P.O.S.S.E.
“it’s not so much a question of needing to be a professor to know the answer – you needed to be a professor to know that it was the right answer, to be sufficiently confident to maintain it in a situation where the stakes were unimaginably high, and to be sure that objections from admirals whose experience and intuition went the other way were wrong”
“Brandon K. Hines spent more than a decade working in support staff jobs and as a script coordinator on Comedy Central’s Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens and Amazon’s Harlem. He was staffed as a writer for the first time on Showtime’s Fellow Travelers. Hines was homeless and had been bouncing between camping, couch surfing with friends and the occasional Airbnb before he turned to driving for DoorDash and Grubhub after his 16-week writing job on the Showtime limited series concluded before the strikes began”
“Regulators and prosecutors will continue their slow game of whack-a-mole while more people are taken for all they’re worth by thieves who use the same old playbooks. As Bankman-Fried becomes a more and more distant memory, the industry will try to convince people that it’s cleaned itself up since its chaotic Wild West days. Without intervention, it may succeed, and the cycle will begin anew.
But I will be here, shining a light on it to the best of my abilities.”
“China ships over $100 billion worth of goods to Africa, of which countries like South Africa, Congo, and Zambia account for the biggest portion. In 2022, online retail in South Africa crossed 50 billion rand ($2.6 billion), fueling the popularity of drop-shipping. But there are concerns about Chinese counterfeits — which currently account for up to 10% of the South African economy, according to the Consumer Goods Council — and growing worries over Chinese brands making South Africa their dumping ground”
“It is always stressful because there are endless last-minute, last changes. Like: Did you remember todo that thing I never told you about until just now? Which means shuffling things around to accommodate for changes.
None are impossible, just unexpected, untimely and under-appreciated”
In my head, I still hear you. When things go well, you gently mock the swelling of my ego. When things go wrong, I feel how you would have held my hand. I flirt, and hear your comments on my choices. I smile at the joy you’d have taken from a news story, remember how you always had the inside track, imagine what you’d say about some drama among our friends.
I almost grab a newspaper so we can do the crossword. For half a second I wonder what you might need from the shops. On the edge of sleep, the world where you’re still here feels so close I can almost smell your perfume.
And several times a day, when I know no one will hear, I say your name. I’ve no idea why.
It’s possible that dating apps face adverse selection. Basically, a new app starts up, and hopeless romantics looking for real love begin flocking to it. But so do sleazy types who lie on their dating profiles. Over time, the earnest daters go on a bunch of bad dates, encountering people who have no interest in real relationships or whose profiles are completely misleading.
Like lemons driving good cars out of the used-car market, maybe sleazeballs push great catches out of dating apps and ultimately ruin the quality of the whole app experience. So people go to a new app with the hopes of finding something better, and the cycle starts again.
“At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing”
https://www.thecut.com/article/marriage-divorce-should-i-leave-my-husband-emily-gould.html
“Spiro had initially hoped to monetize the old bikes it collected from riders by retrofitting them with EV technology — but that hasn’t worked out. Around 40% of the bikes Spiro collects are converted to scrap metal and sold for less than $20 per unit, Samain said. Rest of Worldvisited four of the company’s branches in Togo and Benin, and saw hundreds of abandoned bikes waiting to be scrapped.
Any bike owner can go to a Spiro exchange center, request a swap, get their credentials verified, and pick up a new EV within a week. Riders then pay a daily fee of 3,200 CFA francs ($5.32) for up to seven battery swaps, and each additional swap costs 500 CFA francs (83 cents). The daily fee also covers insurance and maintenance, and riders can take the bikes for check-ups anytime for free. After 150,000 kilometers, a rider takes full ownership of the bike and is not required to pay the daily swap fee”
“You might think: who cares? What’s 5m PS2s between friends? And it’s true that I find this lack of transparency particularly annoying because I am a journalist, and I like to have answers. But the absence of reported sales figures allows companies to spin narratives that don’t line up with reality, to please the markets and their shareholders. They can claim success on whichever metric best backs up that story”
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/03/pushing-buttons-video-game-console-sales