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“The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed deeply skeptical on Tuesday of the legality of the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt, heightening the prospect that the justices would thwart efforts to forgive the loans of tens of millions of borrowers.” — New York Times

Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court,

As I stand before you today, I need to make one thing absolutely clear: I’m a realist. I call things as I see them. And I just have to ask—how can we afford to bail out student loan borrowers when we can barely afford to bail out Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, Bear Stearns, the entire airline industry, General Motors, Chrysler, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Savings & Loan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and then the entire airline industry for a second time? I just don’t see how we can swing it.

Besides, we recently forgave PPP loans for Tom Brady, Khloe Kardashian, and Jared Kushner—three completely average Americans. How many more run-of-the-mill citizens do we need to help? For God’s sake, when will it be enough?

Look: I care about people. I do. But people aren’t people. Corporations are people. And so when I say I care about people, what I mean is that I care about corporations, not people. Instead of bailing out American people, we need to save our money for the next time we need to bail out American corporations. Because American corporations are the real American people. Does that make sense?

In any case, I just don’t see how we can pay for student loan forgiveness when we’re on a very strict budget of spending trillions of dollars every year forever with no end in sight. It seems like we’d be turning a responsible, manageable situation into total and utter disaster. Heck, I think I speak for everyone when I say that money is completely made up, and we can add more of it at any time—except when it comes to helping people.

Now, I predict the defense will argue that student loan forgiveness is just a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of our spending. But I’m here to tell you that our bucket is already full to the brim. What’s it full of? Water. Where’s the water from? Eastern Ohio. And it’s contaminated. And they’re calling a hearing. This means at some point soon, we’re going need to use every penny we’ve got to bail out an entire rail company.

That’s right, a company. If you were listening earlier, that means a person. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let a person drown in potential debt—unless, of course, that person is a literal person.

DESIGNER HILARY: So tell me about your house.

HOMEOWNER AVERY: It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, not far from a Starbucks. It has a charming llama habitat, and I love the wood built-ins in the dining room.

HOMEOWNER TRENT: There’s only one bathroom though. It’s accessible by shimmying through an abandoned mine shaft and riding a rusted minecart to an open pit.

AVERY: Even though I love this house, I’d really like a faucet in the kitchen. Right now, we have to lower a bucket into a well, and the water is full of toxic metals.

TRENT: I want to sell it. I have double vision from mercury poisoning, and there are demons in the basement.

REALTOR DAVID: You absolutely should sell it. This ugly house makes me retch.

AVERY: I want to stay. Our toddler is possessed and crawling up walls, but the dining room is Jamaican mahogany.

HILARY: What would I have to do to make you stay?

AVERY: All we need are a few touch-ups, including an area where I can drink wine with my many friends.

TRENT: We need the kitchen and bathroom gutted. We need the interior walls knocked out and the ceiling raised to form one large circus-tent-style living space. We’d also like to do something about the demons.

HILARY: That’s asking a lot. What’s your budget?

TRENT: Seventy-nine dollars and a Twix bar.

HILARY: I can’t do everything you ask on that budget. And it would be a terrible mistake to remove the kitchen wall.

TRENT: (angrily jamming a Twix bar into his mouth) Kitchen walls are an abomination. The budget is now seventy-nine dollars and half a Twix bar.

(David shows Avery and Trent a potential new home.)

DAVID: This house has seven luxurious bathrooms and a fresh mountain stream that runs directly through the kitchen. It even has that llama habitat you requested. It came in right at your $10 billion budget.

TRENT: I’m sold.

AVERY: This house is nowhere near a Starbucks, and the so-called llama habitat is at sea level. David, what part of “grassy plateau” did you not understand?

(Back at the house remodel.)

HILARY: I have good news and devastating news. The devastating news is that when we removed the kitchen wall of your home, the structure collapsed, killing our entire crew. It also caused the crack in your basement to become a gaping chasm, fully connecting this universe to a dimension of hell.

AVERY: Sounds expensive.

HILARY: The good news is that I painted over all the Jamaican mahogany, and it really brightened up the dining room.

TRENT: How much will it cost to close the hell portal?

HILARY: Five billion dollars.

TRENT: Can’t we just leave the portal open?

HILARY: (stepping over the still-twitching body of the general contractor) I’m afraid not. All of humanity would be cast into eternal suffering.

AVERY: We don’t have much choice then. Fix it. I have faith in you, Hilary.

(David shows Avery and Trent a different potential house.)

DAVID: It wasn’t easy, but I found a house that checked all your boxes. Best of all, it’s in the same neighborhood, near a Starbucks.

AVERY: How could it have been difficult to find? It’s literally two doors down from our current home.

TRENT: I want this house. There’s a grassy plateau for Avery’s llamas, and the basement has foosball instead of everlasting anguish.

AVERY: I hate to admit it, David, but I really enjoy the potable water. This place costs $15 billion though. We could never afford it.

DAVID: Surprise: your old house used to be worth only $10 billion, but now that you’ve spent $5 billion fixing it up, you could sell it for $15 billion.

TRENT: That means we can now afford to buy a $15 billion house.

AVERY: That math totally adds up. We’d even have half a Twix bar left over.

DAVID: Let’s check in with Hilary and see how she did on your remodel.

HILARY: Here is your remodeled home.

TRENT: Is this really the same house? It’s so muted and cavernous.

AVERY: Now that the hell portal is sealed, I can picture my many friends and me drinking copious amounts of wine in here.

TRENT: But the only bathroom is still down the mine shaft.

HILARY: I didn’t have the budget for a complete bathroom remodel. But look, I lined the minecart with faux fur and added matte black hardware.

AVERY: I could drink wine in it.

HILARY: So what’s it going to be, Avery and Trent? Will you love it?

DAVID: Or list it?

(Avery and Trent confer with each other. Suspenseful music plays.)

AVERY: We’ve decided to love it.

DAVID: (spits out his Starbucks Iced Caramel Macchiato) Damn it.

HILARY: (to David) Ha ha. I win. You are trash.

The post Sisyphus Myth appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

2005 was a simpler time. Bjork was getting drunk in bars and cats were thinking about buying boats. Anyways, here’s Triumph of a Heart:

That bar scene looks like it was super fun to film.

null

A security vulnerability report arrived that went roughly like this:

• Create a new user “Attacker” with Administrator privileges.
• Log in as “Attacker”.
• While logged in as “Attacker”, browse to a folder that require Administrator privilege.
• When Explorer tells you that you don’t have access, click “Continue” to gain access.
• Log out as “Attacker”.
• Log in another administrator account.
• Change the account category of “Attacker” from “Administrator” to “Standard user”.
• Log back in as “Attacker” and browse to those same folders.
• Notice that the Attacker has retained access to the folders, even though the Attacker is no longer an administrator.

This story is all accurate, but is there a security vulnerability?

Let’s go through the usual questions.

Who is the attacker? The attacker is the user we called “Attacker”.

Who is the victim? The victim is the other administrator who created the “Attacker” account and then later reduced the “Attacker” account’s privileges to Standard User.

What has the attacker gained? The attacker gained persistent access to resources.

But wait, this all assumes that the attacker was able to log on as the Attacker account and exercise its Administrator powers. The attacker is an administrator on the system. You have already lost!

Once you let the attacker into your system with administrator privileges, they can do all sorts of things to establish persistent access. They can add themselves to the security descriptors of various resources. They can plant a backdoor that gives them an administrative command prompt. They can install malware that steals passwords.

In fact, they can even patch the “Remove a user from the Administrator group” user interface code so that it says “Yup, totally removed Attacker from the Administrator group” without actually doing it.

Once you give away the farm, you can’t take it back. It’s gone.

Note that the system did ask an administrator for permission to grant the Attacker account permanent access to the folder. The prompt from Explorer says, “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to permanently get access to this folder,” and the Continue button requires administrator privileges. So it requires administrator privileges to gain persistent access to a folder. Fortunately, there’s an administrator right there to grant that privilege: The Attacker!

Once you let a bad person become an administrator, you have lost the game. It is essential that you give administrator privileges only to people you trust.

The user interface to remove someone from the Administrator group does what it says on the tin: The user is removed from the Administrators group. But that is not sufficient to clean up behind a rogue administrator, because you haven’t cleaned up all the backdoors the rogue administrator may have planted while they still had administrator privileges. And you may never be sure that you found them all. As the philosopher Ellen Ripley put it, “Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

The post Once you give away the farm, you can’t take it back: Recovering from a rogue administrator appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Get your privacy back: Go to https://incogni.com/sabine and sign up for Incogni. First 100 subscribers get 20% off.

Today we’ll talk about computers made of human brain cells, galaxies that are too big to exist, how the Brits prevented a global chocolate disaster, what the Milky Way’s black hole is having for dinner, how to get radioactive compounds out of water, an impossibly efficient light sensor, better lithium-air batteries, Google’s second milestone on the way to quantum computing, and of course, the telephone will ring.

00:00 Intro
00:32 Intelligence In A Dish
03:39 Webb Finds Galaxies Too Big To Exist
05:50 The Global Chocolate Disaster That Wasn't
08:01 Our Black Hole Is About To Swallow A Gas Cloud
09:47 New Method to Remove Radionucleotides From Water
11:15 An Impossibly Efficient Light Sensor
13:24 Better Lithium-Air Batteries
15:28 Google Reaches Error-Correction Milestone
17:52 Protect Your Privacy with Incogni

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This post, update: a DNA test revealed the CEO is my half brother … and he’s freaking out , was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer who learned through a DNA test that the company CEO was their half brother … and the CEO was freaking out? Here’s the update.

My short update is that he 100% tried to fire me. The long update is complicated but this month has been unbelievable.

Just after my question was posted, my boss “Katie” met with me and told me she was aware of the situation and didn’t agree with how the CEO and HR had been handling it in regard to the nepotism training. I told her my only plan was to forget about it for the time being and she supported that. She told me to come to her if anything changed.

Things were quiet for a week until a major project I was working on was deleted from the company drive. It was a coincidence that I had backed it up on a USB. Katie was suspicious about my project getting deleted and told me to save everything to an external drive and my hardware, and sure enough, the project got deleted again. After that, anything I put on our work servers was getting deleted within hours, as well as any correspondence with clients or my team members. I started sending all my work communication and attachments to Katie and duplicating them on a USB that Katie kept locked in her office. It was like a James Bond movie.

After a mid-month project meeting where I showed up with all my work on a USB drive HR pulled me in because “an anonymous concern” was raised about me “hiding” my work from my colleagues and tried to write me up. Katie must have known something like this was coming because she handled it and BCCd me on all her correspondence with HR and the executive team outlining her concerns about the CEO’s and HR’s behavior regarding the DNA results and that she believed someone was remotely accessing my work computer to delete things. The company VP was horrified. Up until this point, I didn’t know CEBro wasn’t the owner of the company.

Katie and I had a call with the VP that day, who assured me that the owners were being made aware of the situation and that my job was not in jeopardy. The VP also apologized for the write-up attempt and the fact someone was obviously remotely accessing my work hardware. That was on a Friday, and my attempted firing was the following Monday.

CEBro’s mom contacted Dad on the homefront as all this was happening at work. I won’t get into what was said but the gist is Dad was set up as an unwitting donor for a childless couple. As a family we decided to support Dad and just drop it because we didn’t ask for the complete Jerry Springer package, we just wanted to know what part of Ireland Grandma was from.

The Monday after Dad spoke to CEBro’s mother, I was walking through the lobby when HR literally ambushed me and loudly fired me in front of a client and like twenty of my colleagues. Security escorted me out in front of my friends and colleagues who had no idea what was happening so that was pretty dark and humiliating. Katie stopped me on the way to my car and brought me back in for a video call with her, the VP, and the owners of the company. I explained what had happened since I got my DNA results back, the nepotism training, and editing as much of the personal stuff as I could for my Dad’s sake but the whole thing was humiliating. I was unfired but asked to turn in my badge, as both CEBro and I were suspended pending a full investigation by the owners and their lawyer. I was suspended with pay, which HR vehemently protested against. The suspension lasted a week and I had planned to spend that time looking for another job but I just didn’t have it in me.

CEBro did not return after the suspension. I was offered my job back with an apology but I opted not to go back either and have been freelancing and taking some downtime because the last month has sucked. I did accept a generous severance package, so at least they tried to do the right thing.

While some of this sounds flippant, there have been a lot of tears and stress and freaking out because this was a LOT. I don’t like being under a microscope at work or feeling like I’m “in trouble” so it was really increasing a lot of anxiety. I was also hurt because I loved that job and my team and being marched out by security felt awful. Dad feels guilty this turned into me almost losing my job, but none of this is his fault at all. In all of this, I have to say the people I resent the most in this situation were the two goblins in HR who knew they were doing the wrong thing every step of the way and openly enjoyed the drama of it all. Rumors have reached me that both the people in HR are connected with CEBro in some way — like former college friends or exes or something. I wish them the future they deserve.

This post, interviewer scolded me for my outfit, job requires an oath of allegiance, and more , was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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

1. My interviewer scolded me for what I was wearing

I am looking to relocate to a different city in my home state, and a couple of interviews I did with one company were video due to my not being able to do an in-person interview.

I was extremely successful in my first interview with them. A second interview was arranged last minute, three hours before the end of my work day. What proceeded to transpire was a very awkward interview.

After work, I had five minutes to get ready and prepare for my interview. I quickly throw on a dress shirt and tie because I want to be professional, and I jump on Microsoft Teams. As soon as my picture appears and I see the interview panel, the original interviewer from the first interview tells me, “You are wearing the same shirt as last time.” (It’s a different shirt but she basically scolds me. I also didn’t think she would remember what I was wearing a week ago; she probably sees tons of people every day.) Next she tells me to “take your tie off because it doesn’t fit with the company culture.” She didn’t tell me to take it off in the first interview. Is she just posturing for her boss? Safe to say that being critiqued right away killed my whole vibe during the interview.

But the end is where it got really weird for me. One of the interviewers, the president of this branch, asks, “Are you nervous, because you seem like it?” I said maybe a little bit, but unfortunately I didn’t have a ton of time to prepare to calm my nerves. Then he asks the original interviewer if I was nervous during the first interview and she says no. Then they go on a two-minute conversation in front of me about how I am nervous now but wasn’t before. I wasn’t any more nervous during this interview than my first. And I wasn’t so nervous that I was stuttering or not answering questions well. I was just blushing.

I am a recent college graduate with little interview experience for skilled jobs and this is an entry-level position, so I think most people they would be interviewing would be nervous. Was this my fault? Was the president just getting a nice little boost for himself making me feel bad about being nervous? Was this a stress test interview? Were they not very good interviewers?

They definitely weren’t good interviewers, but it sounds like much more than that. Scolding you for wearing the same shirt (whether or not you actually were) and telling you to take off your tie are both incredibly bizarre and rude. The president asking if you were nervous isn’t necessarily a big faux pas on its own, but the two of them having a sidebar right in front of you about your level of nervousness is rude and obnoxious.

These people both sound like jerks. It’s very unlikely this was some sort of deliberate stress test (those are really rare). They’re just asses. It’s a good reminder that interviews are two-way streets; you should be assessing your interviewers just as they’re assessing you, and if they don’t seem like people you’d want to work with, that’s valuable info that the process is designed to draw out (on both sides). So in that regard, the process worked.

2. Is return-to-office anti-feminist?

Like many, my company recently announced it will soon require employees to return to the office three times a week, after just about three years of fully remote work (during which, I might add, productivity improved). It remains to be seen what will happen, as many of us were hired during this period of remote work and don’t live within reasonable commuting distance of the office — but that isn’t why I’m writing.

The other day a colleague said to me in passing that they believe requiring employees back to the office hurts women the most. That it is anti-feminist. Why? Because women are generally the “default parent,” even if both partners work full-time. When a kid is sick or has to be picked up early from school or has a doctor’s appointment, the mother is usually the one who stays home and has to call out of work, or maybe it becomes clear that she cannot work full-time at all — just a few of the many, many examples. As someone who had their first child during the pandemic, I can’t help but agree. Do you see it this way? And, if so, is there anything we can be doing to further emphasize how remote work benefits everyone, but women especially?

I don’t know if I’d agree that bringing people back to the office is anti-feminist, but it’s certainly true in broad terms that it hurts women more than men because women do indeed generally get stuck with far more of the sorts of responsibilities you described. (It’s why far more women than men dropped out of the workforce in the first two years of the pandemic.) The solution to that is multi-pronged: more flexibility from employers, yes, but also better child care options, more societal support for parents, and men picking up an equal share of caretaking. Without the last three — and definitely without the last one — the problem will remain.

I do think that when you’re talking about remote work benefiting women, you have to be careful to be clear that you’re not suggesting companies embrace remote workers caring for young kids at home as a substitute for full-time child care — because it’s impossible to do both well at the same time. But when you’re talking about older kids, or the occasional unplanned or temporary circumstance like a school closure or a sick child, it’s absolutely true that remote work benefits anyone with caregiving responsibilities — and that means disproportionately women.

3. Can I ask to make my job part-time so I can attend graduate school?

I am unsure if I can ask if my current full-time position could be made into a part-time role so I could go to grad school full-time, and how I should broach the subject.

I work as an in-house illustrator for a 150-person company, and I really love my job (it’s honestly top 10% of my specific field in terms of easy, decently paid, and fulfilling) and I know I’m highly valued by my team and supervisor. But I REALLY want to go back to school, and my dream job would be going into academia as a career instead of trying to fit in research on the side (and without the clout of an MFA or being a freelancer). I am full-time and salaried with benefits, but my dream graduate program is full-time only. I am also the only dedicated illustrator in the company that needs new graphics made on a daily basis, and I know if I went part time they would have to either find a full-time person or at least one other part-timer (or worse, the workload would be put onto people who had been really relieved I took the task off their hands). I wouldn’t be going back this year, or even necessarily the next, but how far ahead should I bring it up? Is this a huge faux pas?

It’s a really big ask. If your job could become part-time without someone else needing to be hired, that would be one thing. But you’d be asking them to hire and manage a whole additional person, and they’d be doing that to accommodate you in attending a program that would presumably result in you leaving them at the end of it. If they deeply love you — not just “you do a good job and we like you” but more like “never leave us, you are phenomenal, and we don’t know what we’d do without you” — it’s possible they’d consider it. But even then, it’s a really big ask, and the chances of them agreeing are pretty low.

If you’re going to give it a shot anyway, I wouldn’t bring it up until you have a concrete plan in place (have been accepted to a program and know exactly when you’ll be starting) … and then you’ve got to factor in all the normal stuff about whether it’s safe to give more than a standard two weeks’ notice. If you’re hoping to raise it well before then because their answer will affect whether you pursue the program at all, that’s a lot trickier. In theory you could raise it to your boss earlier as a hypothetical (“just something I’m thinking about at this stage / no concrete plans / wondering whether you’d ever be open to this”) but an answer given to a hypothetical in 2023 won’t necessarily match up with what they decide when it’s really happening in 2024. So it’s tough. Your safest route is to assume they won’t approve it, plan accordingly, and have it be a pleasant surprise if they do.

4. Working when the heat is out

Something happened where my sister works, and I would like your input. My sister works for a credit union, and she works in the loan department located in the basement area of the central branch/administrative office building. Last Wednesday, there was a very bad ice storm and that building lost power. They had a generator, but although it did power computers and at least half the lights, there was extremely limited heat. Where my sister was in the basement, it was tolerable (about 68 degrees). But on the main floor in the actual branch, it averaged between 55-60 degrees. Employees wore their winter coats and were miserable. Space heaters were not allowed since they draw a ton of power and could have destroyed the generator. This mess started last Wednesday morning and power was restored Tuesday at 6:15 pm.

Is making your employees work in these conditions reasonable? (I would like to note that they could have closed the branch and sent the employees to other branches.)

No. OSHA recommends (but doesn’t require) temperatures of 68-76 degrees. 55-60 is really cold.

5. My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance

I am a PhD student graduating this summer, and I have just signed on to a fantastic job that I am really excited about. I’m moving from the east coast to California, where I will work for the University of California with my salary paid by a federal grant.

I received my onboarding paperwork today, and along with all the normal stuff, it included an “Oath of Allegiance.” I am required to sign it in front of a witness who is “legally authorized to administer oaths.” Here’s the full text:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

Am I right in thinking this is insane? On the one hand, it doesn’t bother me that much because I can’t see it ever coming into play. I definitely don’t have the type of job where I’m likely to encounter enemies, foreign and domestic, seeking harm to the constitutions of my state or country (and if they do I’m peacing out, thanks). But I feel weird about signing something this intense, and I don’t really want to. Can they legally require this as a condition of employment?

Yep, they can require it. In fact, it looks like all California state employees are required to take that oath, and all federal employees have one too.

The expansion of SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, that were put in place during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic is ending, pushing about 32 million Americans off a “hunger cliff.” What do you think?

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The European Space Agency proposed a new time zone for the Moon, saying there is a need to establish some synchronicity in how we tell time on the Moon as many countries race to explore it. What do you think?

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The company that distributes “Dilbert” has cut ties with creator Scott Adams after he made racist remarks about Black Americans in a YouTube video that led hundreds of newspapers across the country to drop the satirical cartoon. What do you think?

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STOCKHOLM—With sales of the spirit reportedly tripling after the commercial was broadcast in the United States, Swedish vodka brand Absolut debuted a new ad Wednesday that features a mom swaying back and forth with one eye closed as she tells the camera how she used to dance. “Your mom was quite the dancer, you know,”…

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NEW YORK—Expressing confidence that the new technology wasn’t a threat, FinCorp Solutions CEO Charles Markham reportedly expressed relief Wednesday that artificial intelligence could never replace him if he already contributed nothing to the company. “I actually don’t do anything, so there’s nothing the computer can…

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“The 15-minute city principle suggests you should have your daily needs—work, food, healthcare, education, culture, and leisure—within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from where you live. It sounds pleasant enough, but in the minds of libertarian fanatics and the bedroom commentators of TikTok, it represents an unprecedented assault on personal freedoms.” — The Guardian

If you’re worried about the government confining citizens to life inside a walkable 15-minute box, then we invite you to the 15-Hour City: a metropolis so sprawling and convoluted to navigate only by car, you’ll need over half the day to accomplish the basic necessities of living.

In the 15-Hour City, the most important tenet is freedom of movement. Here, you can travel anywhere you want, as long as it’s on the handful of roads we afford to maintain with a gas-guzzling car that costs half your paycheck.

No one can tell you where to go, except a byzantine array of traffic laws overseen by stir-crazy police officers stewing in a patrol car disguised as a bush on the side of the highway. The city is your oyster, as long as the oyster’s license and registration are up to date.

The 15-Hour City believes everything has its place. Houses go in one location, businesses in another, and in between is a dark sea of soul-crushing concrete and asphalt, a sea of inactivity mimicking the lifeless labyrinth we’ve constructed. All commerce will be moved to our sister city, Fjorskhsh, conveniently located in the darkest part of Sweden. Enjoy the Costco—hope you brought your krona!

The government wants you to walk to your grocery store; we want you to rent an RV to grab GoGurt. They want houses crammed back to back so you can be forced into awful labors like “knowing your neighbor”; we don’t want anyone to hear you if you scream. They want “sustainable cities”; we want this house of cards to collapse before the end of the year.

The 15-Hour City will bring families together, mainly inside the suffocating walls of a car without AC on an August afternoon. Hours spent together crammed onto sticky pleather seats, fighting over the last Capri Sun, like in a Rockwell painting.

You’ll go everywhere together because your house is on the other side of town, so parents and kids alike can experience the joys of a death-defying maneuver across a six-lane highway before school drop-off.

In fact, you’ll never have to leave your car at all. Our zoning laws ensure all doorways can fit a Nissan Armada, so everything in the 15-Hour City can be a drive-thru. We’re mandating all vehicles come equipped with a Murphy Bed that drops down where the DVD player used to be. Sleep in your car, sleep on the go, and sleep in the ER after trying to catch some shut-eye on the way to soccer practice.

The 15-Hour City represents what we think are all the best qualities of a modern city: a lack of social connections, a profound sense of alienation, and a constant stream of being flipped off by drivers from New Jersey.

So we say to you: come one, come all (as long as you can find parking). You’ll never want to leave the 15-Hour City, and even if you do, good luck trying!

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Using hallucinogens carries the serious risk of a bad trip, but a skilled guide can help talk down a friend or loved one before their feelings of paranoia or anxiety spin out of control. Here’s what not to say to a friend having a bad trip.

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My first strike when writing while Black was starting this piece at the end of Black History Month. After February, the next time Black narratives get highlighted is Juneteenth, per the diversity and inclusion report. Unless, of course, a spontaneous movement for social justice occurs. If that happens, the push for Black narratives will increase by around 50 percent—a number I just made up but one that sounds about right.

My second strike, which probably is my first, now that I think about it, was believing I could be a good writer. Sorry, whites, but Black America has consumed white mediocrity for so many years that we even have a saying for it: you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. That fact of life never bothered me, because a good writer works hard anyway. Plus, I could always rely on affirmative action and my Black Card if needed. With that, there was no way I could be stopped. But it turns out I’m what they call a good black writer. Please, don’t get me wrong. A good black writer is almost the same thing. Except, good black writers like Toni Morrison, Kendrick Lamar, Maya Angelou, etc., rose so high above white mediocrity that, compared to them, I’m no good at all. Now I’m fucked.

My third strike when writing while Black was my failure to predict how non-Black people perceive Black stories. Oftentimes, they’re viewed through the prism of Black stereotypes and are loosely judged on whether the story is or isn’t Black enough, based on that stereotypical prism. You can see it up close in the feedback process:

For this character, can we add some of that Black boy joy?

I think the plot needs a little more drama. What if the MC chased her boyfriend around with a knife?

Overall, this story would have a much deeper meaning if you took the father out.

So here I am. In the cell of a Black writer’s jail with three strikes, writing to correct all my mistakes. This piece includes the stereotype of me being locked up. A concept that’s sure to be Black enough for the world. Or at least for the people who read this.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

TORONTO – As Netflix cracks down on people sharing passwords in order to boost its revenue CBC Gem has announced that it too will stop all of its paid Premium Account members from sharing their password just as soon as someone signs up for the service. “Like our American counterpart Netflix we have also made […]

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If I’m God’s Handiwork, Would Someone Please Explain These Thighs!: Discovering Your Unique Destiny
Lechner
2002

Submitter: I work at a public library in a small city in NC. We found this book from 2002 during a recent sweep. I think it’s a good example for your blog because of the outdated humor both in the title and within the work, as well as the outdated design of the cover and call outs within. The book never had particularly good circulation numbers and probably should have been weeded a decade ago.

Holly: I know it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but 2002 was 21 years ago. Let it gooooo!

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This post, my new coworker is putting fake mistakes in my work so she can tell our boss I’m bad at my job , was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’ve been with my company for over 10 years at this point. It was my first job out of college and I have successfully worked myself up the ranks to the corporate offices. I’ve been immensely proud of my progress, up until recently.

I transferred to a new team, which was presented as a great opportunity. Once I was here, it became very clear this manager, Celia, is a hot mess who does not have any idea how to manage people. I’m talking not having proper training programs and then reprimanding people for making mistakes on things they weren’t trained on, reaming people out for leaving at their assigned time, badmouthing employees to their coworkers, etc. It’s just been miserable and I constantly have a pit in my stomach because of it.

In addition to all of this, it feels like one of my coworkers is surgically attached to Celia. This coworker, Julia, is a new hire and has been with the company for less time than everyone else. She is constantly in Celia’s office. There have been multiple times where the team has been working and engaging in normal chit chat, Julia gets up and quietly goes to Celia’s office, and then moments later Celia is reaming us out for not “staying on task” (we are always working, just also talking because this isn’t elementary school, we can talk and work). Julia never works on the reports with us and we’ve been told she’s on a special project for the manager. I have no idea what this means.

Recently, I’ve been getting negative feedback from Celia about not completing tasks or making mistakes. When I go into the record to see who last touched it, it’s always Julia. I just thought Julia was finding the mistakes and fixing them. But I’ve never been one to make the same mistake over and over, so I started to get suspicious. I decided to take screenshots of my work at the end of the day to see if the next time I’m told Julia had to fix a mistake, it actually was correct to begin with.

This is what happened. I was reprimanded through email about not correcting something. When I compared the correct version to my screenshot, I could see very clearly that the record was right to begin with and Julia just re-executed it to make it seem like she had to fix it.

I’m absolutely livid and confused. Why would you alienate yourself from the team like this? But now I’m not sure what to do with this information. I don’t want to let Julia get away with this shady behavior but I also don’t trust Celia to take this seriously or, worse, to even believe me to begin with. Celia clearly never took the time look into the history of who modified the record and what was done (which she can see from her access), she just believed Julia was a genius and I’m some dunce who kept making the same mistake. I would go above her head but I’m hesitant that this would cause more drama. I did mention it to three of my coworkers who I’m close to and advised them to start screenshotting as well as they also are receiving negative feedback.

How would you handle this? Is there a way to go about this without looking like some paranoid lunatic? I’m just so tired of leaving work on Fridays with a lump in my throat because I already have anxieties about being reprimanded on Monday morning.

What the hell!  Julia sounds like she’s intentionally undermining you and your coworkers in order to curry favor with Celia.

In a normal situation with a different manager, you could go to Celia and lay out what you’d found: “I’ve been so baffled about how I could be repeating the same mistakes that I started screenshotting my work after finishing it. My screenshots show that the things Julia has been reporting as mistakes were correct the first time; it’s looks like she’s just re-executing the records so it looks like she had to fix them.”

Are you sure you can’t say that to Celia? If you have the screenshots, it might not be a question of whether to believe you or not.

But if you think she’s too defensive of Julia to hear it, could you say it in a way that doesn’t blame Julia? For example, you could use the script above but rather than outright saying that Julia is re-executing the records to make it look like she fixed something, you could say: “It seems like something is going wrong with our system if Julia is finding mistakes, when you can see from these screenshots that it was right the first time. If the system isn’t saving things correctly, that’s a huge problem so I think we need IT to figure out what’s going on.”

You might even put that in an email to her, attach the screenshots, and cc Julia — framing it all as “something’s going wrong with our system if Julia is seeing mistakes since, as you can see, these were done correctly.” That would put Julia on notice that what she’s doing won’t continue to work, without you having to directly confront her. Hell, with that framing, it might even be reasonable to cc your whole team as an FYI that your database isn’t saving records correctly — “is anyone else seeing this?” — which should really mess with Julia’s scheme.

If none of those feel like options, then I do think you need to go over Celia’s head. Yes, it will mean drama — but there is already drama! Julia is stirring up an entire cobra’s nest of drama by what she’s doing. If you can’t count on Celia to squash it, then the only real alternative is to go to someone who will. When a manager is regularly reprimanding you for something you didn’t do and can’t be trusted to hear reason, that warrants escalation. And the stakes are high enough here that you really should — because the lies Julia is feeding Celia have the potential to seriously impact your reputation in this company you’ve spent a decade working your way up in, and could even cost you your job at some point. You’ve got to bring this to someone — if not Celia, then someone above her. (And when you do that, consider having some of your coworkers join you, to demonstrate that this is a widespread issue, not a misunderstanding with one person.)

If none of the above works, I strongly recommend working on getting out of there. If things remain as they are — with someone actively working to harm you and a manager who’s willing to believe her — the risk to you if you stay is too high.