That kid in the middle looks harrowed; like every day is an endurance test.
"There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are few old, bold pilots."
Gravity reversal. Like suddenly gravity switches to a universally repellent force and everything on the surface of the Earth starts falling into space (me included). Eventually you'd just "fall" away and the atmosphere too and you'd suffocate.
I don't know if you can go into much detail, but what was the "burden of proof?" It sounds like you had something definitive in hand (unanswered customer emails). Couldn't you say something like "our email reply SLA is 30 minutes and employee X continuously fails to meet this?"
I agree, it seems to me that there could be some simple improvements to at least flag suspicious requests. The comment from @kautau@lemmy.world would seem to indicate that a simple address cross-reference when the I9 is submitted could help indicate bogus applications.
Please don't construe my comment here as a defense of the company; I'm only providing some context here regarding how he may have been hired.
If you've never worked near or in an industry like this, you may not be familiar with "cattle call" hiring. There's basically a standing advert from the company for work at the plant: Show up Monday morning at 05:00 and you can be working the same day if they hire you in. Typically there's a group of 10, 20, or maybe more lined up for a job. Everyone is told to bring a photo ID and a social security card.
The kid in the article looks slight, but at 16 he was probably close enough to adult proportions to look like he could do the work. He'd line up with everyone else in front of a table and eventually have his turn to talk to the manager / hiring officer. They'd take his ID and SS card and write down the info, and ask the required questions for the I9 form, likely filling it out for him and signing off as translator / preparer assistance. Then they hand back the credentials and he waits off to the side.
Once they have enough applicants to fill however many positions they need, they send the remainder home. Everyone is given a timeclock ID number. Anyone working the day shift is taken immediately to the plant, handed PPE and tools, and put to work. Second and third shifts are sent home and told to come back in the afternoon or at midnight.
And that's it. That's the extent of the contact during the hiring process. At the end of the week there's a check waiting for you at the plant office. Next Monday the company repeats the process to fill positions for people that didn't show or quit during the week.
The company has 3 days to submit the I9 form, and if it comes back invalid they must terminate employment. But with stolen identities they likely clear and that's the end of any scrutiny. If you asked that hiring manager on Tuesday to pick out someone he hired Monday morning, he probably couldn't do it.
Probably this, on the heels of: https://lemmy.world/post/8643298
So spending is probably up, but it's just deepening the debt hole. We'll see where the bottom of that is soon enough...
"Hey, listen, motherfucker!"
A good hearty borscht (the red variety). Serve with a sprinkle of fresh dill on top and a spoonful of sour cream dropped in.
The labyrinth one is probably my favorite. It's tough to say a web comic has "timing," but the way the look on the labyrinth builder's face hits in the last panel is gold.
I think what they're speaking to is how such a change may alter the course of a presidential campaign. As it stands, there's this notion that a candidate has to try and have broad appeal; they need to spread their campaign out a bit in order to "capture" the electoral votes of a state.
Sans the electoral college, I see presidential campaigns becoming even more polarized and exclusionary. The Democrat campaign will become the "big city loop." Continually visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, and Miami. Maybe they slide in a few secondary metros if it's convenient. The candidate won't have to worry about any non-urban messaging, and if they're particularly incendiary could even preach "dumping those hicks in the sticks."
Conversely, the Republican campaign (not even considering the existing insanity) becomes "everywhere else." They can push the message of "big city Democrats want to destroy you" even more convincingly.
Such an outcome strengthens the "not my president" sentiment (on either side), and just further aggravates partisanship. I'm not saying eliminating the electoral college is a change that could never be made, but I definitely think this is a bad time. It will feel like exclusion and alienation and in politics perception is reality.
For the obvious follow-on question "when is a good time," I don't have a pat answer and I can't even speculate if that will be in 4, or 12, or even 20 years. But it needs to be a time when there's far less immediate friction between the two leading parties, or it's just going to be another wedge opening the divide.
I have several Tampermonkey scripts to keep Youtube useable: 
Additionally uBlock, and a plugin to alter the number of results per row (so I don't wind up with gigantic tiles/icons on a large monitor).
It's a complete disaster without these. :/
The worst is when they phrase the response as if there was just some slight, funny misunderstanding on the part of the machine; "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that! Did you want to..."
For some reason that one really drives my ire.
I recently finished my degree, and exam-heavy courses were the bane of my existence. I could sit down with the homework, work out every problem completely with everything documented, and then sit to an exam and suddenly it's "what's a fluid? What's energy? Is this a pencil?"
The worst example was a course with three exams worth 30% of the grade, attendance 5% and homework 5%. I had to take the course twice; 100% on HW each time, but barely scraped by with a 70.4% after exams on the second attempt. Courses like that took years off my life in stress. :(
According to this, Texas has ~7% of their prison population in private facilities. The national rate is ~8%.
I had one recently that (when changing / creating the password) would allow you paste into the "new password" field but not the "confirm password" field. Super annoying.
I just opened dev tools, pasted it into the "value" property for the control, and kept on truckin'. Just nuts that had to be done though.