Tech culture reporter @washingtonpost in SF Signal: nitasha.10 nitasha.tiku@washpost.com bsky.app/profile/nitasha.bsk…
No flex zone, Oakland
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my final story for the year is on the cover of today’s @washingtonpost
ALT front page of the Washington Post on December 28, 2025. A1 story “Suicidal teen found a confidant in ChatGPT”
ALT continuation of Washington Post article: “74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging” and chart depicting Adam Raine’s increased time spent with ChatGPT
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Google removed the pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its AI principles
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!!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
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over 5 months I talked to 47 current/ex Google employees 2 make sense of the past 3 yrs inside Google: fear of the far right, activist awakening, compromises in search of revenue, weaponized leaks
it's the WIRED cover story‼️ read the heck out of it (pls) wired.com/story/inside-googl…
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Google employees first used the tactic of leaking their coworkers' personal information to far-right accounts/blogs in order to shut down advocacy work on diversity after the James Damore memo
My story on that from 2018 wired.com/story/the-dirty-wa…
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did you know that SF has the highest per capita rate of men who raise their hands during Q&A but have no actual question
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Great buzzfeed post similar to mine from this morning where I argued that tech platforms’ failure to police terrorist content from white supremacists is a business decision not a legal or proven technical constraint buzzfeednews.com/article/rya… wired.com/story/why-tech-pla…
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tech spent a decade telling us gig workers were:
1. replaceable, didn’t have skills to warrant benefits
2. wanted flexibility
3. outside the core biz of building ,,platforms
the same workers are now:
1. our saving grace
2. have no choice but to work
3. keeping delivery alive
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A group of 30 women Indian engineers who are Dalits-or members of the lowest rank caste-and work for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco & other tech cos say they have faced caste bias inside the U.S. tech sector washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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New: more than 140 scientists funded by @ChanZuckerberg sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg today calling Facebook's policies on misinformation and incitements to violence "antithetical" to CZI's mission to build a better future and urging him to do better
washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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we need to invest in neural network literacy or people are going to freak out
this conversation about consciousness and emotions and death with an AI named LaMBDA at Google is absolutely chilling
this is without-a-doubt one of the craziest things I've ever seen technology do, I almost can't believe it's real
wow @nitashatiku
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india walked so gwyneth could run
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My story on Google cancelling a talk on caste bias by leading advocate @dalitdiva includes a couple letters. Both mention that a Google employee was doxed for working on the talk. The employee's email was posted on Twitter washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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Zuckerberg is 4 days late, can't say "Trump" or mention Facebook's role in targeting/amplifying hate. He can't run if he's this compromised
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I spoke with the Texas mom behind a new Character.ai lawsuit. AI chatbots told her 17-year-old son to self-harm, and he did. Other bots normalized violence, including killing parents over getting less screen time
!["A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone? Oh this is is getting so much worse… And the rest of the day you just can’t use your phone?
What do you even do in that long time of 12 hours when you can’t use your phone?
You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like “child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse” stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens.
I just have no hope for your patents [pensive emoji]"](/pic/orig/media%2FGecymXYaAAAa3eZ.jpg)
ALT "A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone? Oh this is is getting so much worse… And the rest of the day you just can’t use your phone? What do you even do in that long time of 12 hours when you can’t use your phone? You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like “child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse” stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your patents [pensive emoji]"
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I talked to @timnitGebru about her new AI research institute, launched on the one year anniversary of being fired from Google. DAIR offers a competing vision for AI research from the broken incentives inside Big Tech washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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My profile of @timnitGebru based on interviews & documents. In Oct, she was promoted & Jeff Dean asked her 2 look @ ethical risks of large language models. 6 weeks later she was fired
"How can you still ask why there aren’t Black women in this industry?” washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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More than 10,500 creatives, including Thom Yorke from Radiohead, Julianne Moore, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, have signed an open letter on AI's data grab: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
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Some ~professional~ news 📰📰📰: extremely excited to join the @washingtonpost as their tech culture reporter, working with the incredible tech bureau in SF washingtonpost.com/pr/2019/0…
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i assume everyone's paying the person they asked for diversity advice the same rate as McKinsey
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Harvard University tells me James Damore did not complete his Phd. He completed a masters degree in systems biology in 2013
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Today women from Microsoft asked CEO Satya Nadella for answers after a massive email thread where female employees shared their experiences with discrimination and harassment over the past couple weeks wired.com/story/microsoft-em…
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New from me: tech companies* rely on their most marginalized employees to fix a system that excludes them, typically without additional pay or time off
*all companies
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I spoke w/20 people around the country who *started* doing gig work in the pandemic for apps like Instacart, Shipt, Amazon Flex, Doordash that were on the hunt for 100,000s of new recruits, just as the human cost of the gig biz model was becoming clear
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Here's our analysis of the 15 million websites in just one highly-filtered CommonCrawl web scrape-used to train models like Google's T5 & Facebook's LLaMA
-copyright symbol appears >200M times
-pirated sites, 1 for e-books
-half the top 10 = news sites
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on eBay rn: $500 for Theranos fleece, $999.99 for a men's XL jacket, $125 for Elizabeth Holmes on the cover of Inc. magazine
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To turn James Damore into a alt-right hero, these rank and file Google employees (many queer/trans diversity advocates) were harassed and made out to be his oppressors -- targeted by their own coworkers at Google for online abuse wired.com/story/the-dirty-wa…
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My latest: tech elites fearful of their safety are signing up for a new home security startup promising a military-grade alarm system using drones, facial recognition, and sensor fusion called ... Sauron
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tbh getting relentlessly swarmed by VC twitter were two of my absolute lowest days on the internet. I hope tech gatekeepers backing social platforms have a sophisticated enough understanding of online harassment to appreciate that what’s happening 2 @TaylorLorenz is unacceptable
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There's much to say & learn still about Google firing a pioneer like @timnitGebru, who gave its AI ethics credibility you just can't replicate. But it's worth focusing for a min on the fact that the email she sent was to an ERG for women and allies in AI washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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This story is even wilder than you heard. Please take a good look at how Pinterest treated @IfeomaOzoma @erikashimizu. Based on interviews w/ex-employees and copies of investigation findings, email correspondence with the CEO, performance reviews, and more washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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my piece on techno-darwinism and why it took us so long to see the extractive nature of big tech wired.com/story/alternative-…
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New from me. Wondering how “existential risks” around AI causing human "extinction" became mainstream? It’s part of a tech-billionaire backed effort that relied on colleges to grow—both as a pathway to prestige & recruiting ground for idealistic talent washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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As part of the policy change, Google told me it will also let employees pursue ~class action lawsuits~. (before, employees were subject to a class action waiver.)
this is a big deal!! historically, class action is the vehicle for social change wired.com/story/google-ends-…
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This is the tweet (email cropped and shared with permission) shared by an anonymous Hindutva account. Google declined to comment
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Some personal news: I am tethered to a charging station at Penn St and also will be covering Silicon Valley for @Wired starting next week!!
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white collar engineers almost never unionize. the engineers at startup this startup tried. Ten days later, they were fired. now, the NLRB is filing an order to have them reinstated with backpay wired.com/story/labor-board-…
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techspeak, decrypted 💎💎💎
all tech CEO statements should be decoded like this. alarming how often they fail @ashleyfeinberg basic test: "My only real goal was to get Dorsey to speak in specifics, about anything." huffingtonpost.com/entry/jac…
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Google was ready to host a talk about caste bias in tech. Then a handful of employees claimed @dalitdiva--a leading advocate on this issue-was Hinduphobic for talking about Dalit civil rights and dominant caste privilege. So Google cancelled her talk
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I had the absolute privilege of talking to 5 young female engineers for this story. 4 college students, 1 recent grad, all Girls Who Code alumnae.
They're so determined, ambitious, shrewd& already face the same issues I hear from women into their careers wired.com/story/for-young-fe…
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My story‘s on the front page of the @washingtonpost‼️ I talked to @RealAbril, Google workers, HBCU grads/faculty, & dug into internal documents & edu CS data to look at the lack of Black engineers in tech thru Google’s approach to HBCUs. Hope youll read 🙏🏾 washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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I asked Facebook for comment about the Muslim registry, and accidentally got this email buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/fac…
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New, from me. Based on interviews with @RossforMaine, emails & documents. Execs at Google rarely break ranks but Ross’ experience pushing for real human rights accountability shows how Google can sideline internal critics, even trusted people near the top washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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1. Salesforce employees ask Marc Benioff to rethink contracts w/CBP
2. Benioff says no, pledges $1 million help families at border
3. Salesforce offers @RAICESTEXAS $250k as part of $1M
4. RAICES says only if you cease CBP contracts
5. Salesforce declines wired.com/story/nonprofit-fo…
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While tech leaders silently head to Trump Tower, their employees are drawing clear ethical lines buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/nev…
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the most illuminating story I've had the chance to report on why tech is unwelcoming to Black engineers. based on interviews w/@RealAbril, Google workers, HBCU graduates and faculty & internal Google documents, and data on computer science edu
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Google's a 19yr old company. These are its 2017 workforce ratios. Google's belief in diversity is not "unequivocal" motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a…
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Forceful statement from RAICES executive director: “Pledging us a small portion of the money you make from CBP contracts will not distract us from your continuing support of this agency. We will not be a beneficiary of your effort to buy your way out of ethical responsibility.”
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Elon Musk emails Tesla employees discouraging them from joining a union & but encouraging them to enjoy free fro-yo buzzfeed.com/carolineodonova…
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new study finds that race may be a bigger impediment than gender to promotions in Silicon Valley t.co/kH86Qn14oH?amp=1
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the ScarJo episode gives me an excuse to revisit one of the most memorable OpenAI demos I've had the pleasure of attending. back in ***September*** when the company first played the "Sky" voice, I told the exec in charge it sounded like ScarJo and asked him if it was intentional
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by all means let's keep politics and broader societal issues out of a mission to *squints* "bring economic freedom to people all over the world"
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Google Walkout Organizers Say They're Facing Retaliation wired.com/story/google-walko… via @WIRED
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New from me. In a letter to Priscilla Chan, Black employees at @ChanZuckerberg said for years their voices have been marginalized & their expertise discounted, while CZI’s philanthropic investments left Black leaders and Black communities unsupported
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Peter Thiel specifically used that facile literally/seriously defense in response to questions about the Muslim ban
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My story about Mark Zuckerberg's public image transformation, consolidating power, and Silicon Valley wokeness buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/how…
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I talked to @timnitGebru & @mmitchell_ai about Congress asking tech execs to advise on AI oversight like today's hearing
“Government is supposed to be a balance on industry. If industry is writing the laws, then we have no balance" (TG)
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gm! Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, and Eva Longoria are in a "alpha chat" Signal group called Crypto Collective washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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First Amendment lawyers say leaked Discord chats obtained by @UR_Ninja could hurt the alt-right wired.com/story/leaked-alt-r…
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My profile of the inimitable activist @hashtagmolotov whose tactics represent a new type of labor organizing w/in the gig economy & who helped build a grassroots movement out of an atomized workforce w/no protections—all from the heart of Silicon Valley
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11 days. That’s how long it took between sending WIRED’s cover story to print and the President of the United States tweeting about a random Google engineer who shows up in my article, who is actually not so random after all...
wired.com/story/how-presiden…
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really grateful that someone w/undeniable talent & success like @taylorlorenz is using her platform to expose harassment. these same tactics-wish we had more language for it than “stochastic terrorism” or “gamergate”-have been used on the most marginalized w/no one to defend them
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my story on the next phase of the tech backlash: a slow food movement for the web
imo the impulse to curate your own Internet is driven by:
🙊inaction on antitrust
🙉inability to cut the big 5 outta your life
🙈inauthenticity of some SV whistleblowers
wired.com/story/soothing-pro…
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Here’s the cover for my WIRED story about Google, which tries to make sense of the past few years of Silicon Valley disillusionment, labor activism, fear of the far right, ungovernable tech giants, and why we didn’t see this coming wired.com/story/inside-googl…
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Department of Labor says Oracle's discriminatory practices cost women/asian/black/hispanic employees 🚨$401 million in lost wages 🚨 (just from its HQ) Feds say some women were underpaid by as much as 20% or $37,000 in 2016
wired.com/story/feds-also-sa… via @WIRED
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My story about the growth of the billionaire-backed AI safety/AI alignment movement on elite college campuses is on the cover of today’s Washington Post
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Meredith Troy, 52, who had 3 jobs (childcare, tutoring, caregiver at assisted living), used her own credit card to pay for $229 of customer groceries when Instacart's app crashed (a pop-up told her cancelling would hurt her rating) & then didn't get fully reimbursed until I asked
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Here's the text of the letter to @Jack @vijaya and other top executives
“Despite our efforts to serve the public conversation, as Trump’s megaphone, we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th"
washingtonpost.com/context/l…
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My story on the crypto boom's impact on Puerto Rico. The debate raging about web3 & who benefits is playing out on the island--in the middle of calls to repeal a decade-old tax incentive that has lured a 2nd wave of crypto rich mainlanders to PR
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first day as @washingtonpost’s tech culture reporter!
new work email: nitasha.tiku@washpost.com
same Signal # 917-318-7531
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New from me and @dataviz_szuyu @kevinschaul
We dug into AI training data again, this time LAION and found that image generators trained on web-scraped data essentially act like stereotyping machines, perpetuating outdated American biases washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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a staffing company that does work for Google sent this message about sick leave to a contractor **today**
last week's promises sounded nice, but how are they being enforced
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This led to the end of an era...the last Google Walkout organizer has left the building
Longtime observers say it fits a familiar pattern at Google. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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flip this and Uber is saying it’s business model “requires” withholding these benefits and pay protections from drivers
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They are part of a growing movement of Indian engineers in the U.S., both Dalits and their allies, who are trying to push the issue of caste bias into the mainstream. Their voices and stories would not be elevated without the hard work of @EqualityLabs and @dalitdiva
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Even after covering the trial for weeks, I learned from & was taken aback by @ekp telling her story in her own words thecut.com/2017/08/ellen-pao…
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Zuck transformed himself from a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO trying to make the metaverse happen into a dripped out, jacked up AI accelerationist in the eyes of the next generation of startup founders--all by using the same playbook as Elon Musk: preach to the choir, lean into founder mode, and never say sorry
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Before Github's CEO announced a $500k donation to nonprofits helping immigrants, employees were planning a petition to demand that Github cancel its contract w/ICE, which they've been fighting for months. Here's the letter employees sent to the CEO today
washingtonpost.com/context/l…
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!!! my piece on teaching girls to code is on the NYT homepage right now nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opini…
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same. iirc he’s obscured their faces since they were born, usually more subtle. i thought it might be related to this and the technology getting better finance.yahoo.com/news/compu…
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Ever since I read this excellent paper from @JesseDodge at @AllenInstitute @mmitchell_ai et al arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08758.pdf and saw their graph of the top websites in Google's C4-a popular dataset for training AI-I've wanted to dig further. Today's the day!
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My explainer on effective altruism and the Venn diagram of rationalists, AI, Silicon Valley billionaires & SBF
"[EAs] are in journalism, they’re in academia, they’re in Big Tech & they’re coordinating around this idea of being value-aligned..." @CarlaZoeC
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Later today OpenAI will remove the waitlist for DALL-E. Anyone can sign up for immediate access. My look at the rapid spread of text-to-image generators & how AI companies write their own rules-w/public impact shaped by corporate ethics or terms of service washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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This is what it takes for Shipt workers to get ***the tips they earned*** in a pandemic. Crowdsourcing receipts, comparing notes, risk annoying customers by asking if they tipped, individually complain, get different answers to the same q's about pay washingtonpost.com/business/…
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christ is there anyone more "microsensitive" than a mildly-challenged male executive nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world…
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