Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

---

Read more

Posts

721

Comments

1,958

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

Alsup has consistently made reasoned, rational rulings through a tech lens when these sorts of things hit his docket. Digitizing purchased books for internal training if the originals are destroyed does feel like fair use, given the works are not made available for others. The First Sale Doctrine is in play.

The pirated shit? Well, that's another story.

I had to create a new Facebook profile in 2013 because at the time, no Facebook meant being roundfiled. So, sign up for a shitty data-mining account just to be fucking considered for a job. I got interviews after that, but they didn't go anywhere because I was already in my mid-30s, and everyone already wanted to pay entry-level wages for what had previously been mid-career positions.

Oh, and the ladder had already been pulled up. Entry-level for life was the goal for those making $80K-100K who just wanted to assert dominance.

At least the Facebook thing is in the past (entry-level applicants are far less likely to have ever joined Facebook than in 2013, when it was simply expected like it was a cellphone), but now we've moved on to breathless accomplishment posts on LinkedIn.

There's no humanity left in the process without already knowing someone on the inside. Already, way back in 2003, when I was poached, company policy was that they had to post the job. So, they knew they were hiring me, but corporate made them post a nonexistent job anyway.

It's admittedly better to be on that end of a ghost job, but AI didn't start the fire. The system had already been (likely for a while) replete with jobs with someone already selected.

The main difference? Those jobs actually existed; the only deception was that it was still open.

And you likely don't see the compensation you could. My last professional job hired me in 2015 as a "copyeditor" -- but they actually meant someone who moved rectangles around at a remote editor's direction on newspaper pages without reading copy.

Then there's the scheduling. Moving out of state with a guarantee that I'd be off by 11 p.m. so that my wife would still be awake when I got home turned into being immediately put on a team that worked until 2 a.m., as we were producing two papers I used to work for (one where I'd been managing editor from 2003-2006, and the other a temporary desk job in 2014) that were on Pacific Time.

With my marriage starting to fray, I walked into the executive director's office and said this schedule was not what I was assured when pulling up stakes from Oregon to Texas -- with a 20% pay cut and rent being triple what it was -- and that this needed to be fixed. Now.

As it turned out, the wheels were already turning on a new commercial department to bring in external clients. It wasn't full-time yet, but I got switched over to dayside design in the meantime ahead of being the team lead for the new department.

Going into detail on the automation I did to keep things humming smoothly is somewhat pointless, but I dusted off my coding skills and learned JS to create a workflow for my team in Google Sheets. It went swimmingly, and my team had a blast while almost everyone else was miserable.

So, now I was a threat. Causing -- hard as it is to believe being possible -- even further realization on other teams that we were all intentionally getting fucked by intentionally dysfunctional processes. But the directors needed bad data for disciplinary purposes, so I was causing too much of a stir and shunted to another department, where I learned the InDesign DOM and turned the work of a three-person team into 30 hours total via JS.

That's when IT got word that a designer was coding! We can't have that if it's not in your title -- even though IT knew fuck-all about the production workflow and couldn't have done what I did. After being forbidden from further automation, I was strung along for 18 months about transitioning to an IT role.

Never again will I work for an employer more interested in control than results.

So far as I'm concerned, the banks and adjacent vultures deserve a fucking haircut on commercial properties after what they did to homeowners during the Great Recession.

I don't think they've forgotten; they just don't care.

But I'm sure Trump is like "another day, another impeachment." He's now opened the door in public discourse to "they don't know what the fuck they're doing" (referring to Iran and Israel), so he's got that one ready to go for any anemic attempt to file articles that go nowhere.

So, a couple of things about this story ... first, the formatting is atrocious. Subheds and interstitial, irrelevant photos after every graf as the piece continues can't possibly be how anyone wants to read news.

Seriously, what does this art have to do with a story about self checkout?

That's just irritating. The larger issue is just how sympathetic this is toward Walmart. Straight news never includes the word "innovative," so that's a red flag we're reading marketing, and it's far from the only example.

The reporting overall isn't terrible when it's not fawning over the company, but that serves only to provide the illusion that this isn't spin but merely an angle. Unfortunately, fawn it does. Like, who the hell was ever going to Walmart for the human experience and personalized service?

Up next: LAPD starts covering their faces and requests an emergency budget boost for masks.

We're all a bit stunned. A Texas Tribune article clarified that because younger folks aren't drinking as much, liquor stores have branched out to selling THC drinks. Abbott has a grifty thing going with both the retail lobby and the state's main alcohol distributor, who wants regulations making it the sole distributor of THC products as well ... like all of them, not just tallboys.

Also, happy cake day!

The ol' malicious-compliance approach. I'm sure they'd write a whiny memo about ghosting.

Overall, things remain grim, but grim is an improvement over scared. Two generous Beeple teamed up to make sure I didn't lose all contact with the outside world.

I'm doing research into the best way to build an elevator pitch ... I don't go to networking events, but I do socialize with the burner community, and I realized that if I can't give a concise yet compelling reason to talk about freelancing, I may be missing out.

It's not a pointless question but more of a thought experiment. Those are important. Trump sure seems hell-bent on finding out what the answer is, though.

Below SCOTUS and many circuits, the courts are still for the most part doing what they're supposed to ... not that the junta gives a fuck. Ignore, appeal, appeal again if need be, take the win. It's a tactic that Trump has had an astounding amount of success with in his private dealings, and I'm not sure he realizes his current main job, when not golfing, is a public-sector position.

Still, we're talking about a guy who can bankrupt casinos, so I don't think he's too concerned about running the U.S. economy into the ground. It's what he knows, and he's got his side grifts.

I'm going to be very surprised if he makes it to the end of his term anyway, given his diet and fitness regimen. I think another 10 years is a pipe dream.

Not that Vance and Johnson being promoted would be an improvement.

At least the sector is getting a boost from mandatory return-to-work. Not exactly sure how companies being in "expansion mode" when it comes to office space aligns with "LLMs are coming for white-collar jobs," but that's why I make the no bucks.

Soooooooo much couching in so few grafs: "potential," "may have been," "could be" (twice).

All that atop the sheer incompetence.

President Donald Trump has been trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

No, he hasn't. He's been talking about it, but that isn't "trying," throwing this squarely into the realm of propaganda.

Unrelated, doesn't Kyiv have windows? Why activate a retiree sleeper agent when a simple defenestration will do?

The weirdest past of all of this to me is the book isn't even coming out until next year. It could be intentional to time with the midterms, but with things moving as fast as they are, it's going to be dated by the time it's on presale.

So, good on him for getting at least part of his work out there while it's still relevant.

And hed writers these days (I find it highly doubtful this wasn't the work of a subed), with the experienced ones having taken buyouts or been laid off long ago, think the purpose of the craft is engagement, not the dissemination of information.

But yeah, books are a good time. At least if one still has the attention span for them.

Tangentially related, I get the impression among younger generations that anything they can't be part of an immediate conversation with the author about isn't worth their time. They either want to shut their brains off completely or go to full main-character syndrome, thinking anyone and everyone -- especially the author -- will read their comments and engage, and that a single poorly crafted sentence is somehow contributing to a parasocial conversation.

The hed being a misdirect is the main problem to me. The content? Meh, shilling one's own book in opinion sections has a long and storied tradition on both sides of the pond, and it's carried over to online.

Has it gotten worse? I'd agree it has, but I'd also argue audience fragmentation is the cause. With book reviews being on life support compared to, say, the '80s and even into the early '90s -- when any serious metro had a Books section on Sundays -- self-promotion has become ever more important.

Time was, an NYT book review, a late-show appearance and a book tour were pretty much the only tools in the box. Now you need to be on 18 social networks (hiring a videographer [money] or learning to do it yourself [money + time]), and penning this sort of piece is a way to throw one more iron into the fire at very low cost.

I'm not saying the execution is good here, but you can't really call this a Guardian problem.

I mean, I've written plenty of pieces like that. Opinion is more observation than calls to action -- I kept those in staff editorials, which I'd write in Voice of God.

Were there a clear way out of this mess, we'd be talking about President Harris. Historical context is important, but it needn't -- and can't -- go all the way to "these situations are exactly the same, and here are the solutions." There's also the matter of how many early resistance documents survived the war, given the Nazis' penchant for banning and burning.

But I agree with the thesis that as people realize they've made a terrible mistake -- today, tomorrow, in a couple of years -- we should show compassion (but I'd stop short of forgiveness). There's not really a path forward when we can't engage with people who admit they were wrong.

Looks like CashApp is live in the UK, but only for domestic transfers. Venmo, on the other hand, is U.S. only. But I appreciate the offer.

Even bus fare aside, there are other complicating factors, such as the lock being broken (I can deadbolt lock from the inside, but I can't lock it when I leave) leading me not to want to spend hours away from the truck. It's not like I'm armed or anything, but the few break-in attempts I've had ended very quickly and peacefully when I emerged from the cargo area.

Literally all my worldly possessions are in here, so best case, someone rifles through shit and takes the stuff they like. Worst case, they know how to hotwire.

I appreciate your kind words, but if I listed all the complications, no one would read the whole thing. The connectivity issue just piles onto the Gordian knot.

I've so far gotten about $45 from a user I don't think it would be appropriate to name for the Fediverse to see. Calls still out on other sources, but no movement. For context, I started the day with $3 in my account, so this is an order of magnitude of improvement.