Today's links

• "Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics: A system without slack is easily disrupted.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018
• Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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"Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (permalink)

It's been 143 days since the WGA went on strike against the Hollywood studios. While early tactical leaks from the studios had studio execs chortling and twirling their mustaches about writers caving once they started losing their homes, the strikers aren't wavering – they're still out there, pounding the picket lines, every weekday:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/how-hollywood-writers-make-ends-meet-100-days-into-the-writers-guild-strike.html

The studios obviously need writers. That gleeful, anonymous studio exec who got such an obvious erotic charge at the thought of workers being rendered homeless as punishment for challenging his corporate power completely misread the room, and his comments didn't demoralize the writers. Instead, they inspired the actors to go on strike, too.

But how have the writers stayed out since May Day? How have the actors stayed out for 69 days since their strike started on Bastille Day? We can thank the studios for that! As it turns out, the studios have devoted so much energy to rendering creative workers as precarious as possible, hiring as little as they can getting away with and using punishing overtime as a substitute for adequate staffing that they've eliminated all the workers who can't survive on side-hustles and savings for six or seven months at a time.

But even for those layoff-hardened workers, long strikes are brutal, and of course, all the affiliated trades, from costumers to grips, are feeling the pain. The strike fund only goes so far, and non-striking, affected workers don't even get that. That's why I've been donating regularly to the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps all affected workers out with cash transfers (I just gave them another $500):

https://secure2.convio.net/afa/site/Donation2?df_id=8117&8117.donation=form1&mfc_pref=T

As hot labor summer is revealed as a turning point – not just a season – long strikes will become the norm. Bosses still don't believe in worker power, and until they get their minds right, they're going to keep on trying to starve their workforces back inside. To get a sense of how long workers will have to hold out, just consider the Warrior Met strike, where Alabama coal-miners stayed out for 23 months:

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/

As Kim Kelly explained to Adam Conover in the latest Factually podcast, the Alabama coal strikers didn't get anywhere near the attention that the Hollywood strikers have enjoyed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvyMHf7Yg0Q

(To learn more about the untold story of worker organizing, from prison unions to the key role that people of color and women played in labor history, check out Kelly's book, "Fight Like Hell," now in paperback:)

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

Which brings me to the UAW strike. This is an historic strike, the first time that the UAW has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once. Past autoworkers' strikes have marked turning points for all American workers. The 1945/46 GM strike established employers' duty to cover worker pensions, health care, and cost of living allowances. The GM strike created the American middle-class:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/

The Big Three are fighting for all the marbles here. They are refusing to allow unions to organize EV factories. Given that no more internal combustion cars will be in production in just a few short years, that's tantamount to eliminating auto unions altogether. The automakers are flush with cash, including billions in public subsidies from multiple bailouts, along with billions more from greedflation price-gouging. A long siege is inevitable, as the decimillionaires running these companies earn their pay by starving out their workers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/general-motors-ceo-mary-barra-salary-auto-workers-strike-uaw-2023-9

The UAW knows this, of course, and their new leadership – helmed by the union's radical president Shawn Fain – has a plan. UAW workers are engaged in tactical striking, shutting down key parts of the supply chain on a rolling basis, making the 90-day strike fund stretch much farther:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-18-labors-militant-creativity/

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car's own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they're brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

This is especially true for staffing. Automakers are violently allergic to hiring workers, because new workers get benefits and workplace protection. Instead, the car companies routinely offer "voluntary" overtime to their existing workforce. By refusing this overtime, workers can kneecap production, without striking.

Enter "Eight and Skate," a campaign among UAW workers to clock out after their eight hour shift. As Keith Brower Brown writes for Labor Notes, the UAW organizers are telling workers that "It’s crossing an unofficial picket line to work overtime. It’s helping out the company":

https://labornotes.org/2023/09/work-extra-during-strike-auto-workers-say-eight-and-skate

Eight and Skate has already started to work; the Buffalo Ford plant can no longer run its normal weekend shifts because workers are refusing to put in voluntary overtime. Of course, bosses will strike back: the next step will be forced overtime, which will lead to the unsafe conditions that unionized workers are contractually obliged to call paid work-stoppages over, shutting down operations without touching the strike fund.

What's more, car bosses can't just halt safety stoppages or change the rules on overtime; per the UAW's last contract, bosses are required to bargain on changes to overtime rules:

https://uaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Working-Without-Contract-FAQ-FINAL-2.pdf

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM's "highly profitable" SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That's been the status quo for 11 years, but when bosses circulated the usual overtime signup sheet last week, every worker wrote "a big fat NO" next to their names.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen points out that this overtime addiction puts a new complexion on the much-hyped workerpocalypse that EVs will supposedly bring about. EVs are much simpler to build than conventional cars, the argument goes, so a US transition to EVs will throw many autoworkers out of work:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-20-big-threes-labor-shortages-uaw/

But the reality is that most autoworkers are doing one and a half jobs already. Reducing the "workforce" by a third could leave all these workers with their existing jobs, and the 40-hour workweek that their forebears fought for at GM inn 1945/46. Add to that the additional workers needed to make batteries, build and maintain charging infrastructure, and so on, and there's no reason to think that EVs will weaken autoworker power.

And as Dayen points out, this overtime addiction isn't limited to cars. It's also endemic to the entertainment industry, where writers' "mini rooms" and other forms of chronic understaffing are used to keep workforces at a skeleton crew, even when the overtime costs more than hiring new workers.

Bosses call themselves job creators, but they have a relentless drive to destroy jobs. If there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers – hence all the hype about AI and automation. The stories about looming AI-driven mass unemployment are fairy tales, but they're tailor made for financiers who get alarming, life-threatening priapism at the though of firing us all and replacing us with shell-scripts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This is why Republican "workerism" rings so hollow. Trump's GOP talks a big game about protecting "workers" (by which they mean anglo men) from immigrants and "woke captialism," but they have nothing to say about protecting workers from bosses and bankers who see every dime a worker gets as misappropriated from their dividend.

Unsurprisingly, conservative message-discipline sucks. As Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, for every mealymouthed Josh Hawley mouthing talking points that "support workers" by blaming China and Joe Biden for the Big Three's greed, there's a Tim Scott, saying the quiet part aloud:

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/republicans-uaw-strike-hawley-trump-scott/

Quoth Senator Scott: "I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely":

https://twitter.com/American_Bridge/status/1704136706574741988

The GOP's workerism is a tissue-thin fake. They can never and will never support real worker power. That creates an opportunity for Biden and Democrats to seize:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

Reversing two generations of anti-worker politics is a marathon, not a sprint. The strikes are going to run for months, even years. Every worker will be called upon to support their striking siblings, every day. We can do it. Solidarity now. Solidarity forever.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• How One Robber Baron's Gamble on Railroads Brought Down His Bank and Plunged the U.S. Into the First Great Depression https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/robber-baron-gamble-railroads-brought-down-bank-plunged-us-into-first-great-depression-panic-1873-180982877/ (h/t Nancy Proctor)

• Crypto scam social science thoughts: The role of the elite news media and academia https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/09/13/crypto-scam-social-science-thoughts-the-role-of-the-elite-news-media-and-academia/

• Turning Pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781956763850/turning-pages/

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Dewey Decimal bullies go after theme hotel https://web.archive.org/web/20030901000000*/http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny–deweydecimaldefen0920sep20,0,3455241.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wirehttps://nymag.com/news/media/50279/

#10yrsago DragonCon cosplayers who dressed up as Marriott carpet get a cease-and-desist for their fabric offering https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/marriott-hotel-carpet-cosplay-legal-action/

#5yrsago Search the databases of Trump political appointees’ resumes and discover their undisclosed conflicts of interest https://projects.propublica.org/trump-town/staffers/category/resumes

#5yrsago Research shows that patent examiners are more likely to grant patents to companies they later work for https://www.nber.org/papers/w24638

#5yrsago Backyard Blockbusters: a documentary about the amazing genre of fanfilms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JRxw-Ww4rA

#5yrsago Puerto Rico didn’t suffer a “natural disaster”: it was looted and starved long before the hurricanes https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-disaster-capitalism/

#5yrsago Apple’s fine-print reveals a secret program to spy on Iphone users and generate “trust scores” https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/apple-trust-score-iphone-data-black-mirror-email-phone-fraud-a8546051.html

#5yrsago Ticketmaster stung by undercover journalists, who reveal that the company deliberately enables ticket touts and rips off artists https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-vegas-1.4828535

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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: Plausible Sentence Generators https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/
Upcoming appearances:

• DIG Festival (Modena, Italy), Sept 22
  https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/

• Launch for Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You," Book Soup (LA), Sept 22
  https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key

• Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

• An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2
  https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab

• Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8
  https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano

• The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis), Oct 15
  https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127

• 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16
  https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/

• 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (Charleston, WV), Oct 19
  https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/

• Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25
  https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances:

• The Jim Rutt Show
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-2/

• How to Take Back the Internet (Wired Have a Nice Future)
  https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-21/

• Sci-fi and Amazon's empire (The Workers' Speculative Society)
  https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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

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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.

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

Good morning. Houston faces four more hot, sunny, and humid days that will carry us through the weekend. However, unlike earlier this summer when high pressure remained intransigent, this high pressure system will start to shift eastward by this weekend. This will allow a weak front to move into, and stall over the Houston region, providing some slight relief in terms of rain showers and moderately cooler temperatures.

Thursday

Skies will be mostly sunny today, with highs in the mid-90s for most of the area, with some inland points possibly reaching the upper 90s. Winds will be light, out of the southeast, at 5 to 10 mph. There is a very slight chance of showers or thunderstorms, perhaps 10 percent, this afternoon. Temperatures tonight will be sticky and warm, only briefly dropping below 80 degrees.

Friday

The last day of the work week will be a lot like Thursday, albeit with a bit higher chance of rain. I’d look for the possibility of thunderstorms to develop during the late afternoon or early evening hours, with perhaps a 20 or 30 percent likelihood of that happening. It’s something we’ll keep an eye on for Friday night lights, and this being Homecoming season for many schools.

Saturday and Sunday

At 1:49 am CT on Saturday we’ll reach the September equinox, the point at which the Sun crosses the equator and heads south. This is the traditional start of fall, and the march toward winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but Mother Nature will care not a single whit this year.

The weekend just looks hot and mostly sunny, with highs in the mid-90s for much of the city, and the possibility of upper 90s further inland. Rain chances, again, will be on the order of 20 to 30 percent each day, but mostly it’s just gonna be sunny outside. Nights will continue to be warm.

Next week

As I mentioned above, a weak front is going to move toward the region by the end of the weekend, and this will change our weather somewhat for next week. I’m afraid I still don’t have great confidence in that that means. It could lead to widespread rainfall accumulations for much of the area in excess of 1 inch, or it could be a tenth of an inch, or two. Monday will have the best chance of rain. The front also could lead to nighttime lows in the lower 70s, or we might get lucky and drop into the upper 60s. At the least, it should mean highs fall into the low 90s for awhile.

SPOKANE, WA—No longer able to suppress their percolating irritation with the self-described “culinary prodigy,” local couple Kevin Cochran and Tina Hayes reportedly ended their mutual silent treatment Thursday to bond over their shared disdain for an arrogant Chopped contestant. “That dude’s, like, 23 and thinks he’s…

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NEW YORK—Attributing the move to its need to address a long-standing safety concern, the NFL introduced a new helmet this week designed to protect players’ wives. “These new helmets are specially designed to withstand repeated blows and to protect the faces of our players’ wives, girlfriends, mistresses, and other…

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Why yes, I have been playing Baldurs Gate 3, how did you know?

I'm also in an actual D&D podcast called "Dragon Friends" with a bunch of really funny people and one of the smartest DM's who has to deal with our shit. I played music for ages and now I'm doing characters. Go listen!

The report blames an “alarming rise in extremist ideology and activity” on white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups that are active or headquartered in Texas.

A community mural in the heart of Lubbock has been vandalized. The artwork, located on a cinder block garden wall at a home owned by the Lambda Chi Alpha Alumni Association, was painted by 24 students ranging from four to 14 years old, as well as two assistants from Miss Megan’s Make Room, an art maker space and workshop studio on 34th street. 

Spray paint, eggs, and flour defaced over 25 areas that will have to be repaired in the mural. Miss Megan’s Make Room has filed police reports as well as complaints for student misconduct through Texas Tech University (TTU) and the TTU Greek Life directors, all Intrafraternity Council members, and fraternities whose symbols were represented in the vandalism. According to staff at Miss Megan’s Make Room, at the time of this writing there are no leads in the case, and there has been no response from the local police department. 

More about the original mural from Megan Shirley-Ross, the namesake and founder of Miss Megan’s Make Room: “Makers in our mural classes learn about working together to complete a project; we solved any design/color questions using votes. Since this mural was also designed for a client, we discussed what it means to make commission work… Makers were given reference materials, including photos of West Texas landscapes such as the Caprock Escarpment, Yellow House Canyon, and Blanco Canyon, paintings from David Hockney’s Grand Canyon painting series, and images of the backgrounds from vintage Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Overall, a total of 60+ hours went into the mural, including the planning stages, prep, landscaping, and touch-ups.”

Ms. Shirley-Ross founded Miss Megan’s Make Room in 2016, where she teaches fine art classes and workshops to all ages, hosts a student art gallery, and offers full-service instructor-led private events and parties. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from Minnesota State University and has been teaching drawing, painting, art history, sewing, embroidery, sculpture, collage, and printmaking to students, from “age two to 90 for the past 10 years.”  

If you have any information about the mural vandalism, or want to donate to repairs, please contact Miss Megan’s Make Room at missmegansmakeroom@gmail.com or the Lubbock Police Department at (806) 775-2865.

The post Lubbock Mural Vandalized; Community Seeks Answers appeared first on Glasstire.

Test your knowledge of one of the highest-grossing singer-songwriters of all time by passing this quiz on Taylor Swift.

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A black bear was spotted in a tree near Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Walt Disney World, leading to a temporary shutdown until it could be captured and removed. What do you think?

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BOSTON—Challenging the alleged benefits of the practice as touted in the press and by social media influencers, a study published Thursday in the Journal Of Hematology concluded that drinking children’s blood is no more likely to lead to eternal life than drinking regular blood. “When it comes to attaining…

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Senate Democrats began holding votes on military promotions after a months-long blockade by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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

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

1. Our building is full of bats, sewer smells, moths, and more

Do you have advice on how to get upper management to take concerns about our facilities seriously? My coworkers and I haven’t been successful in communicating what seem like very obvious, major problems. For context, our employer is one of two tenants in a seven-story building downtown. The other floors have been vacated. The building is clearly run down and not maintained — e.g., the escalators are barred off and the awning is crumbling. The building itself is very outdated, but frankly, that’s the least of our concerns:

– There are bats in the office. Twice in the past month, there’s been a bat on the ceiling above our receptionist’s head (she is very freaked out). This has been an intermittent issue for years. At one point, someone discovered a bat in the office popcorn machine.

– The HVAC is spotty at best. If the AC is running, it creates a loud, distracting rattle on my side of the building that I need noise-canceling headphones to work through. Other parts of the building don’t seem to get AC, and it’s not unusual for most offices to be over 80 degrees through most of the summer. In the winter, we don’t have the ability to turn the heat down. I used to work with my window wide open in the middle of winter, but the windows have been replaced and don’t open now.

– The public restrooms — the ones we send our guests to use — smell like a sewer. One of the two stalls in the public women’s bathroom has been broken for over a year.

– Our offices adjoin to an empty space on the same floor. (We think this is where the bats live.) We think non-employees are accessing our space after hours through this empty space; for example, we found a man’s wallet left on the couch in the non-public women’s restroom.

– The air quality sucks. You get hit with a blast of musty/mildewy smell when you walk in the front door of the building. An upper floor flooded at one point, and we know that because of that, at least one of the director’s offices has mold in the walls.

– Dead cockroaches and moths on the floor and in stairwells are a common sight.

– We technically have a cleaning crew, but they’re spotty at best. We’re lucky if they take the trash out. They don’t vacuum.

Our lease is up next year, and upper management was exploring the possibility of moving to a different floor in the building that was renovated to our specifications. Those negotiations broke down, and now it sounds like we’re just planning to renew our existing lease. I can’t wrap my head around this — for what we’re paying for a downtown space, we could absolutely move to a newer, better maintained building anywhere else in town. I don’t think our director understands how bad this space is for morale, because he has a military background and has said in all-staff meetings a few times that our building conditions aren’t that bad compared to the spaces he worked in while he was deployed. We’re at-will employees, not service members.

I’m at a point in my career where it would make sense for me to move on soon, and the building condition is high on my list of reasons. I don’t understand why these issues aren’t being taken more seriously. Am I being unreasonable to want to work in an office free of bats and mold? How many times can I express displeasure at our circumstances before I get labeled as a whiner or a diva? If upper management has already said what course of action they plan to take, is there any point in me continuing to speak up?

Good god, no, you are not being unreasonable! It’s one thing to work in a building that’s on the older side and has some of the normal issues that come with that, but you work on what sounds like the set of a horror movie. Some of this is an actual health concern.

Your best shot at getting any movement on it is to organize a group of coworkers to all speak up and say the problems with the building have become untenable. It’s possible it’s not too late for your management to change course — but also there’s power in numbers, and you’re a lot less likely to be labeled as the problem if there’s a whole group of you pushing the issue.

Some of this is likely reportable to your local health department as well; it’s worth a call to find out.

2. My company requires us to notify HR when we go to urgent care

My workplace apparently has a policy of having staff notify HR when they go to urgent care. HR’s reasoning is so that they can proactively assist with accomodations if needed. This makes me uncomfortable, as I don’t really like the idea of HR knowing when I go to urgent care. I’m wondering if this is a normal thing for an HR department to step into.

No, it is not normal. Moreover, requiring that you inform them of medical issues will, in some situations, violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (depending on the reason you’re seeking urgent care). There are lots of types of medical information that you can’t legally be required to disclose.

It’s also nonsensical since if you have time to alert HR you’re at urgent care, you would have time to instead alert them about any accommodations you need as a result of whatever brought you there. They can just ask you to inform them if/when you need accommodations (which you would presumably do anyway); they don’t need to monitor or track your urgent care visits.

3. How do I remember to follow up on emails I’ve sent but haven’t heard back on?

I work in local government, where we are generally under-resourced and trying to spin too many plates at once. This means that emails sometimes go unanswered and need chasing up.

I’ve had success using your chasing script in the past, but how do I keep track of which need to be followed up on in the first place? For example, I recently emailed April asking her to provide data on the number of flowers in our parks, to be included in a public document. April did not reply, and by the time I remembered that we still needed this information we were two days from the deadline and the wider Parks & Rec team ended up having to rush to get us the data we needed. We also had no time to ask April follow-up questions or for more detailed data on specific flowers.

Ideally everyone would always respond to every email the same day, but in reality this is not going to happen without a change in how we are funded. Is there a way I could keep track of emails I’ve sent that still need a response without spending ages making some kind of behemoth spreadsheet?

You need a “waiting for” folder in your email — a folder where you drag any messages that it will be important to hear back on, so they’re all in one place and you can see at a glance what you’re still waiting for. You can achieve this with labels too, depending on the email program.

The key, though, is that you need to commit to going through the folder regularly or it won’t do you any good (I go through mine once a day to see if there’s anything I need to follow up on).

Related:
you need a “waiting for” folder

4. What if I really really REALLY know I don’t want to return to work after I give birth?

I know the advice is never say you’ll quit your job instead of taking maternity leave because you don’t know how you’ll feel once your baby arrives, but what if I feel really, really sure about it?

I have always wanted to take a year or more off after having kids, and while no one knows how they will feel, I have nannied and babysat and helped out my sisters pretty significantly after their babies were born, so I don’t feel like I’m going in totally blind. We have also stepped up our already aggressive savings plan to put away the equivalent of my take-home pay for a year to both build up a buffer of short-term savings and to see how easily we can live on my partner’s salary alone, and it is eminently doable, even if we have to step back on saving as much for a few years.

Also, I don’t like my job. I don’t like the company I work for, which is news-making levels of dysfunctional, and my team is understandably a mess. The idea of returning here after giving birth makes me feel physically anxious. I also know I might feel bored and want to work, but I can’t imagine any universe in which it would be here. I was aggressively applying to jobs before I got pregnant and would have set a hard deadline to leave by the end of the year if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, even if it was to go back to freelancing. And really, if I do find not working incredibly dull or we do find money tight, I’ll transition back to freelancing at the end of my self-funded ‘maternity leave’ whenever it feels right.

So where does that leave me? Plenty of friends have suggested taking the maternity leave knowing I won’t come back and just telling my boss things have changed at the end of it, but even the thought of having to talk to them ever again also makes me feel anxious. I really just want a clean break and to never have to deal with these people again. I know it’s a huge privilege to even be able to entertain this thought, but since I can, is there a reason not to just go for it? And if I do, when should I tell my boss? I know there’s a chance of being pushed out before I’m ready, but there is a hiring freeze at my company (see: high levels of dysfunction) and I would be really surprised if they were even able to maneuver to replace me any sooner than they had to.

The advice not to decide anything ahead of time is just meant to highlight that once the baby is actually on the scene, things can change in ways you didn’t expect. Often people assume they know what they’ll want but then their circumstances change — and they can end up regretting it if they already locked themselves into not returning.

In your case, you’ve already thought all of that through, and you were ready to leave even if you hadn’t gotten pregnant. The one thing I’d suggest thinking about that you didn’t mention is whether you’d want to hold onto the job as a safety net in case something happens with your partner’s job. If so, then the safest course of action is to hold off on your announcement that you’re not returning until you’re closer to that date.

But you also get to balance that against the anxiety you’re feeling when you think about having to talk to them again. You might decide that outweighs other considerations, and you’re allowed to make that call. Just make sure you won’t wish you could backtrack later if your circumstances do change between now and then.

5. Advice for former Hollywood freelancers

I have seen a lot of people looking to leave Hollywood because of the triple threat of writer strikes, actor strikes, and Covid after effects, and searching for “real” jobs when we have finally had enough.

In my case, my main question has to do with resumes: On my resume I list a lot of my production credits, but it kind of looks like I am a job hopper and that I really didn’t have much of an impact in these roles. Would it be better to combine all my credits into one large “Freelance Production Coordinator” role and just list the highlights?

You attached your resume so I could see exactly how you’ve done it, and it’s pretty clear that each of the jobs were show-specific; it doesn’t look like job-hopping, just a normal reflection of how jobs work in your industry (and even people outside that industry, like me, should understand that).

That said … it could be interesting to experiment with a resume that combines them all under one umbrella heading and see if you get any more bites with that version. Do some A/B testing and see if there are differences in results! Or it might even end up that when you see the revised resume, it will obviously be stronger or weaker than the other one. Try it and see what you think! There are no hard-and-fast rules on how to present stuff like this.

If you’re trying to free up disk space on a developer system, one place to look for unwanted files is your debugger symbol file caches.

The Windows debugging engine creates a cache of symbol files so it can avoid downloading them repeatedly from the configured symbol server. And that cache can get kind of big, since there’s no automatic pruning.¹ This is the disk space version of A cache with a bad policy is another name for a memory leak.

Places to look are

• $(DebuggerInstallDirectory)\sym
• %TEMP%\sym
• Any directories that have ever been listed in %_NT_SYMBOL_PATH%²
• C:\SymCache
• C:\symbols

Visual Studio also caches symbols. You can configure where it saves them under Tools, Options, Debugging, Symbols, Cache symbols in this directory. It defaults to %TEMP%\SymbolCache.

My tool of choice for investigating disk space is WizTree. I have no stake in this program. Just a happy (paying) customer.

What I do is create a symbolic link from each of these potential cache directories into a single directory C:\SymCache, so that the different debuggers can share symbol caches.

Bonus chatter: Many years ago, I was working on a laptop and fired up the Disk Cleanup tool, and heard the laptop fan shriek to life as it was “calculating how much space you will be able to free”. This seemed odd, so I connected a debugger to figure out why merely deciding what to do was a CPU-intensive operation.³

It turns out that the Disk Cleanup tool was in a tight loop checking whether the Cancel button had been clicked, while a background thread was busy doing the calculations. This behavior was part of the Disk Cleaner’s original implementation in Windows 98, which was particularly ironic since Windows 98 did not support multiprocessing, so the code was saturating your only CPU just to see if it should keep waiting, starving out the background thread that’s actually doing work.

For Windows 10 Version 1709, I fixed it so the code didn’t poll the Cancel button. It just went into a normal message pump, and checked the state of the Cancel button after each message. Clicking the Cancel button would itself generate a message, so checking after each message was sufficient.

This dropped the CPU usage of the UI thread down to basically zero.

Previously, in CPU spin loops.

Bonus bonus chatter: A few weeks after I fixed the problem, the Windows performance team filed a bug saying that their telemetry identified the Disk Cleanup tool’s Cancel dialog as consuming an unusually high amount of CPU. I had the satisfaction of telling them, “Already fixed.”

¹ You can perform manual pruning with the AgeStore program.

² You can tell how old that page is, because it says “Because symbols can sometimes be tens of megabytes in size…” Nevermind that the page itself is over a megabyte. (21KB for the main page itself, and the rest is for the fluff around the page, like 263KB for the syntax highlighter JavaScript library and 121KB for the Microsoft Build advertisement that was present in early 2021.)

³ Some time ago, we learned why cleaning Windows Update files is a CPU-intensive operation.

The post When looking to free up disk space, don’t forget your symbol file caches appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Some time ago, I discussed why HANDLE return values are so inconsistent, and I traced it all the way back to the 16-bit _lopen and _lcreat functions, which returned -1 on failure.

But why do those functions return -1 on failure instead of zero?

The _lopen and _lcreat functions were Windows versions of the C runtime _open and _creat functions. The C runtime functions came in four different versions depending on which MS-DOS memory model you were using, and the convention was that when Windows adopted a C runtime function, it used the “large” version with the L prefix, since that is the most general version.

Okay, so why did _open and _creat return -1 on failure?

Because they were MS-DOS-compatible versions of the Unix functions open and creat. They even preserve the dropped silent “e” at the end of creat.

Okay, so why do those functions return -1 on failure?

On Unix, the return value is an integer that represents a file descriptor, valid file descriptors are integers starting with zero. Every process comes with three predefined file descriptors:

Descriptor	Meaning
0	stdin (standard input)
1	stdout (standard output)
2	stderr (standard error)

Files opened by the program begin with file descriptor 3.

The value -1 is used to represent failure because 0 was already taken.

And that value of -1 carried forward, through a chain of backward compatibility, to Win32 as the numeric value of INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE. We saw a little while ago one of the consequences.

The post Why did the 16-bit _lopen and _lcreat function return -1 on failure instead of 0? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Following a recent TikTok trend that revealed men frequently think about the Roman Empire, The Onion asked men to explain why they are obsessed with the Roman Empire, and this is what they said.

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One-sentence summary

Two systems may try to develop late this week or weekend, a deep Atlantic Cabo Verde wave and a subtropical system off the Florida or Georgia coast.

Near term Nigel

Let’s clear the deck first. Nigel? Still out there.

The stand out feature of Nigel is the size of its eye. It’s tough to specifically measure, but I am estimating this is about 40 to 60 miles across. Dry air has been a persistent issue for Nigel, and it seems to be impacting its intensity and holding it back from becoming more than a minimal hurricane. Nigel will continue to track northwest and then eventually north and northeast, out to sea, no threat to land.

The medium-range (days 6 to 10): Subtropical Southeast vs. Classic Cabo Verde

Two systems may enter. Both systems will eventually leave. The hope is that neither will produce any serious impacts to land. Let’s start close to home.

Southeast subtropical shenanigans

The general theme for this week will be: Upper low forms over Florida, drifts offshore to the east, undergoes a top-down process to form a surface low which may develop into a storm as it tracks north toward the Carolinas. It would probably be a subtropical storm, but the impacts would essentially be similar to a tropical storm, so I don’t want folks to get hung up on technicalities here. There will likely be a coastal storm this weekend that tracks north from Florida toward the Carolinas. Exactly where, how strong, etc. remains to be determined.

The impacts will probably include locally heavy rain, rough surf, possible beach erosion, and gusty winds on the South and North Carolina coasts.

The map above is a preliminary rainfall forecast through Tuesday morning. Florida gets their rain this week, locally heavy at times. As the system organizes that will spread north, certainly into the coastal Carolinas, but also perhaps up Delmarva, the Jersey Shore, Long Island, and southern New England. As of now, this looks like an early autumn nor’easter type impact. Although exactly what intensity the impacts of this system arrive with remains to be seen. We will have more on this tomorrow and Thursday.

Cabo Verde wave

The deep Atlantic is a little sloppy right now, but emerging from this mess will likely be the next wave off the coast of Africa. We continue to have model support for this to develop, however that support seems to have waned a bit since yesterday. The 70 percent chance of development assigned by the NHC is probably a good spot to be right now.

Anyway, this wave will come west over the next week or so and eventually end up near the Lesser Antilles or Puerto Rico. It may swing north of there, or it may enter the islands. It will be steered by high pressure over the central Atlantic.

There is some chance that this high may build far enough west and south to perhaps block out the tropical wave or cause it to slow enough to be picked up by that trough in the North Atlantic. Odds probably favor that latter scenario in this situation. Still, I think in general this area merits watching because of the time of year, the warmth of the water, and the potential track. But it remains too early to say whether or not it’s a particularly serious concern for the islands. We’ll monitor it over the next few days.

Hopefully the most exciting aspect of these two waves will be who gets a name first, if either does. My bet is on the Southeast system today. The next two names are Ophelia (o-FEEL-ya) and Philippe (fee-LEEP).

Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Nothing brewing of note

We continue to keep an eye on the extended period to look for signs of trouble. As of now, it looks like things will be fairly quiet. Wind shear is expected to be well above average in the Gulf and northwestern Caribbean, which would be two key areas to watch in early October. So I’m cautiously optimistic that things will calm a bit, but as always we’ll keep watching.

Good morning. Much of the Houston region has fallen into the 60s this morning, and it feels quite pleasant outside. Unfortunately this early preview of fall won’t last, and we’re going to be headed back to warmer days and more humid nights for awhile.

That’s not to say our weather will be exceptionally hot. It won’t. But increasingly, I don’t think our first reasonably strong fall front is coming this month. That’s happened plenty of times before—the average date of Houston’s first significant front is around the last week of September. But it’s still disappointing that Fall Day remains a ways away.

Tuesday

Today’s weather isn’t bad though, by any stretch. After our pleasing start, highs today will climb to around 90 degrees with sunny skies. Winds will shift to become southeasterly, and this will start to bring a more pronounced and humid flow into the region, although this afternoon should still feel somewhat drier than normal. We should still be able to squeeze out one more night in the low- to mid-70s before we warm back up completely.

Wednesday

As high pressure begins to strengthen some, we’ll see more humidity and high temperatures will nudge up into the low-90s. Like on Tuesday, rain chances will be near zero. Overnight lows are likely to only drop into the mid- to upper-70s, unfortunately.

Thursday and Friday

We will see mostly sunny skies and highs in the low- to mid-90s to end the work week. With the moister atmosphere Houston should start to see a slight chance of afternoon showers and thunderstorms each day, perhaps on the order of 20 percent. Any storms that do develop should pass rather quickly. Lows will remain muggy, in the mid- to upper-70s.

Saturday and Sunday

The weekend should see continued warm and muggy weather, with Sunday likely the warmest day as highs reach the mid-90s. It looks like a weak (again, a very weak one) front will push toward the area this weekend on Sunday. This could drive some rain showers on Sunday or Sunday evening, and then bring some slightly cooler and drier nights with it. I wouldn’t expect anything too robust, but it should bring daytime and nighttime temperatures down a bit. Highs for the most part look to be in the low 90s for much of next week.

A couple of programming notes

I’ve been working on a post summarizing our summer weather and putting it into historical context. Look for that to publish later this week. Also, we’re really getting near the end of the Texas hurricane season, but I’m not quite ready to make that call yet. Soon, probably.

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

A reader writes:

I work at a religiously-affiliated single-sex secondary school in the U.S. (all male). About 65% of our faculty is male, compared with the 35% of us who are female (myself included).

For 40 years, each year after school lets out for the summer, the men who teach and work here organize an all-male camping trip. It is three nights, four days, and it takes place a few hours away from where I live.

The institution I work for does not pay for or outright endorse this annual trip. Women are not invited and would be prohibited from attending. About 40 men attend it each year, including most of the men who retired from the school (even those who retired 10+ years ago).

I dislike this trip on principle. From my understanding, it used to be quite rowdy, with heavy drinking and gossiping about the women who work there (which is definitely a gross and sexist practice). Over the last 10 years, according to my male colleagues (some of whom are my friends), it’s become much more tame, and there really isn’t a lot of gossiping or anything like that. It’s a chance for the men to bond with one another. Since we teach at an all-male school, a high emphasis is put on brotherhood where I work. (No such emphasis on sisterhood.)

Our bosses do not attend this trip, so it’s not like there is a question of networking or face time with administrators. There aren’t really professional benefits to attending, I guess, except that it feels … exclusionary? Which it is. I’ve raised this point to three or four of my male colleagues, who are generally really nice people. They responded by asking me (with genuine sincerity) if I’d even want to attend, if women were invited. I guess the answer is no … camping is not really my thing. Then they say, “Well, don’t worry about it then.”

I’m really struggling to articulate why this trip bothers me, since my employer doesn’t pay for it, it’s not “officially” a work trip (although only employees attend, or are invited to attend), my bosses don’t go, no promotions or networking happens there, AND I dislike the activity in question. But it feels as though women are simply valued less, and generally thought of as people who should be excluded from bonding activities.

For the record, if the school were to force this trip to shut down, there would be a RIOT. People (men) might quit over it. The men describe it as the best four days of the entire year.

Please help me do a gut check here. Is this something worth being upset about? I have worked here for over a decade so I might have lost a sense of what’s normal elsewhere.

It bothers you because they’re saying they see you and other women as Different from them in some fundamental way. It’s injecting sex and gender into a sphere it doesn’t belong in. Sex and gender can matter very much in some situations; they are not supposed to matter in work relationships and at work social events.

It’s a problem even though the trip doesn’t involve extra face time with administrators — because even if no work is ever discussed on the trips at all, the men in attendance are deepening their relationships with each other and building a camaraderie and trust that you will never be permitted to benefit from. Relationships matter at work — they influence who gets turned to for input, who gets extra help, whose voices are listened to and elevated, who get mentored and supported, who’s given grace and the benefit of the doubt (and who isn’t), who’s more comfortable with who, and who gets thought of for a job years from now when you’ve all moved on to other employers. There’s a reason networking with coworkers is valuable, and they’re cutting you out of it in a big way. (I’m sure they’d say you have other opportunities to network with them — but this event sounds like a massive trust-builder and relationship-builder that you don’t get access to because you are without a penis.) They are literally creating a boy’s club where all the men who work together will get to know and trust each other more, and they are deliberately excluding women from that.

It also bothers you because its origins (“heavy drinking and gossiping about the women who work there”) are gross.

And it bothers you because there is a long history of men excluding women from business networking by barring them from spaces where it’s happening (think private social clubs and golf clubs that didn’t allow women) and using spaces where women would be less likely to want to go (think strip clubs). Historically, that has been something that’s kept women on a different playing field than men, both literally and figuratively.

These are all solid reasons to be bothered.

Based on what you’ve said, it sounds like it would take an enormous amount of capital to do anything about it and your chances of success might be low. But you’re not off-base in having a problem with it.

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