Wow. I just got reverse-onioned.

Oh, look. Polk County being themselves out-loud again.

We used to feed only dry and it ended up causing us problems when we had to switch to wet for medical reasons (one had diabetes, and then the other ended up with CKD). The one who was supposed to be smart was somehow bad at eating it (she kept trying to chew it and it would fall out of her mouth 🙄) and also just generally didn’t like it because it’s not what she spent her life eating.

I don’t think dry food is inherently bad or anything, but if that’s your primary source of calories, then you do need to make sure your cat stays hydrated and also that they don’t end up in carb-overload (unless you didn’t mind the thought of giving your cat insulin twice a day, exactly twelve hours apart).

And it sounds like you don’t have to worry about this last part, but for anyone else reading this: please make sure your cats have some amount of both when they’re young and not so set in their ways… don’t make the mistake we did!

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.

Bye, Bob.

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.

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

I no longer have the energy for additional sarcastic remarks regarding this vacuous tool’s culture-war-pageantry.