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silveradeptTo begin, If you give your fucks to the living, and make giving a fuck about the living, that often means that you receive the fucks of others when they give a fuck. Giving it to things that will not give a fuck about you means you end up out of them, eventually. But you can prolong and share and circulate fucks to give by giving them to people and causes that can give a fuck.
In the department of how far out of touch I am for not being on the latest social media sites, the practice of looksmaxxing, a concept from incel and PUA spaces with the idea of making someone's face as sexually attractive as they can, whether through styling or surgery or other such things. The fact that this is a thing that has escaped a place where it should have stayed, that most of the people who promote this idea are very quick to say they're not on board with the space where it came from, and that this is yet another way of enforcing the toxic idea that masculinity is dependent on whether or not the men around you agree that you're being manly, well. This is certainly not a trend that I want to see continue. I suspect that it does lead a lot more people back to the toxic spaces and actions from where it came. The idea itself that your looks can carry you into and through a relationship is laughable, but it seems attractive to people who want to believe there's nothing wrong with their inner selves or that they don't need to do the work unlearning the toxic stuff before they'll become anything more than a first date.
It's this time period's version of the Charles Atlas advertisement, just with less DYNAMIC-TENSION.
After an accident moved women surfers to the Banzai Pipeline to finish out their competition, the women have been proving equal and excellent to the task of taking on one of the most gnarly breaks in surfing. Which is another of those "if you actually give women a chance to excel at something, they will prove more than adequate to the task" moments, and there's still far too much of thinking that women could never so they don't get the opportunity.
Laurie Penny, on Substack, a platform with a Nazi bar problem, about Harry Potter, a fandom whose creator is a massive TERF, and the ways that the Harry Potter fandom became big and expended significant effort to find ways for themselves to be in it, regardless of who they were, and then eventually, in the face of the creator slamming the door and the fandom paying more attention to the other things in the story and the reactionaries not giving way to the fans who had constructed something much better than the source and were ready to do the same to the world, had their idealism curdled into anger. Because Penny wants to stay on the Potter fandom, and the way that it's been abandoned by a lot of the previous die-hard fans, the underlying anger and issues with the society outside are touched on, but not explored fully as mechanisms that fed back into the disillusionment and both accelerated the destruction of the fandom and helped ensure that it would get buried six feet under after being staked. (I thoroughly expect the Potter fandom to explode again once JKR is dead and all the people who left in protest over her return to the place they built for themselves.)
Everyone point and laugh at Florida Governor Ron Desantis, of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, who is unhappy that the people in his state are doing what is written and passed into law about book banning instead of the mythic version he wanted where everyone thinks exactly like him and just knows which things are to be banned and which are allowed to stay. In his ideal world, nobody would accuse Floria of banning books and everyone would agree that all of the books that Florida is banning deserve to be banned, and there wouldn't be anyone "politicizing" this because everyone would be just as right-thinking as he is and only use the process the way he envisioned it, instead of the way that it got written. Rather than repeal the thing entirely, of course, he's going to demand that there be tweaks and fixes and patches applied so it becomes easier to exploit the langauge of the statute for unintended purposes. (He's going to think that it will close all the loopholes, but humans are endlessly creative creatures.)
A concurring opinion of the Alabama Supreme Court has decided they are a theocratic court rather than one devoted to the law and the facts, citing a religious text in support of their decision that embryos are deserving of more rights than the beings that might carry those embryos to term. Alabama is having a rough time of it, with regard to staying on the side of liberal democratic values and not having their governments flagrantly endorse theocratic positions. (ETA: I am informed bybelle_meri that the court was following the law as written in the decision, because the law itself does not establish a minimum age of viability or other limitation on where it may be applied. Whether this was as intended by the crafter of the law or an oversight that allows for this particular situation is unknown. One would hope that the legislature, having seen what happened, would rush immediately to fill this void and provide a useful definition, but with the way that it plays perfectly into the hands of those who wish to exert outsize control over the lives of women, I don't have much hope that this presumably clearly unintended consequence will be filled in.)
West Virginia is not doing much better, unfortunately, The West Virginia House decided, 85-12, that book banning is entirely okay in public libraries, that some artwork cannot be shown in galleries, and that museum artifacts may have to be shielded from view, by removing protections for those institutions from prosecution should someone decide their content is "obscene" and demand the police get involved. There's been a book on my shelf in previous years called Why is Art Full of Naked People? that attempts to answer that and other questions, but in West Virginia, should the bill pass and be signed, such a book will not be allowed on the shelf because it's clearly obsccene to think about the fact that an awful lot of artwork has naked or semi-naked people, and that there is also regular amounts of nakedness in religious works and texts as well.
All of these efforts are the active, very visible acts of the censorious interests of a State actor that would really prefer you be afraid of them and censor yourself and others, rather than making them do it, because, as is noted, if the State has to expend the effort to do all that censorship themselves, they're going to both suck at it and not be able to catch everything. Much better for them if society is doing their work for them so they only have to occasionally make an example of others.
Attorney General Letitia James defeats the Previous Administrator and the judge levels a fine that, with interest, is greater than $400 million USD. The Attorney General also obtained a judgment preventing the Previous Administrator from being part of a New York corporation's board for multiple years. In addition to the nearly $100 million USD judgment entered against him for the defamation of E. Jean Carrol, the Previous Administrator will have to find someone willing to pay up nearly a half-billion USD to cover costs. If he can't find that money, there will likely be asset seizure.
A significant amount of material and structures present in the current day were initially built with money from the New Deal and the strong stimulus efforts from the Roosevelt Administration to pull the country out of the depression. The marks for such things may not be so easily visible, but the New Deal was extremely important toward the recovery of the economy, at least until the next war helped spur the economy even more.
Pharmaceutical company CEOs were asked by Senator Sanders and others about the profit-maximization of their companies and how that makes the cost of many of their drugs unaffordable for the people who need them the most. Senator Sanders also noted the lavish executive compensation, stock buyback, and patent manipulation that keeps costs high as a question of what can be extracted, rather than a question of what would be affordable.
A bass stolen from Paul McCartney more than fifty years ago has been reunited with Mr. McCartney after an entity called the Lost Bass Project traced and was able to follow the chain of ownership from the original thief to a person who realized they had the item in question in their attic and got it back to the original owner. Most impressive, and very glad to have the thing back in possession of the original owner.
A person in Oregon contracted bubonic plague from their very sick pet cat, but is recovering well and contact tracing is working to make sure that other people that may have been exposed also receive diagnostics and treatment. Cats can be plague carriers and susceptible to it, so that's another possible reason to keep your cats indoors and try to keep the feral population down. As well as possible pox carriers in addition, because outside cats get into all kinds of things, and fights, and interactions with, other animals.
A gym cat in Okinawa demonstrates her climbing ability by scaling the bouldering wall of the gym itself, finding that whales use a larynx to sing, and that their singing frequencies are both very limited and in the range of human motor sounds, learning more about a "dragon"-like dinosaur through more complete fossils, the volunteers helping amphibians move across busy roads to their mating grounds, the winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year,
In technology, Disney is apparently shifting large amounts of their physical media production, distribution, and marketing to Sony Pictures Entertainment. Which is an interesting decision for Disney, but also apparently gives them the right to do it themselves if they so desire.
A joke about those who work in tech and want dumb appliances, with replies about finding some of the best dumb screens and other such items for those who don't want their television to spy on them.
Vending machines manufactured by the Inveda corporation are using facial recognition and detection technology without receiving informed and explicit consent to do so. A student snapped a picture of an error message that indicated the presence of the technology, and privacy and surveillance concerns followed swiftly on from the discovery. The company claims they're GDPR compliant and they don't do anything that would be storing or identifying specific people from the technology at work. Everyone knows, at this point, though, that the data collected is always far more valuable and salable than whatever the excuse is to get something in there that will collect that data.
Neurotech is in development, with the aim being the kind of thing that can possibly read the signals of your brain, translate them into some form of data, and then sell or ship that data away or store it on a company's servers somewhere. Thus, there are already persons trying to get the right for people to be secure in their persons to have supplemental legislation passed so that mental privacy is preserved and protection from having your self or your perceptions overwritten by an outside actor is enshrined.
Automattic, the parent company of hosted Wordpress.com blogs and the social media site Tumblr, is apparently going to scrape the content of both wordpress.com and Tumblr to sell to OpenAI for training MidJourney and/or other guesswork machines. Because, once again, the company hosting the content is seeking to monetize it, regardless of whether you want them to, and they will always claim they have the right because they provided the service for free to you and you agreed to it in the Terms of Service. Those who have been told they are about to become fodder for training confabulation machines are, naturally, unahppy at having all of their data scraped and sold to things they don't want to encourage and are looking into the various methods available to attempt to poison the confabulation machines by altering their artwork, and possibly by being as Tumblr as possible to the text so that the statistical inferences drawn are horribly, horribly wrong.
FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt in November 02022 and whose founder has been subsequently convicted on fraud charges, has decided to liquidate and repay all the investors at the prices their material was trading for when the exchange shut down. Which makes this better than many situations where investors have had their exchanges and services go under and they've received nothing in return.
An Alabama AM radio station had a two hundred foot broadcast tower stolen, taking the station off the air and also preventing the use of its FM frequency. Which is a fairly audacious operation to pull on someone, given the amount of potential power in a two hundred foot tower's broadcast. Since it's also a federal crime, if the people who did it are ever caught, it will not likely go well for them at federal trial.
Boeing sacrifices the head of the 737 MAX program, in a desperate hope that will appease everyone, and reshuffles executives in a similar hope.
Funimation has announced that supposedly "forever" available digital copies of material will be removed from various accounts and libraries April 2, as the merger with Crunchyroll continues to convert Funimation accounts to Crunchyroll accounts and so forth. Which, of course, is yet another casualty of the "you only own a license, and therefore we can do whatever we want with the actual content" travesty that has been going on since someone allowed software licenses to do just this. Yes, owning it physically does prevent having it yanked out from under you, but for things that have never had a physical release, the only actual answer is to keep circulating the tapes (digitally.) Which will almost always involve the violation of DMCA 1201 to do, even though most people still operate on the common sense idea that First Sale doctrine should also apply to digital goods.
A company that wanted to test the potential to grow pharmaceutical crystals in microgravity was finally able to retrieve the spacecraft they sent up, after several months where the regulators and the Air Force were unwilling to allow the craft to land from space. Elsewhere, A company called Intuitive Machines, in partnership with NASA, put a craft on the moon, marking the first U.S. private lunar lander to successfully touchdown. It wasn't without issues, but the team managed to work through several crises on the way to Mun and successfully resolve all of them. And Japan's lunar craft resumed operations after being shut off to conserve power until solar panels could begin generating necessary electricity. And then started talking again, having managed to survive a lunar night and at least some amount of a lunar day, so kudos to the engineers at JAXA that made a craft that could survive the night and the day. Lots of countries interested in putting things on the moon, and possibly trying to examine and do something with the water ice that is present on Luna. Makes for a good amount of possible things.
Rebecca Solnit on how San Francisco has changed from being a large urban area with a lot of people saying hello to each other to being consumed by Silicon Valley and those same things that made SF cool being re-cast as problems of crime, homelessness, drugs, and otherwise all the issues that come from incredibly wealthy people thinking that non-wealthy people don't deserve to live anywhere near them, even as those same extractors of wealth demand to know more about us and to let ourselves be spied upon. To which there are some efforts like the Opt Out Project, which works in stages and with thoughts beforehand about how to disentangle yourself from various services and think about what your alternatives might be, and then to establish different habits that keep you from going back to the sites and services you don't want to use. It'll take a little bit of adjustment, the more you opt out, until you have your data arranged in the way that you want to, giving what you are okay with and not allowing for wholesale scraping.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss on specifically making efforts to recruit and hire from underrepresented populations, which also links to Sumana Harihareswara's advice to people looking for better hiring from underrepresented populations. Jacob Kaplan-Moss also differentiates between praise for past actions completed and positive feedback that asks for good things in the past to continue into the future.
Last for this post, when a lead or a leader, a possible framework to allow your subordinates to excel and find the answers to their questions without your needing to be directly involved. Mostly in the idea of training yourself out of reacting to everything. On the flip side of that, advice for someone coming into a new work environment to build trust and then be seen as a person who can get things done, which involves a lot of taking notes and observing and figuring out where the pain points are and then figuring out how the pain points might be fixed, if they can be fixed, and then checking in a whole lot of times to see whether it's something that's worth fixing and that people dislike. I suppose something like this could have been more useful to me when I started at my own institution, and in some of those situations, I did actually succeed at things right from the jump, but there was definitely a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of people who I could have tried harder to win over to my own cause, (Except for the part where they weren't really interested in what I wanted to do, so.)
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
In the department of how far out of touch I am for not being on the latest social media sites, the practice of looksmaxxing, a concept from incel and PUA spaces with the idea of making someone's face as sexually attractive as they can, whether through styling or surgery or other such things. The fact that this is a thing that has escaped a place where it should have stayed, that most of the people who promote this idea are very quick to say they're not on board with the space where it came from, and that this is yet another way of enforcing the toxic idea that masculinity is dependent on whether or not the men around you agree that you're being manly, well. This is certainly not a trend that I want to see continue. I suspect that it does lead a lot more people back to the toxic spaces and actions from where it came. The idea itself that your looks can carry you into and through a relationship is laughable, but it seems attractive to people who want to believe there's nothing wrong with their inner selves or that they don't need to do the work unlearning the toxic stuff before they'll become anything more than a first date.
It's this time period's version of the Charles Atlas advertisement, just with less DYNAMIC-TENSION.
After an accident moved women surfers to the Banzai Pipeline to finish out their competition, the women have been proving equal and excellent to the task of taking on one of the most gnarly breaks in surfing. Which is another of those "if you actually give women a chance to excel at something, they will prove more than adequate to the task" moments, and there's still far too much of thinking that women could never so they don't get the opportunity.
Laurie Penny, on Substack, a platform with a Nazi bar problem, about Harry Potter, a fandom whose creator is a massive TERF, and the ways that the Harry Potter fandom became big and expended significant effort to find ways for themselves to be in it, regardless of who they were, and then eventually, in the face of the creator slamming the door and the fandom paying more attention to the other things in the story and the reactionaries not giving way to the fans who had constructed something much better than the source and were ready to do the same to the world, had their idealism curdled into anger. Because Penny wants to stay on the Potter fandom, and the way that it's been abandoned by a lot of the previous die-hard fans, the underlying anger and issues with the society outside are touched on, but not explored fully as mechanisms that fed back into the disillusionment and both accelerated the destruction of the fandom and helped ensure that it would get buried six feet under after being staked. (I thoroughly expect the Potter fandom to explode again once JKR is dead and all the people who left in protest over her return to the place they built for themselves.)
Everyone point and laugh at Florida Governor Ron Desantis, of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, who is unhappy that the people in his state are doing what is written and passed into law about book banning instead of the mythic version he wanted where everyone thinks exactly like him and just knows which things are to be banned and which are allowed to stay. In his ideal world, nobody would accuse Floria of banning books and everyone would agree that all of the books that Florida is banning deserve to be banned, and there wouldn't be anyone "politicizing" this because everyone would be just as right-thinking as he is and only use the process the way he envisioned it, instead of the way that it got written. Rather than repeal the thing entirely, of course, he's going to demand that there be tweaks and fixes and patches applied so it becomes easier to exploit the langauge of the statute for unintended purposes. (He's going to think that it will close all the loopholes, but humans are endlessly creative creatures.)
A concurring opinion of the Alabama Supreme Court has decided they are a theocratic court rather than one devoted to the law and the facts, citing a religious text in support of their decision that embryos are deserving of more rights than the beings that might carry those embryos to term. Alabama is having a rough time of it, with regard to staying on the side of liberal democratic values and not having their governments flagrantly endorse theocratic positions. (ETA: I am informed by
belle_meri that the court was following the law as written in the decision, because the law itself does not establish a minimum age of viability or other limitation on where it may be applied. Whether this was as intended by the crafter of the law or an oversight that allows for this particular situation is unknown. One would hope that the legislature, having seen what happened, would rush immediately to fill this void and provide a useful definition, but with the way that it plays perfectly into the hands of those who wish to exert outsize control over the lives of women, I don't have much hope that this presumably clearly unintended consequence will be filled in.)West Virginia is not doing much better, unfortunately, The West Virginia House decided, 85-12, that book banning is entirely okay in public libraries, that some artwork cannot be shown in galleries, and that museum artifacts may have to be shielded from view, by removing protections for those institutions from prosecution should someone decide their content is "obscene" and demand the police get involved. There's been a book on my shelf in previous years called Why is Art Full of Naked People? that attempts to answer that and other questions, but in West Virginia, should the bill pass and be signed, such a book will not be allowed on the shelf because it's clearly obsccene to think about the fact that an awful lot of artwork has naked or semi-naked people, and that there is also regular amounts of nakedness in religious works and texts as well.
All of these efforts are the active, very visible acts of the censorious interests of a State actor that would really prefer you be afraid of them and censor yourself and others, rather than making them do it, because, as is noted, if the State has to expend the effort to do all that censorship themselves, they're going to both suck at it and not be able to catch everything. Much better for them if society is doing their work for them so they only have to occasionally make an example of others.
Attorney General Letitia James defeats the Previous Administrator and the judge levels a fine that, with interest, is greater than $400 million USD. The Attorney General also obtained a judgment preventing the Previous Administrator from being part of a New York corporation's board for multiple years. In addition to the nearly $100 million USD judgment entered against him for the defamation of E. Jean Carrol, the Previous Administrator will have to find someone willing to pay up nearly a half-billion USD to cover costs. If he can't find that money, there will likely be asset seizure.
A significant amount of material and structures present in the current day were initially built with money from the New Deal and the strong stimulus efforts from the Roosevelt Administration to pull the country out of the depression. The marks for such things may not be so easily visible, but the New Deal was extremely important toward the recovery of the economy, at least until the next war helped spur the economy even more.
Pharmaceutical company CEOs were asked by Senator Sanders and others about the profit-maximization of their companies and how that makes the cost of many of their drugs unaffordable for the people who need them the most. Senator Sanders also noted the lavish executive compensation, stock buyback, and patent manipulation that keeps costs high as a question of what can be extracted, rather than a question of what would be affordable.
A bass stolen from Paul McCartney more than fifty years ago has been reunited with Mr. McCartney after an entity called the Lost Bass Project traced and was able to follow the chain of ownership from the original thief to a person who realized they had the item in question in their attic and got it back to the original owner. Most impressive, and very glad to have the thing back in possession of the original owner.
A person in Oregon contracted bubonic plague from their very sick pet cat, but is recovering well and contact tracing is working to make sure that other people that may have been exposed also receive diagnostics and treatment. Cats can be plague carriers and susceptible to it, so that's another possible reason to keep your cats indoors and try to keep the feral population down. As well as possible pox carriers in addition, because outside cats get into all kinds of things, and fights, and interactions with, other animals.
A gym cat in Okinawa demonstrates her climbing ability by scaling the bouldering wall of the gym itself, finding that whales use a larynx to sing, and that their singing frequencies are both very limited and in the range of human motor sounds, learning more about a "dragon"-like dinosaur through more complete fossils, the volunteers helping amphibians move across busy roads to their mating grounds, the winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year,
In technology, Disney is apparently shifting large amounts of their physical media production, distribution, and marketing to Sony Pictures Entertainment. Which is an interesting decision for Disney, but also apparently gives them the right to do it themselves if they so desire.
A joke about those who work in tech and want dumb appliances, with replies about finding some of the best dumb screens and other such items for those who don't want their television to spy on them.
Vending machines manufactured by the Inveda corporation are using facial recognition and detection technology without receiving informed and explicit consent to do so. A student snapped a picture of an error message that indicated the presence of the technology, and privacy and surveillance concerns followed swiftly on from the discovery. The company claims they're GDPR compliant and they don't do anything that would be storing or identifying specific people from the technology at work. Everyone knows, at this point, though, that the data collected is always far more valuable and salable than whatever the excuse is to get something in there that will collect that data.
Neurotech is in development, with the aim being the kind of thing that can possibly read the signals of your brain, translate them into some form of data, and then sell or ship that data away or store it on a company's servers somewhere. Thus, there are already persons trying to get the right for people to be secure in their persons to have supplemental legislation passed so that mental privacy is preserved and protection from having your self or your perceptions overwritten by an outside actor is enshrined.
Automattic, the parent company of hosted Wordpress.com blogs and the social media site Tumblr, is apparently going to scrape the content of both wordpress.com and Tumblr to sell to OpenAI for training MidJourney and/or other guesswork machines. Because, once again, the company hosting the content is seeking to monetize it, regardless of whether you want them to, and they will always claim they have the right because they provided the service for free to you and you agreed to it in the Terms of Service. Those who have been told they are about to become fodder for training confabulation machines are, naturally, unahppy at having all of their data scraped and sold to things they don't want to encourage and are looking into the various methods available to attempt to poison the confabulation machines by altering their artwork, and possibly by being as Tumblr as possible to the text so that the statistical inferences drawn are horribly, horribly wrong.
FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt in November 02022 and whose founder has been subsequently convicted on fraud charges, has decided to liquidate and repay all the investors at the prices their material was trading for when the exchange shut down. Which makes this better than many situations where investors have had their exchanges and services go under and they've received nothing in return.
An Alabama AM radio station had a two hundred foot broadcast tower stolen, taking the station off the air and also preventing the use of its FM frequency. Which is a fairly audacious operation to pull on someone, given the amount of potential power in a two hundred foot tower's broadcast. Since it's also a federal crime, if the people who did it are ever caught, it will not likely go well for them at federal trial.
Boeing sacrifices the head of the 737 MAX program, in a desperate hope that will appease everyone, and reshuffles executives in a similar hope.
Funimation has announced that supposedly "forever" available digital copies of material will be removed from various accounts and libraries April 2, as the merger with Crunchyroll continues to convert Funimation accounts to Crunchyroll accounts and so forth. Which, of course, is yet another casualty of the "you only own a license, and therefore we can do whatever we want with the actual content" travesty that has been going on since someone allowed software licenses to do just this. Yes, owning it physically does prevent having it yanked out from under you, but for things that have never had a physical release, the only actual answer is to keep circulating the tapes (digitally.) Which will almost always involve the violation of DMCA 1201 to do, even though most people still operate on the common sense idea that First Sale doctrine should also apply to digital goods.
A company that wanted to test the potential to grow pharmaceutical crystals in microgravity was finally able to retrieve the spacecraft they sent up, after several months where the regulators and the Air Force were unwilling to allow the craft to land from space. Elsewhere, A company called Intuitive Machines, in partnership with NASA, put a craft on the moon, marking the first U.S. private lunar lander to successfully touchdown. It wasn't without issues, but the team managed to work through several crises on the way to Mun and successfully resolve all of them. And Japan's lunar craft resumed operations after being shut off to conserve power until solar panels could begin generating necessary electricity. And then started talking again, having managed to survive a lunar night and at least some amount of a lunar day, so kudos to the engineers at JAXA that made a craft that could survive the night and the day. Lots of countries interested in putting things on the moon, and possibly trying to examine and do something with the water ice that is present on Luna. Makes for a good amount of possible things.
Rebecca Solnit on how San Francisco has changed from being a large urban area with a lot of people saying hello to each other to being consumed by Silicon Valley and those same things that made SF cool being re-cast as problems of crime, homelessness, drugs, and otherwise all the issues that come from incredibly wealthy people thinking that non-wealthy people don't deserve to live anywhere near them, even as those same extractors of wealth demand to know more about us and to let ourselves be spied upon. To which there are some efforts like the Opt Out Project, which works in stages and with thoughts beforehand about how to disentangle yourself from various services and think about what your alternatives might be, and then to establish different habits that keep you from going back to the sites and services you don't want to use. It'll take a little bit of adjustment, the more you opt out, until you have your data arranged in the way that you want to, giving what you are okay with and not allowing for wholesale scraping.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss on specifically making efforts to recruit and hire from underrepresented populations, which also links to Sumana Harihareswara's advice to people looking for better hiring from underrepresented populations. Jacob Kaplan-Moss also differentiates between praise for past actions completed and positive feedback that asks for good things in the past to continue into the future.
Last for this post, when a lead or a leader, a possible framework to allow your subordinates to excel and find the answers to their questions without your needing to be directly involved. Mostly in the idea of training yourself out of reacting to everything. On the flip side of that, advice for someone coming into a new work environment to build trust and then be seen as a person who can get things done, which involves a lot of taking notes and observing and figuring out where the pain points are and then figuring out how the pain points might be fixed, if they can be fixed, and then checking in a whole lot of times to see whether it's something that's worth fixing and that people dislike. I suppose something like this could have been more useful to me when I started at my own institution, and in some of those situations, I did actually succeed at things right from the jump, but there was definitely a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of people who I could have tried harder to win over to my own cause, (Except for the part where they weren't really interested in what I wanted to do, so.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 10:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 05:11 pm (UTC)The bit about dumb appliances was quite interesting. Good food for thought.
As always, lots of good stuff, my friend.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 06:20 pm (UTC)I particularly enjoyed the one about the HP fandom, and the underwater photography.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 07:57 pm (UTC)The bit that was going around Tumblr before about the enthusiast with the smart home and the technology worker with the shotgun next to the printer in case it makes a weird noise is still more extreme, but those of us who want dumb appliances understand it very well.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 07:59 pm (UTC)The bit with the Potter fandom and the way it basically blew up is true to experience, even if I still think it wanted to have a bigger scope than it was allowed.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 12:42 am (UTC)I have a friend who has an Alexa, or equivalent device, and I can't understand him having it. I can understand the convenience, but he's a tech guy, been programming as long as I have (going back to the late '70s) and he has or held a security clearance! I just don't get it. As I've said before, Aside from my Apple TV, only computers connect to my router and my iPhone requires manual activation to get Siri to do anything, which it does poorly.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 12:58 am (UTC)Then again, there's the game whose forums seem to occasionally sprout classified documents so someone can settle a point about how something is supposed to work in the game and doesn't.
I admit, I have smart device stuff, but I try to keep as much of it contained to local as I can.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 09:37 pm (UTC)(a) When the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person, persons, or corporation, or the servants or agents of either, the father, or the mother as specified in Section 6-5-390, or, if the father and mother are both dead or if they decline to commence the action, or fail to do so, within six months from the death of the minor, the personal representative of the minor may commence an action.
(b) An action under subsection (a) for the wrongful death of the minor shall be a bar to another action either under this section or under Section 6-5-410.
So, yeah, that's what the actual final legal code for the state says - no where does it limit the age of a minor child, so... that's how the Supreme Court was able to say "no limitation as to the age or location of the minor child." Previous legal cases used this statute for cases of domestic volience against a pregnant woman charging the abuser with death of a minor if she miscarried... so previous case law combined with the way the code is written is what got us into the mess in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-05 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-06 09:14 pm (UTC)