News You Can Use: 10/3/2018

Social Media is Exhausting

  • You’re Probably Not Even Thinking About One of Social Media’s Biggest Dangers

    When people start sharing information with the public, it can open up doors for the information to be used against them. Details like full name, date of birth, hometown and even school locations and dates of graduation can become dangerous in the wrong hands. Social media platforms typically require your name and your date of birth, but most platforms will give you the option to not make the information shareable.

    Beyond basic information, be careful about what you post. Of course, you should not share your debit/credit card and social security numbers with people online, but images can be dangerous, too. A few examples would be things like posting a picture of your new car and not covering your license plate number or sharing event details that contain your home address.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/320172

  • More tech companies drop college degree requirement

    “In 2017, IBM’s vice president of talent, Joanna Daley told CNBC Make It that about 15 percent of her company’s U.S. hires don’t have a four-year degree. She said that instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational class,” according to this CNBC article.

    Now, Apple, Google and EY are joining the ranks of companies that don’t require a degree, according to a list from Glassdoor.com.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3309059/careers-staffing/more-tech-companies-drop-college-degree-requirement.html

  • Career advice from the “Edison of medicine”
  • LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Warns of Perils in Regulating Big Tech

    If Facebook was restricted and slowed down, maybe what we’d all have is [China’s] WeChat. So, instead of having Facebook as our platform, which is a thing we can evolve in, it’s actually in fact a Chinese company that’s doing it. It’s like simply saying, “Oh, we’re a monopoly in the whole world, and we’re gonna slow down our industry as a way of [solving tech problems],” but that is not a very rational policy.

    Tech needs to do a much better job being transparent. But I prefer a pattern where the government says, “We want you to show you’re having the following improving impact on society. If you’re doing that, we don’t need regulation.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/linkedins-co-founder-warns-of-perils-in-regulating-big-tech-1537967181?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Elon Musk is sad and disappointed by the SEC’s fraud charges

    Reached for comment, a Tesla spokesperson sent the following statement from Musk:

    “This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way.”

    Later, Tesla sent a second statement, this one a joint statement from the company and board of directors:

    “Tesla and the board of directors are fully confident in Elon, his integrity, and his leadership of the company, which has resulted in the most successful US auto company in over a century. Our focus remains on the continued ramp of Model 3 production and delivering for our customers, shareholders and employees.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90243445/read-the-secs-full-fraud-complaint-against-tesla-ceo-elon-musk

Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 9/26/2018

The Source: Staying nonpartisan

  • Google CEO Warns Staff: Stay Nonpartisan

    In a staff memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Pichai told employees, known as “Googlers,” that the company has strict policies against letting political views influence the products they create.

    “We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,” Mr. Pichai said. “The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them accountable.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ceo-warns-staff-stay-nonpartisan-1537580004?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Amazon Is a Giant. But Bigness Isn’t a Crime.

    Many in the field point to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the 2004 case of Verizon v. Trinko. It examined the question of whether Verizon was required, under antitrust law, to provide competitors wholesale access to its telephone network.

    “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free market system,” Justice Scalia wrote.

    In this view, there is no crime in being monopolist; the crime is in abusing that power. According to Justice Scalia, a healthy monopoly “induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-is-a-giant-but-bigness-isnt-a-crime-1537534900?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • An astronaut’s guide to risk taking | Chris Hadfield
  • How to Successfully Delegate Work to Someone Else

    Even if you don’t have a specific “deadline” for a delegated task, come up with an arbitrary one that you give someone the first time you pass a responsibility their way. A reasonable deadline can make sure the task doesn’t get forgotten and can give you a good idea of when you can expect the work to be completed.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-successfully-delegate-work-to-someone-else-1829254908

  • Hate your cubicle? Thank medieval monks

    But medieval monks may have been the first to use cubicles–or a scriptorium, as it was called–as they worked on manuscripts. These writing rooms were also used by lay scribes and illuminators.

    Botticelli’s painting of St. Augustine in his cell depicts a small three-walled alcove with a curtain, further suggesting that such work in Renaissance times was done in secluded spaces to maximize focus. Coincidentally, this painting hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, which was originally the central administrative building of the Medici empire.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90236769/hate-your-cubicle-thank-medieval-monks

Photo by Angelo Pantazis on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 9/12/2018

The Source: Avoiding Deadlines

  • 44 Percent of Americans 18-27 Have Deleted the Facebook App This Year, Poll Finds

    According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Facebook users ages 18 and older have adjusted their privacy settings in the wake of revelations that Facebook repeatedly failed to protect consumer data as it was shared and abused by a myriad of Facebook partners, including political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.

    The study also notes that around 42 percent of Facebook users have chosen to take a break from the social platform of several weeks or more, with a quarter of users choosing to delete the Facebook app from their phones entirely in the last year.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3q5nk/44-percent-of-americans-18-27-have-deleted-the-facebook-app-this-year-poll-finds

  • When should you take a mental health day?

    It is generally not a good idea to take a mental health day spontaneously. That is, if you wake up in the morning and dread going to work, don’t use that feeling as a reason to call in sick. Stress and anxiety are emotional experiences you have when there is something in your world you are trying to avoid. If you call in sick when you feel this way, you are laying down a memory that can start to create a habit to respond to stress and anxiety by actually avoiding work that may need to be done. You don’t want your go-to response to stress to be to run away from it.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90225167/when-is-it-ok-to-take-a-mental-health-day

  • 3 steps to money mastery: Would you rather have freedom or stuff?
  • Confessions of a young ad agency staffer: ‘If you leave for lunch, you get that side-eye’

    In the ad agency world, people who are very young stress themselves until they get sick because they want so badly to be perfect. Everyone I know who is young who works in this business is like, ‘I have to be amazing, I have to get promoted.’ Everyone who is older is so jaded. They just don’t want to work anymore. My boss works from home twice a week and takes calls from home.

    Do you feel like multiple people should be doing your job?

    I handle seven different parts of our client’s business. It’s crazy. I feel like there should be a manager and someone to assist them for every piece of business I work on. They don’t hire enough people. When someone goes on vacation, we have to sit down and train everybody on what we’re doing. It’s very inefficient. I think that to save money they try to cram as many of us onto as many clients and campaigns as possible.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-young-ad-agency-staffer-leave-lunch-get-side-eye/

  • Not all popular YouTubers are raking in cash for their videos

    Marshall says his decision to use “real music” you’d hear on the radio severely cuts into the actual profit turned by his channel. Where the profits for a monetized video that uses music in the public domain would be split between the creator and YouTube, the record labels that own the top-40 tracks take “all of the money, and we are left with zero.” These videos can still be profitable if the YouTuber and the label can reach an agreement; otherwise, monetizing videos with copyrighted music is virtually out of the question. “Out of … 147 videos, we are monetizing 11,” he says in a video explaining his earnings. “That’s 7 percent. We are monetizing 7 percent of the content that we put out.”

    According to Marshall, the only way the team is able to continue making videos is through people buying merch, tickets to their tour (roughly $30 a ticket for general admission, according to a recent sale), or by buying a $4.99 channel membership for special perks. (This model is similar to the one employed by mid-range musicians, who also rely on merch and ticket sales, and independent writers and artists through platforms like Patreon.) “You’re supporting us. Just you buying a shirt, it’s silly … but it’s what allows us to keep doing this,” he explains.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17822822/youtube-youtubers-influencers-video-ad-revenue-subscribers-fitness-marshall

Photo by Chad Peltola on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 9/5/2018

The Source: Shrinking Family

  • Amazon becomes world’s second company to be valued at $1tn

    On Tuesday, a rise in the share price of Amazon, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US, briefly took it above the trillion-dollar watermark for the first time.
    **
    Bezos has become the world’s richest man in the process, with a net worth estimated at more than $167bn on Tuesday, according to Forbes.

    Amazon went public at $18 a share in 1997 – on Tuesday those shares hit $2,050, pushing the value of the whole company over $1tn. Amazon ended the day valued at $995bn, just short of its new record.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/04/amazon-becomes-worlds-second-1tn-company

  • Why work has failed us: Because it’s making it impossible to start a family

    It now costs $31,000 more (adjusted for inflation) to raise a child from infancy to the age of 18 than it did in 1960. Between 1985 and 2011 alone, the cost of childcare went up by 70%, even though wages barely grew. Given that the cost of food, diapers, transportation, and housing has either gone down or stayed the same, this increase largely comes down to the ballooning cost of paying for other people to look after our children.

    This was the exact same period in which women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers. Between 1962 and 2000, women’s labor force participation increased from 37% to 61%, leading to an estimated $2 trillion in economic gains. But in a disconcerting twist, women’s workforce participation actually started declining between 2000 to 2016, dipping from 60.7% to 57.2%. Pew Research suggests that the rising cost of childcare is likely responsible for the increase in stay-at-home moms over the last decades.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90223475/american-childcare-is-an-expensive-nightmare-is-it-fixable

  • A mental hack for surviving bad bosses
  • Sheryl Sandberg’s New Job Is to Fix Facebook’s Reputation—and Her Own

    Now, Ms. Sandberg’s mandate is to spend a majority of her time on safety and security vulnerabilities. She formed a SWAT team to do what she and other Facebookers had struggled with when faced with a crisis: bridge the gap between the technical and business sides of the company to act decisively. The new team makes recommendations to the group of Facebook’s top executives that meet every Friday—known internally as the M-team—with Ms. Sandberg running the show, according to a person familiar with the operations. The shift “from reactive to proactive detection is a big change,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in August.

    Many of the changes that are being put in place to clean up the Facebook platform will be expensive and could have an impact on growth, putting a brake on the ad-revenue machine that Ms. Sandberg built. In July, when Facebook reported that a surprise slowdown in revenue growth for the second quarter was likely to continue along with an unexpected increase in costs for security and privacy, investors shaved almost $120 billion in value from the company’s valuation—the biggest one-day loss ever for a U.S.-listed company.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-gale-of-bad-news-at-facebook-1536085230

  • Consider these things before jumping ship with your coworkers

    Furthermore, if you’re generally happy at work and have a bunch of colleagues leaving, that could serve as an opportunity for you to take over some of their responsibilities and prove what a valuable asset you are to the company. Being that person who shows those incoming new hires the ropes can also help you stand out to your employer and perhaps pave the way to a promotion.

    On the other hand, if you’re not necessarily in love with your job and don’t see a compelling reason to stay, you might consider jumping ship along with your colleagues. This especially holds true if your work is collaborative in nature, and you feel that losing those coworkers will substantially impact day-to-day life at the office.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90228545/consider-these-things-before-jumping-ship-with-your-coworkers

News You Can Use: 8/29/2018

The Source: Gig Economy

  • It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs

    Over these four decades we have seen an increase in the use of day laborers, office temps, management consultants, contract assemblers, adjunct professors, Blackwater mercenaries and every other kind of worker filing an I.R.S. form 1099. These jobs span the income ranks, but they share what all work seems to have in common in the post-1970s economy: They are temporary and insecure.

    In the last 10 years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment. Already approximately one-third of workers, and half of young workers, participate in this alternative world of work, either as a primary or a supplementary source of income.

    Internet technologies have certainly intensified this development (even though most freelancers remain offline). But services like Uber and online freelance markets like TaskRabbit were created to take advantage of an already independent work force; they are not creating it. Their technology is solving the business and consumer problems of an already insecure work world. Uber is a symptom, not a cause.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/opinion/technology/technology-gig-economy.html

  • Big ‘Epic Fails’ Can Feel Like a Punch in the Gut. What Should You Do After?

    Whether it’s a client, a boss or your team, don’t wait to reach out. The key is to learn all of the facts first. Together with your team, iterate a heart-felt and honest response before the end of the day via email or in preparation for a live conversation. It is important not to let more than a few hours pass so that your client and your team can see that you place a heightened yet thoughtful sense of urgency. Blame does not matter and there is no room to take a tit-for-tat approach, nor to overly explain the reasons for the perceived or qualified failure. Instead, take personal accountability for the negative experiences and/or outcomes expressed by your client. Thoughtfully respond with words that explicitly reflect the examples of failure relayed by your clients. Reiterate your company’s mission and your personal commitment to ensuring customer delight. If it makes sense, offer to refund a portion of the costs.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316096

  • The death of America’s middle class: Sky-high rent, second jobs, and 1% TV
  • Sorry, Pal, I Don’t Want to Talk: The Other Reason People Wear AirPods

    Dave Luis, 44, head of marketing for a hospitality startup in Dubai, heard a friend complain about insouciant colleagues wearing AirPods during business meetings.

    “She found it incredibly rude and offensive,” Mr. Luis said. “I’d recently bought mine. Every time we met, she’d actually make a point of asking me to remove these from my ears.”

    Mr. Luis posted a poll on his Facebook page asking for opinions about wearing the devices during meetings. He said he was surprised to find that only 9% of his 80-plus friends found it acceptable.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-pal-i-dont-want-to-talk-the-other-reason-people-wear-airpods-1534949793

  • The secret to getting work done in an open office

    Where people sit is another consideration. “You can’t mix sales, which is naturally a loud process, with developers, designers, or writers,” says Fried. “They go at a different pace. Different jobs require different environments. People who need to make noises are special; we’ve made focus the primary default.”

    By making choices and implementing strategies, Basecamp employees can be focused and undistracted even though spaces are all out in the open. “You don’t have to feel like you have to hide to find quiet; quiet is the default here,” says Fried. “Noise is the exception, and it’s in isolated spaces.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90218546/the-secret-to-getting-work-done-in-an-open-office