Workplace coffee gets weird and ugly. the $15,000 coffee fund, the cheapskate executives, and other stories of office coffee wars (Ask a Manager)

I went indy three weeks ago and since then I’ve had many discussions about about potential full-time and freelance opportunities.

Pluses:

• Exciting new opportunities
• Income means we can buy proper food and not have to eat the dog or cats.
• Videoconferencing shirt is getting a good workout.

Minus:

• I have to shave every day.

Teaching generative AI to give factual answers is going to prove as difficult as teaching it to write credible answers has been.

Even human beings have difficulty distinguishing information from bullshit on the Internet. We can’t even agree which is which.

I’m continuing my project of relearning how to read books. Remembering that as a voracious teenage reader, I would discover an author and read everything I could find by him, until I was caught up or had at least read everything by that author in the local mall bookstores and libraries. Asimov. Clarke. Heinlein. Ellison. Niven. Joe Haldeman.

I am adopting that strategy now, starting with Michael Connelly. He’s written about 40 books. I’m now reading his fourth. This is going to be a while.

In 30 years as a journalist, I’ve never been part of a crowd of reporters shouting questions while chasing a public official or other famous person. I’d probably trip and fall down.

Wyoming Republicans are fighting to keep child marriage legal.

Wyoming Limiting Child Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage (Nick Reynolds / Newsweek)

Mars Wrigley fined after workers fall into vat of chocolate (AP)

Have we learned nothing from Augustus Gloop?

Codebreakers have been able to read a cache of more than 50 encrypted letters written by Mary Queen of Scots more than 400 years ago. (Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica)

Bernie Sanders Has a New Role. It Could Be His Final Act in Washington. (Sheryl Gay Stolberg / The New York Times)

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sanders has a platform to go after Moderna for price-gouging on the taxpayer-funded Covid vaccine, and Amazon and Starbucks for union-busting.

A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean? (Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida / NYTimes). An appalling proposal. Everybody counts or nobody counts.

And the headline is cringe. It’s clear what Yusuke Narita meant. The “I didn’t really mean it” defense doesn’t work in 5th grade and it doesn’t work at Yale either.

J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist."

Charlie Jane Anders discusses how you can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist—Rowling—has spent her career as the public face of her art.

Anders is uniquely positioned to discuss this issue, as she is a trans woman science fiction and fantasy writer with a large public presence. I’m a fan.

Source code containing swearwords is better. (jwz)

After the Ohio rail disaster, Buttigieg is silent on restoring the safety standards Trump repealed. “Civil War-era brake systems were good enough for General Sherman… “ (Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic)

How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government (Ezra Klein / NYTimes)

The legal scholar Nicholas Bagley argues that the liberal “procedural fetish” makes it difficult for government to accomplish anything bold.

…

… to achieve the goals liberals hold most dear, we need a liberalism that builds. A liberalism that builds everything from multifamily housing and mass transit systems to transmission lines and solar farms. And we need a liberalism that can build it all quickly, cheaply and effectively. But even in the places where liberals have governing power, they are often failing to do exactly that. Why?

Conservatives hate big government, and pile on regulations and red tape to cripple agencies. But liberals’ love of procedure and rules, designed to ensure fairness, have the same effect.

“The rich truly do get more hours in the day.” — Poor people pay higher time tax (Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic)

The Last Man Without a Cell Phone

Anne Kadet interviews New Yorkers without cell phones. 3% of Americans go without.

I use a computer—a lot! For my work, and reading things online. I do email. But I don’t have any felt need to have it with me all the time. It’s like, I watch TV, but I don’t feel like I need to carry it around with me all day. The cell phone feels like a solution to a non-problem. Before it existed, you didn’t see undergraduates running across campus to get back to their room after class so they could make phone calls. But now you see them walking around, on their phone, all the time. The contrast I’ve sometimes used is, I grew up in the DC area with no central air conditioning. And we knew perfectly well there was a problem. It was hot and stuffy all summer. And we’re laying on the floor reading the paper in front of a fan. Everybody knew there was a problem, and central AC solved it. But in this case, what was the problem? I don’t see the need.

… iPhone users are extraverted, free-spending, narcissist party monsters. The Android users, meanwhile, are all home binge-watching Law & Order with their extended cat families.

Android or iPhone—Who’s the Real Sheeple? (Anne Kadet)

The real sheeple is the person who thinks their choice between Android and iPhone defines them.

Small Government: The ref has to be more powerful than the players (Cory Doctorow)

Companies should never be allowed to grow too big to fail, because they also become too big to regulate. Mega-corporations become more powerful than the governments that regulate them. Government becomes too weak to even enforce contracts, the one function that even extreme libertarians agree that government needs to do.

… even if governments do nothing but enforce contracts, they still have to be bigger and more powerful than the largest companies and cartels. This should be an area where good faith leftists and capitalist trufans can come together: making small government possible by banning big business.

Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone. The reason? We eat so many chickens.

How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry (Kenny Torrella / Vox)

Kansas City residents react to seeing their city featured on “The Last of Us.” (Robert A. Cronkleton / The Kansas City Star) A fun article.

Why did ‘The Last of Us’ Change Pittsburgh to Kansas City? An Investigation (Dais Johnston / Inverse)

It’s easier to make Canada look like Kansas City.

The answer could be found in one of its nicknames: City of Bridges. Any glimpse of the Pittsburgh skyline will show plenty of bridges along the three rivers surrounding it. Kansas City is also on a river, but the heart of downtown — the part of the city we see in The Last of Us — is more inland, meaning the grim, dry cityscapes we see in the show are more suitable for Kansas City.

I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing. I don’t care if it’s an old dog, a sow, some pet chicken, a stallion, or a fucking 3-day-old kitten. You will do it humanely. That means quickly, painlessly, and compassionately.

— Our Business Is Killing: I never understood why veterinarians are at such a high risk of suicide. Until I became one. (Andrew Bullis / Slate)

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

— Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America

Or, in the words of novelist Michael Connelly: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

Julie replaced our toaster oven with a convection oven that also makes toast, with a fancy electronic control panel, and I managed to successfully use it to make toast without burning the house down. I knew today was going to be a good day.

Artificial intelligence is not a threat. The threat is that we live in a society that considers ownership as sacred and work as worth very little.