Woo! It’s been a while since I posted, so some of these are a bit old at this point.
That’s okay, though! I’ll get through what I can.
by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic
An essay on extreme language common in job listings. As a tech-worker these have become normal to me (rock star coder or whatever) but it’s more uncomfortable when seen in other contexts:
Alley, a co-working space in New York, seeks a social-media and marketing manager at the company who is “one part visionary, one part online warrior, one part pop-culture guru, a dash of precocious energy, mixed with a little lyrical whimsey, and served with a shot of espresso.”
lol:
You can’t just be willing to do the job. You must evince an all-consuming horniness for menial corporate tasks. In an American labor market where wages are stagnant and many workers feel their jobs seeping into their personal time, such demands only create even more anxiety and dread for Americans looking for a new gig.
And yet:
In a survey ZipRecruiter conducted last year, [Ian Siegel, the CEO] says, most employers said they were focusing all their recruiting efforts on job listings themselves. “Instead of doing things like lowering the skills required or improving the pay, it was all about how much they were spending on more job boards or more recruiting solutions,” Siegel says. “There was a real resistance to responding to the market that was telling you that if you want to get good talent, you have to improve your offer.”
by Taylor Telford, Patricia Sullivan, Hannah Denham and John D. Harden, The Washington Post
In May, the average home price in Arlington County — the future home of Amazon’s second headquarters known as HQ2 — was $713,000, up about 7 percent from a year ago. And in April, the average price hit $742,000, or more than 11 percent above the same month in 2018, according to The Post’s analysis. Real estate agents and local economists said inventories are so sparse that some popular Zip codes in Arlington and Alexandria show no homes for sale at all. They added that investors are pouring into the market, looking to turn homes into rental properties.
After reading that bit I wondered how that compared to the prior few years, or to comparable DC-area markets in the same year. I may not be asking the right specific question - but I really don’t know how to contextualize the 7%/11% numbers.
by Jeffrey Young, HuffPost
This piece is on the sorts of family secrets that would have remained hidden if not for the newer genetic testing products (23 And Me, &c.) - both in terms of getting results you didn’t expect (mis-paternity) and the social-network-like connections that get made on the basis of genetics.
It seems like these potentially-negative outcomes should be forseeable by the manufacturers/service-providers - and I question if the consumers had enough information about these risks to appropriately consent to provide their information in this way.
These companies are a weird hybrid of a medical(-ish) service provider (genetic testing) and social-network (linking up genetic-relatives) which adds a conflict of interest - on the service-provider side the ethical issues around consent are important to customer-satisfaction, but more disclosures could limit the data collected and reduce the value of the network(/research-database).
See also A Brutal Inheritance by Virginia Hughes (on BuzzFeed News).
by Michael Sainato, Gizmodo
The company is pledging to spend $800 million this quarter to achieve one-day delivery as the default shipping option for all prime members. But this planned growth has incited concerns from workers, contract delivery carriers, and logistics analysts over how Amazon is seeking to dominate another sector of the economy.
This article goes over Amazon’s squeezing of its delivery independent-contractors (and other labor hazards) in the context of the company’s efforts to achieve one-day prime shipping in the US.
I’ve a feeling Amazon would be squeezing contractors either way, really.
[A former driver for an Amazon delivery contractor] noted the contractor paid workers a flat rate per day and regardless of the hours worked, the daily pay rate always stayed the same. Current job listings for contractors delivering Amazon products cite daily pay rates and note “your wage is up to you!”
by Douglas Starr, Science Magazine via HN
This was a great piece on the psychology of interrogation, and how specific US policies can encourage false-confessions (and what alternate policies could look like). The HN thread has an interesting diversion in to polygraph testing as used by the US govt. for security clearance.
by Bengt Halvorson, Motor Authority via HN
I pretty much never drive, so I could be missing something, but I really don’t understand how touch-screen controls for things a driver needs to interact with are at all defensible.
The HN thread mentions Tesla, where crucial interactions are done through buttons (or something?) on the steering wheel.
Tablet-like touchscreens have become the ubiquitous interfaces of choice, and they’re seemingly everywhere in daily life, on everything from thermostats to coffee makers and refrigerators. But Mazda really doesn’t think they belong in cars—or at least anywhere near the driver’s seat.
It wasn’t a decision that was hastily made, according to company officials. However, as they started studying the effects of touchscreens on driving safety (and driving comfort), it soon became clear what the priorities should be with this completely new system that makes its debut in the 2019 Mazda 3.
It started out by looking at actual times—the times spent looking away from the road to make a screen selection, and the time needed to refocus the eyes on something close versus the road ahead—and decided that it needed to home in on factors that reduced that time.
by Jay Greene and Abha Bhattarai, The Washington Post
[Recent moves by the company] could help Amazon attract a new customer group that has long been loyal to Walmart and its more than 4,700 U.S. stores, many sprinkled throughout rural and lower-income communities. But it also comes attached with some risk for the shoppers: For example, Amazon’s newest credit card’s interest rate tops 28 percent.
On the plus side:
Amazon — along with Walmart — is also part of a pilot program by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow SNAP participants to select and pay for groceries online.
by Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker via HN
The author supposes that the book-value of a corporation matters most when capital is itself expensive (that is, interest rates are high). In a perpetual low-interest rate environment you’d expect companies who’s differentiators aren’t captures by their book-value (i.e. AirBnB and WeWork, who don’t own properties they rent) can see valuations un-moored from what would have been traditional valuations in a more “normal” environment.
It’s interesting to consider that the valuations in some of these companies is more than just hype and has an actual rational basis - but its hard to know in anything but hindsight if this is just wishful investors chanting “but this time it’s different.” Rates have been low for a very long time - at what point is it not an aberration, and instead normal investment reality? I’m not making any bets that would imply an answer to that question.