Writing

Time to flee Glassdoor

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged Glassdoor Internet privacy on by

Glassdoor is a site which lets employees and ex-employees report anonymously on what it’s like to work at companies. It used to place a high value on user privacy, since people reporting bad stuff about their employers can get them into trouble. Recently, though, it’s not only reversed itself but, in a single bound, become one of the worst websites for privacy.

I’m unusually close to Report Zero on this matter, and I think the person making this report would rather not be too widely identified, so I’ll link only to secondary sources here, such as this Ars Technica article, checking them against the original reports for accuracy.
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Gallup doesn’t understand set theory

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged journalism politics polls on by

According to a Gallup Poll article, “Less than a third of Americans say they would be willing to vote for someone nominated by their party who is over the age of 80 or has been charged with a felony or convicted of a felony by a jury.” If that’s true and Trump and Biden are the major-party nominees in 2024, then two-thirds of Americans will sit out the election for that reason alone.

Is that what the poll actually shows? The article goes on to say, “The poll addressed the issues of felonies and candidate age with separate questions each asked of about half of the poll’s respondents.” That makes it impossible to draw the conclusion stated at the top of the article. It’s an issue of set overlap.
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The Hugo cover-up

This entry was posted in Commentary News Writing and tagged China conventions fandom science fiction on by

It’s out in the open now: Legitimate Hugo Award candidates were disqualified because of Chinese censorship. A collection of internal email, posted on Document Cloud, shows that the committee reviewed “anything of a sensitive political nature.” Dave McCarty was specific about the reasons:

In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different … we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. [Ellipses in the original]

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It’s Black History Month, not Black Advertising Month

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged history writing on by

Looking around the Internet and stores, the most obvious signs of Black History Month are ethnically targeted marketing. That’s what advertisers do, I guess. But the original idea was a good one: call attention to people whom older histories tended to ignore.

Writers might get some ideas from looking at black historical figures they admire. Let me just list three:
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