799 posts tagged with business.
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HELF
No one keeps an official list of uninhabited islands worldwide. If they did, it would be long. Norway and Sweden alone have hundreds of thousands of desert islands, including some that are astonishingly remote. One glacier-covered Norwegian island, Bouvetøya, is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest point of land. Desert islands conjure isolation so effectively they’ve become our go-to metaphor for it. We have desert island books, desert island discs, and desert island foods. The New Yorker Cartoon Bank includes nearly 400 hits for “desert island,” perhaps because with just a few lines—a horizontal parenthesis of sand, a few palm trees—an artist can conjure a scene that’s both instantly recognizable and totally self-contained. Reality is more complicated. from Why Some People Are Paying to Be Left on a Desert Island—Alone [Afar; ungated]
cheerful story of a local business
NINA mortgage and a decade of work turn into an actual place and business. There’s an accordion. It’s in Arkansas. It also sounds like what I would like Hallmark romcom movies to be.
The perils of starting a business
Simone Giertz: Was starting a product business a mistake? Shitty Robots may have paid for her house, but after her brain tumor, Simone Giertz (previously on MeFi) realized she needed to come up with a career that didn't involve looking for more fame and being camera-ready. How's that going? [more inside]
The Car You Never Expected (to disappear)
Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was “so uncool, it was cool,” declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn’t enough to keep the car off GM’s chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they’re less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™ [more inside]
We don’t want to categorise people, so we don’t
Sites that are for adults should cater to all of grown-ups’ interests. Lots of people who are over 18 like sex, but they also like comedy and sports and music, so [it’s about] being able to cater to our audience base and to be able to provide opportunities for creators. from Keily Blair, OnlyFans: ‘We are an incredible UK tech success story’ [FT; ungated]
Smart Move(?)
Capital One announced this week that it intends to buy Discover in an all-stock deal valued at $35 billion, which would make it by some measures the largest credit card company in the U.S. While CEO Richard Fairbank covets Discover's independent payments network, consumer advocates fear a negative effect on its vaunted customer service, as well as a general trend of credit card companies squeezing customers more as they grow larger. Though there is an argument that the proposed deal will increase competition at the network level, it will still face heavy antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Reserve and Biden administration regulators. Meanwhile in Congress, criticism of the deal has already been aired by pro-regulation stalwarts, including Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, and... Josh Hawley?
Dream Theater
Stylish woman walks down neon Tokyo street
/ Space man in a red knit helmet movie trailer
/ Drone view of waves crashing at Big Sur
/ Papercraft coral reef
/ Victoria crowned pigeon with striking plumage
/ Pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee
/ Historical footage of California during the gold rush
/ Cartoon kangaroo disco dances
/ Lagos in the year 2056
/ Stack of TVs all showing different programs inside a gallery
/ White SUV speeds up a steep dirt road
/ Reflections in the window of a train in the Tokyo suburbs
/ Octopus fighting with a king crab
/ Flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle
/ Cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast
/ Chinese Lunar New Year celebration
/ Art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles
/ People enjoying the snowy weather and shopping
/ Gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s deep in thought
/ Colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window
/ 3D render of a happy otter standing on a surfboard
/ Corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui
/ Aerial view of Santorini /
OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency. [more inside]
[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]
Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it. [more inside]
Someone Who Is Good At The Economy Please Help Me
Articles asking us to feel sympathy for families barely scraping by on healthy six-figure incomes may be staples of the financial press, but it’s rare that they come packaged as real-world case studies attached to flesh-and-blood individuals. But that’s what happened just before Christmas... Clarence Thomas and the bottomless self-pity of the upper classes
US Steel acquired by Nippon Steel for $14.9B
Announced today, the American company founded in 1901 by some of the original American oligarchs -- Charles Schwab, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan among them -- intends to sell itself to the Japanese company for $14.9 billion including the assumption of debt. [more inside]
"I would have worked at Bandcamp until I retired, happily"
A torrid love affair with GPT-5 has not been ruled out
Sam Altman abruptly fired as CEO of OpenAI by the company's board, which cited a lack of confidence due to inconsistent candor, hindering his ability to fulfill the company's charter. Altman, a multimillionaire tech entrepreneur, ex-president of Y Combinator, and the public face of development for breakthroughs like DALL-E and ChatGPT, had hosted a major keynote for the company just last week; the surprise move has reportedly blindsided primary investor Microsoft. Rumors abound, primarily focusing on the company's uncertain business model, Altman's other ventures, and allegations of abuse by his sister, though the simultaneous departure of cofounder Greg Brockman suggests the issue could be more than just bad behavior by the CEO.
Anybody need 40,000 antique telephones?
Wisconsin couple has tens of thousands of old phones — and nobody to buy them. From the Wisconsin State Journal, the story of Ron and Mary Klappen, who've been selling vintage phone and phone equipment since 1971. But their business may now be at the end of the line.
Zombie Apocalypse
US FTC and states file antitrust suit against Amazon retail operations
The US Federal Trade Commission and more than a dozen state attorneys general have filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unlawfully leveraged its market dominance to stamp out would-be competitors.
Succession: The Reality TV Show
News Corporation and Fox News chair Rupert Murdoch announces he will step down from the helm of his media empire, handing control to his son Lachlan. (SLCNN)
Nobody drives in San Francisco, there’s too much traffic
One day after California green-lighted a massive expansion of driverless robotaxis in San Francisco, the implications became clear.
At about 11 p.m. Friday, as many as 10 Cruise driverless taxis blocked two narrow streets in the center of the city’s lively North Beach bar and restaurant district. All traffic came to a standstill on Vallejo Street and around two corners on Grant. Human-driven cars sat stuck behind and in between the robotaxis, which might as well have been boulders: no one knew how to move them. [more inside]
At about 11 p.m. Friday, as many as 10 Cruise driverless taxis blocked two narrow streets in the center of the city’s lively North Beach bar and restaurant district. All traffic came to a standstill on Vallejo Street and around two corners on Grant. Human-driven cars sat stuck behind and in between the robotaxis, which might as well have been boulders: no one knew how to move them. [more inside]
“Companies may need to be ready to defend themselves.”
The Legal Assault on Corporate Diversity Efforts Has Begun [WSJ gift link] "Employment lawyers say it is likely a matter of time before one of these cases reaches the Supreme Court." Last month, a group of GOP state attorneys general sent a letter to Fortune 100 companies warning them against "race-based preferences in hiring, promotions and contracting." [gift link] The Democratic Attorneys General Association responded with their own letter "pushing back against claims that common efforts to diversify workplaces violate state or federal discrimination laws." [more inside]
Hustle AI
“If they fail to see it, are they even human?”
A 2010 instructional music video, for businesses who have been advised to “Redesign Your Logo”, by Neil Cicierega. (previously)
privatization, technological innovation & other familiar bromides
The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. Review essay by Laleh Khalili on When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm. A US government website records federal contracts given to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and others. Homeland Security and the Pentagon paid lavishly for ‘engaging human-centred design’, developing a ‘culture of continuous improvement’ and other meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms. Two contracts with the federal procurement agency, which earned McKinsey $1 billion between 2006 and 2019, had to be terminated because the company refused to submit to an audit. [more inside]
P.S. THIS IS THE MOST FUN WE'VE HAD ON JUNK MAIL IN A LONG TIME! THANKS!
What was it like working at Atari between 1983 and 1992? I dunno, but if you want to know what sort of emails employees sent each other you should browse atariemailarchive.org
Looking for $100,000 Salary?
See How Much the Biggest U.S. Companies Pay Workers Bigger paydays are on the way for many workers this year—for top earners and those lower down the scales. Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 4.40% is raising its cap on base pay to $350,000 from $160,000, while Apple Inc. AAPL -0.53% said it would raise salaries and its minimum hourly wage for U.S. workers to $22. Starbucks Corp. SBUX 2.33% has promised raises of at least 5% for baristas who have worked for two or more years, and Bank of America Corp. BAC 0.49% is lifting its minimum U.S. wage to $22 an hour starting in July.
“This company proposes to operate a metaverse”
What The Hell Is This Company The 76ers Just Partnered With? by Maitreyi Anantharaman and Chris Thompson for Defector, is an investigation info basketball team Philadelphia 76ers’ newest partner, Color Star, whose CEO, sir Lucas Capetian, almost certainly doesn’t exist.
Insert coin to continue driving
Toyota charges a monthly fee to remote start your car with your key fob. They're not alone: automakers are moving toward subscriptions for everything from GPS to lane-keeping assist to heated seats. With billions of dollars in potential revenue at stake, car companies want to change from "an industry that sells products to an industry that sells services and products."
Milkshakes: the fidget toy for commuters
Almost half of all fast-food milkshakes were purchased in the morning, by commuters who wanted something to do during their drive. Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen explains the job of a milkshake (YouTube). (text article)
Amazon poised to pass UPS, FedEx to become largest US delivery service
Amazon has been steadily building up vast logistics and fulfillment operations since a 2013 holiday fiasco left its packages stranded in the hands of outside carriers. Bank of America analysts predicted Amazon delivered 58% of its own packages in 2019, making it the fourth-largest delivery service nationwide, according to Digital Commerce 360. By last August, Amazon was estimated to be delivering 66% of its own packages.
Amazon’s in-house delivery operations have become a major advantage during this year’s holiday shopping season, which has been particularly challenging due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a global supply chain crunch and labor shortages.
Beyond leveraging its own trucks and planes, Clark said Amazon has been shipping goods to new ports to avoid blockages.
Delta Air Lines to require workers be vaccinated or pay
Delta Air Lines said Wednesday that it will require employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or face the alternative of weekly testing and a $200 monthly surcharge for health insurance. (SLWaPo) (alt, non-paywall source) [more inside]
Cannabiz
What Do You Do With A Billion Grams Of Surplus Weed? Cannabis legalization was supposed to be a licence to print money. Three years on, nobody is turning a profit
Being the only poor person at a tech startup
“I freaked out and cheered over a bonus only to watch the rest of my team quietly put their checks in their wallets and say nothing.” Meg Elison relates some of her experiences being the only person at a tech startup who had to worry about money.
Efficiency is the enemy
Why people and organizations need to not look busy "Any time we eliminate slack, we create a build-up of work. DeMarco writes, “As a practical matter, it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering at each employee’s desk. That means there is an inbox where work stacks up." [more inside]
Feeling Unsure Shouldn’t Make You an Imposter
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. Writing in the Harvard Business Review (limited free articles), Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey examine how and why the idea of imposter syndrome has been approached as an individual pathology rather than a symptom of systemic issues in business culture.
(h/t to Anne Helen Petersen's substack; "imposter syndrome" was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in their study The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. (pdf link)) [more inside]
A New Skipper At The Helm Of Amazon
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has announced his plans to step down as CEO in the latter half of 2021, with AWS head Andy Jassy to take over the position. (SLCNBC) [more inside]
Little Bobby Tables, LTD
A UK business decided to make a splash with their corporate name = by formally registering a cross site scripting (XSS) attack as one, waiting to confound anyone who read the list of corporate names without sanitizing the results. (SLRegister) [more inside]
Mine Safety Disclosures Presents
The (Not Failing) New York Times - "How The New York Times went from failing newspaper to thriving digital subscription business."
"Burning down parts of the city was one of the most popular solutions"
Office vacancies worldwide are expected to peak at 15.6% in 2022. Office leasing is not expected to get back to "normal" until 2025. How does that affect... stuff? [more inside]
Rooms Full of People
Is Palantir's Crystal Ball Just Smoke and Mirrors? Peter Thiel-backed surveillance giant Palantir Technologies (previously) is set to go public September 30. Long controversial for its secrecy and involvement with the more unsavory parts of the national security state (e.g., ICE, CIA, NSA), Palantir is under scrutiny for its financial woes -- it posted a $600 million loss in 2018 and in 2019 -- and for whether its product even works as advertised. Palantir portrays its software as like its namesake — a crystal ball you gaze into for answers... But the truth is that it still appears to take a lot of manual labor to make it work, and there’s nothing magical about that.
We only need each other
In How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age? (The New Yorker), Hua Hsu reviews William Deresiewicz's new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (Bookshop). Deresiewicz writes artists “do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love ... Wanting to get paid does not mean that you’re a capitalist ... It doesn’t even mean that you assent to capitalism. It only means that you live in a capitalist society.” [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses)
Both terrible and beautiful things have happened, are happening, and will continue to happen. Nothing will be unchanged, including board games. Yes, the coronavirus will change board games. That’s what I want to talk about today. [more inside]
This is Not a Democracy, It's a Cheerocracy
Matt Stoller writes about Varsity Brands, and its stranglehold on cheerleading: "The most unpopular extractive arrangement for many of its contests is “Stay to Play,” where non-local teams must book a high-priced Varsity-approved hotel to play in the competition. Staying with a friend or a cheaper place gets a team kicked out of the tournament, and the gym owner fined. These tactics inflated prices in the primary market for cheer competitions, and in the secondary market of apparel and equipment. They also just make cheerleading less fun, or as one person told me, they “kill the spirit of cheer.” [more inside]
Will The Last One Out Please Turn Off the LED Smart Bulb?
General Electric exits the lightbulb business after finally finding a buyer for its lighting unit and will be selling off its last consumer-facing business after more than 120 years of operation. The lighting business is GE's oldest segment, dating all the way back to the company's founding through a series of mergers with Thomas Edison's companies in the late 1880s and early 1890s. [more inside]
Look who's redefining marriage now
Magic Valley NAPA franchise changes health plan to prevent same-sex spouses from receiving insurance (wayback link) [more inside]
The Battle For The Blue Bird
Current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has routinely come under fire for his management of Twitter. But even given the repeated criticism, Dorsey has never faced an actual challenge to his running of the social media company.
Until now. Republican donor and "activist" investor Paul Singer is, through his investment firm Elliott Management, looking to enter into a hostile takeover of Twitter, with the intent of removing Dorsey as CEO. [more inside]
Until now. Republican donor and "activist" investor Paul Singer is, through his investment firm Elliott Management, looking to enter into a hostile takeover of Twitter, with the intent of removing Dorsey as CEO. [more inside]
"We saw, every day, the effects of giving somebody freedom"
Remember a few years ago when the owner of a credit card payment processing company based in Seattle raised the minimum wage of his employees to $70,000/yr while taking a huge pay-cut himself and capitalists the world over, afraid of their beloved & apparently suuuuper delicate system collapsing from such madness, flipped out? The BBC recently checked in with Gravity Payments and its owner Dan Price to see how things were going. Pretty damn well, as it turns out. (via, h/t Chrysostom)
Ma Yu Ching's Bucket Chicken House (est. 1153)
“The games retail market is dying.”
Hard Sell: GameStop employees report extreme pressure from ‘desperate’ bosses [Polygon] “In more than a dozen interviews with Polygon, current and former GameStop employees spoke of a tightening regime of strict sales targets and intrusive customer scripts, designed to extract as much value as possible from the company’s dwindling base. All the employees we spoke to said they were concerned about the future of the company. Most reported their customer numbers had decreased noticeably in the last year. “I’ve seen a change in the sheer desperation the company has towards its profit margins,” said one store manager with multiple years’ experience at the company. “The company is frantic and distrustful,” said one assistant manager. “You can feel it in every message they send. The structure is falling apart and they’re scrambling.” “I think they’ll close a thousand stores this year,” said one former store manager with many years’ retail experience.” [more inside]
The Consultants Behind Every Crisis
“ McKinsey has faced mounting scrutiny over the past two years, as reports by The New York Times, ProPublica and others have raised questions about whether the firm has crossed ethical and legal lines in pursuit of profit. The consultancy returned millions of dollars in fees after South African authorities implicated it in a profiteering scheme. The exposure of its history advising opioid makers on ways to bolster sales induced the usually secretive firm to declare publicly that its opioid work had ended. Last month, the Times reported that McKinsey’s bankruptcy practice is the subject of a federal criminal investigation.“ How McKinsey Helped the Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants (ProPublica/NYT) “ From top to bottom, the post-1970s job insecurity, legitimated by #McKinsey ideas, intertwined with the industrial undocumented workforce that made #Silicon Valley possible.” (Twitter)