sparr

I've gotten the same advice from multiple laywers: I don't have a case (deja vu!). My past experience in similar situations is that they really mean I'll recover less than their time costs, which is very different. I expect I'll accomplish something if I persevere. So I guess it's time to branch out and describe the situation to friends for probably-not-legal-advice advice.

I lost my job at Amazon a couple of weeks ago. The process that led to this was initiated and controlled by my manager. I believe they did this in retaliation for my escalating concerns about their behavior to their manager and HR. Those concerns were centered around them reprimanding me in front of my team for not meeting expectations they hadn't communicated to us, which were different from expectations that had been explicitly communicated in writing. Those expectations were around availability and response time for on-call duties. However, attorneys tell me that this isn't a valid retaliation claim, because salaried employees don't have hours protections. There is an outstanding internal ethics investigation on this issue, initiated before I found out for sure that I was being terminated, and ongoing since then.

One of the attorneys I reached out to suggested that I request my personnel record from Amazon. MA labor laws say they must provide it within 5 days. Today is day 14. They acknowledged the request on day 2. On day 7 they again acknowledged it, verified the original request date, and said they would fulfill it before the required deadline (which had already passed?). Attorneys tell me I have no civil claim for this violation; I can just report them to the AG and they will get letter telling them to eventually comply.

When I was terminated, I was offered a severance agreement with a relatively small payment, in exchange for giving up any employment rights/violation claims I might have. They gave me 21 days to consider. Today is day 15, so I have 6 days left to decide. Attorneys tell me I have no claim related to this deadline and their failure to provide the legally required personnel record. I believe this is coercive on their part. One attorney told me not to sign and that I should keep asking them for the records; maybe that will leave some future possible action open? Unfortunately that attorney also said that I'd probably spend more hiring them than I'd recover. Slightly related, the agreement says they are under no obligation to provide severance, which isn't true because they promised it under a different agreement signed earlier in the process.

While reading the law around the personnel record request, I learned that Amazon broke another state labor law months ago when they started the process that led to my termination. I found out mid-process that the situation would prevent me from transferring or being promoted, and MA law says they have 10 days to inform me when that sort of thing goes into my personnel record so I can rebut it. As far as I can tell, from talking to dozens of other people who experiences the process, it's company policy to keep that situation secret. Unlike the previous concerns which might apply to just me, this one feels bigger. I suspect Amazon has violated the rights of hundreds of MA employees in this way. Again, attorneys tell me I have no civil claim for this violation; I can just report them to the AG and nothing will happen.

My experience so far is that there's a ~6 day lag in correspondence with a human at Amazon for HR-related inquiries, so I don't have a window to discuss even the severance/records thing with Amazon before making a decision.

What do you think I should do?

Ideas: Take the severance Call/email another dozen attorneys Use extraordinary measures to reach someone in HR soon enough to ask for an extension on the severance decision Represent myself in a civil claim for the personnel record law violations and their impact on my ability to make informed severance agreement decisions Find other Amazon folks with one or both of the same personnel record law violations _____?

In The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars[1], rationalist blog author Scott Alexander writes about trends in controversial internet discourse. He uses some graphs from Google Trends and other data to support the idea that at any given time there is one major cultural issue dominating internet arguments, while most other issues take the back burner while also experiencing fundamental shifts in the background. Then he gives numerous examples from blogs and wikis and online communities on each topic. He lays out a few distinct periods, starting with what he calls “New Atheism”, which was trending approximately 2004-2012, then died out over the next few years. “Geek Feminism” took over, and lasted from about 2010-2015. From 2014 forward, Racism took over as the leading topic of discourse and outrage. While none of the topics ever disappeared, they all decreased in frequency by a large margin over a few years after their heyday.

He goes on to describe how the fading of these topics represents a large number of people losing fervor and completely abandoning more extreme positions (while possibly adopting new ones), rather than just a proportional widespread decrease in interest. Whole communities shift their focus. Blogs and forums get rebranded. Conversations die out completely and new ones spring up in their place. A particular example given is the phrase “white feminism” which was virtually nonexistent prior to 2009, saw negligible use until 2014, then skyrocketed in 2015 as intersectionality, or lack thereof, suddenly took over a large fraction of feminist discourse while racism became the leading topic elsewhere.

Over the last 6-8 years, I have occasionally mentioned that I've been watching from afar as some of the people I still follow/subscribe/etc from my past communities seem to have matured and escaped from the influences in question. I've lamented that they are unlikely to ever retroactively apply their newfound wisdom. Now I'm wondering if, instead, almost everyone around them changed course, and what I thought were exceptional improvements were really just small slices of a wholesale community/subculture-wide abandonment of those problematic positions. Whether the risk of upsetting those people through actions they previously opposed has disappeared without my knowing it.

It never occurred to me prior to this article that this topic which is a defining part of my adult life experience might have simply disappeared from the radar of almost everyone else. After I was kicked out of all the environments in my social circles where such things were regularly brought up by the unreasonable people in question, I was left with no way to see that they weren't being brought up [much] any more.

The description in the article of the height of the phenomenon in question sounds like an only slightly caricaturized version of arguments and vilifications that I spent at least a few years experiencing and now a decade being exiled for, and that are still among the largest influences on my fears of interacting with people. Over and over, my “it should be ok for me to ask a woman out” would get turned into “you think every woman owes you sex” or worse. The climactic example from the article involves a physics blogger (Scott Aaronson), who made a comment deep below an unrelated essay saying he was affected by this discourse when he was younger, became suicidal, sought professional help, and it took years to get over the hangups to ask anyone out and eventually find a happy marriage. A leading feminist blogger (Amanda Marcotte) turned this into an article where she accused him of all manner of terrible misogynist positions about women owing him sex. From the article: “And that's just the beginning! It was whole pages full of this stuff! And most of the other top feminists wrote similar essays that were equally off-the-wall. Somehow there was an entire movement full of people who thought this was a completely accurate and proportional way to respond to things.” I think I met more than a few people from that movement.

Is it a coincidence that the year of Marcotte's response to Aaronson, the year the article gives as the “climax” and height of extreme and vocal positions on this topic, is the same year I was kicked out of the Boston Bureau of Erotic Discourse group, primarily due to my efforts to counteract the influence of people trying to define “creepy” and “nonconsensual” in ways that could not be safely predicted or avoided and could be weaponized at any time for any reason? Are these spaces really no longer full of the problematic positions and discourse I was opposing back then? Have all, or even most, of those people not only given up those positions, but forgotten they and their friends ever held them? Am I inaccurately predicting today that they would label “creepy” or “nonconsensual” the things they said they would label those ways 8 years ago? Were all the people I know now, who tell me I’m delusional or irrational or exhibiting trauma response, somehow insulated from this phenomenon in the apparently short window where it was a major problem?

Since moving back to Boston, I’ve once again become more aware of the social norms and discourse in the communities I left behind. I still don’t have access to those specific spaces, but I get glimpses in other ways. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that a lot of my past writing about Boston vs other cities (particularly the fringe communities I am part of: makers, burners, etc) was a huge coincidence, and the problem was more about timing than location. More often than not, I see people advocating and demonstrating consent and communication norms that match those I was arguing for a decade ago. Unfortunately, what most people seem to have ingrained is “I disagreed with this person a decade ago”, without any mental capacity and/or willingness to cross reference that with changes in their own beliefs or the community norms around them.

Do you, person who blocked or exiled me for arguing with you in the early 2010s, still hold the beliefs that I was arguing against? If so, have you noticed that almost everyone who supported your development of that belief has changed course, that almost everyone around you is supporting the positions I argued for a decade ago? Or, if not, have you considered apologizing?

(This is a rewrite and elaboration on a private post I made about two years ago.)

Analogy: If you switch your fandom from American Football to Soccer, are you willing and able to set aside at least some of your past conclusions about soccer fans who tried to convince you to switch?

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture

Every new year I commit to giving social networks other than Facebook a serious effort. I read my news feed on other networks before visiting FB. I cross post things to other networks in addition to FB.

This year I'm changing it up a bit. Due to the ongoing meltdown of Twitter, there have been massive migrations to other platforms, some newer than others. The demographic trends in those migrations make some of these more appealing to me than others.

I will be focusing almost all of my new social media interaction efforts on Mastodon for this year's resolution.

I am @[email protected] or http://mastodon.social/@sparr and I invite all my friends and acquaintances to follow and interact there. I may eventually create one or more additional profiles in the fediverse for specific sorts of content, TBD.

Mastodon is a federated service. It works kinda like email. You make an account on a server of your choice, the same way you choose gmail or hotmail or your own domain and server for email, but you can still interact with people on other servers. Most Mastodon servers talk to each other, but some block each other due to incompatible content and moderation policies, e.g. on an instance meant for kids you might have trouble following someone from an instance meant for porn. Learn more or just find a server to join at https://joinmastodon.org/

The way that Mastodon servers talk to each other isn't restricted to Mastodon servers. The language they speak (“ActivityPub”) is free and open to implement and use. Mastodon looks and works a lot like Twitter, with short mostly-text posts, sometimes small images or videos, presented in a feed/stream. There's another platform called Pixelfed that looks and works more like Instagram or Flickr, hosting mostly big images, presenting them in more of a gallery feed. There's another platform called Peertube that looks and works like Youtube, hosting large/long videos. There are also platforms for long form blogging, including Write Freely (where you'll find me as @[email protected] but you probably don't need to follow that since my Mastodon account will boost most of my Write Freely posts). All of these platforms can and do talk to each other. Users on them can interact with each other. You can reply to a Peertube video or follow a Write Freely author from your Mastodon account. You can boost Mastodon posts on your Pleroma account, etc.

And this isn't limited to “new” platforms. There is a Wordpress plugin so that your Wordpress site will send and receive content via ActivityPub, allowing users of Mastodon or Pleroma etc to directly follow your blog and boost your posts to their followers, rather than just copying and pasting links. Tumblr is working on support currently as well.

This system isn't perfect. It's experiencing growing pains as millions of people join a network that previously only had a few hundred thousand users. There's work being done on moderation and privacy and client features. New clients are being written almost daily. But it's getting better, and it was already good enough for me to use and love years ago. I strongly recommend you give it a try.

I'll close by mentioning that I intend to remain active in the following other places, although I'll be checking and posting to Mastodon and Write Freely first for a while:

https://facebook.com/sparr0 https://reddit.com/u/sparr https://fetlife.com/sparr https://sparr.substack.com

PS: My understanding is that significant chunks of the Twitter exodus are also headed for Tumblr.com, Post.news, and Hivesocial.app. While they mostly don't appeal to me, I include them here in case they are a better fit for you.

#NewYearNewNetworks #SocialMedia #SocialNetwork #Facebook #Reddit #Twitter #Mastodon #Substack #fediverse #ActivityPub

Hello! I am Sparr and this is my #longform #introduction. As of this writing, I'm 40 years old, cis male, and live near #Boston. My professional work centers on #devops #continuousintegration #deploymentautomation, at the moment specifically aimed at the #containerd project. My hobbies include #community building, #videogames, #boardgames, #event organizing, #maker pursuits including #carpentry and #welding, some #kinky activities, #softwaredevelopment, and #education.

I am #radicallyhonest, an aspiring #rationalist, an amateur supporter of #effectivealtruism, and prioritize #objectivity and #agency in my decision making.

My online discourse often focuses on #controversial topics such as #consent, #kink, #racism, #sexism, #politics, #communication, #honesty, etc.

There's more information about me in my #datingprofile and much more information in my #personalusermanual.

You can find other slices of my online presence on Mastodon, Reddit, Dreamwidth, Fetlife, Twitter, Substack, Flickr, StackExchange, Github, LinkedIn, OKCupid, Facebook, Instagram.

PS: A secondary purpose of this post is to demonstrate the ability to #boost across the #fediverse, so you've probably reached this from #Mastodon rather than directly through the #WriteFreely instance I authored it on.