How do other countries deal with this?

I need to find a job in the next few months. I'd been eyeing a particular part time position that would be really good for me, but I procrastinated a bit. When I got my resume and cover letter together, the job had disappeared from indeed and their website.

The same organization had a somewhat similar position still open, but with full time hours. I'm coming back into the workforce after 15+ years on disability, so I prefer part time at least to start. But the part time job was gone, so I reworked the cover letter and submitted it for the full time position.

This morning I checked and the part time position is back on both sites and says, "Hiring multiple candidates". These jobs have been open for over 6 motnhs, this is a hard area to hire in, especially given the wages.

The full-time position doesn't have any contact information listed, so there's nobody I can email and say, "Would you also consider me for (other position)?". It's not a large organization. I'd be surprised if the hiring manager was even a different person, but only the part time listing had contact information listed.

Should I just submit for the other position? Or wait and see if I get an interview/hired before applying for the other? I get the impression that they'd rather fill the full-time position, and it's a better fit for my resume/skills. I don't think it would look good to immediately apply for the part-time position after selling myself as the perfect person for the full time.

They haven't even had 1 business day to consider my first application. Indeed says they normally respond within 1 business day, but I don't know how trustworthy that is.

So, should I apply or wait a bit?

Lol

Body camera footage obtained by Kentucky Public Radio shows that as Lt. Caleb Stewart walked closer, the woman yelled, “I might be going into labor, is that okay?”

Her water had broken, she said. “I’m leaking out,” she told him. She grabbed a blanket and a few personal effects as a bright orange city dump truck pulled up to remove the makeshift bed.

The woman had no phone. She said her husband went to call an ambulance, so Stewart called one for her. But as she walked toward the street to wait for help, Stewart yelled at her to stop.

“Am I being detained?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re being detained,” he shouted. “You’re being detained because you’re unlawfully camping.”

Stewart was enforcing a new state law that bans street camping — essentially, a person may not sleep, intend to sleep, or set up camp on undesignated public property like sidewalks or underneath overpasses. He has issued the majority of the citations for unlawful camping in Louisville.

“So I don’t for a second believe that this woman is going into labor,” he said.

He returned to find the woman sitting on the ground, with legs askew and labored breathing, waiting for the ambulance. Stewart hands her a citation, and she balls it up and tosses it aside as the ambulance arrives to take her to the hospital.

“You’re all horrible people,” she said, as she got to her feet. “I’m glad y’all got this job to f*** with the homeless and not help society.”

Later that day she gave birth to her child, according to her attorney, Public Defender Ryan Dischinger. He said both the woman and her son are healthy three months later, and the family is now in shelter without assistance from LMPD or the court system.

“The reality for her, and for anyone who’s homeless in Kentucky, is that they’re constantly and unavoidably breaking this law,” Dischinger said. “What she needed was help and compassion and instead she was met with violence.”

Now, she’s waiting for a late January trial date on her citation, which could carry a fine and requires the people charged with street camping, who are mostly homeless individuals, to appear before a judge.

I was running on an unused logging road and came up behind a wild cat. It didn't see me coming, so I got pretty close, maybe 20 feet away. It turned and stared at me for a second and then took off up a steep hill.

It was about 2.5 feet to the top of it's head, a little smaller than a Labrador. It wasn't a bobcat or lynx, because it had a long tail, but I don't think it was long enough to be a mountain lions tail(I don't remember seeing it curled). It had a brown coat and the tail had a stripey bit at the tip. 100% a cat from the body shape and movement.

But after looking it up, it seems like mountain lions basically don't exist in new england, or at least are extremely rare. Its limbs were not as thick as the mountain lion images I'm finding online.

I thought maybe it was one of those megasized housecats, but this trail is separated from town by a deep and wide river, any housecat would have had to walk 3 miles and across 2 bridges(one of which is a metal mesh footbridge) or 7 miles along the logging road to get to the nearest house. It's also below freezing out and there's 5+ inches of snow on the ground.

It's making me feel like I hallucinated this or something, because it doesn't seem possible. Hopefully I'll see it again now that I've looked at a ton of wild cat pictures. I was trying to remember as much detail as possible when I saw it, but I didn't know what to look for.

Pictured: Google trends showing a lot of people just today discovering Joe Biden isn't on the ballot

Another great Ed Zitron essay about the tech industry. Some quotes:

The "growth mindset" is Microsoft's cult — a vaguely-defined, scientifically-questionable, abusively-wielded workplace culture monstrosity, peddled by a Chief Executive obsessed with framing himself as a messianic figure with divine knowledge of how businesses should work. Nadella even launched his own Bible — Hit Refresh — in 2017, which he claims has "recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement."

There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.

One employee related to me that managers occasionally add that they "did not display a growth mindset" after meetings, with little explanation as to what that meant or why it was said. Another said that "[the growth mindset] can be an excuse for anything, like people would complain about obvious engineering issues, that the code is shit and needs reworking, or that our tooling was terrible to work with, and the response would be to ‘apply Growth Mindset’ and continue churning out features."

In essence, the growth mindset means whatever it has to mean at any given time, as evidenced by internal training materials that that suggest that individual contributions are subordinate to "your contributions to the success of others," the kind of abusive management technique that exists to suppress worker wages and, for the most part, deprive them of credit or compensation.

One post from Blind, an anonymous social network where you're required to have a company email to post, noted in 2016 that "[the Growth Mindset] is a way for leadership to frame up shitty things that everybody hates in a way that encourages us to be happy and just shut the fuck up," with another adding it was "KoolAid of the month."

There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.

The problem, it seems, is that Microsoft doesn't really care about the Growth Mindset at all, and is more concerned with stripping employees of their dignity and personality in favor of boosting their managers' goals. Some of Microsoft's "Connect" questions veer dangerously close to "attack therapy," where you are prompted to "share how you demonstrated a growth mindset by taking personal accountability for setbacks, asking for feedback, and applying learnings to have a greater impact."

This all feels so distinctly cult-y. Think about it. You have a High Prophet (Satya Nadella) with a holy book (Hit Refresh). You have an original sin (a fixed mindset) and a path to redemption (embracing the growth mindset). You have confessions. You have a statement of faith (or close enough) for new members to the church. You have a priestly class (managers) with the power to expel the insufficiently-devout (those with a sinful fixed mindset). Members of the cult are urged to apply its teachings to all facets of their working life, and to proselytize to outsiders.

As with any scripture, its textural meanings are open to interpretation, and can be read in ways that advantage or disadvantage a person.

And, like any cult, it encourages the person to internalize their failures and externalize their successes. If your team didn’t hit a deadline, it isn’t because you’re over-worked and under-resourced. You did something wrong. Maybe you didn’t collaborate enough. Perhaps your communication wasn’t up to scratch. Even if those things are true, or if it was some other external factor that you have no control over, you can’t make that argument because that would demonstrate a fixed mindset. And that would make you a sinner.

Yet there's another dirty little secret behind Microsoft's Connects.

Microsoft is actively training its employees to generate their responses to Connects using Copilot, its generative AI. When I say "actively training," I mean that there is an entire document — "Copilot for Microsoft 365 Performance and Development Guidance" — that explains, in detail, how an employee (or manager) can use Copilot to generate the responses for their Connects. While there are guidelines about how managers can't use Copilot to "infer impact" or "make an impact determination" for direct reports, they are allowed to "reference the role library and understand the expectations for a direct report based on their role profile."

To be extremely blunt: Microsoft is asking its employees to draft their performance reviews based on the outputs of generative AI models — the same ones underpinning ChatGPT — that are prone to hallucination.

Microsoft's culture isn't simply repugnant, it's actively dystopian and deeply abusive. Workers are evaluated based on their adherence to pseudo-science, their "achievements" — which may be written by generative AI — potentially evaluated by managers using generative AI. While they ostensibly do a "job" that they're "evaluated for" at Microsoft, their world is ultimately beholden to a series of essays about how well they are able to express their working lives through the lens of pseudoscience, and said expressions can be both generated by and read by machines.

I find this whole situation utterly disgusting. The Growth Mindset is a poorly-defined and unscientific concept that Microsoft has adopted as gospel, sold through Satya Nadella's book and reams of internal training material, and it's a disgraceful thing to build an entire company upon, let alone one as important as Microsoft.