In his samizdat existential stories Vaclav Havel used to quote Absurdist Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who suggested that every problem (or truth) passes through three stages on the way to acceptance: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Australians are more worried about being attacked by China than their Taiwanese counterparts are, research suggests.
One in 10 Australians believe China will attack their country, which is double the number in Taiwan who fear a similar offensive, according to the Australia Institute.
Australians fear Chinese invasion: study
Work From Office No Mercy/No Malice. Do note that if your work is with either material or “meeting the public,” WFH isn’t even an option. We used to call people who could not work from home “essential workers” but that phrase died out, along with a lot of the workers
The anti-work movement Axios
The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score NYT
How Are Unpaid Internships Still a Thing? Teen Vogue
PEB 250 Recommendations ‘Fair and Appropriate’ Railway Age. For more on a potential railroad strike, see NC here
Starbucks Illegally Threatened Seattle Workers, Labor Board Claims Bloomberg
Why the Left Needs Free Speech Plebity
Presidential Power to Declassify Information, Explained
The New York Times – “While it is legally irrelevant, former President Donald J. Trump claims he had declassified the top secret files the F.B.I. seized at his Florida residence. Former President Donald Trump’s claim that he had declassified all of the documents that the FBI seized in the search of his Florida home last week — including those marked as top secret — has heightened interest in the scope of a president’s power to declassify information.
On Friday, Trump’s office claimed that when he was president, he had a “standing order” that materials “removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them,” according to a statement read on Fox News by a right-wing writer Trump has designated as one of his representatives to the National Archives. Apart from whether there is any evidence that such an order actually existed, the notion has been greeted with disdain by national security legal specialists.
Glenn S. Gerstell, the top lawyer for the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020, pronounced the idea that whatever Trump happened to take upstairs each evening automatically became declassified — without logging what it was and notifying the agencies that used that information — “preposterous.”…
America’s $7T Retirement Crisis Is Only Getting Worse - Bloomberg via Wealth Management: Americans have been warned for years of an impending retirement crisis. Yet the situation is getting worse. Even when everything was going right — inflation was nonexistent, interest rates were low and stocks were in an extended bull market — there was a multi-trillion dollar savings shortfall.
Then came a pandemic, war in Europe, decades-high inflation, the fastest rate-hiking cycle since the early 1980s and fears of a recession. The resulting market turmoil erased some $3.4 trillion from 401(k)s and IRAs in the first half of 2022, according to Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. And that’s just for the people who have retirement accounts.
About half of private-sector workers don’t have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, and many of those who do end up saving very little. It’s a problem that isn’t easily fixed, and contributes to the sense that the American Dream is in decline. And while surging inflation and volatile markets are bad news for people in or nearing retirement, the picture may be even worse for young Americans who are priced out of the housing market, struggling to build wealth and buried under mountains of student-loan debt…”
Search Engine Roundtable via Twitter: “Most SEOs that have been doing the search engine optimization thing for any amount of time know that Google can and likely will drop out URLs from the Google index. John Mueller from Google confirmed that this happens with Google Search on Twitter the other day. John wrote “It doesn’t really matter what happened, but yes, any URL can drop out of the index over time.” Even URLs that you deem important or one of the most prominent sections of your site can happen to see that URL drop out of Google Search. The trick is to make sure to have the URL prominently linked to throughout the site’s navigation and from other popular pages on your site. Google still may decide not to index the page later on, but you need to keep that URL relevant, unique and helpful for Google to still want to index and also rank the page…”
- See also Fast Company – Google’s search tweaks will help prioritize quality websites in results – “The update will prove especially helpful for results relating to online educational materials, shopping, arts and entertainment, and tech-related content.”
- See also Search Engine Land – “Google’s new helpful content update targets sites creating content for search engines first. Google will soon rollout a change to its search ranking algorithm that may prove be one of the most significant changes in over a decade.”
