From Grok to Palantír to “wireheading,” tech bros are renowned for flawlessly using literary references to name and explain technology in ways that absolutely never misunderstand the source texts. Here are some examples you might hear bandied about the Bay Area and beyond.

Doublethink | verb
To operate two large language models simultaneously, typically one with each hand.

Usage: “I don’t care that you’re going into labor, honey. I’m doublethinking with Claude and Grok right now.”

Cash-22 | noun
A situation in which a startup founder must do unspeakable things to secure necessary funding.

Usage: “Our CEO was in a Cash-22 at the Peter Thiel pitch event, and now he’s a mere shell of a man.”

Sword of Damocles | proper noun
A human-first motivational framework employed in Amazon warehouses.

Usage: “Since implementing Sword of Damocles, productivity has increased by 25 percent while bottle-peeing has remained flat.”

Big Brother | proper noun
The new word Meta uses for managers.

Usage: “My Big Brother gave me ‘missing expectations’ because I haven’t been working hard enough to monetize Marketplace lookie-loos.”

Trojan horseable | adjective
Describing a non-dating app that is effective for finding dates.

Usage: “Zillow is extremely Trojan horseable.”

Kfka | proper noun
A startup building AI-powered government systems, starting with immigration and visa processing.

Usage: “My H-1B visa got denied by Kfka. When I appealed, I had to argue my case to a chatbot that kept referring me to other chatbots.”

This is the grave of Robert Barnwell Rhett.

Born in 1800 in Beaufort, South Carolina, Robert Barnwell Smith grew up in the plantation elite of South Carolina and boy howdy would he represent their scumbag interests all the way. He was related to a lot of the Revolutionary era South Carolina leaders. Their interests weren’t really that different than the rest of the nation at that time, but after 1800, with the rise of the cotton gin and the great wealth generated in South Carolina, that sure changed. Smith was headed into politics from a young age. He first won election to the South Carolina legislature in 1826 and stayed there until 1832. This was the moment when the state started becoming a hive of massive extremism in ways that even the rest of the South could not imagine at that time. Sure, the rest of the South might have opposed high tariffs, but talking about secession? That seems insane. That’s because it was insane.

Smith would push these ideas from the time he was young. He loved slavery. Absolutely loved it. He thought slavery was the destiny of the races, with whites naturally leading, and he thought that northern whites were stupid for not seeing this. He and people like him were the masters of the world and he intended to keep it that way. He was elected in 1832 as the state’s attorney general, running on a platform of extreme pro-slavery and nullification and that made him popular. He remained in the position until 1837.

Also, Smith changed his name to Rhett in 1838. William Rhett was an ancestor of his who was an early leader of South Carolina and who had gotten famous fighting pirates and I think was a big time slaver. Smith thought this name change was romantic and would give him additional cred, evidently, and so Robert Barnwell Rhett it became when the man was 38 years old. Seems weird to me. He was pretty fucking weird though.

Anyway, Rhett thought most of the South Carolina elite were not committed enough to slavery and secession. So in 1844. he was part of the Bluffton Movement, which was a group of extremists in South Carolina. The nation had not listened to the South bitching about tariffs and in 1842, passed another one that was not favorable to South Carolina’s interests. Rhett left this movement to stand up for another round of nullification and to threaten again to leave the union. Now, this was too early for secession and so Rhett’s real goal here was to reform the union, even if secession might be the only option. But still, this was pure extremism. It was too much for John C. Calhoun, who was still the real power in the state’s politics. He put a stop to it. But the groundwork was being laid for future actions. Rhett’s favorite newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, wrote of two great evils–the tariff and abolitionism, and stated they were “cohesive, cooperative, concurrent, kindred and co-essential atrocities.” OK then.

Rhett was pleased with the presidency of James Polk, who stole half of Mexico to expand slavery. But he thought the Compromise of 1850 was a sellout to the abolitionist north. Like everything else, only southern extremism was the answer. He convened the Nashville Convention in 1850 to unite the South in secession. The South was not quite ready for this, but he saw the progress. Meanwhile, Calhoun died. Who did South Carolina select to replace him? Yep, Rhett. Calhoun was too conciliatory anyway. But then Rhett thought the rest of the South Carolina leadership a bunch of cowards. In 1852, the legislature decided it would not push for secession right away. In response, Rhett resigned from the Senate rather than represent such a bunch of cucks.

So Rhett went home to his Charleston Mercury and spewed propaganda and pushed extremist ideas and candidates fo the next eight years. By the time the nation elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, he was ready to rock and roll and his influence had just grown and grown. He was elected to the Confederate legislature in 1861 and remained there for the war. Like far right extremists in our government today, they all hated each other back then too and Rhett loathed Jefferson Davis.

A lot of this is that Davis, like much of the rest of the Confederate leadership, did not believe in slavery as much as Rhett. Just committing treason in defense of slavery was not enough for this man. Oh no, anyone believed in that. No, see, what was necessary was reopening the transatlantic slave trade. That became Rhett’s top priority. He ranted and raved about this at the Confederate founding convention and was infuriated that the Confederate Constitution did not solve this affront to the white race. He also believed that Confederate states should also be able to secede from the Confederacy. Give him credit, I guess. He actually believed this shit, unlike a lot of the Confederate leaders, who only talked about secession as a tool but in fact were totally authoritarian in fact. Rhett believed it.

But I want to be clear–no one and I mean no one did more to father secession than Robert Barnwell Rhett, very much including Calhoun or Davis.

Another reason Rhett hated Davis is that the Confederate president tried to create a functional nation (and let’s not really give Davis credit here, he was terrible as Confederate president even if you take out the reasons why this fake nation existed). So when Davis issued an order that the government confiscate saltpeter supplies, Rhett lost his shit. TYRANNY, he cried. HOW DARE BIG GOVERNMENT LIBERALS LIKE JEFFERSON DAVIS TRAMMEL UPON ON OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.

The other thing that happened to Rhett during the war is that he lost all his money, which was of course largely invested in humans. I think a lot of his plantation land was near the Atlantic coast and very quickly, the Union army took this land over and freed the slaves, de facto if not de jure.

After the war, Rhett left South Carolina for Louisiana. At least Rhett had the late life he deserved. He had serious skin cancer problems, which led to noted disfigurement that seems to have disgusted most of the people who saw him. I can’t imagine a more appropriate fate. It eventually killed him, in 1876. He was 75 years old.

In conclusion, Robert Barnwell Rhett is the worst politician ever from the worst state in American history. Burn in hell.

Also, can you help me out here–how did that Confederate flag up on Rhett’s grave end up broken and under my muddy shoes? It’s a real mystery.

If you would like this series to visit other secessionist scum, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. If I haven’t earned support for this series today, I don’t know what I can do. William Yancey is in Montgomery, Alabama and Louis Wigfall is in Galveston, Texas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,110 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In 2011 I wrote about the Flemish municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a complex of Belgian exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands.

Reader Serge De Man tells me that residents have now installed a swing on the border, so it’s possible to swing between countries.

There’s a pun here, but I can’t find it.

“Dear PoPville,

Saw your 3/12 post about Charlotte the cat. My friend sent me a picture of a new poster on a lamp base: with an 855 hotline number on this new edition, that leads to a very pleasant British voice offering options such as

“hear about charlotte’s day yesterday”, “talk to charlotte”, or “hear what she has to say about the controversy”. It’s my favorite 2026 event, this, whatever it is. A needed non sequitur break from the Horrors.”

ICYMI:

“Charlotte is Belgian-Korean. Her mother was a diplomat and her father was a Tycoon. Charlotte rejected the trappings of her family’s aristocratic lifestyle to become a piano player at a famous jazz bar where she is popular for her musical talent and mysterious aura. She is friendly but firm, dazzling but deliberative… And she doesn’t like being asked too many questions about her past. She has traveled extensively (She prefers by train) And she is known to have business in most capitals around the world.

Can be seen at Crispus Attacks Park” (ed. note: Bloomingdale)

Because all of you absolutely love my LOAC posts, Joseph Orenstein at Just War has an exhaustive look at the legal implications of the Minab school strike:

The Shajarah Tayyebeh school was not a military target on Feb. 28, 2026. It had not been a military facility for a decade. Its civilian character was visible, documented, and verifiable. That a U.S. military strike nonetheless destroyed it—killing more than 165 people, most of them children—is a tragedy whose legal dimension cannot be resolved by characterizing it as a simple accident.

The failure to maintain current, verified intelligence before approving a strike against a fixed installation in a non-denied environment is an independent violation of Article 57’s precautionary obligations—separate from any distinction violation. The triple-tap pattern raises an additional question the investigation must answer: whether the second and third missiles were released without any reassessment of first-strike observations.

And the potential role of AI-assisted geospatial tools in possibly laundering a decade-old misclassification into an approved strike package raises questions about the institutional architecture of target verification that extend well beyond this case. As targeting processes increasingly incorporate machine learning and automated analysis, the legal responsibility for verification cannot be delegated to an algorithm. A human—a targeting officer, a JAG, a commander—must remain accountable at the point of approval.

None of this necessarily rises to the level of a war crime under the Rome Statute’s willfulness standard. But it rises well above the threshold of an unremarkable mistake. Article 92 of the UCMJ provides a more realistic vehicle for individual accountability than the Rome Statute in this context — one that does not require proof of intent to strike a school, only proof that a legal duty existed and was culpably neglected. The law of armed conflict demands that we take that seriously—not in a spirit of adversarial prosecution, but in the spirit that animates the Geneva Conventions themselves: the obligation to learn, to reform, and to prevent the next Minab.

A thorough, independent, and publicly disclosed investigation is not optional. It is the law.

Orenstein is thorough, and if you want a better understanding of how LOAC functions I’d recommend a full read. TL;DR the strike was a clear violation of IHL (International Humanitarian Law), but to be considered a “war crime” you’d have to establish intentionality and that’s rough here. Dereliction and negligence are not sufficient for that elevation. However, the strike may well include a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which does include dereliction of duty. But there are also considerations that have to deal with intel process, with AI, and with double-tap policies. Worth your time.

The post Minab Revisited appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Last month we talked about bosses and offices with weirdly outdated expectations from a far-off era. Here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The host

A former boss had very strong ideas about technology.

Pre-pandemic, some employees had access to Zoom and used it occasionally for in-house meetings.

Obviously, in 2020 we had to pivot to using Zoom for every meeting. My boss insisted that he be the “host” and the only “host” of Zoom meetings. He said it was important for people to know that he was host, in the sense that he was convening the meeting and responsible for the meeting outcomes. He could not be convinced that in a Zoom context, most of the hosting role involves managing the delivery of the meeting. Because he would not allow any co-hosts, so much time in meetings was spent on things like him asking someone to share their screen, when the person not have share screen permissions, and then we’d have to coach the boss, in real time, through the process of giving a meeting participant the ability to share their screen. Every time. There was no learning curve.

Relatively quickly, I started scheduling meetings and when he would ask to be “the host,” I’d say it was so weird, but Zoom wasn’t letting me make him the host, wow, technology, who knows, right? Then he would start every meeting by declaring that regardless of what the screen said, he was THE HOST of the meeting (akin to when Michael Scott on The Office “declared bankruptcy”).

2. The FedExes

My former boss, who just turned 90, had me FedEx a printed letter to Africa every time he sent an email to anyone there. This was literally in the last 10 years, so not decades ago. We’d often have a response from that person via email before FedEx even departed with the letter. These were $130ish PER LETTER to send, on our small nonprofit’s budget. Eventually I just started telling him I FedExed them even though I didn’t and he never knew the difference, but we saved so much money.

3. The “girl”

My boss shares an office with a separate business, and the other business owner insists on calling me “the girl” or “your girl” in conversations with my boss or others. It should be noted I am in my late thirties with a professional degree, not a high school student, not that that should matter. I finally started addressing him as “old man” with my boss’ approval and he has stopped talking to me all together.

4. The cost of an email

I once had a boss (~10 years ago) frantically pull me aside to ask how much money it cost to send an email. He was elated to learn it was a free action!

Same man wouldn’t allow us to have any books/newspapers, but don’t care what we were doing on the computers (this was a back-of-house retail job, so not in view of customers, but with some of the weird controlling behavior of your classic retail work). I think he was so computer illiterate that he genuinely couldn’t conceive of anything we could be doing on a computer that wasn’t work. You could fully see the screens while walking by, and people would blatantly be on Reddit/imgur with giant images and had no issue. But pull out anything on paper and we’d get in trouble. I was a college student and couldn’t do homework out of a physical textbook, but could off of a PDF of a textbook.

5. The mail merge

She was beyond computer illiterate to the point that she didn’t “trust” mail merging information, like mail merging name and address into a letter or invoice, and instead expected her people to type it out. I got dragged into the mess to show her how mail merge worked, try to teach it to her, show the high rate of errors when people are forced to type and Nope. Flat out not having it, doesn’t trust it, etc. Her staff ended up literally lying to her on how receipts and tax letters and invoices were being produced and basically blowing off work every Friday when they would work from home to … type for hours (and instead, of course took 10 minutes to mail merge).

6. The print-outs

We had an executive, just 10 years ago, whose admin would come in half an hour early so she could print out his schedule for the day, print out his emails, highlight the important bits, and assemble it all together in his leather folio for him. Then stick it under his iPad on his desk. She’d then stay late to type his email replies for him, from what he wrote on the paper.

This was the CIO. The head of IT.

7. The husband’s name

I worked at a very old-school membership library that wanted to grow their younger membership base. As the newest and youngest staff member, I was asked to contribute ideas. I pointed out that I made the initial membership contribution (before I got the job) and now worked for the org but the second I added my husband to my library account, every single piece of communication was addressed to Mrs. Husband’s First and Last Name. Including work mail. And that was something that was going to actively turn a lot of people away from joining or working with the org. Especially from the multiple universities around us.

The new director agreed but the rest of the staff, uh, did not and were very much in the “it is tradition! This is how we have always done it!” camp.

This was 2016.

8. The rules

At one place I worked, the owner hated the smell of coffee, so there were no coffee makers on site. People had to bring in their own coffee from home or a coffee shop. There were lots of other weird rules –

1. No popping popcorn in microwaves (one person put 30 minutes instead of 3, so no one was trusted with popcorn ever again).
2. Everyone must wear a name tag at all times.
3. No coats on the back of chairs (could get caught under wheels and cause an accident).
4. No temporarily keeping shared food on an empty desk (think donuts for a couple of hours). Eating at your desk was soon banned after a specific incident, even though it had previously been allowed. No clue why that day set the owner off. The owner was going to write up the employee until it was explained that the employee was on vacation and not responsible for someone else putting food on their desk.
5. All employees, including salaried employees, must use the time clock for entry, exit, and lunch breaks. The penalty for being one minute late was worse than calling off, so there would be people who literally called out from the parking lot and went back home. My team had a spreadsheet for time clock games to help us beat the system. Due to rounding, you could be gone for 14 minutes but clock a zero-minute lunch by clocking out at 12:08 and back in at 12:22, as an example. Both were rounded to 12:15, so it was a zero-minute lunch break. We used the same logic to have longer lunch breaks, since we only got 30 minutes.

9. The telex

I was brought in to do annual updates on a practice guide (big legal book designed to actually be helpful to practicing lawyers with real clients) in 2019 because the former editor was retiring. One of my recommended changes the first year was to change an example from “telex” to “facsimile.” The change wasn’t approved until the following year.

I will be doing updates this summer and might get bold and try to change it to “email.”

I only knew what a telex was because early in my career I worked on a case where the evidence went back to the 1940s, including telexes.

10. The last names

At my previous job, my boss was in her seventies – lovely woman, I really enjoyed working with her – but she insisted it was *just not done* to call anyone you worked with by their first name. The whole department was Miss, Mrs., Mr., or Dr. except for the custodian, and I’m like 90% sure that was just because he wouldn’t tell anyone his last name. Scratched it off his nametag and everything. My boss still called him Mr.

11. The sperm bank

I used to work in a small specialty medical lab. One of the services we offered was a sperm bank for men who were undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. A tech would examine the donation microscopically before freezing it to make sure it actually did contain viable sperm. Our boss would not let any of the single techs do the microscopic analysis, only the married ones could do it. He said it was inappropriate for a single woman to look at sperm.

12. The wooden blocks

About ten years ago, my sister worked in one of the largest public library systems in the United States, in a major city. Instead of emailing requests for books kept in the archives, she had to write each request on a piece of paper, rubber band the paper to a small block of wood, and throw the wooden block down the stairs into the basement/archives.

Twice a day, someone down there would gather the blocks, fill the requests, and bring up the books (for distribution to patrons) and wood (for reuse).

The post the wooden blocks, the meeting “host,” and other weirdly outdated office practices appeared first on Ask a Manager.