P.O.S.S.E.
“Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn’t a thriller where you’re trying to surprise them with twists and turns”
“I was expecting to poke around the interface for a while, and maybe ask a friend to take screenshots from the other side. Instead, within seconds, I was sitting in front of dozens of complete strangers who were waiting for me to talk. I ended the stream, adjusted my webcam, and started again. Within two minutes, I had hundreds of viewers. I asked them how they ended up there but nobody answered. I put on a face filter. I played carnival music. I showed them my dog. One informed me that the same pencil was much cheaper at the Dollar Tree”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/what-i-learned-selling-a-used-pencil-on-tiktok-shop.html
“Since 2010, councils have had 60 per cent of their spending power cut by central government, which aggressively reduced funding in a bid to reduce Britain’s budget deficit after the 2008 financial crash. (In 2009-10, the deficit reached 10 per cent of GDP, and the national debt was at 67 per cent by May 2010.) Government ministers encouraged councils to be more entrepreneurial and raise their own funds through commercial investment, and in 2015 abolished the Audit Commission, which had kept a check on their finances. Council officers became prime targets for dubious investment propositions”
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2024/03/bust-britain
“Sitting Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on a dozen more criminal charges this week. The party that claims to be in favor of prosecuting corrupt leaders hasn’t done anything to remove him from his position. He’s a free man, and one of the country’s most powerful politicians, while facing reams of evidence he’s been working on behalf of foreign governments in exchange for cash for years”
https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/elite-impunity-politicians-tech-media-and-taxes/
“But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in”
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/leadership-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/
“Riot pays its executives well beyond the company’s carrying capacity. Riot CEO Jason Les is getting $21.5 million a year, mainly in bonuses and stock. Executives awarded themselves another $213.6 million in stock and options as of January 2024 — but it’s performance-based! They’re really efficient at setting money on fire”
https://amycastor.com/2024/03/04/bitcoin-mining-riot-platforms-10-k-is-full-of-tentacles/
“Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 this June. If she retires this year, Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the court — playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the court again relies on both the timing of the deaths or retirements of conservative judges, plus not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold”
“Vice’s bankruptcy filings paint a fascinating narrative of a company cratering under wide-scale industry disruption. It’s a business without a consumer revenue stream that depends too heavily on advertising and partnership deals. Vice “relied on external funding, raising both debt and equity capital to fuel its rapid growth and to fund expenses in certain parts of the business,” wrote Frank A. Pometti, a consultant hired as the chief restructuring officer of Vice Media, in a May 2023 declaration filing. “Although these fund-raising efforts helped to finance Vice’s growth, they ultimately led to the company being burdened by a highly leveraged and unusually complex capital structure.”
With the Feb. 22 disclosure that Vice is getting out of the news business, all that remains is Vice TV, a joint venture of A&E and Vice, the ad agency Virtue and Vice Studios. The question is whether Fortress has a vision other than reducing overall spend as it tries to bring in revenue from a number of stand-alone businesses”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/vice-media-shane-smith-1235837714/
“Every one of them decided, as transparently as possible in this case, that the text of the Constitution would have forced them to do something they did not want to do or did not think was a good idea, and so they would not do it. The justices did not want to throw Trump off the ballot, and so they didn’t. Not only that, but in order to head off the unlikely scenario of Congress trying to disqualify Trump after the election, they said that Congress must specifically disqualify individual insurrectionists, despite such a requirement having no basis in the text. Even if you agree with the majority that this was a wise decision politically, it cannot be justified as an “originalist” one; it was invented out of whole cloth”
“materials have expanded from the once radical vegan leather to include a whole bowl’s worth of fruit and vegetable-based alternatives, from apple to grape, pineapple, banana, even cactus. You only need to look at the continuing rise of brands like Veja – whose vegan leather sneakers have become ubiquitous among climate-conscious suburbanites – to see why bigger brands are worried.
But amid all these competing claims, it can be hard to know which of these new products are actually better for the planet, versus which just sound better. “Vegan leather” and “fruit leathers” are just plastics – for a fact that led the Portuguese government to ban the term in 2022”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/sustainable-zero-carbon-sneakers