously I do so with appropriate consideration and thought. It’s also something I come to with a lifetime’s experience as a user, consumer and balloon filler of water.
First off water saves researcher lives! Which is I think a strong start for any best of anything contender. Water clearly has a role in supporting life, putting out fires etc. but to be best-lab-liquid you have to do more, and water is relied on to do so much more. Water is the go-to answer to the part of a risk assessment where you spill something dangerous and are inevitably recommended to “dilute with lots of water”.
It’s a bit counter-intuitive that when you spill something the first thing you do is make the spill bigger with water but that is the brilliant power of water to prevent people from accidentally wiping up concentrated gook.
Most labs even have showers that are specifically designed for washing researchers down if they spill something concentrated gook on themselves. Even though most of the showers are filled with more rust than water they are sometimes the only thing stopping a researcher from getting a super cool-looking giant hole in their leg.
Secondly, water helps with waste disposal. We’ve actually written an entire article about the phrase “down the sink with lots of water” which is the pinnacle of a lot of labs’ hazardous waste disposal systems. But just because it gets misused a lot doesn’t make it a bad idea per se and if anything is a sign of just how good water is for getting rid of small amounts of complex lab waste that it is often the default answer.
Since we wrote that article a number of lab-sink disposal systems have been developed which take “down the sink with lots of water” and add UV sterilisation, thermal degradation and a lot of filtration. Which, is a great addon but even those systems are nothing without waste helping water.
Thirdly, water helps make so many cool things sometimes just by being cool. Because not only does water save lives and dispose of waste it also helps make the things that threaten our lives and needs disposing of!
Without water biochemistry labs would be filled with many bottles of off-white power waiting for a solvent. Without water, chemistry labs would have solutions sat in empty temperature baths connected to distillation columns capable of separating nothing. Without water, physics labs would have overheating lasers and some very dirty components. Without water, geologists would have… umm dustier rocks?
Lastly, you need water to make coffee. There’s no more to that argument as I think it stands on its own, albeit with a slightly twitchy wide awake look.
So, for all of the above reasons and more water is unequivocally the best lab liquid. Others come close, Ethanol is a strong contender and Oobleck certainly gets some points for being the go-to science demo, but nothing can touch the long list of things we have to thank water for. So raise a glass of to celebrate this amazing liquid, but remember no drinking the lab, pour it down the sink and don’t forget to wash it away with plenty of water.
I’ve had an ImageWriter II printer gathering dust in the back of my closet for at least a decade. Originally purchased at the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market for 25 cents, it was an obsolete anachronism even then, and the seller was desperate to get rid of it. It came home with me, but I never used it and the printer was quickly forgotten.
Recently I wondered: Will it still work? Have the internal capacitors leaked their caustic innards all over the PCB? Has the ink ribbon from Bill Clinton’s presidency ossified into solid rock? Will those tiny and fantastic dot-matrix pins be stuck forever in tar-like goo?
Somewhat shockingly, I discovered that you can still buy new ImageWriter II ink ribbons in 2023. And also continuous feed paper, with the tractor holes on the sides. You can even find newly-made Mini DIN 8 printer cables, if you know where to look.
It was a journey back in time, straining to remember setup steps that I’d last done 30 years ago. In the classic Mac OS, where is printer setup done? In the vaguely-named Chooser desk accessory? Is it supposed to show me a list of installed printers? Do I need driver software? Which classic Mac OS programs even support printing?
After a few minutes of awkward experiments, I discovered TeachText and its six glorious built-in bitmap fonts, with a choice of six specific font sizes. No Postscript, vector fonts, or arbitrary text size scaling here.
I typed a few lines of text, clicked the print button, and… nothing. Seconds passed, and I felt the sting of failure, but then the printer sprang to life. Hooray, success! I was rewarded for my efforts with a soothing bzzzt-bzzzt-bzzzt symphony of print head movement as the ImageWriter slowly processed the page. And I do mean slowly. Even in normal quality mode, it takes about a minute to print a single page of text. I shudder to imagine the speed of high-quality print mode.
We are spoiled with today’s laser printers that can render a full page in seconds. For now it’s fun to relive the world of 1980s printing. I feel like I should be writing an 8th grade history report about Julius Caesar and then creating Happy Birthday banners with Print Shop.
For people who are attending Mactoberfest Meetup on October 14, I’ll have a computer running MacWrite and connected to this Imagewriter, so you can experience the good old days too. Bring your school history report on a 3.5 inch floppy.
NEW YORK—Alleging “massive systemic theft” of his original work, bestselling fantasy author George R.R. Martin filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI this week after its artificial-intelligence interface ChatGPT mentioned incest. “I practically invented incest, and it is a theme at the heart of all my books,” said…
The man whose life inspired the film Sound Of Freedom about fighting child sex trafficking has reportedly stepped away from his watchdog organization after an internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations brought by seven women. What do you think?
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
When I was hired for my current job, it was for overnights, with the understanding that I would work three to four days per week. I was also trained on the evening shift. Since those training shifts, all my shifts have been overnights. I was also assured that I could move to full-time after several months, working both overnights and evenings. There is almost always only one person working overnight, every night. I had a second, seasonal job, but that ended months ago and will not re-open.
That full-time status never appeared, and several actual full-timers have been hired. That is beside the main issue. The main issue is the full-time overnighter, Rick. For the past several months, I have been scheduled for three days and him four. At least once a pay period, he has called me, asking me to come in for him. Almost always, it’s to take the shift, not to switch with him. He has always assured me that management is aware. (I doubt this, but anyway.) Almost always, I take it. Nor have I missed a single one of my own shifts, unless it was switched at his request.
He also keeps calling one or two hours before the start of his shift to ask me to take it, and if I don’t answer his texts, he will call me. His excuses have ranged from his mother being in the hospital, to him being “too tired.” The one time I turned him down, I had a 103+ degree fever. He complained about my saying no, until I offered to take one of his other days. He turned me down, and then complained to another coworker that he wasn’t sure if he’d “feel like working that other day.” He did not mention the fever to her, of course.
I was warned that he would try to take advantage of my time, and have been told by multiple people that he is lazy. I should have listened, but my bank account dictates otherwise. My coworkers advised me not to complain, saying that management would probably just ban shift switching altogether and there would go that extra day of income. To be honest, I have been more upset about the late notice than the shifts themselves. It’s quiet at night.
Until this schedule. I looked at it tonight, and I am down to two days, and he has five. The manager is out until Monday, but I texted her with the following: “I need to talk to you on Monday, please. I can’t afford to only have two shifts in a week. Rick texts and calls me at least once a pay period to work his shifts (usually within a couple hours of the shift), knowing I can’t afford to refuse. I don’t think it’s fair he gets even more hours when he doesn’t work the ones he has.”
If management punishes me, I’m planning to job hunt. Less pay (nothing around here pays within $2 of what I currently make) but more hours will still be a net win for me. Am I handling this the right way? I feel like Rick has me by the short hairs and knows it. I also get the feeling that he may start calling me more often to cover his shifts, knowing I can even less financially afford to say no. I very much doubt management is keeping an eye on who’s scheduled vs who actually shows up, especially at night.
Job search.
The issue is less Rick — although he’s a problem — and more that you’re working somewhere that promised you full-time work, has reneged on that, and now is scheduling you for even fewer shifts than you started out with.
Rick is a problem only because your employer has put you in a position where the only way to get enough shifts to support yourself is to say yes to Rick’s last-minute requests. If your employer was giving you the amount of hours they promised you, you’d have a much easier time saying no to Rick. He might be taking advantage of the fact that he knows you want more shifts, but your employer is responsible for you being in that spot in the first place.
All that said … if your management is unaware of who’s actually working each shift (and doesn’t realize how often it’s you, not Rick), that’s worth pointing out. I could quibble with the framing of your message to your manager a bit, but it’s reasonable to say, essentially, “I came on board with the promise of having full-time hours by now. I don’t have that, and in fact I’m scheduled for fewer shifts now than I was earlier on. I’ve been working X extra shifts per week because Rick frequently asks me to take his at the last minute, but that’s not sustainable and I need a schedule I can plan on. Since I’ve been averaging X shifts a week, can we formalize that on the schedule so it’s not dependent on last-minute calls from Rick to fill in for him?”
WASHINGTON—Following hours of meetings with lawmakers to try to shore up U.S. support for his country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly grabbed whatever office supplies he could get his hands on in the Capitol Thursday, saying he needed them for war. “We really need a bunch of these staplers for the…
