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Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills - Bloomberg
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 3:15 PM

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A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

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DIY mushroom-growing kits are a problem for Ontario forests | The Narwhal
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 8:54 AM

The Narwhal
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Mycologist Aishwarya Veerabahu regularly walks the forests near her home in Wisconsin, marvelling at the myriad shapes and colours of mushrooms, sometimes foraging for something to bring home and sauté in garlic and butter. It’s a landscape she knows well, but in the last few years, she’s been noticing a worrying and unfamiliar presence: vibrant yellow, tightly clustered invasive making itself at home. 

Known as golden oyster, it’s a ’shroom completely altering native fungi communities in North America.

“Golden oysters will grow in an order of magnitude more than any other mushroom that you’d see. If you come up on a log with golden oysters on it, there’s always a ton of them, multiple clusters,” Veerabahu said.

The popular mushrooms, often found on menus and supermarket shelves, are native to forests in Russia and Asia. They were first brought to North America in the early 2000s for cultivation, and took to the forests by 2010, expanding their numbers and range rapidly.

“There are some times where I’ve gone through a forest and teared up because I know that there are other mushrooms that were in that wood that aren’t there anymore,” Veerabahu said. “It can be a very sad thing when now it’s just dominated by this one species.”

A researcher at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, Veerabahu published a study last August that used data from citizen scientists to confirm the trend she’s been seeing locally. Golden oyster mushrooms — scientific name Pleurotus citrinopileatus— are quickly invading North America, including Ontario. 

And, scientists say, a booming home-growing trend may be accelerating their spread into forests and impacting biodiversity.

Golden oysters have been found in 25 states, “after escaping cultivation” of commercial growers and hobbyists. They’ve made their way to Ontario, where there have been more than 80 sightings logged on the iNaturalist app of the clusters growing out of dead hardwood in forests, provincial parks and even residential neighbourhoods. 

While most golden oysters in Canada are still concentrated closer to the border with the United States, the species has already travelled as far north as Magnetawan, Ont., near Parry Sound, and is increasingly established around Georgian Bay, on Lake Huron. The speed and distance of its spread has been surprising, Veerabahu said.

“It has thoroughly been unleashed and rapidly spread over the course of a short decade,” she said, adding that the mushrooms have more recently appeared in Quebec. “The best thing that we can do now is to try and prevent it from getting to new regions.” 

Cassidy Mailloux is a guide at the Ojibway Prairie Complex in Windsor, Ont., who takes guests through the nature reserves year-round. She’s also working on a biodiversity study of the region’s native mushrooms as part of her master’s degree at the University of Windsor and has posted golden oyster sightings on iNaturalist, observations that helped inform Veerabahu’s study.

“We’ve only seen it in one of our parks out of the entire complex … and that’s one of our heavily foot-trafficked and most travelled parks,” she said, adding that this is a good sign that the invasion “hasn’t fully taken off yet.”

Seven clusters of golden oyster mushrooms grow on a log on the forest floor. Bright yellow golden oyster mushrooms grow in tiers up a tree trunk. In Ontario, there have been more than 80 sightings logged on the iNaturalist app of invasive golden oyster mushroom clusters growing out of dead hardwood in forests, provincial parks and even residential neighbourhoods. Photo: Aishwarya Veerabahu

Still, she worries about the effect of invasive golden oysters on rarer species of fungi, such as the coral pink marulius, which is uncommonly reported but in large abundance in the Ojibway Prairie Complex. 

“I’m worried the golden oyster mushroom might take precedence,” Mailloux said, given golden oysters are an aggressive species that can grow quickly and prolifically in many kinds of wood and even sawdust — unlike some native species that require specific conditions to thrive. Both the city and her organization are still trying to figure out the best way to manage the invasive — and say visitors documenting sightings can inform this work. 

“Encouraging citizens to upload these observations can really help management and our ecosystem,” Mailloux said, “and just keeping a track on how bad it might be getting in the area.”

Despite the threat, the Government of Ontario has not added live oyster mushrooms to its prohibited or restricted invasive species lists, which would make it illegal to import, buy, sell — or sometimes even possess — an ecologically harmful strain.

Without this regulation, Veerabahu said, live cultures continue to be transported across borders. And, she said once golden oysters colonize an area, fewer other unique fungal species will be found there. The communities that do exist are also entirely changed. 

“Let’s say in an uncolonized dead tree, you had a nice, rich community of fungi A, B, C, D, E. Once golden oyster colonizes, now it’s golden oyster and fungi X, Y, Z,” Veerabahu said. 

This makes her concerned about a domino effect because fungal communities are primary wood decomposers of forests, playing an important role in cycling nutrients and storing carbon. “The identity of which species are able to coexist in that space is changing.” 

Monica Liedtke, terrestrial invasive plant coordinator for the Invasive Species Centre, in Sault St. Marie, Ont., agreed. She told The Narwhal via email that non-native invasive fungi can significantly disrupt Ontario’s ecosystems and environmental processes that have developed over thousands of years.

“When non-native invasive fungi establish, they can interfere with important symbiotic relationships between native fungi, trees and plants,” Liedtke told The Narwhal. Golden oysters can quicken the rate of wood decay, which then impacts the birds and bugs that use dead and dying trees for homes and food. “Over time, these disruptions can affect biodiversity across the entire ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, climate change is creating warmer conditions that will make Ontario even more hospitable to these mushrooms, allowing them to expand their range. Veerabahu and her team used a climate prediction model developed by NASA to predict what might happen in the next 15 years. The model predicted that the North American region climatically suitable for golden oyster mushrooms to grow would almost double. 

Kyle McLoughlin, an arborist and supervisor of forest planning and health for the City of Burlington, said the reason he fears golden mushrooms is exactly why they’re popular among amateur growers.

“From an ecological perspective, they don’t have a niche. They can go anywhere. They’re very wide-ranging. They’re very comfortable in a lot of different types of wood and a lot of different environments,” McLoughlin said of golden oysters. “This is also why you can grow them so well.”

Kits with detailed growing instructions are readily available on the internet, with prices between $20 and $40. These are a “major source of their invasion,” McLoughlin said. 

“It’s literally being introduced into people’s homes and their properties through grow kits,” McLoughlin said. “We shouldn’t be selling people potential invasive species to bring into their homes.”

Still, grow kits remain widely sold with little public awareness of the risks. Consumers are often not warned when they buy a grow kit that tossing spent soil onto the compost pile, or leaving a kit outdoors, could unintentionally help an invasive spread.

There are some ways people can help slow the spread if they spot oyster mushrooms. If someone sees a log on their own property pop with golden oysters for the first time, it could be helpful to burn it, Veerabahu explained. People can also forage the mushrooms from forested areas, collecting them in closed containers to prevent spores from spreading.

Two bags of wood chips with golden oyster mushrooms growing out of them, sitting on grass in front of a gardenExperts say grow-your-own oyster mushroom kits should only be used indoors and disposed of carefully to avoid the spread of the invasive fungi into natural environments in Ontario. Photo: Shutterstock

The challenge is to muster enough public awareness and political will before things get out of control.

“It’s kind of like cockroaches. Once you start to see them, you know there’s a heck of a lot more in your walls,” McLoughlin said. “They are putting billions of spores into the air when they’re fruiting. And this is happening constantly.”

Some companies that have sold these kits around the world, like Far West Fungi, North Spore and MycoPunks have since discontinued some products due to concern. In a blog post titled “Yellow Oyster Disaster Zone,” MycoPunks wrote: “No shade intended on any other vendors who choose to keep selling golden oyster kits … we’ve all got our own different moral codes, but it’s not something we feel able to do in good conscience any more.”

But, given a lack of regulation in the province, it’s still easy to import kits from within Canada or around the world to grow in Ontario.

“Gardeners [and] hobby farmers should carefully consider the species they are cultivating. Choosing native species helps to reduce ecological risk,” Liedtke, from the Invasive Species Centre, said. Some kits sell species such as lion’s mane or chestnut mushrooms, which are both edible and native to Ontario. 

For those who are growing golden oysters, the Invasive Species Centre advises that used grow kits should be sealed in a garbage bag and left in the sun for several days to a week; this process, called solarization, helps kill remaining spores and fungal material. Then, the bag should be disposed of in municipal waste — not compost. 

“Neither the producer nor the consumer wants to be part of that spread,” Veerabahu said. “The mushroom grow kits are a huge point of concern. They’re essentially a live culture that can be transported anywhere, but they’re not being regulated and I’ll never blame hobby mushroom growers for that.”

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Hegseth’s Culture Wars Are Inviting a Military Disaster
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 8:10 AM

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Pete Hegseth, America’s self-proclaimed “secretary of war,” is nothing if not quotable:

It would be easy to pass Hegseth’s sound bites off as mere rhetoric — an infinity-loop locker-room speech intended to stir the troops and stoke the culture wars. (All of the above quotes come from an address he delivered to senior officers at Quantico, Virginia, last September.)[1] But his ambitions run deeper; chief among them is to reform America’s military capabilities “for generations to come.”

Count me skeptical: Revolutions in training, equipment, tactics, personnel and organization occur over the long haul. The force that he and President Donald Trump have unleashed on Iran was forged decades ago, beginning with the post-Vietnam war reforms of the 1970s and President Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup of the ’80s.

But Hegseth may be planting the seed for a radical change in one aspect of military behavior that doesn’t get enough attention: psychology. Broadly, armed forces take on a mentality shaped by their leaders. My concern is that the wrong one can lead to disaster.

One person who understood the importance of the second half of the phrase “military mind” was Norman F. Dixon. A British psychologist with a decade of military experience, Dixon wrote a remarkable (and surprisingly funny) 1976 study called “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence,” which won a devoted following among military and corporate leaders and remains in print on its 50th anniversary.

Despite its title, the book is no broadside against fighting men and women or their leaders. Dixon rightly insists that it is “only by contemplation of the incompetent that we can appreciate the difficulties and accomplishments of the competent.”

Nor does he postulate that incompetence occurs more frequently in the military than other professions; the problem is that in no other profession can incompetence cause so much human tragedy so quickly.

And no other profession has such an obligation to scrupulously examine history and learn from past mistakes.

Thus the first half of Dixon’s book closely analyzes several British military fiascos, including the retreat from Kabul of 1842, the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, the muddy trenches of Flanders Fields in World War I, and the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in World War II.

For the empire on which the sun never set, there were plenty of dark moments. “Like the common cold, flat feet or the British climate,” Dixon writes, military calamity “is accepted as a part of life — faintly ludicrous but quite unavoidable.”

In fact, he argued, it is neither of those things: “Military incompetence is a largely preventable, tragically expensive and quite absorbing segment of human behaviour. It also follows certain laws.” And it is unimaginably costly, in terms of national aims, treasure and, far above all, blood.

This is where Dixon’s originality and professional training as a psychologist kick in. In the second half of the book, he puts the military mind on the couch and ingeniously lays down those “certain laws.”

Through brief psychological profiles of the generals and admirals who led those disastrous 19th- and 20th-century wars, he demonstrates how top brass — and the militaries they led — succumbed to institutional rigidity, groupthink, uniformity and authoritarianism.

There are few better examples than Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces in the second half of World War I, who remorselessly sent millions of young soldiers into a veritable meat grinder for little or no purpose. Hundreds of thousands never returned.

In addition to being “manifestly lacking in compassion towards his fellow men,” Dixon writes, Haig displayed the “triad of traits which, according to contemporary research, defines the obsessive character and is correlated with authoritarianism. He was obstinate, orderly and mean.”

Catastrophe can happen even to the smartest among them: Dixon describes General Arthur Percival, whose almost pathological resistance to reinforcing Singapore’s defenses led to Japan’s easy conquest in 1942, as “highly intelligent.” Yet, like other architects of disaster, he was afflicted by rigidity, obstinacy and dogmatism.[2]

“Those intellectual shortcomings which appear to underlie military incompetence may have nothing whatever to do with intelligence, but usually result from the effect upon native ability of two ancient and related traditions,” he explains. “The first of these, originally founded in fact, is that fighting depends more upon muscle than brain, the second that any show of education is not only bad form but likely to be positively incapacitating.”

Half a century later, we find these two traditions going strong. For an example of the first (muscle over brain), look no further than Ukraine. On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin exhorted his nation and troops: “Strength and readiness to fight … are the necessary foundation on which you can only reliably build your future.” We are now in the fourth year of a war he expected those troops to wrap up in three days.

For the second, there is Dixon’s warning about a “cult of anti-intellectualism” — which brings us back to Hegseth’s most recent cultural jihad. For decades, the Pentagon has sent promising junior officers to elite universities to obtain graduate degrees, a practice the secretary banned last month on the grounds that they returned with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.”

The tragedy here would be obvious to Dixon: “The saddest feature of anti-intellectualism is that it often reflects an actual suppression of intellectual activity rather than any lack of ability.”

There are plenty of other examples that should trigger alarm about the long-lasting psychological effects on America’s force of Hegseth’s version of America First. His catchphrase these days is in fact a state of mind — the “Warrior Ethos” — in which he takes great personal relish.

There is, Dixon writes, “a complex interaction between the nature of military organizations and certain features of human personality.” Given Hegseth’s intention to forge a military in his own image, I think it’s fair to consider a few more personality characteristics that Dixon enumerates in his catalogue of the causes of incompetence:

  • An equation of war with sport

  • Resentment toward the inquisitiveness of war correspondents and the public about naval or military affairs

  • A cult of “anti-effeminacy”

  • “Love of the frontal assault” and “natural distaste for defensive responses”

  • An obsession with “muscular Christianity”

  • An imperviousness to loss of life

    • Hegseth, alas, checks all those boxes: Titling his book In the Arena; censoring and banning reporters; pushing women out of combat roles; disparaging “defenders” as not being “warriors”; sporting a “Deus Vult” (“God Wills”) tattoo.

    Most disturbingly, he dismissed the death of US service members in the Middle East with the trite “tragic things happen,” while Trump added: “That’s the way it is, likely to be more.

    Add it all up and, as Dixon puts it: “We are talking of ‘militarism,’ a sub-culture which, in the end, may well hamper rather than facilitate warring behaviour.”

    In case you think this analysis is less relevant now than half a century ago, consider this warning from one of the great military minds of our day, retired General Stanley McChrystal, who headed Joint Operations Command during the Iraq war. “The danger of some of that verbiage now is that much of the force is 18 years old, and it’s influenceable. They see that and they go, ‘Wow, that’s the way we ought to think. That’s the way we ought to be. We are superior,’ ” McChrystal recently told David French of The New York Times. “I even have a problem with the word ‘warrior.’ Traditionally, warriors were separate from soldiers. The difference between an army and a mob is discipline and leadership.”

    Another catchphrase that Hegseth and Trump have used to valorize the military is “peace through strength.” It echoes an admirable and effective attitude that informed the deterrence strategy toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War and undergirded decades of subsequent American global leadership.

    But Hegseth laid bare the disingenuity of his version in the speech he gave last year to his captive audience of his generals: “Peace through strength brought to you by the warrior ethos … we are the strength part of peace through strength.”

    Where, then, is the peace part?

    Warfare has at its heart the paradox of waging both war and peace.[3]This is why Dixon suggests that “a tight rein on aggression is mandatory in a profession whose stock in trade and solution to most problems is physical violence.”

    Hegseth’s military will have no problem with aggression. The question is, will anybody be holding the reins?

    –With assistance from Ale Lampietti and Taylor Tyson

    This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

    More From Bloomberg Opinion:

    • Hegseth and His War Department Have Lots of Explaining to Do: Andreas Kluth

    • Hegseth Is Targeting the Military’s ‘Constitution’: James Stavridis

    • NATO Enlargement Was a Good Idea, Until It Wasn’t: Tobin Harshaw

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    The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham
    Sunday March 29th, 2026 at 12:15 PM

    Blog - thatshubham
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    Website Carbon - 0.11g of CO2/view ➜

    This website is cleaner than 90% of web pages tested.

    © CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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    Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026) by Cory Doctorow
    Sunday March 29th, 2026 at 12:08 PM

    Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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    Today's links

    • Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping with plenty; "The Shakedown"; Chickenized reverse-centaurs; France v iTunes; Copyfight discipline; Mystery lobbyists; "Where the Axe is Buried"; Free/open microprocessor; Folk models of computer security; Bug-eyed steampunk mask; Academics embracing Wikipedia.
    • Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
    • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
    • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
    • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
    • Colophon: All the rest.


    A 1950's pharmacy with a labcoated pharmacist behind the counter. The pharmacist's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' its mouth covered with a black bar scrawled with grawlix. The pharmacy has been made over to look haunted, with purple mist rising from the ground and cobwebs in the top corners. A CVS Pharmacy sign hangs in the background.

    Understaffing as a form of enshittification (permalink)

    At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

    Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.

    Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.

    But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.

    The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.

    The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

    That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

    If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.

    This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.

    Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.

    Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).

    Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base.

    In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:

    https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/

    Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."

    As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.

    There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/

    The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.

    Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).

    Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/31/1139783599/new-york-nursing-home-owners-drained-cash?ft=nprml&f=853198417

    Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.

    Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.

    Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html

    Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."

    As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

    Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.

    Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.

    Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.

    I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

    The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

    That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

    "We did this with AI" has become a synonym for "We don't care if this is done well":

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos

    "We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs.

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #20yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

    #20yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!) https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/

    #20yrsago Coping with plenty – stuff gets cheaper, space gets pricier https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/feb/28/retail.shopping

    #20yrsago France will let Microsoft play iTunes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828296.stm

    #20yrsago A new discipline to describe the copyfight https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010702/https://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002930.html

    #20yrsago Right-wing think-tank hates DRM https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/circumventing-competition-perverse-consequences-digital-millennium-copyright-act#

    #20yrsago Reasons to take math in high school https://web.archive.org/web/20060610134055/http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html

    #20yrsago Sun ships free and open microprocessor https://web.archive.org/web/20060221112756/http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html

    #20yrsago Octavia Butler scholarship will send people of color to Clarion https://web.archive.org/web/20060406161412/https://carlbrandon.org/butlerscholarship/

    #20yrsago Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects https://web.archive.org/web/20060505232346/http://www.justicemag.com/daily/item/2590.html

    #15yrsago Folk models of home computer security: what we think our PCs are doing https://rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf

    #15yrsago Fixers’ Collective: people learning to make broken stuff work again https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/0321/The-art-of-the-fix-it

    #15yrsago Bug-eyed monster steampunk mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/158400.html

    #15yrsago Scholars to stop pretending they don’t use Wikipedia; will work out best practices instead https://www.bbc.com/news/education-12809944

    #15yrsago Electronic publishing Bingo card from John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/20/the-electronic-publishing-bingo-card/

    #15yrsago RIP, Mike Glicksohn, Hugo-winning science fiction fan https://file770.com/mike-glicksohn-1946-2011/

    #15yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs getting millions https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html

    #15yrsago Reluctant witness refuses to admit he knows what a photocopier is https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/03/identifying_photocopy_machine.html

    #15yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet

    #15yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/

    #10yrsago Howto: start a fire with a lemon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2vT665bGI

    #10yrsago First order of business for hard-right government: canceling Croatia’s answer to The Daily Show https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/17/satiric-show-pulled-from-croatian-tv-for-intolerance-03-17-2016/bi/all-balkan-countries/

    #10yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their cars’ patch-levels current https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/

    #10yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706

    #10yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider threat” training docs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning

    #10yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s backdoor https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html

    #10yrsago Russia moots ban on discussions about VPNs, reverse proxies, and other anti-censorship techniques https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-holders-want-site-block-circumvention-advice-banned-160319/

    #10yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/

    #10yrsago Meet the Commercial Energy Working Group, a lobby group that won’t say who it lobbies for https://web.archive.org/web/20160320150011/https://theintercept.com/2016/03/20/mysterious-powerful-lobbying-group-wont-even-say-who-its-lobbying-for/

    #5yrsago Support Amazon workers today https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#what-rhymes-with-bezos

    #5yrsago Department of Truth https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#dot

    #5yrsago The political possibility of cities https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/21/ex-urbe/#arcology-politics

    #5yrsago Aviation bailout cost $666k/job https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#aa

    #5yrsago Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue

    #5yrsago Help news, not news-barons https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#big-news

    #5yrsago Announcing "The Shakedown" https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#monopsony

    #5yrsago Chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

    #1yrago You can't save an institution by betraying its mission https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it

    #1yrago AI can't do your job https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

    #1yrago Ray Nayler's "Where the Axe Is Buried" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

    • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today's top sources:

    Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1034 words today, 54661 total)

    • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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    "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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    ISSN: 3066-764X

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    iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
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    LinuxGeek
    8 days ago
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    This is a long read, but worth it. His comments about the role of AI in under-staffing struck a chord with me. One of the many reasons that I finally left Comcast was because I couldn't dispute my bill with a live person.

    All of DOGE’s work could be undone as lawsuit against Musk proceeds - Ars Technica
    Sunday March 29th, 2026 at 12:05 PM

    Comments on: All of DOGE’s work could be undone as lawsuit against Musk proceeds
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    Elon Musk must defend himself against a lawsuit alleging that he unlawfully seized too much power as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a judge ruled Monday.

    According to the plaintiffs, Musk needed Senate confirmation before directing DOGE on drastic actions like eliminating agencies, mass firings, and steep budget cuts. Allegedly going far beyond the authority granted in President Donald Trump’s most expansive DOGE executive orders, Musk took every inch of power granted and then increasingly used it to overreach unlike any presidential advisor who came before, the suit says.

    In her opinion partly denying a motion to dismiss, US District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan did not buy the US government’s defense that Musk held no office formally established by law—and therefore did not need Senate confirmation and cannot be alleged to have exceeded his authority under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.

    “Nobody thinks, for instance, that the White House Chief of Staff or White House Counsel are officers in any fashion, despite the fact they may exercise tremendous influence across the government,” the government’s motion to dismiss said.

    Chutkan called the defense “disquieting.”

    “Defendants appear to make the extraordinary argument that an individual who holds an important office and wields immense power is not subject to the Appointments Clause so long as the office was unlawfully created, and the power was unlawfully seized,” Chutkan said.

    “Under that interpretation, the President could evade Appointments Clause scrutiny by (1) usurping Congress’s power to create a principal office and assign it powers, and (2) unilaterally appointing an official to that office without Senate confirmation,” the judge continued. “The court will not countenance such a two-fold attack on Congress’s role in our system of checks and balances,” she wrote, noting that “if the President unilaterally creates a principal office, endows it with unlawful powers, and fills it without Senate confirmation, that is more—not less—reason for Appointments Clause scrutiny.”

    Chutkan also declined to view Musk’s influence as akin to that of Trump’s cabinet members, writing that “the alleged powers of the head of DOGE are clearly weighty and important.”

    For now, plaintiffs have shown enough to allege that as DOGE’s head, Musk exercised “almost ‘unchecked’ discretion” and received “minimal supervision.” Reporting only to Trump, it seemed plausible that Musk could take any step he wanted, knowing he would get the “rubber stamp” of the president.

    At this stage, the judge emphasized that “plaintiffs have adequately pled that the head of DOGE is an officer of the United States” and that the position still unlawfully exists in government. And while DOGE is scheduled for termination on July 4, 2026, “there is no termination date for the overarching DOGE entity or its leader, suggesting permanence,” plaintiffs had noted.

    The lawsuit was raised by nonprofits that were allegedly harmed by DOGE’s broad government cuts. Their case was later consolidated with a similar lawsuit brought by a coalition of states led by New Mexico. It was filed in February 2025, before Musk left DOGE in May, and plaintiffs alleged that their claims about Musk’s unchecked power also apply to his successors.

    In a loss, every harmful move that DOGE made could possibly be undone.

    “If Plaintiffs prevail on their claim that Musk was not constitutionally appointed and therefore lacked authority to exercise the power of a principal officer, the court could vacate Musk-initiated policies or cuts that are causing Plaintiffs ongoing harm,” Chutkan wrote.

    Musk may regret X posts bragging about DOGE

    Unsurprisingly, Musk’s posts on X were cited in the lawsuit as part of “ultra vires” claims that the executive branch made an “extreme legal error” in allowing him to assume an outsize government role.

    On X, Musk made several posts suggesting that DOGE was operating at his direction, plaintiffs alleged in their complaint. That included posts like “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Additionally, Musk posted, “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist,” prior to Trump confirming he told Musk to look into the department. And perhaps most damning to the government’s defense, in reference to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which senators claimed Musk long wanted to kill off—Musk posted, “CFPB RIP.”

    The Office of Personnel Management also seemed to borrow Musk’s exact template for a “Fork in the Road” email giving government employees an option to resign and accept buyouts. Musk sent a similar email after taking over Twitter as he quickly moved to reduce staff.

    Again, the government tried to claim that Musk couldn’t be doing anything wrong in the role because he wasn’t violating any specific statute in this unique role.

    The judge rejected that logic. Pointing to Musk’s X posts and other public statements from the White House and DOGE officials, Chutkan said that plaintiffs had shown enough evidence that “defendants are exercising immense power without any grant of statutory authority whatsoever. That is the sort of ‘extreme legal error’ that can sustain a claim for ultra vires review.”

    As the lawsuit proceeds, plaintiffs will try to prove what many critics claimed was obvious after Trump appointed Musk as a special government employee: that Musk was acting as president.

    Perhaps notably, Musk claimed on X—after his breakup with Trump—that Trump would have never won the election without his support.

    Although Musk never claimed to be acting as president, he deemed himself “first buddy” in another X post, which lawmakers cited as a sign that Musk was acting as “co-president.” Among the critics was Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote on X that Musk seemed to be pulling the strings and became $200 billion richer after Trump got elected.

    “Are Republicans beholden to the American people?” Sanders said. “Or President Musk? This is oligarchy at work.”

    For plaintiffs, the lawsuit is not about Musk as an individual, though. They allege that without an injunction preventing further government cuts and an order undoing DOGE’s worst work, Americans will continue to suffer from Musk’s unprecedented power grab even as his successors maintain DOGE’s mission.

    Elon Musk “has roamed through the federal government unraveling agencies, accessing sensitive data, and causing mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people,” plaintiffs argued. “Oblivious to the threat this poses to the nation, President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities. As a result, he has transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation.”

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