blog
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“I may have gotten a woman fired for less than $2 and a pint of ice cream.”
Kira Witkin in Esquire: I Got Paid to Spy on People While They Worked. I know a lot of people that work or have worked in retail and more than a few have been fired after failing secret shopper tests. I’ve never considered the other side of the story though. The average commission is $15…
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What we Know About the Effects of Remote Work
Interesting summary of current data in the NYT. It’s about a lot more than ‘productivity’ (and however that’s defined. This article includes a few things that I wouldn’t have considered: Working mothers have generally benefited from the flexibility of being able to work remotely — more of them were able to stay in the work…
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Private Equity-izing A24
Maybe it was always going to be this way — A24 to expand, produce more commercial films. Private Equity bought a chunk of the company at a high valuation, now A24 has to figure out how to justify it. Prepare for Everything Everywhere All At Once Again and Again, I guess.
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NPR Quit Twitter and nothing happened
From Nieman Reports: Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X,…
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a.k.a Mr. Chow
I don’t know anything about this guy, his art or his food, but this trailer makes me want to know everything.
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Making cars less dangerous to pedestrians
There is so much hype around self-driving cars, and passenger safety is always a critical concern for carmakers, but the easy work is to use technology to decrease the danger to people outside the car. This BBC article talks about exactly that. I find it amazing how design and safety standards for vehicles vary so…
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Ed Zitron interviews Molly White
Molly started Web3 is Going Just Great and has been an interesting crypto skeptic for a long time. This interview here has a lot in it worth listening to. Zitron always asks smart questions (“Do you think [SBF] is a mastermind or a dipshit?”), and White is excellent. Also, just saw that the theme song…
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Molly McGhee writing about class in The Guardian
There’s a lot more to say about this piece, and maybe I will try to figure out some way to say it. But this article is fire: Born Poor Stay Poor. The whole thing is excellent: The American dream has been sold and replaced with a Ponzi scheme meant to benefit the investor class. College…
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Anne Trubek on Substack
I always like learning about how smart people work, and often it’s not nearly as sophisticated as I imagine it to be. This is one of those.
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Corporate Bullshit
This book looks fun, and it sounds a lot like Paul Fairie’s upcoming The Press Gallery. (he is the guy behind viral Twitter threads like A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore). I read The Big Myth recently which touched on a lot of these garbage arguments that corporations use to try to…