The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900; in the 2000 years prior, it did not really change. The consensus among informed observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13 and 34 inches by 2050. By 2100, it is extremely likely to be closer to six feet, which means, unless you own a yacht and a helicopter, sayonara. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do so more quickly.
Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time.
I was acting the part of what I call Quintessential Host, someone who seems to have anticipated every guest’s need and desire—and this is key—without breaking a sweat or having to try too hard. The role is a trap. It’s about martyrdom and the idea that you only get to enjoy yourself once everyone else has been taken care of. But it’s also a tad controlling.
But free to roam, with flights to any imaginable destination just a click away (credit card points!), an unlimited number of new people to meet, and nothing to tie me down but a backpack, I felt more unmoored than ever.
Interestingly, most management books describe peacetime CEO techniques while very few describe wartime. For example, a basic principle in most management books is that you should never embarrass an employee in a public setting. On the other hand, in a room filled with people, Andy Grove once said to an employee who entered the meeting late: “All I have in this world is time, and you are wasting my time.” Why such different approaches to management?
In reality, good assistants save their bosses much more than that. They ensure that meetings begin on time with prep material delivered in advance. They optimize travel schedules and enable remote decision making, keeping projects on track. And they filter the distractions that can turn a manager into a reactive type who spends all day answering e-mail instead of a leader who proactively sets the organization’s agenda. As Robert Pozen writes in this issue: A top-notch assistant “is crucial to being productive.”
__"I think walking is probably the single most underutilized tool in health and wellness,"__ says nutrition coach and personal trainer Jeremy Fernandes. According to Fernandes, the reason we rarely hear about walking as a major fitness tool—in the same conversations as stuff like yoga or expensive spinning bikes—is that people aren’t emotionally prepared for fitness to be easy. “Most people want to believe that working out and fat loss needs to be hard. If you need impossibly crushing workouts to get in better shape, then you’re not responsible when you fail,” he says. "But a basic program performed consistently—even a half-assed effort done consistently—can bring you a really long way, much further than going hardcore once in a while."
The research certainly concluded that the employees were working hard. Total hours worked were 30% higher than before the pandemic, including an 18% increase in working outside normal hours. But this extra effort did not translate into any rise in output. This may explain the earlier survey evidence; both employers and employees felt they were producing as much as before. But the correct way to measure productivity is output per working hour. With all that extra time on the job, this fell by 20%.
Isohumulone is the acid found in hops that gives beer its bitter bite. Though the IBU scale can be used as a general guideline for taste, with lower IBUs corresponding to less bitterness and vice versa, it's important to note that malt and other flavors can mask the taste of bitterness in beer.
The distributed office is not a placeless space. A Zoom call is a place; a Slack channel is a place; your manager’s inbox is a place. These are all “rooms” in which bosses can evaluate worker performance. It’s a fact of human diversity that different people thrive in different spaces, so we should expect that the virtual spaces of remote work will reward certain skills that went underappreciated in office settings.
Many women discount later-onset depression, thinking postpartum depression only happens right after the baby arrives. This is not the case.
We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It's hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down.
Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s ‘white fragility,’ ‘unconscious bias’ or ‘internalized white supremacy.’ I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim — such as ‘all whites are intrinsically oppressors’ or ‘white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children’ — and then, when confronted with disagreement, adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel ‘defensiveness’ or ‘anger’ are reacting out of guilt and shame.”
But I’ve been in numerous meetings with enthusiasts for cryptocurrency and/or blockchain, the concept that underlies it. In such meetings I and others always ask, as politely as we can: “What problem does this technology solve? What does it do that other, much cheaper and easier-to-use technologies can’t do just as well or better?” I still haven’t heard a clear answer.
What Wheel does phenomenally well is bring together multiple sides of the marketplace to drive better, faster and more affordable access to care.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
Light a cigarette anywhere in my house, and you’ll be dazzled by the flow of the smoke—up and around, through doorways, swirling toward the ceiling and then back to the floor, inscribing elegant arcs through the air—never resting until it finds its way out a window.
Many pundits seem to delight in observing that the board can’t fix any of the “real” problems with Facebook, a view that is true at the level of questions like “how do we fix our broken information sphere and polarized society?”, and false at the level of many questions of vital importance to to individual users. Questions like: why did Facebook delete a post in which I criticized the government? Why can’t I see strikes against my account? Why are policies enforced inconsistently? Why are US politicians held to a higher standard than foreign leaders? Why aren’t the community standards available in Punjabi? People who don’t see those as “real” problems with Facebook have strangely little empathy for the billions of people who use the company’s services, even as those same critics style themselves as noble sentinels of a free society.
If you’re a programmer and you have no equity and no union representation, then you have no form of ownership or leverage. Any employer who’s trying to make you feel like an owner is setting you up for a rude awakening. So don’t be a chump and buy into it.
Employees are going to vote with their feet and I feel for People Ops teams who are going to be having a tremendous number of emotional conversations.
And in any case, the fact remains that this is a company co-founder calling out an employee in front of all of their peers, and then following up by sharing that post publicly on the web, redacting little more than the employee’s name. Unlike the co-founder, the employee can’t risk responding in public without fearing for their job. The power dynamics here are ugly — the sort of thing that could make you think twice about wanting to work for someone.
Most Americans don’t have a news source they trust, and more than half of Americans
Often, there are two company cultures. There’s the glossy, official, Comms Department-approved culture — and then there’s the real, lived experience of showing up every day and working at a place. If the difference between those two versions is large enough, the result is generally serious, sustained, employee-management resentment. Let’s call that “culture gap.”
The only benefit of Obama’s restraint was as a source of lessons for his vice-president Joe Biden. Most obviously, the lesson is that erring on the side of restraint is worse than erring on the side of stimulus. Second, that the likelihood of securing Republican support for anything is minimal, so there is no point in proposing an inadequate response in the name of bipartisanship. The final lesson is reflected in the fact that neither Emanuel nor Summers has been given any role, formal or otherwise in the Biden Administration.
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.
Velocity does not equal haste. It is possible to deliver high quality work at high velocity. The way to do that is to have a maniacal focus on the fastest path to value. Most delays in projects are not because the person was trying to avoid low quality work. Most delays are because the team wanted to do too much and spent weeks working and planning, and ended up not doing anything at all. If we narrow our focus to the increments of value we are delivering, we can ship quality with velocity.
The greatest forced blackout in U.S. history, as this event has almost certainly become, was the result of a systemic and multifaceted failure. There are no promises of when power will be restored and little likelihood that the episode won’t be repeated in a corner of the country hard hit by climate change.
Francis’s peer-reviewed papers showed a fascinating phenomenon: That as the Arctic was getting warmer and warmer, the polar vortex was taking more and more drunken adventures down south.
These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.
We grouped the most common mistakes into four categories: (1) mispricing on one side of the market, (2) failure to develop trust with users and partners, (3) prematurely dismissing the competition, and (4) entering too late.
I’ve written about Apple and Amazon’s organizational designs on various occasions, including Apple’s Organizational Crossroads and The Amazon Tax. What is fascinating is that the two companies are polar opposites of each other: Apple is extremely centralized and focused, befitting its obsession with being the best, while Amazon is extremely decentralized and independent, befitting its obsession with experimentation. It’s why Apple is known for multiple groundbreaking products, while Amazon is known for multiple groundbreaking businesses. I think, though, the fact they are so drastically different speaks to why Bezos and Jobs rank so highly as CEOs: the only way you end up on the extreme end of the organizational structure axis is via clear intent and purpose from the leader.
In an all-remote setting, where team members are empowered to live and work where they're most fulfilled, mastering asynchronous workflows is vital to avoiding dysfunction and enjoying outsized efficiencies. Increasingly, operating asynchronously is necessary even in colocated companies which have team members on various floors or offices, especially when multiple time zones are involved.
One of my favorite quotes is in the final book, when Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real or is all of this happening in my head?” And Dumbledore responds, __“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”__ For me, that quote is equally true of entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to believe in the things that are happening in their head, and make them real.
When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.
The true promise of digital health is the delivery of high-quality care at a fraction of the cost, and at dramatically higher scale than incumbents—by using modern tech and AI to do what historically has been done through human labor or poorly functioning IT products. A risk to this promise is that every digital health company ends up allocating all of its cost savings to rebuilding the same components of their operating systems over and over again from scratch, across their separate walled gardens.
”Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.”
This is a very annoying way to live. I want ideas to carry over from one day to the next, and when they contradict each other, I want to get to the bottom of it and figure out the truth. I want to feel like my beliefs about the world are well-grounded, and unknotted—I want my beliefs to be more like a chef’s mis en place than a hairball at the bottom of a drain.
Ending the filibuster isn’t about enacting an extreme agenda, it’s about empowering the more moderate half of the Democratic caucus to set the agenda. They ought to step up and do it.
However, almost all of them have no idea that they want Slack. How could they? They’ve never heard of it. And only a vanishingly small number will have imagined it on their own. They think they want something different (if they think they want anything at all). They definitely are not looking for Slack. (But then no-one was looking for Post-it notes or GUIs either.)
Male leaders stay at unicorns twice as long as female leaders: The study found that the average tenure for female founders is just 1.78 years, while the average tenure for male leaders is 2.66 years.
“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”