What’s behind the Shopify Effect ⁠✦
Shopify merchants now represent 3.6 million jobs around the world, and every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify.
Shopify merchants now represent 3.6 million jobs around the world, and every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify.
the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith. It’s easy to find cases where reality tests that faith — the most obvious and famous example being the building of the atom bomb. Like many of the people who built it, I still wonder whether it was right to give humankind the power to wipe itself out; my faith in the goodness of science is not absolute.
What that view misses, I think, is how confusing rules like these are to employees. One Basecamp worker I spoke with today, who requested anonymity, wondered the extent to which parenting issues could be raised at work. “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.”
Team members want to know that you believe in them, and that you have their back. Particularly when taking on opportunities that could be exciting, but hold the risk of failure. Managers are often advised to ask in 1:1s, ‘What could I be doing to support you more?’
The first of April was a day when we were supposed to be aware that not everything was as it seemed, that we should be on our guard. And now, exhausting as it is, every day is like that.
In North Kosovo, though, cryptomining is about as close to printing free money as one can get. The region is an anomaly—not just within the country, but across almost all of Europe—for the fact that it doesn’t charge its residents for their electricity. In a strange twist of fate, locals pay for almost none of their public services.
THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value.
Video games: Fun, visually breathtaking, easy to learn, doesn’t tell me I should reduce my salt intake because of familial risk for hypertension.
Face-to-face is like a perfect avocado. The cost of in-sync time, real-time interaction time, that’s time that we don’t get again.
A staff writing job in journalism can be a wonderful thing, and there are far too few of them available these days. But they also come with a relatively low ceiling, at least by the standards of top performers in other industries. An ace reporter at a major American newspaper will struggle to make more than $150,000 a year. That’s great money compared to most jobs in America. It’s also probably not enough to buy a house in any of the cities where, before the pandemic, you could actually get a job paying $150,000 a year.In exchange for that low ceiling, though, reporters got some great benefits, especially if their newsroom was unionized: health care, legal protections, editing, distribution of their work, and a regular salary. The flip side is that the job has not been a particularly stable one over the past two decades: layoffs occur with alarming frequency; American newsrooms lost 16,000 jobs last year.