1. Glad he’s okay.
2. That photo is absolutely iconic.

I hear you–this obvious to you and I and to plenty of people, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years it’s that the majority of people need to hear the same message, over and over, in lots of different forms, from lots of different sources, in order to internalize it. There is a disappointing amount of value in being Captain Obvious when it comes to communicating with large groups of people.

Agreed. I think we’re in the, “fuck around and find out,” era of tech company unionization, and I’m fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don’t think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.

Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.

I shall! Thank you!

Bye, Bob.

I would heart this if I could. I just started lifting about 2 months ago.

I was literally just thinking that it definitely has Moonrise Kingdom vibes.

Seriously, though, that photo makes me feel a nostalgia that I can’t quite place. Absolutely phenomenal photo!

Um, super weird question, but would you DM me what that medication is? I’m dealing with some aggressive degeneration and trying to get out in front of it as much as possible, so entertaining all possible options.

Yep! For all the psych nerds, it’s pretty much a direct lift of the Milgram Shock Experiment

That and, their action for low-risk is all wrong. The stakes are too high to not give someone help, regardless of the risk level.

Yep. The ones who manage to slip notes to their veterinarian to help them get away are the exception.

That is absolutely fascinating, kinda disappointing, and a really good find.

Could a human have judged it better? Maybe not. I think a better question to ask is, “Should anyone be sent back into a violent domestic situation with no additional protection, no matter the calculated risk?” And as someone who has been on the receiving end of that conversation and later narrowly escaped a total-family-annihilation situation, I would say no…no one should be told that, even though they were in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, they will not be provided protection, and no further steps will be taken to keep them from being injured again, or from being killed next time. But even without algorithms, that happens constantly…the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim, so they don’t have to feel some kind of way for giving an innocent person a death sentence because they were just doing what the computer told them to.

Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.

Yep. But it also seems like people are so shocked by the data that maybe they’re missing the moral of this story, too? …sure it’s impressive that Valve has done so much with such a small workforce, but I think the reason they’ve been able to move so quickly is because they have such a small workforce. Companies get slow because they get big…I don’t care how much you tout your SAFe processes; you will always lose efficiency as you grow. It’s the difference between steering a canoe vs a cruise ship…the more you grow, the more you have to fight against momentum. So, my takeaway from this is that they figured out the secret to continued success as a maturing company, and good for them.

Now, I say all of this with sincere hopes that they don’t work their smaller number of employees to death and ask them to take on inappropriately burdensome workloads. Because if that’s the case, they should fuck right off with the rest of their peers.

This is not something yet widely known in Florida arts circles…thank you for sharing this.

Give that cat literally anything he wants. Tuna? Check. Snuggles? Absolutely. Nuclear launch codes? You got it, dude.

Pretty sure the data they’ll be getting will be payment enough.

Don’t drown their perspective out because you want to convince them of yours.

I feel like news has the same problem that art does, in that organizations are always required to pander at least somewhat to their funding sources. If NYT didn’t have to get money from corporate sources and could instead truly be powered by the people, the optimist in me would like to believe that they wouldn’t have to publish articles like that…but maybe that’s naive. As someone who has actively worked in the arts, I know that many arts organizations are much more free with their words and frank in their critiques when they don’t have to bite the hand that feeds them.

So, all of that to say, please give to the news (…and arts) organizations that you feel most passionately about. NYT has done plenty of shitty things in their past, so maybe them, maybe not. But someone deserves to make money for their journalism.