Please don’t thank me too soon

It happened again.

I got a notice from my university saying that there was a problem with some of the university-wide software that was resulting in some services responding very slowly or not at all, and that they were working on it and apologizing for any problems that this may be causing users. So far, so good. But then they went and added “Thank you for your patience”, something that I see frequently and also hear on recordings when you call a business and there is some waiting involved to speak to a human being.
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Capitalism and bullying

The oligarchy in the US, aided by the politicians they buy, have been waging a relentless war against worker unions. Workers who lack the collective protection of a union are highly exposed to abusive practices by employers and managers. An excerpt from a new book Bully Nation by Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass makes the case that the bullying of vulnerable workers who try to unionize or otherwise improve their working conditions is a consequence of the inequalities generated by unchecked capitalism.
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My love-hate (but mostly hate) relationship with Facebook

Many of you would have received the request from some business or organization to “Like us on Facebook!” If you have a Facebook account, you also get email alerts that promise updates on the ‘status’ of friends and if you click on them you will find that rather than being a significant change in their lives (new job, moved to new city, major relationship changes, etc.), it is often something really trivial, such as that they are ordering pizza. As a result of several such updates, I now don’t bother to click on them. And yet, they seem to garner a lot of ‘likes’ by their friends.
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Fox News and the Republican party surrender to Trump

Eric Boehlert looks at how the Republican Party and especially Fox News have surrendered to Donald Trump and the widely panned softball interview that supposed tough interrogator Megyn Kelly gave him was the best indicator of it. He quotes the New Yorker magazine saying that the interview was “a useless exercise, except, perhaps, for those watching from one group: Republicans looking for a script for how to surrender to Donald Trump.”
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