Today in news that reads like bad satire aimed at amoral millennials: the tale of Kirsty Edmondson, a 23-year-old sex worker who allegedly killed a former teacher with a lethal heroin dose, took a selfie with his body, and lived in his apartment with the corpse for a week.

Edmondson and her boyfriend, Christopher Sawyers, are charged with the murder of Kenneth Chapman, a 47-year old resident of Eccles, UK. According to the Daily Mail Online, Chapman was a client of Edmondson's, and the two had a "fling" before the murder. After the killing, the pair allegedly stole money, a TV, and a computer, and posed as the victim in a text to a relative asking for more cash.

In court today, Edmondson denied killing Chapman but admitted to stealing his stuff. From the Daily Mail:

She added she 'wouldn't kill anybody' before insisting: 'I'm not a killer, it's not how it looks'

Edmondson, who admits stealing money and property, told the court today she was 'deeply ashamed of what I have done before and after he died.'

She continued: 'I might not be sat here bawling but when I go back to that sweat box and realise everything that's happened, believe me, I'm paying for it.

'I would never kill Kenneth Chapman. I wouldn't kill anyone but I definitely wouldn't kill him.

'I'm not that type of person. I have got no reason to want him dead. I didn't do anything towards killing him. Christopher Sawyers did.'

Edmondson alleges that Sawyers (who she calls Twinny) carried out the killing, and that she complied because he convinced her she'd go to jail if she went to the authorities. The trial is ongoing.

[Image via Daily Mail]

The House GOP picked establishment candidate Kevin McCarthy over Tea Partier Raul Labrador for Majority Leader this afternoon. McCarthy's Whip job will be taken by Rep. Steve Scalise.

Former Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who was shockingly defeated in his primary last week, was gracious about the whole thing.

Congratulations to my good friend @kevinomccarthy on your election as our next @GOPLeader!

— Eric Cantor (@GOPLeader) June 19, 2014

Though the Tea Partiers in the House made noise about putting someone more conservative than Cantor in the Majority Leader position, they did not succeed, which just ensures fact that they'll try to knock out Speaker of the House John Boehner after November's midterm elections.

[Image via AP]

A reporter had to cancel her credit cards after her purse was stolen while she was doing a story about a robbery spree—wait, it gets more ironic— outside a police station.

KTVU's Heather Holmes was outside Oakland's police headquarters Monday to report on a spree of car robberies in the Temescal neighborhood. A young woman had been attacked in broad daylight earlier that day, and witnesses stepped in to break up the attempted mugging.

While she was explaining all of this to viewers, thieves were taking her purse from the unlocked news van. By the time she realized it was missing, 20 minutes later, they'd already run up charges on her cards.

R u kidding me? Doing a live report at @oaklandpoliceca headquarters & my purse is stolen from the live truck! We were parked outside #OPD!!

— Heather Holmes (@hholmesktvu) June 17, 2014

Oh the irony of it all...while reporting on violent mugging, my purse is stolen. Thieves used my bank card 20 mins after swiping my bag.

— Heather Holmes (@hholmesktvu) June 17, 2014

A rash of car breakins in the area? The thieves are becoming more bold? You don't say!

Here's the whole report:

[H/T Uproxx]

"Let me first assure you: We do not have a plan on the shelf for the invasion of Canada," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Senate panel yesterday.

This week, a group of otherwise mentally sound adults agreed to go fucking insane all at once. The object of their manic episode was Yo, an app that sends the word "Yo" to other people with the app installed. It's garnered over a million real dollars from investors. I talked to the one in charge.

Yo is exactly the kind of thing that techies adore. The story—intentionally stupid app nets $1.2 million in venture funding—is eminently bloggable. The app itself is clever on an 8th grade level, simple enough to tweet about, and proof that truly, money is a pastry puff, a trifle that can be scooped and bent and mushed around without any tethers to reality. On its own, Yo is just evidence of what we already know: that people are silly, and that TechCrunch is the kind of publication that will write an earnest essay on Yo. But Yo isn't just another viral migraine—it's an insincere idea, but it's received very real money. If money still means anything anymore—and I'm not sure it does!—we need to insist that a million dollars is not a trifle, and that giving this amount of money to an app that does literally one thing is worth scrutinizing. We're supposed to be talking about businesses here, right?http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/yo-...

Israeli investor Moshe Hogeg is the CEO of Mobli, an Instagram clone, and led the $1.2 million angel investment round with $200,000 from his own pocket. He declined to list the other investors, but was nice enough to speak with me as I asked why someone would ever spend $200,000 on a joke app. The answer, basically, is why would you ever not?

"You need to be nuts to regard the numbers," Hogeg tells me. "It's crazy, it's viral, the engagement is unbelievable." This occult metric of "engagement" is something every startup craves more than Teslas and stock options, an end in itself that's defined roughly as "how much are people clicking your shit instead of someone else's shit?" In the case of Yo, it's a lot: Hogeg says he's literally never seen anything that's engaged users more. But are people tapping single button that does one thing really "engaged" with anything? Is it a problem that this app doesn't really do anything? Hogeg says I'm being shortsighted:

"I like to do things in the easiest way. We are always looking for the easiest way. My secretary, I love her, but I hate to tell her to come." Now Hogeg can send her a message that says "Yo" instead, using a specialized app for this purpose alone. "My wife, she complains I don't call her enough during the day. Now I can send a push notification anytime I want." When I ask if this is enough to build an entire company on top of, Hogeg speculates about Yo's future: he can imagine Starbucks baristas, McDonald's cashiers, and Virgin America flight crews all getting your attention with Yo. Nevermind that many service companies have their own apps that send out their own push notifications. "Yo is more than a yo," Hogeg says, like a software yogi. "I have no idea if it's going to succeed."

OK, so again, why invest so much money in this thing that took, by its founder's admission, eight hours and zero dollars to code? "It's a stupid app," Hogeg admits. But "it's not responsible to not give it a chance." He cites its virality again, and points out that Marc Andreessen recently praised the app. Marc Andreessen is never wrong, right?

2/Yo is an instance of "one-bit communication" — a message with no content other than the fact that it exists. Yes or no. Yo or no yo.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 19, 2014

Hogeg demurs when asked if he thinks $200,000 is even a lot of money: "200 is a lot of money, but it's not a lot of money at the same time." But why does it need any money at all, if it took zero money to create? Hogeg points out that Yo now has a staff of five, and it'll need office space. Office space for what, he doesn't say. Will Yo make money? "Yeah, I guess." He compares it to Google, which in its early days was doubted as a viable business.

@cullend @samfbiddle Having VCs shit themselves over this and talk about it seriously, makes what we do *feel* meaningless to an impt group.

— Jenna Bilotta (@jenna) June 19, 2014

But even if $200,000 isn't a lot of money to you, is there any moral element to promoting a deliberately joke-y app when so many people are working—in vain—on software with a purpose?

Does Yo deserve a million dollars? What could someone more earnest have done with even Hogeg's $200,000 slice? "The world doesn't work on deserve," replies Hogeg. He's worked just as hard as his father back in Israel, he explains, and has far more money. So much for the glimmering Silicon Meritocracy. "I'm not a hater," Hogeg elaborates. "I never was. But I can understand the criticism: I was a young engineer, I worked my ass off. If back then I could see an app like Yo getting a million, I would go nuts." I feel like I'm on the verge of a moral breakthrough with Hogeg, but he drifts back into software zen-speak. "[Success] is not about the technology, it's about the execution." "Execution" here is a euphemism, I think.

To anyone struggling in Startupland who might wince at Yo's 24 hour attention spree, Hogeg has a message of hope: "I hear you. We love you. You need to be creative, disruptive, think outside the box. You need to be a lover, not a hater. The energy you send into the world, you get back."

So why not send $200,000 worth of energy into the world via charity, rather than investing in Yo? "Charity?" Hogeg bristles. "Who says I'm not? I choose my life, I choose to enjoy it." For Hogeg, enjoying one's life seems to include this sort of recreational investing, treating business ventures like parlor games, or a kind of thrilling diversion—Hogeg refers to his habit of buying lottery tickets. It's all a very fun and giggly "maybe" for a man who can afford to play "what if" with large sums. The stakes sound low: "[Yo] is not making the world a better place…[and] I don't think it's too much money. It's surprising we're on the phone right now. If Marc Andreessen writes what he writes, we should all be very humble. Who knows, there might be something to it." And even if there's nothing to it, as there likely is not, Hogeg remains calm: "Don't be so arrogant to think that Yo can't make you eat your words. You can look at this interview, years from now. We will never eat our words. We already won."

Yeshiva University poured more of its endowment into hedge funds than any other school of its size. Yeshiva University managed to lose more than a billion dollars. These two facts are related.

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Remember the eruptive combination of Diet Coke and Mentos that everybody liked before it jumped the shark in a Weezer video? Here's a guy wearing it.

The team from popular Canadian dudes-yelling-about-food YouTube channel Epic Meal Time has covered a man in candy and dipped him into a vat of soda to promote the upcoming Epic Meal Empire TV show.

Eepybird's original Diet Coke and Mentos experiment was named "the most important commercial content" of 2006 by Advertising Age. But this is 2014, and it takes a little more to be "important" and "commercial" with your "content" these days: You have to #doitforthevine.

Sometimes, that means turning yourself into a human Mentos grenade and sliding right into the corrosive dunk tank we call The Future.

[H/T Eater]

Gee, I wonder why this was scrapped.

Actually, I wonder why anyone thought any of it was a good idea. TMZ has posted footage from the video of Lady Gaga and R. Kelly's collaboration "Do What U Want." The clip was shot in November, just weeks before The Village Voice revisited the sexual-assault accusations against R. Kelly in Jessica Hopper's widely circulated interview with Chicago Sun-Times' Jim DeRogatis. That effectively stopped the momentum of Kelly's just-released Black Panties in its tracks and probably prevented Gaga from releasing the video, in which Kelly plays a doctor who sedates her and then hosts a sexy party on her passed-out body. (Since then, more allegations of R. Kelly's sexual misconduct have surfaced.)

Oh yeah, and Terry Richardson directed it. You know, that guy from that story this week. It's like Lady Gaga was being provocative and hanging with predatory dudes on purpose! I mean, can you imagine?

In January, Gaga claimed that the video was delayed because:

I was given a week to plan and execute it. It is very devastating for someone like me, I devote every moment of my life to creating fantasies for you. All my most successful videos were planned over a period of time when I was rested and my creativity was honored.

She also claimed back then, referring to her then-recent, commercially underperforming album, "The next few months of ARTPOP will truly be its beginning. Because those who did not care about ARTPOP's success are now gone, and the dreams I have been planning can now come to fruition." So yeah, that's probably not the best source there.

The largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S. voted today in Detroit to allow the clergy to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies in the states where gay marriage is recognized. Passed by 76 percent of its 1.8 million members, the provision will amend the church's Book of Order, or constitution, to now read "two persons" instead of "a man and woman" in its language about marriage.

According to Religion News Service, today's vote will not become church law until it is voted on and passed by a majority of the 172 regional presbyteries, though the change is expected to pass.

The adoption of gay marriage ceremonies is being viewed as a measure to combat dwindling membership, which conservatives say can be attributed to the church's embrace of liberal ideals. And though the vote passed by a three-to-one ratio, the addition of gay marriages to the church remains a tenuous proposition, especially in more conservative parts of the world where the church has a presence. From USA Today:

Conservative Presbyterians, though, were concerned that approving same-sex marriage could further accelerate the decline of the Presbyterian Church, which has seen a 37% decrease in membership since 1992, a drop of more than 1 million, from 2.78 million to 1.76 million last year.

And some at the convention expressed concern it could affect the perception of Presbyterian missionaries in more conservative parts of the world where the church works, such as in the Middle East. There are 315 Presbyterian churches in Egypt alone.

BREAKING NEWS: #PCUSA pastors can now marry same-sex couples in states where it is legal. #GA221

— Presbyterian Church (@Presbyterian) June 19, 2014

[Image via AP]

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers announced today a tentative deal to legalize medical marijuana in New York state, restricted to patients who consume edibles, take pills, or vaporize. Cuomo's administration were reportedly successful in their push for a no-smoking provision in the deal. http://gawker.com/cuomos-inactio...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that up to 75 of its scientists may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria in its laboratories in Atlanta. According to Reuters, the scientists were exposed after staff at a high-level biosecurity lab failed to follow the proper procedures to render the live anthrax bacteria inactive. So far, the CDC reports, none of the potentially exposed staff has reported any symptoms.

Staff beyond the high-level lab became exposed when the anthrax samples were transferred to a lower-level lab that, believing the bacteria to be inactive, were not properly protected against airborne exposure. From the Associated Press:

The safety lapse occurred when a high level biosecurity lab was preparing anthrax samples. The samples were to be used at lower security labs researching new ways to detect the germs in environmental samples. The higher security lab used a procedure that did not completely inactivate the bacteria.

Workers in three labs who later came into contact with these potentially infectious samples were not wearing adequate protective gear because they believed the samples had been inactivated. Procedures in two of the labs may have spread anthrax spores in the air.

Per Reuters, inhaling anthrax spores can be especially dangerous, with a high likelihood of death once illness reaches the second stage of symptoms:

In inhalation anthrax, bacterial spores enter the lungs where they germinate before actually causing disease, a process that can take one to six days. Once they germinate, they release toxins that can cause internal bleeding, swelling and tissue death.

Inhalation anthrax occurs in two stages. In the first stage, symptoms resemble a cold or the flu. In the second stage, anthrax causes fever, severe shortness of breath and shock. About 90 percent of people with second stage inhalation anthrax die, even after antibiotic treatment.

The potential exposure was discovered by CDC officials on Friday, June 13. Dr. Paul Meechan, director of the environmental health and safety compliance at the CDC, told Reuters that as many as seven staff members may have been directly exposed and that around 75 people have been offered a 60-day treatment regimen.

Meechan also told Reuters that an internal investigation has been launched and that the incident has been reported to the Federal Select Agent Program, "which oversees the use and transfer of biological agents and toxins that pose a severe threat to the public." He said it is currently unclear if the transfer of the active anthrax bacteria was accidental or intentional.

[Image via AP]

At least 37 civilians were killed this morning in Syria's second car bombing in two days. On Tuesday night, ISIS militants—after capturing major Iraqi cities Mosul, Tikrit, and Tal Afar—attacked and set on fire Iraq's largest oil refinery. In Hollywood, Taylor Swift just refuses to go on a date with Orlando Bloom.

What's a guy gotta do to get a date with Taylor Swift? Bombard her with text messages? And phone calls? Begging her for a date? Apparently it's not that easy, according to the National Enquirer:

"Orlando has been bombarding Taylor with text messages and phone calls, begging her for a date," reveals a pal of Taylor Swift. "But she's been playing hard to get. She's flattered because she thinks Orlando is so sexy and, in normal circumstances, she would leap at the chance."

What are the abnormal circumstances, though? (The Iraq stuff?)

But Taylor is concerned that dating Orlando would destroy her friendships with Selena Gomez and Miranda Kerr, and is worried about being involved in a rebound romance.

Ohh.

"She's looking for a serious relationship. She doesn't want to be just another notch on his belt. Taylor knows that Selena is nuts about Orlando and wants to have a real relationship with him. Yet all he seems to want to do is ask her about Taylor!"

Wait, how did that last bit of gossip work its way to Taylor's pal? Selena told a source, who told Taylor, who then told her pal? Seems like a long way to go, but I guess that's what friends (sources) are for.

I just hope these two beautiful kids can work it out.

[image via Getty]

James Bushart, 44, of Arkansas, is apparently familiar with meth, but has never seen a Plymouth Prowler before. He was arrested this week for DWI and drugs after cops say he menaced a couple in the car—which he thought was a spaceship—and told them to take it back to their alien planet.

The driver of the car, Jay Ward, says Bushart followed him and his girlfriend as they drove their Prowler around town. Bushart then stopped short in front of them, exited his own vehicle, called Ward an "alien" and yelled at him to "take his spaceship back to where they came from," according to Little Rock-based Fox 16:

What the victim, Jay Ward, seems to think caused the problem was the car he was driving; a Plymouth Prowler...

"That was my biggest problem with what was going on was how upset he was. I guess in reference to the vehicle was the only thing I could think," Jay explained. "I was a little upset about that mostly because I also had a passenger with me that was concerned for her safety as well."

According to the police report Bushart claimed he was curious about the car because "it looked like a futuristic machine."

Ward was concerned he might have to resort to the concealed gun he carries, but he left Bushart to police to deal with. They found meth and a pipe on the man before arresting him.

"At one point, he also told police that he was 'a very big deal' and that he had 100,000 Asian flowers," Fox 16's Josh Berry said in his report. "Exactly what that means, we're not sure."

Rectify is about a man who is freed from death row after 19 years because his conviction has been vacated. Rectify is about sin, the South, and families who, like groups of stone, weather and drift with time. Rectify, returning for its second season last night, is also the worst recent example of "slow TV," a subgenre that includes The Walking Dead, True Detective, and the middle episodes of every season of Game of Thrones (the ones with too much movement and machinery).

Slow TV is an aesthetic mode (and kind of viewership) that promises future rewards from intense concentration—a thing cannot just be a thing. Don't enjoy Matthew McConaughey's scowls because they are wittily gnarly, enjoy them because they hold the secrets to the universe! Sometimes slow TV reaps rich ambiguity and surprise from the banal, but other times, slow TV is just fucking dumb. (Did you buy a copy of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow? Have you burned it yet?)

Sure, slow TV has produced brilliances, like The Wire and a few episodes of Game of Thrones and that one episode of Breaking Bad with the fly. But without complication, the form naturally gives itself to excess. An object at rest stays at rest. Stillness, seriousness, and scrutiny get all tangled together. The Sopranos, the fountainhead, crystallized a lot of these rules and then ignored them. Rectify, the nadir, follows these rules over the edge.

It has a dreamy cast—seriously, Abigail Spencer, J. Smith-Cameron, and Adelaide Clemens are exquisite in the classic sense—and a central mystery (did Daniel really do it?; and if not, who did?), but no centrifugal force. It has a lot of moods—languor, despair, and abstract overriding misapprehension—but a narrow, literal dramatic and visual vocabulary that gets in the way of our enjoyment. Everyone pauses. There is a lot of pausing. And symmetry! Faces look away from each other to hide a tricksy new feeling, but they never look away from us. Even a hug has to mean too much.

The Good Wife and Teen Wolf are two of the best things you can watch on TV right now. They are funny, tragic, and weird; they are devilishly visual and clever and silly to the point of crassness. They are not slow. They are not just slow. Friday Night Lights felt slow but wasn't, like a feint. Treme was slow, but also wasn't really a TV show, not a story. More like watching the sidewalk outside of a coffee shop.

Rectify sometimes resembles a story, but you get the sense that it would prefer to be left alone. That maybe you should just go ahead change the channel. When, at the end of the season 2 premiere, Daniel and his best friend (a black man, the only one) meet in a dream state to talk about hope and heaven, they say things like, "Thank Gawd," and then they both cry. The camera lingers. They are wearing white. The cows in the background are black. The statue is headless.

This, the critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in a recent rave, is "truly Christian art." He's half right, I guess: All of the worship, and none of the salvation.

[Images via Sundance]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

Clam, the psychic clam, whose eerily accurate prediction of a U.S. win in Monday's World Cup match earned him (her?) fans worldwide, is back—and he's predicting a U.S. victory over Portugal in the team's second match of the tournament on Sunday. Don't forget: Clam has never been wrong!

After correctly predicting the winner of the U.S. Men's National Team's World Cup game against Ghana on Monday, Clam the psychic clam has become an viral sensation, earning fans worldwide for his cool style and perfect record in predicting World Cup matches. No other allegedly "psychic" living animal can claim to match Clam's 1.000 average—or his flair for the dramatic! Cure yourself of World Cup fever by catching Clam fever today!

Video by Nick Stango

You probably expected this, but Clayton Christensen—the Harvard professor who coined the term term that's become an almost religious byword in tech—is an arrogant ass. But in a new interview with Businessweek's Drake Bennett, you'll learn he's an even bigger ass that you ever imagined.

Christensen, like some other slowly shriveling white technologists with penises, does a poor job of masking how threatened he is by Jill Lepore. Her recent New Yorker essay makes very short work of disruption as a golden, sacred term—maybe it takes an extremely smart person to fully ridicule an extremely dumb idea.

But Christensen isn't convinced, likely because his career is stacked atop the validity of this particular stupid term—he's That Disruption Guy. In the Businessweek interview, Christensen reveals he's so threatened, in fact, that he starts referring to himself in the third person. Maybe a bruised ego is easier to numb if you're floating above yourself, looking down?

In a stunning reversal, she starts instead to try to discredit Clay Christensen, in a really mean way. And mean is fine, but in order to discredit me, Jill had to break all of the rules of scholarship that she accused me of breaking—in just egregious ways, truly egregious ways. In fact, every one—every one—of those points that she attempted to make [about The Innovator's Dilemma] has been addressed in a subsequent book or article. Every one! And if she was truly a scholar as she pretends, she would have read [those].

Emphasis added. Jill, you know nothing of my work! He gets angrier:

Do the integrated steel companies like U.S. Steel make rail for the railroads? No. Do they make rod and angle iron, Jill? No. Do they make structural steel I-beams and H-beams that you use to make the massive skyscrapers downtown, does U.S. Steel make those beams? Come on, Jill, tell me! No!

When Bennett mentions that an investment fund premised on "disruptive technology" failed, and that Christensen predicted the iPhone would bomb, he again retreats to the third person:

That money was put in the market by somebody who is not Clayton Christensen. So what does that tell you about the theory of disruption, or about Clayton Christensen?

Still: the only name he seems more obsessed with than his own is Jill Lepore's, who he assumes a strange familiarity with:

You keep referring to Lepore by her first name. Do you know her?

I've never met her in my life.

It's probably going to stay that way.

Photo: Getty

This group of kids from Michigan's Grosse Pointe Music Academy presumably went through a dozen weekly rehearsals for their rock band class, all culminating in this: Playing Weezer's "Undone (The Sweater Song)"—a song that, judging by their ages, they're familiar with from Rock Band—at their big debut gig.

Even knowing that something is about to go hilariously wrong, you'll want to root for them as they recover from a shaky countdown, (sort of) find their rhythm, and prepare to launch into the vocal section. Instead, you can only watch as everything unravels, and something is soon lying on the floor. Lying on the floor.

They've come undone.

[H/T Vulture]

We received a variety of responses to our open call for stories about what it's like to work at General Motors. Two of them stood out, both because of their detail and because of how different they are.

One of them comes from a former engineer who worked at the automaker from 2003 to 2004, and the other comes from one who worked there from 2010 to 2011 after the bailout and reorganization. The former describes his time there as a nightmare job with a horrible supervisor, while the latter describes it as a very positive experience he remains proud of.

GM is an extremely large company. (This has been both a strength and a weakness for them over the decades.) It's not at all unreasonable to think that an employees who work in different departments with different people could have very distinct experiences.

The timing of their employment is also worth considering. The former engineer whose story we featured yesterday and this one who hated his job both worked there years ago, before the bailout. The one who said he enjoyed his job worked there much more recently. The engineer with the better experience at GM also admits he has less job experience under his belt than the others.

Is GM's culture making progress? For the sake of the automaker and American manufacturing as a whole, I certainly hope so.

Their stories are below with minimal edits. If you have experiences working at GM — or any other automaker — send them to tips at jalopnik dot com.

DidntChooseTheTiltLife:

I worked at GM from June 2010 until September 2011. I graduated from RPI with a dual B.S. in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, cum laude. I interviewed for the GM position sometime in the middle of March 2010. It was my first job out of college. I spent my time working in Powertrain (Pontiac, MI) as a Design Responsible Engineer. In that role I was assigned a transmission component that was used across a variety of legacy and upcoming vehicles. This component was (and I believe still is) used by the large 6-speed front and rear wheel drive transmissions (Corvettes, Sierras, Lacrosses, most of the big crossovers, etc), so volume was in the millions but I can't remember exact numbers. It was not an original design position, more like managing changes to the component's existing design from model year to model year, be it finding ways to save cost or improve reliability. Doing the latter usually did the former when you factored in reduction to warranty-covered repairs. I took inputs from the warranty/reliability team, the production/assembly team, the supplier, and our designers and tried to get them all talking to each other, making sure that changes suggested or required by one group were properly communicated to the other groups, properly recorded on the appropriate drawings and prints by the design team, and then properly implemented and monitored to make sure the required effect of said changes were realized. It was meeting-intensive.

During college I had worked for the US Army as a civilian engineering intern, and I had Co-op'd at General Electric for a semester in a group related to turbine engine development. That is to say, I am by no means a seasoned engineer, but, I have been around a couple of different engineering cultures. Mind you, GM had JUST come out of bankruptcy, so the atmosphere was more buoyant and positive than it probably was previously - most of my coworkers had survived the previous cuts, and were looking forward to the products that were about to launch - the Volt, the ATS, etc. The company was about to have an IPO. Corvette won its class in Le Mans, Jim Mero destroyed Nurburing in the ZR1 (I took home COTD on 9 June 2011 for my over zealous response when Jalopnik posted the video). There was a lot of good going on, so I am biased in optimistic fashion.

Overall I had an incredible experience at GM. I was excited just to have a job in that economy, and I felt I was doing important work for a recently rejuvenated and well-storied American brand. I traveled around the country for my work meeting with suppliers and troubleshooting issues exposed by warranty returns. I was amazed at what I felt was an enormous amount of responsibility for such a novice engineer. Rightfully so, I worked shoulder to shoulder with a veteran transmission engineer of some 20+ years who reviewed all my work and coached me on a daily basis for how to maneuver the oftentimes imposing "Process of Engineering" at General Motors.

But it definitely had drawbacks. Yes, it was meetings-intensive, sometimes prohibitively so. I was incredibly frustrated by my dealings with UAW people (an entirely different story). I was often called upon outside of working hours by my boss, or some other engineering supervisor. I witnessed design decisions made on the basis of cost instead of quality. My suppliers dragged their feet when we tried making changes to improve quality, but they would be the first in line and back for seconds if it meant cost savings. Not to mention that the annual mid-summer shutdown basically cut my use-able vacation time in half. I spent plenty of days ticking down the clock, waiting to hop on my V-strom and head home.

Overall, I would categorize my purpose as project managing efforts to reduce cost and improve reliability in a legacy component while periodically putting out brushfires caused by our transmission assembly plant or the supplier...or the sub-supplier...or the sub-sub-supplier. One time, I had to travel to Mexico because a supplier's supplier had been making a sub-component wrong. A design had been translated from English to German to Spanish and the poor guy at the press was literally placing the blank pieces of material in upside-down. Not GM's fault. But GM gets the blame when the customer has to bring their car back because the transmission is stuck in second gear. And my boss's boss was halfway up my arse with daily meetings. I literally spent a night at the Tech Center hunched over a microscope with a team of engineers trying to figure that one out. I even got an ex-girlfriend out of it.

But I think in the big scheme of things, the company was headed in the right direction. I understood why a lot of those meetings were necessary; all it takes is one over-looked detail and BOOM millions of vehicles need a recall or worse, someone gets hurt (case in point). Clearly, autojim had a worse experience than I did. He worked at GM during a (somewhat) different time. He was, without a doubt, a more qualified engineer than I am or ever was, though he was working in a different position, so I will not speculate on his office politics or personality. I haven't been to GM since I left, so I can't comment on what the GM Tech Center or GM Powertrain culture is like these days. I can easily see how someone who has a lot of experience could feel boxed in. But in my eyes, that's how big companies work sometimes. A critical part of fitting in to the corporate process of engineering is understanding that you ARE just a cog in a larger machine. It can be frustrating to watch your efforts go seemingly unrewarded. I hope autojim has found meaningful employment at a place that affords him the flexibility and autonomy he was clearly lacking at GM. It's GM's loss. But when you're talking about millions of cars, billions of dollars, there NEEDS to be a process. There NEEDS to be a structure. Otherwise, nothing would get done and people would just spend all day doodling up flying boat-cars. There's a place for that stuff, and it's working for people like Burt Rutan or Elon Musk, or striking out on your own. In my particular case, my efforts were rewarded. I got a "bonus" at the holidays. I got a raise at my first annual review. If I had stayed at GM I think I would have been doing alright.

However, I am a young man, and opportunity called. For the record, all during my time at GM, I was a USMC individual ready reservist...I completed OCS in 2009, and I had a 2ndLt's commission waiting for me, all I needed was an open flight school spot to take it. That spot opened and I decided it was an opportunity I couldn't pass on. My boss and my entire work group were extremely supportive of my decision to leave. I felt guilty because of all the opportunity and great experience GM had provided me. I look back on my short time at GM fondly, and I consider it a positive formative experience. I intend to to apply at GM whenever my wife and I decide we're tired of the military, which won't be for a while, since being a pilot is bad ass and I'm just getting started. But I intend to at least TRY and go back, someday.

[...]

People ask me all the time if I would buy a GM car, as if having worked there for a single year makes me some kind of expert. My answer to them is an absolute and enthusiastic YES. In fact, I do, every day. It's a 2008 Astra with 90k miles and it's never let me down, not once.

He added this about vehicle production and safety:

GM is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, dealing in millions of vehicles annually, in what is becoming an ever-more litigious society. People are dying (no pun intended) to find ways to blame someone for their own incompetence, and lawyers are lining up to scam a buck doing so. Better call Saul and all that. I did not work on anything related to the ignition, so I cannot comment on that group's management or engineers.

In my LIMITED experience with transmissions, the worst thing we experienced as a result of a transmission issue was a "walk-home"...someone's car wouldn't go into gear, or would get stuck in 1st gear, etc, and they would have to...walk home. Most days, its a huge PR failure with a very unhappy customer. But no one get's hurt. The car either didn't even make it out of the driveway, or most cars can be "limped home" in 1st or 2nd gear because of PRNDL over-rides to electro-mechanical control component failures. We will all probably experience this type of car related failure at least once in our lives. It is quite literally the reason that wreckers and flat beds exist. Nonetheless, those limp home cases had high priority. Not uncommon for myself or a testing engineer to be on the phone with the dealership's technician trouble shooting from a few hundred miles away, or better yet, making sure the parts were saved for further analysis. But let's put it into perspective. What if that same person, same car, same mode of failure happened when a semi-tractor with hot brakes was barreling down the highway and all of a sudden Suzie Homemaker can't get her Traverse out of the intersection because the car won't shift into 2nd gear? It's a national tragedy. Was it avoidable? Depends on how good her lawyer is. Did Suzie properly follow transmission maintenance? Depends on how good her lawyer is. I never, not once, not ever, was aware of any case where any customer was ever hurt due to a transmission failure associated with my component, or any other component for that matter.

But I will tell you this. I walked into my position with an initiative underway to improve what was a known production spillage cause (production units that don't get out of the factory because of a defect)-on the order of some 0.05% or whatever. Probably less than a total hundred units per year, and they were caught in our assembly line tests. But that is significant from a production bottom line cost perspective. When put to testing in a controlled environment, it was realized as "rough shifting." A customer probably wouldn't even know there was an issue, and for all intents and purposes, there wasn't. It was a "fine tuning" thing. There was a solution on the table that was staring us in the face. It was part of the original design that was scrapped due to cost. Every time I went to a meeting on that particular problem, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that capable, intelligent GM engineers had already solved the "problem." But the Supplier wanted nothing to do with it because it would actually increase their spillage while reducing ours, so they made the cost to implement the change prohibitively high, and our managers kept pressuring us to find a way to solve the problem without involving the supplier. And in terms of real world numbers, there was thought to be "zero" impact on the customer, it was purely a money/production spillage issue. So we worked on an alternative solution and it was hitting pre-production testing as I left. No one considered it a safety issue.

But all it takes is one, just ONE Suzie Homemaker episode and all of a sudden its a conspiracy. And who's fault would it be? Mine? Because I didn't scream at the top of my lungs? An easy scape goat for sure...the rookie engineer who doesn't have a family or a 401k on the line. How about my manager? Shouldn't he have coached me to scream and pout? How about the Program Manager, who kept telling me to work around the problem because he didn't want to deal with the multiple millions of dollars it would cost to solve an issue costing tens of thousands. You tell me. But we live in a litigious society. Shit like this ignition thing happens all the time, in every industry - Unintended Acceleration, etc. It's what happens when you build increasingly complex machines with increasingly stricter cost requirements with incredibly tight bottom lines. I don't have the answer.

Overall, it doesn't change my original comments about working at GM. That was just one case, and it didn't have to deal with a known safety issue. I stand firm that I would return to GM. There's good people there, building good vehicles. That case I gave is something that drives engineers insane, but its unavoidable, regardless of industry.

And a former engineer who emailed us wishing to remain anonymous:

Today's article really hit close to home.

I had an almost carbon copy experience back in 2003 - 2004 working for The General.

I had been working in the auto industry since my first summer home from college in 1994. My father pulled some strings and got me working in a test lab shooting off airbags for a tier 1 supplier. For the next 9 years, I worked at three different tier one suppliers developing electric components and embedded controllers with four different OEMs. In October of 2003, I received a phone call that would forever change my attitude towards The General.

One of my former colleagues was recently hired into GM with the initiative to bring "tier 1 development" experience in-house. He dropped my name to his manager who then forwarded my information to HR. The HR contacted me and set up an interview, which went really well. Within a week, I was given a formal letter of DIRECT (read: not contract, or contract to direct) employment.

I was off to the show!

The honeymoon was very, very, very short lived. A typical conversation on my first day with my new peers consisted of comments like: "So what department did you transfer from? You have a blue [direct employee] badge, that means you transferred. If you didn't transfer, what college did you come from? What do you mean you came from a supplier? Why don't you have a green [contract employee] badge?"

The whole green badge / blue badge differentiation always reminded me of Dr. Suess' Star Belly Sneetches.

While these comments were annoying, nothing could have prepared me for my program manager. For sake of this conversation, lets call him Brandon. Brandon was a "lifer" at GM. Never saw an engineering decision from any other place than the dark side of a GM desk, and was proud of this fact. At first, Brandon was trying to make me feel welcome by inviting me out to lunches with the other engineers and stopping by for random afternoon chats. That was all very short lived though.

After a few months of indoctrination, I was off to visit an assembly plant with Brandon and another engineer to investigate various testing equipment that other divisions were using. While walking out to the car, Brandon stops in his tracks, hands me a box of lab equipment and says: "You're a level 7, I'm a level 8. You should be carrying this." The other engineer, who was also a level 8, used this opportunity throw his laptop bag on top of the box I was already carrying. I literally stood silently for a good 15 - 20 seconds in disbelief as I watched my two colleagues walk towards the car without once turning around. This wasn't an isolated hazing incident that I could later laugh off, this was normal behavior.

Fast forward another few months, I find myself in a supplier meeting discussing a preliminary software release to GM. Brandon was calm and cool initially, but then suddenly blew a major gasket when the supplier started discussing their "Cal-DS" strategy.

"What the fuck do you mean it won't fucking be ready? Are you that fucking stupid? Do you think we're going to accept this bullshit from a fucking half ass supplier like you? Are you too fucking stupid to read the fucking specification to give us exactly what we fucking asked for? If you had half a fucking brain, you wouldn't be working for a fucking supplier! Fuck you you fucking fucked fuckers!"

Everything I've quoted is word-for-word (from memory) ....except maybe the last sentence. This 'might' be an embellishment on my part merely to drive home the point of exactly how many F-bombs were dropped in this particular meeting. ;)

Needless to say, the mood in the conference room was very tense. Everyone knew that Brandon was out of line with his language... and that he was completely wrong in his understanding of the specification. Feeling bad for the supplier, I finally stepped in hopes to calm Brandon down:

"Uh, Brandon? The specific integration portion of Cal-DS you're worried about will actually be performed in-house by GM."

He immediately stopped shouting and moved to the next topic on the agenda. I thought to myself "cool, its over" but I was wrong. On my way out of the building, Brandon jumps in front of me and shouts: "Don't you EVER make me look bad in front of a supplier again!"

Megalomaniac anyone?

Three months later my performance review came back with alarming number inefficiencies, most notably 'does not work well with others'. My manager scheduled a Friday afternoon review meeting to discuss 'goals and objectives' (first time this was mentioned in the 12 months I had been working there ironically.) I saw the writing on the wall from one hundred miles away. The ax was coming.

A few days before the impending firing, I was discretely clearing out my desk when I overheard Brandon talking on the phone in his cube. "I've been trying to get this guy fired for months now, I think it's finally going to happen on Friday...."

I had thoughts of just not showing up anymore and waiting for GM to fix-the-glitch in my payroll, but that would have left me zero potential legal recourse. Also, you can't get unemployment in Michigan if you technically quit. Friday afternoon came, went to the meeting and took my firing like a man. I've never been in jail or prison before, but I can imagine the relief I felt walking out of GM for my last time would be similar to getting out on parole.

I got fired on a Friday, put my resume online later that evening, took my first (of four) interview Tuesday morning, accepted my new position on Friday, started my new job a week later with a nice 5% pay increase. In twenty years of working for the auto industry, I've been out of a job for exactly two weeks.

The story doesn't quite end here. A year into my new job (at another tier 1 supplier, thankfully) I was having a casual water cooler conversation with the manager of the SW department. He was talking about a new GM business award. I asked if the program manager was a guy named Brandon. Sure enough, my old buddy was program manager for a project that my new company was working on. I warned the SW manager to document everything. A month later, the SW manager stops me in the hallway to thank me:

"You were sooo right about Brandon. Per your suggestion, we documented every piece of correspondence. He tried to pull a major bullshit change over the top of us, but I was able to call his lying ass out."

Getting fired from GM was the best thing that ever happened to me. I never would have believed it if I didn't experience it firsthand myself.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Rian Johnson, director of Brick and Looper, has been tagged to write and direct Star Wars: Episode VIII.

Deadline reports that Johnson will also direct Episode IX, but sources speaking to both the Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap deny that claim. Instead, they say he'll write the treatment for Episode IX, but will not direct it. Here's Deadline on the news:

Essentially, that means that the intention is for Johnson to take the baton from JJ Abrams, who has gotten the space franchise off the ground and is right now helming Episode VII. I don't know too much more at this point, but it is in keeping with Disney and Lucasfilm's strategy of entrusting the venerable franchise to the best and brightest writers and directors, including the spinoff films that are being directed by Chronicle's Josh Trank and Godzilla's Gareth Edwards.

Johnson responded to the news on Twitter:

https://t.co/z0T140SzXv

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) June 20, 2014

Disney plans to release a new Star Wars movie every year, beginning with J.J. Abrams's Episode VII in 2015.

[image via Getty]