05/04/2026
May. 4th, 2026 04:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
the_devils_panties_feed
Same temperature, different environment.
the_devils_panties_feedOccupying
May. 4th, 2026 04:01 amdumbing_of_age_feed
The Dumbing of Age Book 15 Kickstarter is in that fun meanderingly slow crawl between $45K and $50K, so, hey, remember last week when we unlocked the DAPPER DINA magnet? Fun times!
how to dodge a coworker’s MLM party, my manager is fixated on old mistakes, and more
May. 4th, 2026 04:03 amaskamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. How can I politely dodge a coworker’s MLM product party?
How do you politely dodge coworkers’ MLM “parties”? I despise multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs). They’re predatory, cult-like organizations, and I refuse to support them in any way.
A coworker recently invited me to her cookware-hawking “party.” Putting aside the fact that I rarely cook anything more elaborate than spaghetti, I really just can’t bring myself to support this. The problem is, this is a colleague who I like a lot and collaborate with regularly. I don’t want to lecture her about the toxic nature of these companies but it feels rude to just blow it off. I’d claim to be busy, but it’s an online event. How do I politely turn it down?
“I don’t really buy cookware, but thank you!”
If she responds that you don’t need to buy anything and it’ll be fun just to attend: “They’re not really my thing, but thanks anyway.” (Or you could just say that from the start.)
If you were someone she knew to be an avid cook, you could also say, “I’m super picky about cookware and only have a couple of brands I buy” or “I’m trying to be disciplined about not buying any new kitchen things.” And if she pushed after that: “It’s not really my thing, but thank you.”
MLMs often train their salespeople in how to overcome objections so any of these answers could spur her to try to change your mind (which would be especially inappropriate to do with a coworker, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen) but falling back on “it’s not really my thing” will work as long as you’re firm about sticking to it. (In fact, that’s often the case with boundaries — it almost doesn’t matter what specific you land on, as long as you are willing to stick to it.)
2. Manager is fixated on very old mistakes
I’ve been working at my current job in mechanical design for a little over a year and a half. An inherent part of the design process in my industry is very long lead times for client feedback and other departments doing their portion of the design, which means it can be months before a design I have finished actually starts being built.
My boss frequently calls me in to lecture me about errors in projects I worked on a year or more ago, when I was still brand new and had very little experience with how the company did things, but weren’t noticed until production began more recently. I know I’ve improved significantly since those early days, and would never make the obvious mistakes I did early on, but my boss talks about these errors in the present tense as if they are happening now, and dismisses any explanation I offer about how long its been and how much I have improved. My coworker who started the same day I did gets treated the same way, and the two of us have already gotten one email from our boss’s boss about the errors we “are” making and how it costs the company money to fix.
For the most part my job is very satisfying. I enjoy the work, the hours are very flexible and open to WFH if needed, and aside from this issue my boss isn’t bad; they answer questions and explain things when I ask, leaving me alone to work at my own pace otherwise. But it’s frustrating and demoralizing to feel like I’m being judged and evaluated based on an image that is very much not reflective of my current work and I’m constantly concerned about being warned or even fired because of those past errors. Aside from privately tracking my corrected errors, which suffers from the same long delay between design and production, how can I prepare myself in case the department manager continues to get an outdated impression of my performance?
Can you name it for your manager? For example: “You’ve pointed out a few errors to me recently that were from back when I first started, like X and Y, and I want to make sure you know that that’s not something I’m still doing currently — it was back from when I was learning the job and still figuring things out. I’m always grateful to get feedback, but I also don’t want you to worry that those are errors I’m still making.”
Depending on how that goes, you could also say, “Is there a good way for me to communicate than an error was from a year or more ago when I was still learning? I don’t want to sound defensive when you’re giving me feedback — I definitely want any feedback you have for me — but ideally I’d like you to know if it’s something from a while back that is no longer happening.” She may not have a good answer to that, but the act of asking it should help get it on her radar as a thing that’s happening.
3. Child care and hotel rooms when two spouses are attending the same work conference
I wrote in last year about my spouse’s company suddenly competing with mine (update here). My spouse and I still aren’t bidding on the same work (thank goodness!), but we do still work in similar roles for separate clients in different industries. Turns out, both of those clients use the same vendor who hosts an important annual conference. We now may both be asked to attend the same conference!
In our previous, child-free life, that would be no problem. But per my previous update, we now have a baby to consider! We can’t both travel to the same conference without a childcare option. Our options would be flying a relative out to take care of the baby while we are traveling or bringing the baby with us and seeking a childcare option during the day (and likely evening with busy conference schedules!). Do you think we would have any grounds to ask for our companies to pay for childcare during the travel days? I doubt it, but curious about your opinion of what’s normal in cases like this. I have nightmares of us bringing the baby to the conference and switching off care between sessions. I’m not serious about that one, but could you imagine how awful it would be to attempt nap time behind a booth or in some random conference room?
Separately, what would we do about a hotel? It would be weird for us to travel and get two separate hotel rooms, but I couldn’t ask my company to pay for half of a hotel room, right? Does anyone else attend the same conference with their spouse for different companies and run into issues like this?
You can’t really ask your company to pay for child care in a case like this; in all but the most unusual situations (where you have an extremely hard-to-find skill set and are wildly in demand) that would come across as out of touch. You’re generally expected to figure out child care or explain you can’t go. Is the latter an option for one of you?
But if you do both go, for the hotel one of you would just tell your company that you don’t need them to book a hotel room because your spouse will also be there and you’ll be sharing a room.
4. Backing out of a summer job if I get a better offer
I’m a college student who recently applied to several summer internships in my dream industry. I’m pretty confident in how I presented myself, but I also want to be realistic about this pretty competitive industry, so I also applied to some local businesses as back-up summer jobs. The problem is, many of these local places have responded to me expressing interest much faster than the internships. If I get into an internship, I’ll definitely take it, but I don’t want to turn down any of my back-ups before I know that for sure.
What do I say if I get a hiring offer from a back-up job while I still have a chance at the internships? If I accept and then get a better opportunity, is there a tactful way to back out of that job, without seeming disrespectful or damaging my credibility with the business?
This is a thing that happens with summer jobs. They won’t be thrilled, but they’re unlikely to be shocked or outraged either. You’d simply say something like, “Unfortunately I’ve had a conflict come up and I won’t be able to work with you for the summer. I really appreciate you offering me the opportunity, and I wanted to let you know as soon as possible. I apologize for any inconvenience this causes, and I wish you and the team all the best for the summer.” They might be loath to hire you in the future, but that’s just how this stuff goes.
5. Is networking required to get a job now?
I’m seeing a lot of stuff online saying that because the job market is so bad right now, the best way to get a job is through networking. On some posts you say networking is nice but not a requirement; you can still get jobs without it. Is that still true, or is networking now a must-have?
And if it is a must, what are some good ways to start networking with strangers? I’m job searching now but I’m not sure if I can rely on my current/former coworker network for jobs.
Networking is helpful but not a must-have. People get hired without networking all the time!
That said, it can make your job search easier, so it’s a good thing to do to whatever extent you can, because it can get your application an additional look that will help you stand out among a slew of qualified candidates.
Here’s some past advice on how to do it.
how to tell your network you’re looking for a job
how to send a networking email that won’t be ignored
how do I use alumni contacts in my job search?
I hate the idea of networking — it feels slimy
what does good networking actually look like?
The post how to dodge a coworker’s MLM party, my manager is fixated on old mistakes, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
The 1990s called and they want their dialog box back
May. 3rd, 2026 10:35 pmunsung_feedThis is perhaps my favourite feature in Lightroom. You press ⇧T, you draw a few lines, and presto – your photo is now even:
This is doubly magical to me. The first part is that this is even possible – that you can straighten the photo in both dimensions after the fact, and save for some parallax nuances the viewer won’t know any better.
For decades, this has been the domain of tilt-shift lenses, but if you ever tried to use one, you know how harrowing of an exercise this is. A tilt-shift lens looks more like a medical device and less like a piece of photography equipment:
The “obvious” way to emulate a tilt-shift lens in software is a bunch of sliders, and Lightroom has those also…
…but that’s still pretty cumbersome in practice, abstracted in a strange ways, like piloting a plane by pulling the linkages connected the flying surfaces: you will admire someone who can do that, but won’t ever want to do it yourself.
Hence the second magical moment: The team created the new interface I showed at the beginning, where you point to things that should be straight directly, and the necessary tilt-shift calculations happen behind the scenes.
Alas, Lightroom didn’t fully stick the landing. The interface is a bit jittery, and missing nice transitions that could help understand what’s going on. But what brought me here was this unpleasant interaction:
What’s wrong with it? If you want to play along, stop here and ponder: How would you improve it? Because this is a classic UI exercise where there are symptoms, and there are problems, and there are principles under the hood of it all.
The first possible improvement: Don’t do a dialog like this. These are ancient and so annoying. Every time I see a centered dialog covering everything, popping up in response to a delicate mouse operation, I want to shout “read the room!” It’s better to drop a little tooltip next to the cursor that automatically disappears: more modern, and more “compatible” with mousing.
Then: Why am I allowed to start and finish an action that the machine already knows won’t go anywhere? Disable the drawing option, put a little “verboten” icon on the mouse pointer, or do something else that will prevent me from drawing a line to begin with.
But that brings us to point three, and how I would approach this as a designer. Because I would – counterintuitively – go the other way and allow the user to draw as many lines as they wanted, and just didn’t permit to commit the entire operation if there were more than four lines on the screen.
Why is that?
It’s the same principle as you see in all the social media composing fields, and in well-trained forms: do not constrain the editing process.
This field is limited to 300 characters, but it’s clever enough to only enforce its limits when you try to post. There is no downside to allowing you more room in the editing process. Maybe you write by constructing a few sentences first and only then combining them into one, maybe you want to see two riffs one below the other to choose the better one, or maybe – this is most likely – you’re not even paying attention and your motor memory is doing the editing for you, instinctively. Use any text editor for just a few months, and cut, copy, and paste, word swapping, and splitting sentences become second-nature gestures – that is, until the UI starts throwing in some arbitrary barriers.
Above in Lightroom, it might actually be easier for me to draw a fifth line and then delete a previous one, instead of doing it in the precise order Lightroom desires, or by dragging an existing line to move it instead of creating a new one.
Maybe an overarching principle would be this: If you are aiming to build something so delightfully direct manipulation as Lightroom did here, you have to fully commit to that stance, even deep in the weeds. Because every time I see a 1990s dialog appear when my fingers are flying fast, I feel like this:
And something tells me others will too.
‘2 Letters From Steve’
May. 3rd, 2026 11:47 pmdaringfireball_feedI don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until the end of March. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.
★ Crimes Against Decency Need as Much Cover-Up as Crimes Against the Law
May. 3rd, 2026 11:25 pmdaringfireball_feedA follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters about the incredibly private things they witnessed from footage captured by users of Meta’s AI Glasses.
There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them. The moment this investigative report was published in late February, the fate of Sama’s Kenyan operation was sealed. They were toast. The key to understanding this is that Meta runs a criminal enterprise. Most of the organized crimes Meta commits aren’t crimes against the legal code (although some are), but rather crimes against public perception and human decency. Remember what they did with Onavo, their VPN product? Was that illegal? Dunno. Was it outrageous? Hell yes.
Let’s just concede for the sake of argument that there’s nothing illegal about the way Meta was sending video footage from users’ AI Glasses to contractors in Kenya to review. I presume they’re still doing it today, just with different contractors, in a different computer cubicle sweatshop, perhaps in a different country. Nothing to cover up legally. But just the plain description of what they’re doing fills people with a visceral repulsion. However, people only have that visceral reaction if they know what’s going on. Part of the whole premise is that the whole thing has to be kept on the q.t.
If it said right on the box that when you use Meta AI Glasses, the footage might be reviewed by third-party contractors, and when that footage is reviewed, you — the user whose footage is being reviewed — won’t know it’s happening and won’t get prompted first for permission (because you’ve actually OK’d it in advance just by hitting the “Accept” button on the long dense terms of service that literally almost no one reads because such terms are written in impenetrable legalese), almost no one would buy them. And if it were more widely known that this is how these glasses work, there’d be more of a social stigma surrounding those who wear them.1
That, I think, is the primary reason why the contractors were in Kenya in the first place, and their replacements (now that Meta has terminated its contract with Sama) are surely still in some third-world country. It’s not about the lower wages (but that doesn’t hurt). It’s about the fact that the entire existence of the operation is easier to keep quiet when it’s literally on the other side of the planet. It’s a goddamn marvel that the investigative reporters from those two Swedish newspapers found them.
Most illegal acts are scandalous, but many scandalous acts are perfectly legal. But all scandalous acts need to be covered up. The operation has to be kept quiet, has to be covered up, because it’s unacceptable. It’s outrageous. If this were more widely publicized, Meta would suffer on two fronts. First, it would become better known that there’s nothing artificial about some of what they call “AI” — it’s in fact powered by human intelligence, just in another hemisphere. Second, and related to the first, some of the interactions you have with Meta AI — including images and video you send it, and images and video captured by Meta AI Glasses — are reviewed by human contractors. People write things and show things to AI, thinking it’s kept private between them and a computer program, that they would never share if they knew it might be seen by human beings paid by the AI provider to refine the training and correct its mistakes. A lot of people only use these “AI” products because they have no idea what’s actually going on.
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack
Anyway, enjoy the Meta AI built into WhatsApp and Instagram. And maybe keep a link to that report on Meta’s contractors in Kenya handy for anyone you meet who wears AI Glasses.
-
It’s a fascinating mystery what becomes a scandal and what doesn’t. One flaw in our news media culture is that stories from other countries, especially countries where English is not the primary language, tend never to gain traction here. You’d think the Internet, and the rise of very good automated language translation, would change this. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. After this story came out in February — a joint investigation co-published by the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten — it just faded away after a few days. I remember thinking when I linked to it, “Man, this feels potentially explosive — this might blow up into a big scandal.” But it didn’t. I didn’t forget about it, but I hadn’t thought about it in weeks, until I happened to catch this news — via Nick Heer — that Meta had severed ties with Sama, the contracting firm.
I can’t help but think that if the exact same original report had been published by, say, The New York Times or The New Yorker, or in video form by 60 Minutes, that it might have blown up into a sizable scandal and public relations disaster for Meta. But as it stands, it largely passed without note. In addition to the fact that the original story was published in Sweden, the other missing factor is they didn’t publish leaked images or footage from users of Meta AI Glasses. We read testimony from these Kenyans that as part of their jobs, they watched AI Glasses owners having sex and going to the toilet, but we never see footage of of AI Glasses owners having sex or going to the toilet. That shouldn’t make a huge difference, but human nature is such that it does. ↩︎
[Sponsor] WorkOS: Go From ‘We Don’t Support SSO’ to Enterprise Ready in a Weekend
Apr. 28th, 2026 11:07 pmdaringfireball_feedEvery B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way.
With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
“Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys?”
May. 3rd, 2026 09:52 pmunsung_feedIn our Unsung yellow pages, in between people writing Chrome plugins to fix UI of other apps, and gamers creating mods to fix bugs that the developers leave behind, we need to make some room for another category of apps.
Some time ago, Daniel Kennett created a little utility called Keyhole with a singular purpose:
Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys triggering a random video in your web browser, doing something else weird, or by them doing… nothing? Even though your music player is right there?
Me too! And so Keyhole was born.
Keyhole intercepts media transport key presses before the operating system gets a hold of them, and promises to do a better job dispatching them to the right place.
This week Kennett added another feature – the app will monitor the repeat setting that apparently occasionally gets out of whack, and fix it for the user.
We could call these kinds of apps “janitor apps.” I know of a concept called cron jobs, but I’m assuming these quiet workers do backend-y things like moving files around, cleaning up databases, pinging servers, and so on. I am less aware of work like Kennett’s that fixes stuff on the UI layer.
Is it strange that I find this kind of an app pretty… noble? Of course, Apple should fix it; perhaps Bugs Apple Loves could even introduce a serious multiplier for “a bug bothers someone so much they fix it for Apple.”
Of note in the last dialog box: “Keyhole has fixed Music’s repeat setting X times.” I think this kind of a counter is pretty brilliant.
Blockheaded
May. 3rd, 2026 04:59 pmdr_drang_feedComplaints about Apple’s design choices usually involve transparency, color, and other legibility concerns. These criticisms are legitimate, but the poor design choices that usually set me off are the ones involving the mechanics of commands—what I have to do to get something done. I think of these as the “design is how it works” mistakes.
Yesterday, for example, I was going through my mail on my iPhone and came upon a piece of spam. I put it in the Junk folder with the hope that future emails like it would stay out of my inbox, but I also wanted to do something stronger. I wanted to block all future emails from that sender. I’ve done this with other senders many times before, so I know the steps to take, but I decided this time to document the process because it’s so stupid.
Tapping anywhere in the header turns the various fields blue, suggesting that a further tap on any of them will perform some other action. I’m not sure why these fields aren’t blue to start with, but that’s not my real complaint, so we’ll pass over that.
Since I want to block the sender, the natural thing is to tap on the From field. Indeed, a menu pops up with a set of commands associated with that person/address. You might think that one of them would start a new message (as opposed to a reply), but no, which I find kind of weird. More to the current point, though, is that a command named Block Contact or Block Address is also missing.
I know perfectly well that I can block contacts from my phone, so how do I do it? The Copy and Search commands are clearly wrong, and View Contact Card seems even more wrong, as I have no contact card for this person. Nor do I want one—he’s a spammer. But because I once tapped View Contact Card, possibly by mistake, I now know that that’s the choice to make because this is what appears:
It doesn’t show an existing contact card for the sender; it shows a potential contact card, one that I could add to my Contacts app. But also included in the list of things I can do with this potential contact is block him. Which is what I did.
But this process makes no sense. View Contact Card should not be the path you need to take to block someone you have no intention of turning into one of your contacts. It’s not just an extra step (like tapping the header to turn all the fields blue), it’s a step in the wrong direction. No reasonable person who has not already gone through this process would think that View Contact Card is the command you choose to ensure that you never see an email from this spammer again.
The natural place—the correct place—for a Block Contact or Block Address command is on the popup menu you see when you tap the From field. There’s plenty of room for it. Hiding it behind a command whose primary purpose is something else isn’t a matter of taste, it’s an error.
Apple used to think about things like this and put commands where they made sense. I know that Apple has many more products than it used to, but it also has many many more employees and much much much more money. Simple things like this shouldn’t be falling through the cracks.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Peace
May. 3rd, 2026 11:20 amsmbc_comics_feed
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
Triple the median would of course be 50% more inner peace.
Today's News:
Episode 2773: And My Hacks
May. 3rd, 2026 10:02 amdarths_and_droids_feed
If you create something specially for an adventure or campaign, you gotta use it at some point. Just keep trying to recycle it until it makes sense to include it. Or get so desperate that it doesn't make sense, but what the hell.
aurilee writes:
Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)
Hmmm..... Well, I guess this means that BB isn't the only one not riding a mount. Aaaaaaaand..... that's about the only plus I can see here. I guess there's a reason the destroyer doesn't simply take off into space, but heck if I know what that is. Obviously we wouldn't get a fight sequence here if that happens, but it seems very silly for there to be troop carriers available for a fight on the the hull of a ship.
Plasma bow? Makes just as much sense as a plasma crossbow, I think. It makes just as much sense as any of the other not-basic blaster types of weapons. Plus, all you'd need for ammo is some spare metal bits, a volatile energy source, and artificial muscles fibers to hold it all together. I hope we get to see it actually fire.
Transcript
Early names
May. 3rd, 2026 03:36 amunsung_feedThe original 2004 Gmail iteration of the now-ubiquitous modern status bar (here presenting undo send) was internally nicknamed a butter bar because… well, just look at it:
(I believe at least Google today calls this a snackbar.)
The UI pop-up element hosting Google Talk inside Gmail – the very same thing that’s more commonly called a “toast” these days – was originally termed a mole:
The column view in NeXTSTEP was called a browser, but a few years later someone put together a different kind of a browser on that very same machine, and the original term has been sunset – after NeXTSTEP became Mac OS, the view was renamed to “column view”:
These three are off the top of my head. Please send in more!
Happy time_t 1777777777 to all who celebrate
May. 3rd, 2026 03:09 amjwz_org_feed
2026-05-02 08:09:37 PM PDT = 1777777777
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Mouse pointer as a mere mortal
May. 2nd, 2026 10:36 pmunsung_feedI gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this:
I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions:
- This feels wrong. If the mouse is the extension of my fingers, and the mouse pointer the extension of the mouse, this is in effect the app grabbing my hand and moving it.
- I did not know this was even possible. I can see how moving the mouse pointer programmatically can be useful in very specific situations (like scrubbing, or accessibility), but… not like this.
- If you do something for the user, won’t that make it harder for them to remember how to do it themselves?
- I’ve seen this kind of a thing many times in my career: Someone genuinely asks “hey, if this is such a huge transgression, why wasn’t it codified somewhere in the style guide?” But to me the challenge is that it’s hard to imagine everything that needs to be preemptively captured and prohibited. I have to imagine this stuff for living, and I literally did not think anyone would just move a mouse pointer like this.
So seeing this now, yeah, I’d bundle this inside the “some interactions are 100% sacred” bucket, alongside focus never being hijacked randomly (especially in the middle of typing), avoiding scrolling anything until I specifically ask, undo and copy/paste needing utmost protection, and a few more.
In the opposite camp, here’s a fun new project by Neal Agarwal (only worth clicking on a computer with a mouse). This is a situation where it feels perfectly fine for a cursor to be hijacked; as a matter of fact, there is something really interesting about a mouse pointer feeling less like a deity floating above it all, and more like a regular in-game actor.
This reminded me of that time, in the earlier days of Figma, when I prototyped an interaction where you could select someone else’s pointer and press Backspace to delete it:
We didn’t seriously consider it because it felt just too weird, and not that effective in solving “the other person’s cursor is distracting me” problem. But today it feels like it belongs to the same category as the two examples above.
I’ll let you decide if it’s closer to Agarwal’s delight or Lightroom’s terror.
View From a Hotel Window, 5/2/26: Chicago, IL
May. 2nd, 2026 08:37 pmscalziwhatever_feed
I’m staying north of the river, which is unusual for me. Also, the parking lot you see in the photo isn’t for my hotel. But it is a parking lot! Forms were obeyed.
I’m on town because tomorrow I’m in conversation with Joe Abercrombie about his latest book The Devils, and if you’re curious to see us I believe tickets may still be available. If you’re not curious to see us, fine, I guess, we’ll just sit there staring awkwardly at each other for an hour or so, I mean, whatever, it’s fine. It’s fine.
Ironically, this weekend is the 35th reunion for the University of Chicago Class of 1991, of which I am a part, and I am missing those festivities for this, and I feel a bit of a heel about it. Sorry, Class of ’91. You know you’re awesome.
— JS
A C A Bee
May. 2nd, 2026 08:27 pmjwz_org_feed
She seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could "enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape" in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence. [...]
I've seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his "elevated heart rate" was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I'm speculating about that. [...]
This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. [...]
Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. "[A]bout a thousand of Woods's bees died during the encounter," it reported, "many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting." I assume that "about a thousand" is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don't really buy the deputies' story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.