For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class.
This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.
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 CEO is protecting a horrible employee no one can stand
I was hired as a senior director three years ago with direct reports in 10 office locations in the U.S. and other countries. One is a contractor, John, who I later discovered fabricated his background and experience. John cannot seem to handle the simplest of tasks without someone on the team providing him with exact step-by-step instructions, and he still doesn’t comprehend well. After multiple talks, meetings, illustrations, notes, presentations, and guidance, John still cannot manage his tasks without hand-holding.
The entire team is so frustrated after nearly a year of tolerating his inability to complete tasks. Along with that, he has a nasty attitude towards his colleagues who ask him to manage something simple or a project with an immediate deadline. My CEO, who is a very fair and nice guy, decided to have John report to him temporarily to defuse things. Was everyone thrilled? At first yes, because everyone felt he would finally perform and manage his tasks. But John dismissed requests from his colleagues and gaslights them at every turn, because he feels untouchable now that he’s reporting to the CEO. Going to HR proved useless, and employees are stressed out over the CEO’s failure to see John’s incompetence and nasty attitude. In addition, John is unprofessional and has divulged giving work to friends outside the company to assist him with tasks, which is a violation of policy. The CEO knows about John’s behavior, but says other colleagues thinks he’s doing fine and he and HR have no complaints. John had several crying bouts with our CEO and is a pathological liar. Somehow our CEO fell for this. When our CEO travels, which is often, John’s demeanor changes from acting angelic to a nasty tyrant.
This has truly frustrated the team, and John doesn’t care since he knows he’s liked by the CEO and our HR business partner. How can we get our CEO to see that John is a total slacker, pathological liar, and sucking the life out of his colleagues? We have proven and provided details to our CEO to no avail. Nothing on John’s resume about his experience is lining up. Our CEO doesn’t seem to want to get rid of him, even though his contract is coming up in June for renewal.
If you’ve already laid out the case in detail to your CEO, including John’s lies about his background, I don’t know that there’s more you can do. It’s possible that if you can catch him in violation of a very clear black-and-white policy that your CEO cares about personally, that could do it … or you can try presenting a steady drumbeat of every problem John causes … but if your CEO already knows everything in your letter and doesn’t care, you might be out of options. In some companies, key people on your team could simply refuse to work with John and that would bring the problem to a head, but in others that would backfire on them, not John. If people the CEO values start leaving over it, that might finally get some traction … but even that might not.
I will say that, like yesterday’s letter-writer, it sounds like you let the problems with John continue way too long. If he was reporting to you for almost a year before he transferred to the CEO, ideally you would have acted to let him go much, much earlier. At this point, the reality is that it might be out of your hands.
2. Coworker on extended sick leave comes in to use our sports facility
I have a question about colleagues who are out on sick leave who continue to come on-site to use our employer’s sports facilities.
I work on a site that has a sports center attached to it; staff have to pay a monthly fee to join, like any gym membership. Recently my colleague, Delilah, who has been out for several months on extended sick leave, has been spotted coming in to play tennis over the lunch hour. The colleagues are unimpressed, which I can understand because since some of them are covering her workload, and are complaining behind her back, including to management. This could make it harder for Delilah when she comes back to work and rejoins her team.
But I can also understand that for this colleague, coming in to get some exercise and contact with other people might be beneficial to her recovery and overall well-being. Should someone say something to Delilah, and if so, what?
First, it’s totally possible for someone to legitimately need an extended sick leave but still be able to play tennis. It could even be something suggested by her doctor, for all we know! But not everyone understands that, which is why the optics of doing at it her workplace are not great. It’s unsurprising that people are talking about it.
Just on a human level, it would be a kindness for someone to point that out to Delilah … but if I were her manager, that’s not a conversation I’d go anywhere near because it could easily end up sounding discriminatory. (I would, though, try to shut down the complaints from other employees.)
3. Can I ask for a higher salary because I’ll need to buy a car?
I live in Los Angeles and have never owned a car in the ten years I’ve been here. Previously I have just avoided interviewing for jobs that would be too difficult to commute to, and it’s never been easier than in my remote positions for the last few years. I’m actively job hunting now and everywhere I’ve interviewed has had a hybrid in-office model, if not totally mandatory in-office.
I’m not opposed to finally taking the plunge and buying a car, but is it reasonable to negotiate that when the salaries are already listed in job postings? Interviews have all asked if I have a problem working in office and I always say it won’t be a problem without getting into the specifics, but I don’t know it’s reasonable to make a point out of asking higher than the listed salary range if they’re expecting a commute from me. I don’t want to become a non-option by being a squeaky wheel about this in interviews too early. When should I bring it up and is it even a useful bargaining tool in a city where everyone is expected to already own a car?
Yeah, needing to buy a car isn’t something you can include in your salary negotiation. Salaries are supposed to be based on market rate and what the job is worth to the employer, not on applicants’ personal expenses. You can factor it into your own thinking about what salary you’d need to take a particular job, but it shouldn’t be a point you raise when negotiating.
4. I was promised a three-month salary review but no one’s brought it up
I started a new job in January. In the final interview, they asked what salary I was looking for and I said X amount, which was genuinely the number I was hoping for. A few hours later, I was offered the job over the phone with pay of X amount + a few thousand. Great! I was also told they expected I would do really well at this company, and after three months, they could bump me up to X amount + 6,000. This number is far beyond what I thought I would be making at this stage in my career, although it is in the general range I’ve seen other people in my position at other companies making. I also have this in writing. Specifically, “We will review you in about three months to see about a bump.”
The three-month mark was in April, and no one has brought up a performance review. I feel very well liked and successful in this position, although I don’t have anything concrete to show for my time (which is very common in this position in this industry for this time frame). I would love more money! I feel okay right now, but more is always better. At what point do I bring this up, and what do I say? Does it matter that although I’ve received a lot of praise, I haven’t necessarily made the company X amount of dollars yet? I’m feeling slight imposter syndrome when it comes to asking for this amount of money.
They promised they’d review your salary in three months, and it’s been longer than three months. It’s completely reasonable to bring this up — in fact, if I were your manager and this had somehow slipped my mind, I’d be dismayed if I realized months later that you had never brought it up with me! You can just say this: “When I was hired, my offer letter said that after three months we’d look at bumping my salary to $X. Is that a conversation we can have now?”
5. Asking a laid-off coworker for a reference
I’ve been looking for a new job for several months now, after our billionth reorg. It was slow going for a while, but I recently tweaked my resume and am getting a lot of traction. Phone screens are coming in, and I have two in person interviews next week.
While this was happening, my company had yet another reorg, this time with layoffs. The person I work most closely with was laid off. I was not. I would really like to ask him to be a reference when things progress that far, but I’m worried that it would be indelicate or rude to reach out when I know he’s struggling. What’s the etiquette around asking for references from a coworker who was just laid off?
It’s normally fine to do! If anything, he’s likely to appreciate that you could be a reference for him as well (or that you could end up in a job where you could potentially help with leads or contacts or so forth).
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the role of AI and copyright, with much of it focused on fretting by various copyright maximalists about how things created by AI need more copyright or how AI systems are violating the copyright of artists, both of which seem to be fairly questionable claims at best.
But, copyright law professor Brian Frye recently participated in a Copyright Office “listening session” regarding copyright and AI, and he suggested an entirely different way that everyone (including the Copyright Office) should be thinking about. As he notes, the questions everyone seems to be fretting about appear to be easily answered:
I think we are asking the wrong questions about AI and copyright. Everyone is asking whether copyright protects AI-generated works and whether training an AI algorithm infringes copyright. The obvious answer is no and no.
Copyright only protects works created by people. AI doesn’t even create works, it generates content, which we consumers interpret as works. Roland Barthes predicted the death of the author, and AI has written the author’s obituary.
Likewise, training an AI algorithm doesn’t and shouldn’t infringe copyright. AI algorithms don’t copy works, they merely catalog rhetorical conventions and then deploy them to create conventional content.
Instead, he notes, everyone is missing the much bigger picture in that we could be (and arguably should be) using AI to tell us which other works (of the ones created by humans) even have enough creativity to deserve copyright protection in the first place:
We should be asking what AI can tell us about what copyright should protect and why. Copyright can only protect “creative” works. But courts and the Copyright Office have struggled to define “creativity.” Maybe AI can help?
An AI algorithm is essentially a nonsense generator, designed to produce banalities. In other words, AI is uncreative by design. An AI algorithm is a machine for regurgitating conventional wisdom. Indeed, we are amused when an AI “hallucinates” and fails to satisfy our pedestrian expectations.
But we can be just as boring as any AI. And there’s no point in copyright protecting banalities. Maybe AI can help us limit copyright to works that are actually creative. It’s easy, just ask AI to evaluate the “creativity” of works produced by people, to determine whether they deserve copyright. No one knows a fake like a faker, and AI is designed to identify banality. That’s what makes it a killer app.
We don’t know how to identify creativity. But AI can tell us what isn’t creative. Maybe that’s good enough to tell us what is creative, if anything.
Of course, the likelihood of this happening is basically nil, but it’s still a point worth thinking about. In the copyright world, there have long been arguments over what counts as being creative enough to get copyright’s protections. This may have been most notable in the realm of photography, where some (somewhat reasonably!) argued that the photographer, especially in outdoors/landscape photography, was merely capturing a scene created by nature, and therefore had little, if any, creative input into it.
The courts have generally side stepped this issue by arguing that the photographer gets copyright on the artistic decisions in terms of things like “where to point the camera” and “how to frame the photograph.” But that’s often felt like a cop out.
It’s intriguing to think of AI in a different way, as a much more impartial observer of whatever works are seeking copyright, with the ability to say whether or not a give work has the requisite creativity to get copyright. It may seem like a silly (or even trollish) suggestion, but it’s difficult to argue it’s any worse than how things are currently done.
This week I upgraded my home internet service to 10 Gbps, and not because I needed faster speeds, but because it was simply cheaper than my existing 400 Mbps service. A 25x speed improvement for less money? Yes I’ll take that, thank you! This upgrade started me thinking about how much computer technology has improved over the decades. When I was a kid, I often thought that the most interesting period of technological advancement was 50 or 100 years in the past: when a person could be born into a world of horse-powered transportation and telegraphs, and retire in an era of intercontinental air travel and satellite communications. Yet the changes during my lifetime, when measured as order of magnitude improvements, have been equally amazing.
Processor Speeds – 6000 times faster, about 4 orders of magnitude
The first computer I ever got my hands on was my elementary school’s Apple II, with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. Compare that to Intel’s Core i9-13900KS, which runs at 6.0 GHz without overclocking, for a nice 6000-fold improvement in clock speed.
Raw GHz (or MHz) is a weak measure of CPU performance, of course. Compared to the 6502 CPU, that Intel i9 has much wider registers, more registers, more complex instructions, superscalar instruction execution, hyperthreading, multiple execution cores, and other fantastic goodies that the MOS designers could scarcely have dreamed of. I’m not sure if there’s any meaningful benchmark that could directly compare these two processors’ performance but it would be an entertaining match-up.
As impressive as a 6000x improvement may be, it’s nothing compared to the improvements in other computer specs.
Main Memory – 1.4 million times larger, about 6 orders of magnitude
In 1983 my family purchased an Atari 800 home computer, with a huge-for-the-time 48 KB of RAM. What’s the modern comparison? Maybe this pre-built gaming PC with 64 GB of RAM? That’s more than a million times larger RAM capacity than my old Atari system, but it’s not even very impressive by today’s standards. Windows 10 Pro theoretically supports up to 2 TB of RAM.
Communication Bandwidth – 33 million times faster, about 7 orders of magnitude
Who doesn’t love a 300 bps modem? It was good enough for getting that Atari system communicating with the wider world, connecting to BBS systems and downloading software. But today’s communication technologies are so much faster, it makes my head spin. What am I ever going to do with 10 Gbps internet service… stream 200 simultaneous 4K videos? Download all of Wikipedia, ten thousand times every day?
To put this in perspective, the amount of data that I can now download in one minute would have needed 68 years with that Atari modem.
External Storage – 182 million times larger, about 8 orders of magnitude
Over the past few decades, the champion of computer spec improvements has undoubtedly been external storage. My Atari 1050 floppy drive supported “enhanced density” floppy disks with 130 KB of data. While that seemed capacious at the time, today a quick Amazon search will turn up standard consumer hard drives with 22 TB storage capacity, for a mind-bending improvement of 182 million times over that floppy disk.
If you’re a vintage computer collector or a BMOW Floppy Emu user, then you’re probably familiar with the fact that the entire library of every Apple II or classic Mac program ever made could fit on a single SD memory card today.
Hardware and Software Cost – 0 orders of magnitude
Despite all these million-fold improvements in computer performance, hardware today still costs about the same as it did 40-some years ago when that Atari system was new. The Atari 800’s launch price in 1979 was $999.95, roughly the same price you’ll pay for a decent Mac or Windows laptop today. The Apple II launched at $1298 in 1977, and the first Macintosh cost $2495 in 1984. In real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), the cost of computer hardware has actually fallen substantially even while it’s improved a million-fold. That first Macintosh system’s cost is equivalent to $7428 in today’s dollars.
Software prices have also barely budged since the 8-bit days. The first version of VisiCalc (1979) was priced at $100, and today Microsoft Excel is $159. As a kid I mowed lawns to earn enough money to buy $40 Atari and Nintendo games, and today a kid can buy PS5 or Nintendo Switch games for $40. Why? I can’t buy a cheeseburger or a car or a house for 1983 prices, but I can buy the latest installment of the Mario game series for the same price as the original one?
Looking Ahead
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the past, it’s that I stink at predicting the future. Nevertheless, it’s fun to extrapolate the trends of the past 40 years and imagine the computers of 2063, if I’m fortunate enough to live to see them. 40 years from now I look forward to owning a home computer sporting a 36 THz CPU, with 90 petabytes of RAM, a 330 petabyte/sec internet connection, and 3 zettabytes of storage space, which I’ll purchase for $1000.
CHICAGO—In a full-blown panic just moments after realizing he had ejaculated inside of his girlfriend, local man Braden Twigg reportedly rushed to CVS Thursday to also impregnate the pharmacist. “Don’t worry, I’m running out to the store right now,” said Twigg, assuring his partner he would be right back as he…
WASHINGTON—Claiming that historians have unfairly vilified the 20th-century German dictator and misrepresented his role in the far-right political party, many conservative pundits and activists argue that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi allegiances have been greatly exaggerated. “Just because Hitler was Führer and Chancellor of…
CINCINNATI—Confirming that the enlightening weekend experience had left her with “a total change of heart,” J.K. Rowling announced Thursday that she was no longer transphobic after attending the Cincinnati Pride Parade and Festival and winning a free cell phone charger from the booth of a bisexual real estate agent.…
by Jeremy Schwartz, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica
State lawmakers passed a bill requiring courts to report involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles for inclusion in the federal gun background check system. The law closes a gap revealed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune in 2022.
Hailed by researchers as the 'largest underwater scanning project in history,' a thorough 3D scan has revealed the Titanic ocean liner in detail from its location 3,800 metres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and approximately 590 kilometres south of Newfoundland.
Meow Wolf, an arts and entertainment company with locations in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Denver, has announced its North Texas location, named The Real Unreal, will open on Friday, July 14, 2023.
Located in a former retail space within Grapevine Mills, a large destination shopping mall known for its entertainment venues like SEA LIFE Grapevine Aquarium and LEGOLAND® Discovery Center, the new Meow Wolf has 29,000 square feet of exhibition space. Visitors will explore more than 30 rooms featuring creations by 150 artists and fabricators. Featured artists work in a variety of mediums, including murals, sculpture, photography, and video game design.
Meow Wolf Collaborative Artist Dan Lam in studio. Photo by Jordan Mathis | Courtesy of Meow Wolf
While many of the contributors either work for Meow Wolf or have participated in the development of other Meow Wolf locations, the organization also brought in 38 Texas-based artists to assist with the production. Some of the Dallas-based artists included are Dan Lam, a sculptor known for her drippy organic creations; muralist Mariell Guzman, who has created murals across the state; and painter Riley Holloway, whose work was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art through the Dallas Art Fair Acquisition Program. See the full list of artists here.
Exhibition Detail of Meow Wolf Grapevine. Photo by Shayla Blatchford | Courtesy of Meow Wolf
Detail of Morgan Grasham’s Installation, part of Meow Wolf Grapevine. Photo by Will Heron | Courtesy of Meow Wolf
Like other Meow Wolf locations, The Real Unreal combines fantastical art and storytelling. According to the company, the narrative that unfolds is about “a missing boy, a chosen family, and Hapulusgarrulus Lophoaquaflori.” The story was developed by LaShawn Wanak, a fantasy, science fiction, and horror writer, who is also the editor of the webzine GigaNotoSaurus.
LaShawn Wanak. Photograph courtesy of Al Bogdan at Confusion 2020
In an interview on the Meow Wolf website, Ms. Wanak discussed her writing history and elements of The Real Unreal. When asked what she hoped people would come away with from the story she has written for Grapevine, she explained: “It goes back to the caring. I want people to come away with the people in the story, knowing that they deeply care for each other, even though they have disagreements, they can figure out stuff and they deeply care for each other. And that a lot of what their actions stem from is from love, even when it seems like it’s a negative action, when they’re trying genuinely to care for the person and basically trying to figure each other out and figure out how to live with each other.”
In a recent press release, Dale Sheehan, Senior Vice President and Executive Creative Director of Meow Wolf, discussed the new space. He stated, “When participants step into The Real Unreal, they start a cosmic odyssey where surprises await around every corner, and each discovery sparks its own story. Every element in the exhibition weaves together a tapestry of characters, stories, and worlds. The creative energy of The Real Unreal extends beyond the physical, and leads to a potential unlimited host of cosmic side-effects.”
Meow Wolf Grapevine Key Art, Courtesy of Meow Wolf
Though The Real Unreal does not open until Friday, July 14, tickets are now available for pre-purchase ($50 general admission, $45 for children). Additionally, the company announced a cryptic pop-up to be held at Grapevine Mills this Friday, May 19, by a “creative wellness brand,” Laernü, which seems to have little online presence other than its connection to Meow Wolf. According to the press release, Laernü offers “custom supplements and educational courses support[ing] practices to tap into creativity from universes beyond our own at unaffordable prices.” The few details provided about the pop-up state that it will “appear from a rhombus-shaped cloud” and that participants will be able to interact with a claw machine to “retrieve a myriad of otherworldly ephemera-including Meow Wolf tickets.”
Publish but be damned — … The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 studies at a rate of one every 37 hours”…. Impressive as that is, Luque still has a way to go if he’s going to catch and exceed Russian chemist Yuri Struchkov. Struchkov was awarded the 1992 Ig Nobel Literature Prize “for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days”….
Handy for hanging — 1. Animals with hands and arms that make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch are likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. 2. Humans have hands and arms that don’t make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch. That is why humans aren’t very likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine….
Handy for standing — 1. Older people swing their arms more than young people, as part of keeping their balance rather than frequently toppling over. 2. If everyone is forced to stand while keeping their hands clasped in front of their body, young people are less prone to toppling than older people. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at Coventry University and Imperial College London in the UK, the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Punching up data — While brain scientists elsewhere study the accumulated effects of a lifetime of whacks to the head, a quartet have been watching how people respond to the sight of a fist fast approaching their face. An account of their action-adventure experiment jabs out from the midsection of the journal Human Movement Science….
An anonymous reader shares a report: Hey, did you hear? Verizon has incredibly, out of the goodness of its heart, revealed new phone plans that don't include "bloated" service bundles. How thoughtful! There's just one catch: they're kinda less expensive, except not really, because things that used to be included are now an extra $10 per month each.
On the surface, the new plans sound simpler than the current Get More, Play More, etc. There are two options -- an expensive one and a bit less expensive one -- and you add the extra services you want, like the Disney / Hulu bundle or Apple Music Family a la carte. That's nice in theory, but if you're switching from one of the current unlimited plans, it's very likely you'll need to pay more if you want the same things you used to get included in your monthly rate. [...] On top of all that, these plans are just plain confusing. There's an old plan called "Welcome Unlimited" and a new plan called "Unlimited Welcome." Great, makes perfect sense. Also, Verizon is still playing its cute little game of not including "Ultra Wideband" mid-band 5G on its lower-tier plan, only the much slower "Nationwide" version, which is largely just LTE dressed up as 5G.
Google's new inactive account policy already has people up in arms. The company announced on Tuesday that accounts that have gone unused for two years will be deleted, and a lot of people are asking what exactly this means for YouTube content. There are probably millions of videos out there from dead and inactive YouTube creators—would Google's new data policy mean deleting nearly two decades of online history?
Google's blog post yesterday certainly gave that impression, "If a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents—including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos." That policy would mean wiping out things like the first YouTube video, official YouTube accounts of former US presidents, and tons of content from retired YouTubers and music artists. That would be awful.
A day later, Google now says there will be no digital burning of Alexandria. YouTube's creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, clarified on Twitter that Google has "no plans to delete accounts with YT videos." 9to5Google heard the same statement from a Google spokesperson. That is great news, but that's also very vague and runs contrary to what all of Google's current documentation says, including the blog post. Can people keep a Google account alive forever with a single video? We've had an email out to Google since Tuesday night asking for some kind of formal policy regarding YouTube videos, but we haven't heard anything yet. It seems like the company is still figuring this out.
Woodbridge, ON – Caleb Chen, a Grade 4 student, had a slow smile creep across his face after hearing his teacher pronounce the french word for seal: Phoque. “Every year when we do animals we get to this chapter in the book and all the kids think it’s the greatest day ever,” said Madame Tremblay. […]
A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to make it illegal for carmakers to eliminate AM radio from their cars, arguing public safety is at risk. From the report: AM radio is one key way that government officials communicate with the public during natural disasters and other emergencies. Officials worry that if drivers don't have access, they might miss important safety alerts. Some manufacturers are eliminating AM radio from their electric vehicles (EVs) because of interference from the electric motors that creates annoying buzzing noises and faded signals.
They argue that car owners can still access AM radio content through digital streaming packages or smartphone apps (though such services sometimes require a subscription). While AM might seem like a relic of the past, nearly 50 million people still listen to it, according to Nielsen figures provided by the National Association of Broadcasters. The proposed legislation, to be introduced today by Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and others, would require all new vehicles to include AM radio at no additional charge. In the case of EV models that have already eliminated AM radio (from BMW, Ford, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo), carmakers would be required to disclose the lack of AM access to consumers. The law would also direct the Government Accountability Office to study whether alternative communication systems are as effective in reaching the public during emergencies. Further reading: Saving AM Radio - the Case For and Against.
At college graduations, the faculty wear dark flowing robes, satiny hoods, and puffy hats. Look closely, and you’ll notice little variations—they are not arbitrary. Each detail tells a rich story about the professor wearing the regalia.
Robe Color Indicates the professor’s approach to dressing for class:
Black: Funky vintage
Red: Four-season surf vibe
Dark blue: Frump
Any other color: Whatever the fuck I want; I have tenure
The Velvet Bands on the Robe’s Sleeves Indicates the professor’s approach to grading papers:
Four stripes: Having read a reasonable number of papers per day, only when rested, calm, and well-fed, I return the papers with insightful, civil comments and fair grades within two weeks of their submission. (N.B. Four-striped robes are no longer manufactured and are only available via special order.)
Three stripes: I procrastinate all week, then do all the grading in a frenzied, caffeine-induced weekend delirium.
Two stripes: I procrastinate for weeks, then do all the grading over holiday breaks to maximize my sensation of martyrdom.
One stripe: I procrastinate for months, then give all students whose parents are lawyers an A and everyone else a B.
The Color of the Hood’s Velvet Trim Indicates the professor’s reason for going to grad school in the first place:
Black: I say it’s because of my passion for my field. But if I’m being honest, I just wanted to avoid the “real world” for a few more years, and I felt lost without the validation and structure college offered. I also wanted a challenge, but now I constantly wonder, Why? Didn’t I know yet that life itself is already challenging enough?
Navy blue: Same.
Dark maroon: Same.
All other colors: Same.
The Color of the Satin Chevron Stripe Inside the Hood Indicates the professor’s approach to the Q&A portion of panels at academic conferences:
Lilac: To promote my own research
Emerald: To hightail it out of Ballroom D early and beat the bathroom rush
Cardinal: To lavish unqualified praise that I’ll later try to parlay into sleeping with the presenter
Royal blue: More of a comment than a question
Yellow: Nap
The Color of the Satin Lining of the Hood Indicates the professor’s approach to office hours:
Orange: I schedule office hours during my only free hour all day, lunch, then depress students by spending the whole time apologetically eating sad beige yogurt that crusts in the corners of my mouth.
Light blue: My office hours are always packed because of my nervous tendency to reveal exam answers when speaking off the cuff.
Purple: My office hours are always packed because I’m hot.
Burgundy: I keep my office door closed during office hours so no one sees me on my knees, praying no one will come to office hours.
Silver: What are office hours? Is that something people do on Fridays? I haven’t been to my office on a Friday in twenty-five years.
Cords (optional accessories that hang around the neck) Similar to football players awarded skull decals to stick on their helmets, faculty members are given a new cord for each sack. In academia, it’s considered a “sack” if you stand up during a faculty meeting and point out whatever way the administration is currently destroying the faculty / the students / the working class / themselves / the entire concept of education.
Tam (the little hat) No details about the tam mean anything. But the fact that you know it’s called a tam, and you call it a “tam” and not “the little hat,” means everything.
All-Black Robe, No Sleeve Stripes, Blue Satin Hood, Coat of Arms Over the Left Breast That Reads “RAVENCLAW” Indicates a Halloween costume purchased for $35 on Amazon by an underpaid contingent professor.
Trevor Jacob, a 29-year-old YouTuber, pled guilty to a federal charge after he destroyed the wreckage of a plane he intentionally crashed to gain views, admitting to authorities that he planned to crash the plane in a video he made to promote a wallet. What do you think?
TALLAHASSEE, FL—Letting out a bone-chilling scream at the sight of the Disney princess, Gov. Ron DeSantis reportedly ran crying out of a child’s birthday party Wednesday after a surprise visit from Elsa. “No! I want to go now!” the sobbing prospective 2024 presidential candidate said at a backyard birthday gathering…
After a Florida teacher was accused of indoctrination for showing the animated Disney film Strange World, The Onion asked Florida parents to explain why they oppose schools showing movies with gay characters, and this is what they said.
NEW YORK—Noting that “the kid” had some “serious chops” to have already done so much damage, executives confirmed Wednesday that a precocious new Goldman Sachs hire had destroyed 1,000 people’s livelihoods on his first day. “You know, I wasn’t sure about him when we first hired him, but based on the sheer amount of…
Valve has decided to update the Steam traffic tracking system for game developers after reviewing privacy issues with Google Analytics, the most widely used tool for accessing such data. Instead, developers looking to monitor their games' statistics will have to use Steam's own built-in traffic reporting tools.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responds to a local TV reporter’s question in May 2021 in Miami. | Carl Juste/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Dozens of videos on social media show empty construction sites and farms even before a new law goes into effect.
The videos from Florida aren’t hard to find: Dozens of clips of empty fields, abandoned construction sites, and scores of truck drivers calling for boycotts of the state have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Twitter over the last month. The common thread? Fear and frustration over the state’s newest anti-immigrant law, signed a week ago by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which mandates that businesses with 25 or more employees verify the citizenship status of workers through the federal online portal E-Verify or face stronger penalties, among other new restrictions.
The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.
Florida is home to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and many work in the kinds of businesses that would be impacted by the law, known as SB 1718. Many of those affected are also members of mixed-status families — where a son or daughter, for example, might be a US citizen while their parents are not. The bill’s impact extends beyond the workplace to health care and highways: Even family members could be targets of law enforcement under a new provision that punishes anyone who transports an undocumented person “knowingly and willfully” into Florida across state lines.
The law also requires Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to collect the immigration status of patients and calculate and report the cost of health care for undocumented people to the state; it no longer permits undocumented people to use driver’s licenses issued from other states and prohibits state ID cards to be issued to them.
Combined, these provisions may also deal a devastating blow to Florida businesses that rely on migrant labor, as it may force workers and their families to flee Florida, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Florida state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, told Vox.
“The narrative that immigrants are not welcome here is going to have a huge impact on our business community — in particular industries such as construction, hospitality, health care, and agriculture — because they rely solely or primarily on migrant labor. As fear becomes the norm in immigrant communities, a lot of these migrant workers will start leaving the state and looking somewhere else,” Vilchez Santiago said. “And there is a lot of fear in migrant communities across the state.”
Acres and acres, tons and tons, of rotting food in Florida fields. FARM WORKERS ARE NO LONGER SHOWING UP TO WORK. LET’S STAND IN SOLIDARITY AND BOYCOTT FLORIDA, BOYCOTT FLORIDA’S ORANGE JUICES AND PRODUCE!! #Florida#boycottflorida#floridastate#farmworkers
The law was already causing panic across Florida before DeSantis signed it. In South Florida, reporters with a local CBS News affiliate tracked empty construction sites across Miami-Dade County and spoke with construction workers who said that many of their coworkers were not showing up to work because they feared deportation. An NBC affiliate interviewed farmworkers in South Florida considering moves out of the state because of fear of persecution.
DeSantis’s office referred Vox to comments the governor made during a press conference this week. “When we have something like an E-Verify, that’s a tool to make sure that longstanding Florida law is enforced,” DeSantis said. “You can’t build a strong economy based on illegality.”
Gina Fraga, an immigration attorney in Palm Beach, told Vox that she knows of many families preparing moves out of the state because of “panic” over the law. Undocumented workers she knows in the construction, landscaping, and agricultural business are now receiving notices of termination because of the law, which includes strict human trafficking punishments that don’t make exceptions for mixed-status families, or for those who came to the US as children and are covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The penalties under SB 1718 are severe: Businesses that fail to use E-Verify would be fined $1,000 per day and the state would suspend an employer’s license if they are caught employing an undocumented person. The law also enhances human trafficking and smuggling penalties for people, including US citizens, making it a second-degree felony, punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to 15 years in prison, to transport five or more undocumented people or an undocumented minor into the state of Florida.
DeSantis has called it an “honor to usher this bill through the process” and said it should serve “as the model for the nation to combat this crisis created by our very own President.”
Fraga, who volunteers with the Farmworker Coordinating Council, a nonprofit advocacy group for agricultural workers, said that the harsher punishment for crossing state lines is a direct attack against farmworkers because of the seasonal nature of their jobs. “Depending on the veggies, they travel to South Carolina, to Georgia — so they’re scared now, and a bunch of them are moving to Georgia, and they’re planning on not coming back to Florida,” she said. “That means everyone is going to be affected in our grocery stores in terms of price because nobody wants to do these jobs.”
And all this fear and confusion has been recorded online, through various kinds of clips showing workers leaving their jobs after learning of the new law’s restrictions. Other videos show truck drivers calling for boycotts of Florida because of the threat crossing a state border would mean for them.
Those calls for boycotts have been compiled by independent journalist Arturo Dominguez on Twitter, and have been shared by Democratic politicians criticizing the new state law: “Ron’s ‘woke’ war will cause prices to increase on all goods and services. Congrats Ron on tanking Florida’s economy and creating inflation,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, a former agriculture commissioner, tweeted over the weekend.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also shared Dominguez’s thread, arguing that “the US has such deep needs right now, particularly in labor. Yet policymakers (of ALL stripes) take our immigrant communities for granted. No más. Time to stop biting the hands that feed.”
Still, the law isn’t in effect just yet, and there may be legal challenges raised against it, Fraga said. And just how much of an economic effect this new law will have on Florida is unknown — though anecdotally, business owners and employers seem to be bracing for significant churn in the labor force at a time when Florida has a near record-low unemployment rate and tight labor market. “The reality is Florida needs workers,” Vilchez Santiago said. “The only way we can keep our economy moving is by ensuring that our businesses have access to the labor they need.”
There is a long history of trademark silliness concerning the phrase “Taco Tuesday.” As with many trademark stories, the original sin in all of this was committed by the USPTO , which in the ’80s somehow managed to grant the Taco John’s chain a trademark on the term, despite it being both very descriptive and, after years of lax enforcement, absolutely generic at present. What you will find missing in the stories that we’ve done on this topic in the past is an entity with real weight behind it attempting to invalidate Taco John’s trademark entirely. Sure, everyone from restaurant trade associations to LeBron James (seriously!) have gotten involved, but what we need here is a good old fashioned Goliath to come and stamp out David when he’s misbehaving.
Enter Taco Bell. The largest player in the Americanized Mexican food market has finally entered the fray and has petitioned the Trademark Office directly to invalidate the mark.
The taco chain filed a petition Tuesday (naturally) with the US Patent and Trademark office to cancel the trademark, owned by rival Taco John’s for 34 years, because Taco Bell claims the commonly used phrase “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos.”
The use of the phrase “potentially subjects Taco Bell and anyone else who wants to share tacos with the world to the possibility of legal action or angry letters if they say ‘Taco Tuesday’ without express permission from [Taco John’s] — simply for pursuing happiness on a Tuesday,” the filing said.
It’s a little cheeky, to be sure, but the meat of the requests relies on solid complaints about the mark. The term is at least partially descriptive: deals for tacos on Tuesdays. And even if it isn’t descriptive enough to be denied a trademark, the term certainly has become so widely used and generic at this point, at least in part due to lax policing from Taco John’s, that it should be invalidated.
The very idea that a taco joint anywhere in America cannot run sales, advertising, or promotions for their own “taco Tuesdays” is a blatant violation of the purpose of trademark law. Nobody is going to see an advertisement for Taco Tuesdays at Taco Bell and somehow think Taco John’s is involved. That is purely due to how the public sees the term. Again, this is a clear indicator that the mark should be done away with.
Taco John’s has 40 days to file a response, and if the two chains can’t reach an agreement, the case will move to a discovery period where each company can make document requests and present evidence stating their case. Following that would be a trial and oral arguments presented in front of the board’s judges.
According to Gerben, Taco Bell has a “strong case” because US trademark law “prevents the registration of common phrases or phrases that become commonplace after a registration is granted.” In this instance, the slogan “has become a cultural phenomenon with a long history of being used by individuals and companies other than the current owner of the trademark,” he told CNN.
And therefore never send to know for whom the Taco Tuesday bell tolls, Taco John’s; it tolls for thee.
PORTLAND, ME—Asserting that the correlations were there if you just paid attention, local conspiracy theorist Paul McLaughlin was reportedly convinced Wednesday that the entire universe was connected with God’s abundant love. “Just look around, and you’ll see that this goes all the way to the big guy upstairs,” said…
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/3ba1122929607aa49da8a948955d81b9/Sunset%20TCEQ%20MM%20TT%2026.jpg)
