Weekend link dump for December 15

“Sniffing a colleague can be considered sexual harassment according to a recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.” That may sound silly, but the description of what was actually happening doesn’t sound silly at all, it sounds nasty and threatening.

If for some reason you’ve been wanting to download your Gmail and Calendar information, now you can.

Optical illusions usually succeed at fooling me.

“Assignment contracts, also called preassignment agreements, are often buried in dense thickets of legalese in non-compete contracts […] Typically, it means you’re signing over the entire contents of your brain to your employer.”

“No wonder almost all serious efforts at fraud involve either election officials committing fraud or absentee ballot fraud, which takes place outside the supervision of poll workers and election workers.”

“Think about that: for decades, the health care industry has deliberately taken ruthless advantage of the very people who are the weakest and most vulnerable—those who are poor or unemployed—and seems to think that this is a perfectly decent and moral way to conduct business.”

“People with better alternatives don’t go to work for Walmart at eight or nine dollars an hour. And a main reason that Walmart workers don’t have better alternatives is that we have run economic policy in a way that doesn’t give them better alternatives.”

Have you been pwned? Now you can check.

“For the past dozen years, Oklahoma government and groups have spent more than $70 million in federal money on a marriage program originally aimed at reducing the state’s high divorce rate in hopes of fighting poverty. More than fourth-fifths of that money for the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative came from the state’s pool of federal welfare funds. During that time, however, the rates of divorce, unmarried cohabitation and single-parent families have increased in Oklahoma and the nation, while the percentage of households with married couples has declined, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.”

NBC will be staging more live family-friendly musical productions whether you liked their version of The Sound of Music or not.

Speaking of The Sound of Music, RIP, Eleanor Parker, who played The Baroness in the original movie.

“They said they wanted to be open to different monuments, and this seems like a perfect place to put that to the test.

Andre Johnson is a mensch.

“Rice and Boston College would have played for the national championship if there was a national championship game based on graduation success rates among bowl teams.”

Reports of “Republican civil war” are greatly exaggerated.

MLB will ban home plate collisions next year if the MLBPA approves. Good move, even if it is 44 years too late for Ray Fosse. And please, enough with the ridiculous whining.

The reason why Republicans have nothing left to offer on health care is because they now oppose everything they once advocated.

When they can drone-deliver groceries, let me know.

It pays – literally – to be nice in Nice.

“What’s the point? There is no point. It’s ridiculous. This is the most ridiculous thing I could come up with,” Stevens said of his Festivus pole. “This is about the separation of church and state.”

I’m Your Lawyer, Mr. Grinch.

“If you’re going to fight a war on Christmas, an all-out ban on the holiday seems like a pretty solid goal. It’s also something the Puritans actually accomplished, in multiple countries, for decades, putting today’s Christmas haters to shame.”

“There’s now so much fake content out there, much of it expertly engineered to go viral, that the probability of any given piece of viral content being fake has now become pretty high.”

There is no California doctor boycott of Obamacare.

RIP, George Rodrigue, best known for his blue dog paintings.

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