Not only have corporate efforts to monopolize repair resulted in a flood of proposed state and federal laws, the idea was also included in the Biden Administration’s recent executive order on monopoly power and competition. Said order urged the FTC to tighten up its rules on repair monopolization efforts, whether it’s ham-fisted DRM, or making repair manuals, parts, and diagnostics hard to come by.
“While historically Deere has outcompeted rivals to win farmers’ and ranchers’ business, in recent years it has resorted to leveraging its monopoly power in the market for large agricultural equipment to dominate the repair market for its equipment,” the complaint says. “
A farmer who purchases Deere equipment today may not realize that Deere, under the guise of technological advancement, has made it impossible for farmers to make important repairs themselves or to go to an independent repair shop. Even where purchasers of Deere equipment are aware that Deere requires important repairs to be performed only by Deere-authorized technicians, Deere’s market dominance leaves these purchasers little to no choice but to submit to Deere’s terms.”
The repair asks the FTC to formally acknowledge that John Deere has attempted to monopolize repair through the combination of restrictive, unnecessary DRM and its exclusive repair network, which often forces rural tractor owners to travel hundreds of miles simply to repair their own equipment.
A recent report by US PIRG found that mass consolidation in dealerships has resulted in one dealership chain for every 12,018 farms and every 5.3 million acres of American farmland. That consolidation is clearly by design, and part of the company’s attempts to force Americans to pay significantly more money to repair essential equipment.
Recognizing that this movement isn’t going anywhere and hoping to avoid legislation forcing their hand, several companies like Apple have slowly backed away some of their harsher repair restrictions. Companies that continue to force the issue simply find they’ve driven additional support to a movement that quickly shifted from niche nerd fare to the mainstream.
After World War II devastated the global economy, there was a push for a new universal currency. This is the story of how the U.S. dollar won. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
Looking back at the Timex Data Link Model 70, an early smartwatch introduced by Microsoft in 1994 for Windows 3.1 PCs! It stores up to 70 data entries viewable on its LCD screen, but its real party trick is how it wirelessly synchronizes with a CRT monitor. Just point your wrist at the screen and data transfer begins, it's awesome. And it's NASA approved for space travel, too!
Annise Parker is as politically savvy as they come. Her storied career includes six years on the Houston City Council, six years as Houston city controller, and six years as mayor, when she won bipartisan praise for her administrative competence. But even Parker was tripped up by new voting laws that the GOP-dominated Legislature passed last year. Parker and her wife are both older than 65 and traditionally vote by mail. This year, both had their mail-in ballots rejected because they failed to write the ID numbers that they used to register decades ago in the correct spot on the envelope, as Senate Bill 1 requires. Theirs were among the 11,717 absentee ballots—nearly 30 percent of all mail-in votes—that were rejected in Harris County, whose…
Texas is worried it could lose over a billion dollars in federal funding over Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive requiring medical professionals to report gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse.
Lucky for them, Texas officials probably can’t be prosecuted for bullying under the state’s education laws. The gist of those laws, however, is crystal clear, and so is the effect of their actions and rhetoric about gender-affirming health care.
by Rhonda Fanning, Texas Standard, Caroline Covington, Texas Standard
Amber Briggle is speaking out again, after making headlines for inviting the Texas Attorney General to dinner in 2016. Texas Child Protective Services is investigating her family.
Management fired an employee, we’ll call him Mark. Mark is one of our field technicians. His performance is spotty, at best. He frequently calls out, and his attitude frankly sucks. This past week alone, he called out once, didn’t wake up for a night job he was scheduled for (he was off all day to rest beforehand), used the company credit card inappropriately, and gave our dispatcher grief when she tried to send him to a job at 5 pm (techs are assigned jobs up to 6 pm). Mark has always had these issues, but things have gotten worse over the last 3-4 months. Because of all the well-documented reasons above and more, management made the decision to fire him. And he was let go.
Afterwards, my coworker, Dan, went to Mark’s vehicle with him. This is standard — we make sure technicians take all their possessions off the truck and leave the tools and equipment we provided. After a couple minutes, Mark told Dan to “hang on” and “not touch another effing thing” before marching back into the building. Mark then demanded to meet with the manager who fired him, the manager’s direct supervisor, and the company owner to plead his case as to why he should be kept on. I’m not sure what was said, but with all the evidence stacked against him, we all assumed he would be dismissed (since he had already been fired).
Alison … they unfired him. With mountains of documentation of poor job performance, frequent call outs, and a bad attitude, I’m not really sure what they were thinking. Doesn’t it set a bad precedent if management says “Just kidding! This problematic employee said pretty please, so we’re not going to fire him after all”? It’s all employees are talking about today, because we’re all … angry isn’t the right word. Aghast, maybe? Mark is someone we’ve all had at least one issue with. I’m probably more perturbed than most because I work so closely with Mark. Every job he goes to, I process the paperwork and order materials needed. And there is ALWAYS a problem.
It seems petty to ask if I can leave my job over this. I’ve been at the company for five years and, in general, love my work. But I think this instance just demonstrated how ineffectual our management is. Not just in this circumstance, either. This is more a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were. We frequently joke that the only thing consistent here is the inconsistency of management, which is never a good thing.
So even if the advice is “be like Elsa and let it go,” can you offer advice on how to grapple with this? How do I reconcile a good place to work (usually) with this new info? Am I wrong to think management handled this poorly?
So, in theory, there could be more to this than you know. For example, while Mark sounds Highly Problematic in many ways, if they gave him Specific Reason X for his firing, and Mark pointed out that Specific Reason X happened to conflict with, say, a medical accommodation he was entitled to under the Americans with Disabilities Act, it could explain your company backtracking. That doesn’t mean that someone with ADA accommodations can do whatever they want without risking their job — it definitely doesn’t — but if one specific thing led to the firing, that one specific thing rightly should be scrutinized. There are a whole bunch of other similar scenarios that you wouldn’t necessarily know about. Another example: if Mark had just made a good faith report of harassment or discrimination, firing him right after that would look awfully suspect (especially when none of his bad behavior had been enough to get him fired previously).
Of course, if it happened that way, it would mean your company had acted without legal advice, which is a really dumb thing to do if any of those issues were in play.
Alternately, it could be none of that. Mark might have just pleaded his case and they changed their minds because they suck at managing. Or who knows, maybe Mark has some seriously weird dirt on the company owner and threatened to expose it. You might never know what happened, although I bet you’ll start hearing rumors.
Regardless, though, what you do know for sure is this:
* Your coworker is unreliable, bad at his job, and rude to colleagues, and your company is not holding him accountable for that. They tried but they’re either so weak that they caved to his pressure or they did it so incompetently that it didn’t stick.
* This is part of a pattern of bad management at your company, and you have no reason to think that will change.
Mark is a symbol of that second point, and it’s the second point that really matters. It’s the second point that you have to decide if you’re willing to continue to live with or not. It’s not petty if you decide you’re not.
This week, let’s talk about times when you’ve seen someone exploit their power for good. Specifically: times when you saw someone violate the letter or the spirit of a rule or otherwise do something that could technically be considered under-handed in order to achieve good in the world. Please share in the comments!
I wanted to send in an update about my “friend” (who is actually my sibling who uses they/them pronouns) who I wrote about two and a half years ago here.
My sibling continued to do inappropriate things at work and continued to react with extremes every time I disagreed with them or tried to set a boundary. Sending in this question and seeing the responses was the beginning of me realizing how messed up our relationship was, and how much pain and anxiety it brought me. I went to therapy and gained some boundary-setting skills, and in the last six months I have finally put a lot of distance between myself and my sibling. It has been great! I am so much happier and confident in all my relationships now that I can set boundaries, and I also am happier not caring so much about my sibling’s antics. I spent so much of my life trying to “help” them, and I now know that I can’t make them change and I can’t be responsible for their actions.
As for my sibling: once COVID happened, they began “working from home” which for them meant taking three hour naps during the workday. They started strange conflicts with their supervisor and said inappropriate and concerning things as “jokes” (like joking about death and dying). Just the other day, they let our family know that they quit their job with no other job lined up, which makes me wonder if they were finally coached out. They have some sort of plan to volunteer and then get a social work degree from Canada. But their monkeys are no longer my monkeys and I have exited the circus. :)
You were kind enough to publish my letter and both you and the readers gave me some excellent advice, so I thought I’d send an update.
Essentially, in my situation, the pandemic turned out to be very helpful, because everyone scattered to work from home indefinitely and many people moved away entirely. I was able to buckle down and work on my own project with few interruptions by simply ignoring my e-mail and all the meetings they’d planned that weren’t part of my job description. It’s much easier to say no when it just means not responding to requests for unreasonable time drains, though I did do some guest lectures etc. to keep my network active.
My problematic co-worker moved back home and got married – when I wouldn’t go to her non-covid-safe wedding, we more or less fell out of contact. We have now both defended our PhDs and left the programme, though much to her chagrin, I got there slightly ahead of her.
Since my funding ran out before I could finish due to having to adapt my research to what was possible in the pandemic, I moved to an area with a much lower cost of living and got a part-time job as a lecturer at a local technical college. It turns out that if I budget carefully, I can actually get by here on a 20h/week job while still owning a car and renting a two-bedroom flat just for myself, so while I’m casually searching for a second job or freelance work to rebuild my savings, I’m mostly just enjoying having actual free time!
I miss the international research community (and the frequent conference travel) of my previous phase of life, but there’s a lot to be said for this change of pace.
Unfortunately, everyone was right. Shortly after this, I set up meetings with a couple members of the Executive Council I have relationships with and trust. They listened, they protected me, they documented. There was no retaliation. They said they would be “asking more questions” and “determining appropriate action.” I only know for certain of one other coworker they talked to about it.
We’ve had resignation after resignation and nothing changes. So, it was time to move on. I’m starting a new job elsewhere next month!
i expect to love my new company and coworkers just as much as I do now — without the added bullying. While I’m frustrated that I went through the mental stress of trying to make a difference, at least I can walk away knowing I truly tried everything.
I work at potentially the most dysfunctional toxic company on the planet. While my list of complaints is exceedingly long, one of the biggest ones is the attitude that it’s unreasonable to expect a work-life balance. I regularly work 9-10 hours a day (salaried), but have gotten comments about leaving “early.” Any time before 8 pm is considered early, I guess.
Lately I’ve been hearing HR say we are expected to work “professional hours.” I typically work 8 am – 5 pm, sometimes later, and never take breaks (except to read your blog!). I’m under the impression that those are not considered “professional hours” here, but it’d be totally normal anywhere else I’ve ever worked! So, is this A Thing now? Or did my employer make it up to get people to work more hours? Since they don’t seem to understand the meaning of “professional” in general, I’m inclined to think it’s just made-up nonsense.
Any thoughts on this? I’m looking to leave ASAP, but knowing my 45-50 hours/week is considered unprofessional just makes me angry.
They made it up.
Professional hours are typically considered 9-5, 9-6, 8-5, or various variations reasonably close to that. 8 pm is not a typical ending time.
It’s possible that by “professional hours,” what they really mean is “you are exempt, salaried professionals and you’re expected to stay until the job is done, not work to a clock.” That’s reasonable only if (a) your workload has slower times too and (b) the flexibility they want from you goes both ways and you can leave earlier than, say, 5 during those slow times when your workload allows. But if you’re getting comments about leaving early any time you leave before 8 pm, that’s not the case.
It sounds like your company is just trying to pressure you into working long hours all the time by attempting to rewrite the definition of “professional.” They are wrong.
A sizeable update to the open source 3D graphics suite Blender is available to download. Blender 3.1 is performance-packed follow up to the incredibly well-received Blender 3.0 release that squeaked out at the end of last year. As I’m not someone who knows how to use Blender —boy do I wish I was that talented— I’m not the best person to walk you through what’s changed. But do you know who is? The Blender team themselves. Yes, to help demonstrate what’s changed (and how the changes improve things) the Blender team has put together a fabulous five minute video that […]
Enlarge / A nurse waits as another staff places sand bags near the window for protection in Kramatorsk City Hospital in eastern Ukraine.
(credit: Getty | SOPA Images)
The World Health Organization has verified 18 Russian attacks on health care resources in Ukraine, including attacks on health care facilities, health workers, and ambulances, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing Wednesday. The verified attacks, which are all in violation of international humanitarian law, involved 10 deaths and 16 injuries.
The latest tally came as reports circulated online that Russian forces had carried out a "direct strike" on a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted video footage of the wreckage, writing, "People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!" The footage shows a person walking through a hallway, passing room after room in ruin. The brightly colored rooms have their windows blown out, furniture destroyed, and other rubble strewn about. The video captures glimpses of flipped beds, a crib, a pink changing table, a small child-sized cot, and a trail of blood on the debris littering the floor, though no injured people are seen.
It wouldn't be very controversial to state that "Star Trek: Voyager" sits at an unusual crossroads in franchise history. Essentially functioning as an olive branch to fans who felt threatened by the more challenging and unconventional paths traveled by "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager" brought fans back to the safe confines of a much more familiar environment. An emphasis on exploration, a constantly roving starship with a traditional crew (aside from the very un-Federation-like Maquis half, at least), a noticeable lack of interpersonal conflicts among the crew in the early going, and heavily episodic adventures with little to no carryover from one episode to the next. If it weren't for the unique premise of the show, fans would be forgiven for thinking they'd somehow entered a spatial distortion or subspace rift that transported them back to the halcyon days of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
Various growing pains (yes, the unofficial "Wait three seasons for the episodes to get good" rule of thumb remains alive and well here) and reactionary creative decisions aside, "Voyager" would eventually go on to inspire a sizable group of devoted fans and provide several classic moments in "Trek" lore ... and not just the controversial ones that even the most casual of fans will have undoubtedly head about.
One unexpected detail, in fact, continues to resonate with fans (and even cast members) of the series to this day. Of the many memorable characters on board the USS Voyager, lost in the faraway Delta Quadrant with little hope of a timely return to Earth, the Talaxian known as Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and the Ocampan named Kes (Jennifer Lien) quickly became integral (if somewhat divisive) parts of the crew. Romantically involved with one another right from the start, much of the early seasons of "Voyager" mined conflict and soap opera-esque drama from external obstacles such as jealous love triangles, placing one or the other in physical danger, or the built-in reality of Kes' naturally short lifespan encompassing only eight or nine total years. The largest change to the status quo, however, completely changed the tenor of their very relationship. The choice to split up the couple was a momentous enough move on its own, but doing so without even airing their actual break-up scene to give fans a more concrete sense of closure? That's a whole other level of "boldly going."
Anatomy Of A Breakup
To be completely fair, we do get to see the moment of Kes and Neelix's separation in season 3 of "Voyager," in episode 10 titled "Warlord" -- though with very little in the way of actual set-up or much in the way of meaningful fallout. An early scene sees the two reach what seems like only a temporary impasse in their relationship, as Kes complains of the oftentimes clingy Neelix's suffocating needs and intense jealousy over who she chooses to spend her time with. Having never experienced a romantic relationship outside of this one, Kes understandably feels eager to see what else the universe has to offer and suggests a parting of ways ... or so we think. Of course, because this is "Star Trek," these relatively minor concerns are complicated by the fact that Kes has done all this while being possessed by a recently-deceased alien entity with tyrannical, warlord ambitions. Compelled to drive her closest friends away and escape from the ship, she spends the rest of the episode fighting to regain control of her own mental influence while her unwelcome intruder goes on the warpath. You know, run-of-the-mill "Trek" stuff.
Ultimately, however, the episode ends on a somber note as Kes grapples with the fact that her brief but violent rampage can't be undone and that she will, fundamentally, never be able to maintain the exact same relationships with the Voyager crew as she once did.
Episode 21, titled "Before And After," further doubles down on the Neelix/Kes breakup with another Kes-centric storyline. The episode introduces an unexpectedly moving time travel wrinkle (one that "Lost" and many other shows in its wake no doubt borrowed from) that opens a window into a hypothetical future where Kes is married to Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) and has started a family in her waning years. The actual mechanics of Kes starting the episode as an aged woman ("aged" being a relative term for a nine-year-old Ocampan, of course) and repeatedly jumping back to earlier points in this future timeline are unimportant, at least compared to the visceral impact of seeing Kes and Neelix's platonic, if somewhat awkward, new dynamic.
For such an episodic series, these two hours of "Voyager" did much of the heavy-lifting to incorporate such a dramatic shake-up to potentially skeptical viewers ... which brings us back to that unaired breakup scene.
A "Beautifully Written Scene"
No matter the accepted consensus of any given "Star Trek" show, you can be sure that certain creative choices made on the series will continue to invite discussion and debate years down the line. The same applies to the short-lived Kes and Neelix romance. During an episode of "The Delta Flyers" podcast, co-hosted by Garrett Wang (who played ensign Harry Kim) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris), actor Ethan Phillips opened up about this very topic.
As it turns out, a crucial scene directly addressing the impact of their separation was actually written and filmed ... but never made it to the air. While talking about a certain scene taking place between Neelix and Kes where their tumultuous history together isn't even acknowledged on any level whatsoever, Phillips points to a previous episode that could've featured an important moment of reckoning between them. Surprisingly, neither of Phillips' co-stars had even heard of this development. Adding that it was a "beautifully written scene," Phillips explains:
"...we did do a scene where we both acknowledge that we're not a couple anymore. We shot it in the science lab, which was a set we didn't use often. And Kes and I had a closure conversation where we said we want to be friends now and blah, blah, blah. And it was, it was quite a nice tag to the relationship. They never aired it ... it was a very good scene. It was easily a six or seven-page scene where we track what happened to us and what we think might have caused the split, but that we want to stay friends..."
The elephant in the room, however, can't fully be avoided. Phillips goes on to admit that the specifics of their relationship were never clarified and that pesky age difference became too glaring to ignore:
"It was a lot of ambiguity about that relationship to begin with. Was it platonic, wasn't romantic. And it was shaky, just the optics You know, I'm an older guy, and here's this very young girl who's ostensibly two years old in her race, and I think they weren't sure how to handle it so much. And so I think they just thought let's just move on, and maybe they'll forget about it."
"Trek" lore is littered with moments like these, but we'll never forget the saga of Kes and Neelix on "Voyager."
In November 2020, my company announced that since they couldn’t have a company Christmas party they were going to use the money on a car someone could win. The person who won could choose any car they wanted and the company would pay X amount toward the car. If the car was more than that, the winner would have to pay the remainder out of pocket. The money was only going toward a car, you couldn’t ask for cash instead. Everyone who was a full-time employee for two or more years and was not an executive or higher was automatically entered. If you won and didn’t want the car, they would redraw.
In 2020, it went great. A white-presenting woman from our legal department won and the company sent out an email with her and her husband smiling and standing in front of her new car in December.
In 2021, the company sent out a poll asking if we would prefer to do a car drawing again or have a company Christmas party, and most people wanted a car drawing again. The winner this time was a janitor who appears to be Latino and has a Spanish name, and we got a picture of him and his family standing in front of a minivan.
While everyone seemed happy for the first winner, some people were not so happy this time around. A coworker, Gaston, with the same manager as me was particularly vocal that he didn’t believe that the janitorial department should “count” or be included in the drawing. I got a lot of classism vibes from him and told our manger about it. But our manager said Gaston wasn’t doing anything illegal and he was allow to express his opinions during lunch and non-work hours as long as it wasn’t against a protected group.
Gaston sent a company-wide email stating that he didn’t think janitors should be included and hinting that maybe instead of being a fair drawing it had been rigged so the company had a feel-good story and picture to send around. I feel there must have been more emails or discussions I don’t know about, because a company-wide email went around from HR about how the drawing was blind and didn’t not take into account race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
I was originally going to write in and ask you if there was a way I could organize people to speak up about how they thought the whole thing was fair because I was worried, with the big stink he was making, that next year the company would ditch the drawing. But yesterday (it’s March as I write this) I was at a social event and speaking to someone from a different department when I mentioned the group I work in. The response: “Oh! you’re from that racist team that doesn’t think people of color can win things legitimately.” I was horrified and tried to explain of course I didn’t think that, though one of my coworkers was disappointed. (I was careful not to call Gaston a racist.) Still, the man I was speaking to clearly didn’t believe me. Now I’m worried about my own reputation. Should I ask to transfer? Look for a new job? Hope it all goes away? Send out a company-wide email of my own? I talked to my manager again and he gave the same answer as last time.
Gaston sent a company-wide email stating that he didn’t think janitors should be included in a company-wide holiday drawing.
I have to repeat that: Gaston sent a company-wide email stating that he didn’t think janitors should be included in a company-wide holiday drawing.
Something is wrong with Gaston. On top of the classism and likely racism, his judgment is astonishingly terrible.
Also, your manager — astoundingly negligent. The fact that Gaston wasn’t breaking the law doesn’t make what he did okay. That’s an incredibly low standard for your manager to have! A decent manager would have told Gaston his comments were classist and gross, didn’t reflect the company’s values, and gave them serious pause about his judgment and character. And when Gaston sent out the company-wide email … at that point he’d shown his judgment to be so bad that any competent manager would need to respond. What that means depends on the specifics of Gaston’s job but I’d certainly be reflecting on, for example, whether he could continue having contact with clients, interns, the public, VIPs … and whether I could trust his judgment and values enough to do his job in general. We’d be having some very serious conversations and I’d be doing a lot of rethinking.
But as for how this all could affect your own reputation … I’m skeptical that it will, unless you see more evidence of it beyond that one comment. People won’t normally assume one person’s rogue agenda represents everyone else who happens to be on their team, unless that team rallies around them or already has a reputation for the types of opinions that were expressed.
That said, you should use different language if this comes up in the future. Saying that Gaston was “disappointed” in the results of the drawing sounds like you’re downplaying or even excusing what he actually did. He wasn’t just disappointed; he decided to vocally be a classist and racist asshole. Don’t say he was disappointed; say you were disgusted by what he wrote and he doesn’t speak for the rest of you.
You might also consider actions you can take to promote equity and inclusion for people who are marginalized in your workplace. Are there employee resource groups or ally groups you can join? Can you push for anti-racist policies and trainings? Push for salary transparency and pay equity? Look for ways to mentor or sponsor employees who don’t normally get that help, or to open the door wider to people who might otherwise be excluded? (I’m guessing there’s plenty of work to be done in these areas given your company’s lackluster response to Gaston’s email, and also because there usually is.) Let Gaston’s behavior spur you to work to make things better! In addition to being worthy work on its own, it will make it clear you don’t stand with him.
Just listen to the rhetorical gymnastics Republicans in the Florida Legislature have employed to defend what opponents call the“Don’t say gay” bill. We have nothing against LGBTQ kids, they argued. We’re just protecting parental rights, they said, trying — and failing — to defend themselves against charges that they are homophobic. But it took a debate on the Florida Senate floor on Monday for the true views of at least one of the politicians behind House Bill 1557 to emerge: There are just too many gay kids nowadays. That, apparently, is why bill sponsor Sen. Dennis Baxley, a Republican from …
The indictment of Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and her deputy on a laundry list of felony and misdemeanor charges is related to an election security breach in her office last year.
(Image credit: Mesa County Sheriff's Office via AP)
It’s time for another Evel Kneivel book. This little paperback is still alive and kicking at a library. This paperback should have been weeded on condition, and evidently the owning library taped it enough to survive a nuclear war. I can’t believe it wasn’t weeded when libraries were went to computers in the mid 1990s. It also has an RFID tag. I would be willing to bet the tag cost more than the book. My favorite part is the blurb on the back cover that says “exciting black and white photos”.
Remember, paperbacks are not intended to last 50 years. This is also geared to kids. Why rescue a paperback that won’t get any play from the kids. Maybe they can read it with Grandma and Grandpa.
We currently have several openings at Such Good People, a nonprofit celebrating its quinceañera—a term we just love that we learned from our one Latinx staff member. Founded by a self-described empath sitting on a pot of generational wealth and the husband who relies on her financially, we preach a gospel of performative wellness through synergistic work that emboldens inspiration, activation, and manifestation. I’m afraid we can’t be more specific about our mission than that.
For the many open positions we have right now, we strongly encourage applicants from communities underserved by nonprofits exactly like us: BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, maybe a person with a disability if it doesn’t require us to retrofit the two-hundred-year-old brownstone that one of our founders was bequeathed by her great aunt. We actively seek diversity and inclusivity because such practices greatly enhance our success rate with grant applications. But if those diverse opinions differ from our founders’ vision, we know you’ll keep those thoughts to yourself at staff meetings because—you’re such good people. And if you do speak up, we’ll gently but firmly remind you that our founders are the head of this family and they believe that employees, like children, should be seen and not heard.
We are the first to admit that our organization was not as diverse as it should have been when we launched in 2007, and that’s mainly because we pictured it, well, like our own family: suffocatingly white, simmering with epigenetic resentments, communication primarily through sarcasm and subtext. Over the past decade, we are proud to have expanded our definition of family, largely by tasking a photographer at our public events with finding the few good people who don’t look like most of us and taking lots of photos, which we then sprinkle liberally around our website and in our brochures.
If you’re a POC or queer in a way that we find non-threatening, stop by for an informal interview, where we’ll give you a little complimentary bag of Jordan almonds left over from our founders’ daughter’s abruptly canceled wedding (something we never, EVER talk about), and ask you naïve and sometimes offensive questions while putting a hand on your shoulder in a condescendingly parental way. If you’re fat or over forty, we might tell you that you’d look pretty if you lost some weight, or how that haircut adds ten years—but we would absolutely be doing this for your own good, just as our founder’s mother did for her.
Don’t get us wrong—we, of course, as required by law, welcome applicants of all ages and body types that can afford to live with a health insurance plan whose deductible is greater than what they’ll make in a year. Until recently, we employed a number of middle-aged people who’d helped to build our organization from its inception, but honestly, what were they even doing still working for us? It was time for them to leave the nest, and so, just as we did with our thirty-two-year-old son who’d been living in our summer house since college, we made conditions miserable until they quit, which also spared us having to pay any severance or unemployment.
When you come to our offices—we do nothing remotely because the upkeep on this dilapidated mansion costs a fortune and our founders think it’s a waste not to be here in person—don’t be surprised by the dozen or so folks with placards you’ll see outside. That’s just our former employees expressing their diversity of opinion, something we strongly encourage because we’ve been told repeatedly by police that there are no legal grounds to make arrests.
Don’t think of it as “crossing a picket line”—think of it as a family disagreement, like two branches of relatives contesting a will, or a large brood whose matriarch pits all her children against each other while the patriarch just stands in a corner smiling enigmatically, silently hoping it will all be okay. We are not suggesting that the couple who founded our nonprofit might be narcissistic and codependent; we are merely stating that it’s perfectly healthy to consider folks who helped build our organization dead to us if they had the gall to tell our founders that “good people” would provide better insurance and paid time off.
So peruse our openings (grab a coffee, it’s a long list) and fill out the online application form. Don’t be alarmed by the immediate solicitation for a donation—we simply want to see if you actually need a salary or if this will be a droll time-filler while you wait for your trust fund to kick in.
Oh, and don’t waste time googling us. After all, we’re family! Apply today.
How hard is it to determine whether ice cream should melt, in the context of international law? Edwin Vermulst attempts to lick that problem, in this lengthy exposition:
Annise Parker is as politically savvy as they come. Her storied career includes six years on the Houston City Council, six years as Houston city controller, and six years as mayor, when she won bipartisan praise for her administrative competence. But even Parker was tripped up by new voting laws that the GOP-dominated Legislature passed last year. Parker and her wife are both older than 65 and traditionally vote by mail. This year, both had their mail-in ballots rejected because they failed to write the ID numbers that they used to register decades ago in the correct spot on the envelope, as Senate Bill 1 requires. Theirs were among the 11,717 absentee ballots—nearly 30 percent of all mail-in votes—that were rejected in Harris County, whose…
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A sizeable update to the open source 3D graphics suite Blender is available to download. Blender 3.1 is performance-packed follow up to the incredibly well-received Blender 3.0 release that squeaked out at the end of last year. As I’m not someone who knows how to use Blender —boy do I wish I was that talented— I’m not the best person to walk you through what’s changed. But do you know who is? The Blender team themselves. Yes, to help demonstrate what’s changed (and how the changes improve things) the Blender team has put together a fabulous five minute video that […]
