Roundup: Mental health; Seasonal workers; Executive compensation; AI ethics, Overtime

Instead of finding help for our mental health during the holidays, we turn to work, busyness, and our substances of choice to get us through. And that's before we even begin to deal with untangling string lights and risking our lives on ladders. This is just one of the many reasons I want to be a fat bear and hibernate all winter.

Sorry to funk your festive.

Apparently, the North Pole has its own rules for seasonal work and maintains jurisdiction over people, elves, and reindeer, including Rudolph, despite his harassment and discrimination claim based on the color of his nose.

I bet this just got me on the naughty list. Oh well.

This is a clear and understandable discussion of executive compensation during mergers and acquisitions.

Compensation is like the game of Mancala. Players move stones around the pockets and into bigger pockets, or "stores," until the stones are redistributed and the rules say stop playing.

With executive compensation, there are extra pockets and even more stones. And that's probably where I should abandon this metaphor, but . . . .

When ethics become a business decision, the discussion instantly becomes about money, not ethics.

We probably won't know the whole story about what happened with Sam Altman's firing and return at OpenAI until the books begin to roll out. And even then, we may not learn the truth because money has a way of changing people's stories.

Whether someone must be paid overtime depends on how much money they make and how much responsibility and autonomy they have to control their own work and the decisions involved in their work. It's not whether they are paid a salary or by the hour.