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29 MAR 2019 · The Atlantic
America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.
The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.
But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.
Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.
“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”
Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.
Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.
Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”
Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”
That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.
As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.
In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.
This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.
In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”
According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)
In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)
Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”
His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.
Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.
Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.
Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)
Barbara Stengel,
29 MAR 2019 · Popular Science
On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, when a Volvo SUV traveling at 39 miles per hour hit and killed her. Although she was one of thousands of U.S. pedestrians killed by vehicles every year, one distinctive—and highly modern—aspect set her death apart: Nobody was driving that Volvo. A computer was.
A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about technology making life-and-death decisions. Twelve months later, a survey by AAA revealed that 71 percent of Americans were too scared to zip around in a totally autonomous ride—an eight percent increase from a similar poll taken before Herzberg’s death.
Self-driving cars are already cruising our streets, their spinning lasers and other sensors scanning the world around them. Some are from big companies such as Waymo—part of Google’s parent conglomerate Alphabet—or General Motors, while others are the work of outfits you might not have heard of, including Drive.ai or Aptiv. (Uber operated the Volvo involved in Arizona’s fatal crash and took its self-driving cars off the roads for about nine months afterward.) But what makes some of us so wary of these robotic chauffeurs, and how can they earn our trust?
To understand these questions, it first helps to consider what psychologists call the theory of mind. Put simply, it’s the recognition that other people have brains in their heads that are busy thinking, just like ours (usually) are. The theory comes in handy on the road. Before we venture into a crosswalk, we might first make eye contact with a driver and then think, He sees me, so I’m safe, or He doesn’t, so I’m not. It’s a technique we likely use more than we realize, both behind the wheel and on our feet. “We know how other people are going to act because we know how we would act,” explains Azim Shariff, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, who has written about this issue in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
But you can’t make eye contact with an algorithm. Autonomous cars generally have backup humans ready to take control if necessary, but when the car is in self-driving mode, the computer’s in charge. “We’re going to have to learn a theory of the machine mind,” Shariff says. What that means in practice is that self-driving cars will need to provide clear signals—and not just turn signals—to let the public know what that machine mind is planning.
One solution comes from Drive.ai, a company running self-driving vans in Texas. The bright-orange-and-blue vehicles have LED signs on all four sides that respond to the environment with messages. They can tell a pedestrian who wants to cross in front of the car, “Waiting for You.” Or they can warn them: “Going Now/Please Wait.” A related strategy is intended for passengers, not pedestrians: Screens in Waymo vehicles show car occupants a simple, animated version of what the autonomous vehicle is seeing. Those displays can also show what the car is doing, like if it’s pausing to allow a human to cross. “Trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable to somebody else,” Shariff says. “We engage in it because we can pretty easily predict what the other person will do.” All of which means that if the cars are predictable and do what they say they will do, people will be more likely to trust them. Sound familiar?
Communicating with the machine mind is important, but that doesn’t mean we want it to mimic exactly how humans think and act while driving. In fact, the promise of traveling by autonomous car is that silicon brains won’t do dumb things such as text and drive, or drink and drive, or rocket down the highway while upset after a breakup. (Cars don’t date.) “I believe that they have the potential to be safer” than regular cars, says Marjory S. Blumenthal, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation think tank who has researched the vehicles. But she says there’s not enough good data yet to know for sure.
One practical way to create a reputation for safety is to start slow. The University of Michigan’s pair of self-driving shuttles go just 12 miles per hour. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering who oversees the little buses, says the research team behind the project is building trust by not asking too much: The predetermined route is just about a mile long, so they’re not exactly speeding down a highway in the snow. “We’re trying to push the envelope but in a very cautious way,” Peng says. Like other experts, Peng compares self-driving cars to elevators: an initially frightening technology that people eventually got used to.
Ultimately, not everyone will have to trust driverless cars enough to go for a ride, and especially not at first. Indeed, the public isn’t homogeneous, says Raj Rajkumar, who directs the Metro21: Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He notices three categories of potential users: tech skeptics, who know that their computer crashes and worry about getting into a vehicle controlled by one; early adopters, who are delighted by the promise of new tech; and people who are stressed by driving and would rather not do it if they don’t have to. The early adopters will buy in first, followed by the folks who just dislike driving, and then finally the skeptics, he argues. “So it’s a long process.” Trust grows like a self-driving shuttle drives: slowly.
26 MAR 2019 · Washington Post
The phones have turned on us. Our little pocket pals seduced us with cheap long distance, unlimited texts, endless apps. Now they beep and shudder and flash with strange numbers at all hours of the day. We answer, and our beloved iPhone (or Android, or bedside landline) impales our eardrum with a cruiseline ad. It tries to sell us a medical back brace. It threatens to jail us unless we wire our life savings to the IRS.
Spam bots nest in call centers on every continent, spewing out phone calls by the millions, saturating the communication networks. Spam and scams swarm through our phones like Hitchcock’s birds down the living-room chimney. There is no escape.
More than 10 billion robo-calls have been placed so far in 2019, by call-blocking company YouMail’s estimate — almost double the same period a year before. Another report by First Orion, the call-blocking and caller-ID tech company, estimates that nearly half of all cellphone calls will be scams at some point this year.
Assuming the plague ever subsides, how will we forgive our phones?
Press 1 to be transferred to the nightmare realm.
“It started off two or three a day. As time went by, it went to 50 or 60,” said Matt Briscoe, who switched cell-service providers last summer and brought home the telephonic equivalent of a roach-infested couch.
Briscoe, who runs a community newspaper in Corpus Christi, Tex., hears from far more spambots than humans these days. On March 11 alone, he declined 44 calls purporting to originate from the 704 area code in Albemarle, N.C. — which, given the prevalence of number spoofing, probably means the caller is anywhere but Albemarle, N.C.
“This thing is just buzzing in my pocket constantly,” Briscoe said, shortly before his conversation with The Washington Post was interrupted by his eighth spam call of the morning. “If it’s something that seems odd, I won’t answer. If I do, nine times out of 10, it’s: ‘Hello! Would you like to be connected to a health insurance specialist?’ ”
He has the voice down pat: the cheerful, soulless “Hello!” of a spambot inviting you into an abyssal call center from which you may never return. You’ve probably heard such a voice yourself.
If not, you will.
Press 2 and scream to disconnect this call.
When Cabot Phillips stepped into the elevator at his apartment building in Alexandria, Va., one evening last month, the elevator was talking.
“Excuse me, is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?” a muffled, presumably human voice said from inside the emergency speaker. Phillips had assumed the speaker was for the fire department. Now, as he ascended to his home, it seemed to be asking him in broken English for $299 in IT charges.
“Sir, you are illegible for your labor, okay?” the spam said.
“Dude, you’re calling an elevator,” Phillips said, and proceeded to his door. He later reflected, “I was hoping an elevator was still a sacred location for peace.”
Press 3 for desperate prayer.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. Surely this is spam’s most powerful incarnation yet. Earlier outbreaks were at least contained to our email inboxes, or hampered by the relatively primitive telemarketing technology of the past century. Now spam teleports into our purses and nightstands and innermost lives, advertising gastric balloons, demanding debt payments, speaking languages we don’t understand. Spam dispatched by fly-by-night ministries even offers to pray for us.
If you plotted a graph of a phone call’s usefulness from Alexander Graham Bell’s first in 1876 until today, it would climb steadily through the 20th century, rocket skyward with the advent of mobile phones, and then take a U-turn and slap us around the ears with everything the machines have learned.
“We’ve returned right back to where we were in the ’80s,” said Jeffrey A. Hansen, an IT consultant who has testified as an expert witness in dozens of consumer lawsuits against robodialers. “Same software. The only difference now is computers are exponentially faster. Tens of millions [of calls] versus thousands.”
Hansen traces the phone spam era back to 1974, when two men in Colorado patented an “automatic telephone caller” that simply dialed numbers in numerical sequence — 555-1111, 555-1112 — and blared a prerecorded message at whomever picked up. The technology improved with cell centers’ profit margins. By the early 1980s, Computerworld magazine was advertising $13,000 Davox terminals that fused a monitor, keyboard and a phone handset into a telemarketer’s dream machine. Brrrrring brrrrring!
Press 4 if this sounds familiar.
In 1991, a committee room full of U.S. senators listened to an answering machine recording that had been annoying people across the country. A disembodied voice boomed over Hawaiian background music: “Just think about that, you and a friend or a loved one enjoying the beautiful beaches of Waikiki, and call me at 1-900-321-6666.”
“Telannoyers,” as some called them, were so endemic at the time that Congress passed laws restricting them, followed by the Do Not Call Registry in 2003. For a few years, it seemed like phone spam was contained. Then came the age of cellphones, international VoIP calls and offshore call centers that can mask their location to make it look like they are calling you from down the block. Then came the Trump administration’s deregulatory zeal, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai celebrated a 2018 court ruling undoing Obama-era restrictions on autodialers.
In April, a Senate subcommittee convened once again to discuss the phone-spam crisis. They interrogated a Florida telemarketer named Adrian Abramovich, who was accused of placing nearly 100 million robo-calls with spoofed caller IDs.
“I’m not the kingpin of robo-calling that is alleged,” Abramovich protested. “I receive four or five robo-calls a day. . . . I’ve been receiving more than ever, myself. Usually I never answer the phone.”
Press 0 to speak to the void.
Abramovich had a point; the problem goes far beyond any one person or call center. Despite the government’s $120 million dollar fine against him last May, the call-blocking company Hiya estimates spam calls increased nearly 50 percent in 2018. They come from all corners of the world — from the marketing departments of major American banks and from clandestine call centers hidden above bars in Delhi, India.
More and more, the spam makes us mistrustful of our own ears.
“I got one just the other night,” said Margot Saunders, senior counsel for the National Consumer Law Center. “Someone said, ‘Hello Cathy.’ I said, there’s no Cathy here. A voice said, ‘Oh, that’s okay. Since I got you . . . .’ It took a few minutes to figure out I wasn’t talking to a real person. It’s a robot! There’s a company making snippets of recorded voice which operators in India press buttons to implement.”
Your torment may be recorded for quality assurance.
When Paul Romer got a 6 a.m. call from an unrecognized number at his home in New York last fall, he assumed it was spam and went back to sleep. He later learned it was from Sweden; he’d won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Courtney Kelsey, 21, made the same mistake when she answered her spam-infested iPhone in St. Louis this month, and the man on the other end struggled to pronounce her name.
“I asked him to — whatever list I’m on or wherever they’re calling from, could they take me off the list?” Kelsey recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t hear you. Is this Courtney?’ I just hung up.”
She ignored a second call, blocked the number and only later realized it was from the Ritz-Carlton, where she had applied for a serving job. Kelsey hadn’t managed to reschedule the job interview by the time she spoke to The Washington Post last week.
Stay on the line to repeat this call forever.
So it’s come to this. We confuse spambots for humans, and humans for spambots. The sci-fi author Charlie Stross once posited a future in which spam becomes so good at mimicking human interaction it becomes self-aware — the “Spamularity.” Is that what awaits us if the phones don’t shut up?
Saunders, the consumer group lawyer getting spammed by human simulacrums, says the nightmare could be over within months if the telecom giants would invest more in anti-spam technology, which is now spotty at best — or if the government would force them to (as the FCC’s Pai has now indicated he might). If not, she said, the unsustainable status quo will continue.
In the meantime, Briscoe — the Texas newspaper publisher besieged with health insurance calls from not-Albemarle, N.C. — has tried just about every spam-blocking app on the market.
“We’ve used RoboKiller. That hasn’t worked with this one at all,” he said. “Hiya. Truecaller. Mr. Number. Not even close.”
In desperation, he once tried staying on the line with the spam, perhaps hoping to plead for his sanity with the promised “health insurance specialist.”
Instead, he said, an agent asked him for his height, weight, birth date and social security number. When Briscoe asked for an insurance license number, the agent supplied one as fake as whatever $299 anti-virus software is sold in an elevator.
Finally, Briscoe asked his tormentor who he worked for.
“You didn’t want no [expletive] insurance anyway,” the agent replied and, for a change, hung up on him.
26 MAR 2019 · Bloomberg
What can we learn from the case of someone who turned $100,000 in short-dated call options into a $2.5 million profit?
As detailed in MarketWatch earlier this month, trader Steve Oliverez was pretty sure the Republican tax overhaul was going to be approved by Congress. Working with a data set of one -- the 1987 tax overhaul -- he correctly surmised that passage would be bullish for stocks.
His gamble paid off. Oliverez took his winnings, bought a new house with cash and took the rest of the year off to celebrate, traveling throughout the U.S., Southeast Asia and Japan. Who wouldn’t want to buy a new home and travel the world for a year? One trade, a huge return -- time to open that options-trading account and get in on the winnings.
No. Don't.
Investors need to beware of how highlighting one person's one winning trade is an invitation to trouble -- and losing money. Focusing on a single outcome 1 versus a repeatable process raises more questions than it answers, including:
-- Are these trade results statistically significant?
-- Was this trade the result of luck or skill?
-- What is the long-term track record of this approach?
-- Is it a repeatable strategy?
Poker champion Annie Duke notes that professional card players call the focus on what just occurred “resulting.” In her book “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts,” she explains the problem with this approach. “Resulting” assumes “the quality of the outcome tells you about the quality of the decision-making.” It doesn’t.
Looking at a single big winning trade suffers from this same error.
Resulting looks to me like a combination of several other behavioral problems: Availability bias (thinking that what comes easily to mind is representative) in what we read in online media; a degree of hindsight bias in the after-the-fact explanation as to why this was a good trade; some outcome-over-process focus as well. But perhaps the most important aspect of this is the survivorship bias: How many trades that were losers were not included in the discussion?
Some years ago, I pointed out how various lost-and-found trades are a classic example of survivorship bias. Two favorites are the lost EMC stock certificate and forgotten bitcoin purchase. In each case, the record of an investment was somehow misplaced. Many years later, when they were found, these positions had enormous gains.
Why survivorship bias? These big trade winners generate headlines, but the day-to-day run-of-the-mill wins and losses do not. Thus, you are more likely to learn about are the outsized gainers, with none of the offsetting losses provided for context. Let's cite a few headlines that you didn't see (because I made them up) to make the point:
-- Man Finds Worthless Lehman Brothers Stock in Attic
-- Woman Inherits 10 Million GM Shares Just Before Bankruptcy Filing
-- Misplaced AIG Shares Are Almost Worthless
-- Penny Stocks Found Under Mattress Lost All Value
OK, so these aren't real headlines, but they make the point. Yet, they reflect an important aspect of financial markets, or the fuller story about the vast majority of speculative trades. They are not newsworthy, and so a selection bias in what makes news means you never saw them. Some of the imagined events are no doubt true, but there is no reason that you would ever know about them.
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with speculating if done wisely and with eyes open. Take a small portion of your assets -- no more than 5 percent of your liquid net worth -- and dump them into a separate account. 2 Label it “speculative fund” and do whatever you want with that capital: become an angel investor, buy microcaps, trade options, whatever.
These sorts of accounts have several advantages: first, they are relatively small, so if the investments crash and burn, there is little harm done to your net worth. Indeed, it might even help prevent speculation with your real money, which could result in catastrophic losses.
Second, if any trade works out, you can let it ride. It is much easier to say, Sell your losers but hold onto your winners, than to actually do so. Try to find people who bought meaningful amounts of Apple Inc. circa 1997 or Amazon.com Inc. in 2009 and are still holding the shares today. When a trade works out so well it creates the equivalent of several decades worth of your normal earnings it is all but impossible to be unemotional and objective about it. Working with a small percentage of total assets avoids many of the usual loss-aversion issues that are so common.
Perhaps the most important lesson comes from Oliverez himself. “Even if you get a big payout from time to time, the longer you play the more you lose,” he said. That is smart, and it shows that he understands just how big a role luck played in his trade. So, let’s say congratulations to him, and learn the correct lessons from his successful speculation: Never confuse lucky gambles with a good investing strategy.
We discussed the trouble with anecdotes last month via Ray Wolfinger. He coined the original quote, “the plural of anecdote is data.” What he meant by this was that “anecdote might bevalid data leading to a potentially significant conclusion. For that reason, when an unusual anecdote captures one’s attention, it shouldn’t be casually dismissed, lest a deeper truth be missed.”
I suggest doing it at a different brokerage firm fromwhere you keep your real money. This makes it more difficult for you to transfer money into losing positions with merely a click.
11 MAR 2019 · The Atlantic
Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.
But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.
“I worry about all those diseases,” said Millar, 43, who has been homeless most of her life.
Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.
Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.
People in Washington State have been infected with the diarrheal disease shigella, spread through feces, as well as Bartonella quintana, or trench fever, which spreads through body lice.
Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio, and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.
Public-health officials and politicians are using terms like disaster and public-health crisis to describe the outbreaks, and they are warning that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population.
“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in his State of the State speech in February, citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County, and typhus in Los Angeles County.
“Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”
The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.
The diseases spread quickly and widely among people living outside or in shelters, helped along by sidewalks contaminated with human feces, crowded living conditions, weakened immune systems, and limited access to health care.
“The hygiene situation is just horrendous” for people living on the streets, says Glenn Lopez, a physician with St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, who treats homeless patients in Los Angeles County. “It becomes just like a Third World environment, where their human feces contaminate the areas where they are eating and sleeping.”
Those infectious diseases are not limited to homeless populations, Lopez warns: “Even someone who believes they are protected from these infections [is] not.”
At least one Los Angeles city staffer said she contracted typhus in City Hall last fall. And San Diego County officials warned in 2017 that diners at a well-known restaurant were at risk of hepatitis A.
There were 167 cases of typhus from January 1, 2018, through February 1 of this year, up from 125 in 2013 and 13 in 2008, according to the California Public Health Department.
Typhus is a bacterial infection that can cause a high fever, stomach pain, and chills but can be treated with antibiotics. Outbreaks are more common in overcrowded and trash-filled areas that attract rats.
The recent typhus outbreak began last fall, when health officials reported clusters of the flea-borne disease in downtown Los Angeles and Compton. They also have occurred in Pasadena, where the problems are likely due to people feeding stray cats carrying fleas.
Last month, the county announced another outbreak in downtown Los Angeles that infected nine people, six of whom were homeless. After city workers said they saw rodent droppings in City Hall, Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson briefly shut down his office to rip up the rugs, and he also called for an investigation and more cleaning.
Hepatitis A is caused by a virus usually transmitted when people come in contact with the feces of infected people. Most people recover on their own, but the disease can be very serious for those with underlying liver conditions. There were 948 cases of hepatitis A in 2017 and 178 in 2018 and 2019, the state public-health department said. Twenty-one people have died as a result of the 2017–18 outbreak.
The infections are not a surprise, given the lack of attention to housing and health care for the homeless and the dearth of bathrooms and places to wash hands, says Jeffrey Duchin, the health officer for Seattle and King County, Washington, which has seen shigella, trench fever, and skin infections among homeless populations.
“It’s a public-health disaster,” Duchin says.
New York City, where the majority of the homeless population lives in shelters rather than on the streets, has not experienced the same outbreaks of hepatitis A and typhus, says Kelly Duran, an emergency-medicine physician and assistant professor at New York University. But Duran says different infections occur in shelters, including tuberculosis, a disease that spreads through the air and typically infects the lungs.
The diseases sometimes get the “medieval” moniker because people in that era lived in squalid conditions without clean water or sewage treatment, says Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA.
People living on the streets or in homeless shelters are vulnerable to such outbreaks because their weakened immune systems are worsened by stress, malnutrition, and sleep deprivation. Many also have mental illness and substance-abuse disorders, which can make it harder for them to stay healthy or get health care.
On one recent February afternoon, the Saban Community Clinic physician assistant Negeen Farmand walked through homeless encampments in Hollywood carrying a backpack with medical supplies. She stopped to talk to a man sweeping the sidewalks. He said he sees “everything and anything” in the gutters and hopes he doesn’t get sick.
She introduced herself to a few others and asked if they had any health issues that needed checking. When she saw Millar, Farmand checked her blood pressure, asked about her asthma, and urged her to come see a doctor for treatment of her hepatitis C, a viral infection spread through contaminated blood that can lead to serious liver damage.
“To get these people to come into a clinic is a big thing,” she said. “A lot of them are distrustful of the health-care system.”
On another day, 53-year-old Karen Mitchell waited to get treated for a persistent cough by St. John’s Well Child & Family Center’s mobile health clinic. She also needed a tuberculosis test, as required by the shelter where she was living in Bellflower, California.
Mitchell, who said she developed alcoholism after a career in pharmaceutical sales, said she has contracted pneumonia from germs from other shelter residents. “Everyone is always sick, no matter what precautions they take.”
During the hepatitis-A outbreak, public-health officials administered widespread vaccinations, cleaned the streets with bleach and water, and installed hand-washing stations and bathrooms near high concentrations of homeless people.
But health officials and homeless advocates said more needs to be done, including helping people access medical and behavioral health care and affordable housing.
“It really is unconscionable,” says Bobby Watts, the CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, a policy and advocacy organization. “These are all preventable diseases.”
11 MAR 2019 · The Guardian
Consider the squishy. The point of the squishy, a palm-sized mass of polyurethane in the shape of a fruit or a croissant or a unicorn cat, occasionally scented with strawberry, is to squish. The point of the squishy is to be held in the hand of a person with energy that needs redirecting and for them to direct it into the soft heart of the squishy, to squeeze it into almost nothing in their palm, only for it to reinflate again, asking for more. In 1988 a TV writer called Alex Carswell threw a pen at a photo of his mother after a stressful phone call with his boss. It gave him an idea.
It was the “Age of Stress” – the Daily Mirror (among other newspapers) had identified it as “a killer” – and so the perfect time for Carswell to launch his “stress ball”. By the 1990s it had evolved from something squishy designed to be thrown into something squishy designed to be squeezed, and to be squeezed mainly by kids, who collected them in small scented families in their rucksacks. In a 2015 study of patients undergoing varicose vein surgery, those that handled stress balls reported feeling “less anxious”.
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“When you’re stressed, your body tightens up,” says Dr Kathleen Hall, founder of the Stress Institute, explaining why throwing or squeezing something feels good, “so a physical release helps to let go of some of that energy.” Carswell was not the first person to link a calming of the mind to a busy-ness of a hand – in 206 BC, the Han dynasty in China trained to stay mentally focused during combat by squeezing walnuts. The croissant squishy comes from an ancient place.
That repeated action led to fidget spinners becoming one of the most popular items bought on Amazon in 2017. They were not simply triangles of plastic; they were a stress-relief toy, a treatment for ADHD, an answer to smartphone addiction, a modern rosary – and the cause of moral panic, as teachers confiscated them as contraband. They were the stars of a growing anxiety economy.
Alongside products designed purely as medical aids, such as meditation apps, there is a thriving offshoot of lifestyle goods marketed through their anxiety-relieving qualities. Product innovation oriented around anxiety (encompassing stress, mood and sleep) spans nearly 30 different categories, including chocolate, yogurt, air fresheners, fabric conditioners and skincare. There is a company called Body Vibes which, for £30, will sell you a pack of anti-anxiety stickers that “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies”. Throw a squishy ball in the high street and you’re likely to hit something to cure your stress.
If the 80s were the age of stress, this is the age of anxiety, with 30% of Britons experiencing an anxiety disorder during their lifetime. “The NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, published in 2016, indicated that anxiety and depression affected about one in six people,” confirms consultant clinical psychologist Dr Nihara Krause, founder of youth mental health charity Stem4. This rise in anxiety coincides with a crisis in mental health care. And long waits for treatment often lead to more complications, and the problems multiply, a kind of silent mitosis, leading to even more pressure on the NHS as well as the patient. This has created a market for domestic anxiety cures that can be bought online, and fast.
“Because community services are cut,” says Krause, “there is little in the way of help for those who are unwell but don’t meet the threshold for acceptance to established services. And those who are severe can’t access help because specialist services are under-resourced. I am really keen on providing early intervention tools that are evidence-based and are therefore effective. Sadly there are a lot of products on the market that are not tested for their efficacy.”
Developed in the early 1990s by American engineer Catherine Hettinger, fidget spinners were designed as a calming tool, but when they went mainstream, marketers built on their medical promise simply by adjusting the aesthetics – much like adult colouring books, the publishing phenomenon of 2015 which sold millions due to their therapeutic mental health benefits; and more recently, the weighted blanket. In 2017 the sleep-health industry was worth between $30bn and $40bn. Mattresses were being marketed like iPads, iPads were swollen with sleep apps and the weighted blanket, a therapeutic aid, was redesigned as a chic lifestyle accessory.
A fleece Gravity Blanket costs £149 and is the colour of a Manchester sky. “Studies have shown that using a weighted blanket increases the level of serotonin and melatonin as well as reduces cortisol,” says its website. The company was founded by psychologist Joanna Goliszek. She ran a therapy centre in Poland, working with, she tells me, “an autistic boy with an urgent need for a weighted blanket. But most products available on the market were simply not affordable.” She started to manufacture them in her apartment and, in 2017, launched across Europe, reshifting their focus, the new customer being “everyone”. On Instagram, there are almost 32,000 posts with the #weightedblanket hashtag, including one from Tori Spelling, naked but for her blanket, explaining how it has changed her life by helping her sleep. Despite the fact that companies had been manufacturing them primarily for children with autism-spectrum disorders for many years (leading, as they went mainstream, to claims of appropriation), Time magazine named “blankets that ease anxiety” one of the best inventions of 2018, quoting figures from a sleek US start-up (also called Gravity, no relation) which had already sold $18m worth of blankets.
In early 2018, in her New Yorker essay The Seductive Confinement of a Weighted Blanket in an Anxious Time, Jia Tolentino wrote that their success “arrived deep into a period when many Americans were beginning their emails with reflexive, panicked condolences about the news.” It was no coincidence that they had become a million-dollar business when much of the world felt like it needed to be put to bed. They had co-opted a familiar coping strategy (the feeling of being held) by repackaging a product that originated to assist a vulnerable community and selling it to people who felt anxious, ie almost everyone.
Mine arrived in a large box and, when I opened it, the blanket felt extremely cold. It took some effort to unfold it and then transport it to my bed – carrying the blanket felt not like carrying something objectively heavy like bricks or bags of tins, but like carrying a very light thing when you’re coming down with flu. I arranged myself under its grey soft weight, and then I fell asleep.
In the morning I woke in the same position. Unlike other anxiety aids, which encourage movement, fiddling, this large flat beanbag prevents movement. You are gently forced into a comforting stillness. Brushing my teeth the morning after a deep, deep sleep, I swilled the phrase “self-care” around my mouth.
In its earliest iteration it was used by doctors advising elderly patients on how to stay healthy at home, but by the late 1960s people used it more often in reference to the doctors themselves, having recognised that those in emotionally wearing professions could only look after others if they first looked after themselves. With the rise of the civil rights movement, self-care became political. Women and people of colour insisted that an autonomy over one’s body was necessary to fight racist and sexist systems, and indeed to survive. The phrase has since spread and mutated to include such diverse applications as gardening, antidepressants and peeling foot masks.
Today one of the places the phrase is most visible is in online articles about skincare routines, the ritual massaging in of oils and perfecting lotions, where the user is encouraged to concentrate less on how their skin looks tomorrow, but more on the mindful motions of looking after themselves.
“I know now that anxiety doesn’t really ever go away entirely,” wrote Olivia Muenter in an article called How My Beauty Routine Helps With My Anxiety, for Bustle, “but sometimes it shuts the hell up. And, for me, it’s often the quietest during my beauty routine.” She describes the action of moisturising as if it was meditation. Her skincare routine “pushes [her worries] away and what I’m left with is the simple act of doing something that makes me feel good”.
It’s at skincare that two arms of the anxiety economy cross, with the rise of CBD beauty. Owing to the increased interest in cannabis for medicinal use, the CBD (a non-psychoactive chemical compound found in marijuana) industry is expected to reach an estimated value of $22bn by 2022, with products including (but not limited to) teas, ice cream, vapes and hair conditioner. Last year Estée Lauder became one of the first mainstream beauty brands to release cannabis-infused products, alongside a growing list of smaller companies that included it in their brightening face creams, soaps, moisturising oils and mascaras, with the promise that CBD has anti-inflammatory properties. Though some claim it to be “stress-relieving”, simply by containing CBD their anxiety-relieving side effects are implicit.
A cynic might point out that considering the pressure the cosmetic industry has maintained in pushing customers to achieve unrealistic beauty standards, their new insistence that their primary role is to reduce anxiety is ironic. Evidence of CBD’s efficacy in skincare is largely anecdotal and a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found widespread mislabelling of CBD products sold online. There is a similar issue in all areas of the CBD industry – complications around legalisation have made it hard for researchers to discover what it actually does. Small trials suggest that CBD could be effective in treating anxiety, but only in far larger doses than are usually offered. While a product can boast in its marketing materials that CBD reduces anx
22 FEB 2019 · Collaborative Fund
The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.”
– Jeff Bezos
You can ace the most prestigious grad school and then spend years in prison for insider trading. It’s happened. And the decision to risk everything on a trade that nets you a few percentage points is the kind of thing someone with half the IQ will look at and say, “How stupid are you?”
There are types of smart that have nothing to do with intellect. And there are types of stupid that have nothing to do with unintelligence.
Smart is the ability to solve hard problems, which can be done many ways. Stupid is a tendency to not comprehend easy problems. It’s also is a diversified trait.
A few kinds of stupid prevalent in business and investing:
1. Intelligence creep: Not knowing the boundaries of what you’re good at, and assuming talent in one area signals skill in all others.
Dictators are never marketed as just good at politics. They’re portrayed as superhumans, masters of everything. Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Jughashvili, but changed his name to a word that translates to “Man of steel.” North Korea said Kim Jong Il shot 11 holes in one on his first round of golf, was an architectural master, and a music virtuoso.
An innocent version of this happens when you’re good at one thing, so you and those around you assume you should be good at all other things.
Take the investor who is gifted at, and made a lot of money doing, one kind of strategy (merger arbitrage) and then extrapolates that confidence into something they have no experience in (gold, macro, politics, predicting recessions). The odds of a disappointing outcome then round to 100. Of course they do – the kind of nuance and skill needed to, say, forecast global interest rates is not the kind you thing you can pick up in a year.
The important thing is most investors without big success in one strategy would never consider betting their portfolio on a new, disparate strategy. They’re more likely to stick to what they know. You need intelligence in one strategy to make you think, with confidence, that you’re good at all the other ones.
An important investing skill is defining what you’re incapable of and staying away from it.
2. Underestimating the complexity of how past successes were gained in a way that makes you overestimate their repeatability.
There’s a thing in biology called Dollo’s Law that says organisms can never re-evolve to a former state because the path that led to its former state was so complicated that the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero.
Say an animal has horns, and then it evolves to lose its horns. The odds that it will ever evolve to regain its horns are nil, because the path that originally gave it horns was so complex.
Dollo’s Law affects investors and CEOs with a unique kind of stupid.
There are things that, once lost, will likely never be regained, because the chain of events that created them in the first place can’t easily be replicated. If you realized how valuable those things are you’d be more careful about risking their loss.
Brand is one. Brands are so hard to build, requiring the right product at the right time targeted to the right users who want that one thing, produced in the right way by the right people, all done with consistency. Once lost it is nearly impossible to regain, because of odds of building a successful brand in the first place were so low. So when management cashes in brand equity for short-term gain, I want to shout, “Stop! This isn’t a factory that you can just rebuild when it’s broken. If you lose that brand it’s gone for good.”
Teams are another. Success is often personalized among one person, discounting how important members of their team were to a win. That one person will often marginalize their team, or go out on their own, only to learn the hard way how vital others were to what they considered to be “their” success. And once disbanded that specific team will likely never return.
3. Discounting the views of people who aren’t as credentialed as you are, underestimating the special knowledge they have since they’ve experienced a world you haven’t.
A different kind of stupid is not believing that there are different kinds of smart.
Only seeking the input from those who fit your singular definition of smart misses the masses whose knowledge wasn’t measured by standardized tests. And those masses, with lower credentials than you, have likely experienced a world that you haven’t, which gives them a perspective you don’t have.
Solving problems means understanding how people behave. And you’ll only understand how lots of people are likely to behave if you open your mind to their views, opinions, goals, and solutions. Even people who are different than you. Especially people who are different than you.
4. Not understanding that in the classroom the game is you vs. the test, but in the real world it’s you vs. coworkers, employees, customers, regulators, etc., all of whom need to be persuaded by more than having the right answer.
This is a cousin of #1 above. It’s common when technical founders assume their ability to design a great product is correlated with their ability to manage hundreds of people, when in fact those things can be miles apart.
People who create the best products are often able to do so specifically because their thought process isn’t restricted by norms that ground most people. But that same trait can make them counterproductive bosses, because the “rules-don’t-apply-to-me” mindset that’s so effective when building a new product can be disastrous when managing people, especially as a company scales. Very talented engineers, designers, product people can make HR and managerial decisions for which the only response is, “How stupid are you?”
The first rule of natural maniacs: No one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like.
5. Closed-system thinking: Underestimating the external consequences of your decisions in a hyperconnected world, or dismissing how quickly those consequences can backfire on you.
There’s a thing in economics where the professor says “assume a closed economy.” You model how an economy works assuming zero trade with, or influence from, other countries. Then you drop that assumption, view at the world as it actually operates, and BOOM … the original models are useless.
One kind of stupid is when you assume your business decisions live in their own closed economy, and the things you do either don’t affect others, or if you know they do, you underestimate those people’s ability to turn around and stick it back to you.
This is especially true in today’s world where things aren’t just connected; they’re an untangleable web where nothing is more than a few degrees removed from everything else in the world. If you mistreat your employees, or your customers, or your suppliers, and assume that it’s OK to do so because those actions will be contained to those people, the odds that your actions will eventually become known to someone who’s indispensable and who you rely upon are greater than they’ve ever been.
Bernie Madoff summarized this idea a year before his scheme unraveled. “In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate the rules,” he told an audience in 2007. “This is something the public doesn’t really understand. It’s impossible for a violation to go undetected. Certainly not for a considerable period of time.”
22 FEB 2019 · It’s quite fashionable to hate email. Countless articles have been written decrying how awful it is. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to reinvent it. And the latest fad is just to give up — screenshots proudly showing six-figure unread message counts and articles about “inbox infinity” abound.
I’ve become quite the contrarian on this subject. I love email. It’s my secret weapon. Some of the best news I’ve ever gotten came in an email. As an adoptive dad, I caught my first glimpse of two of my kids through an email. I’ve closed deals, hired amazing talent, and connected great people via email.
I love Slack as well, but there is still nothing better than email for connecting with the world outside, and looping in members of your team to get things done.
I’m sure there are a lot of people who get more email than me, but I’m no slouch in that department. I’m the CEO of a 200+ employee company with 20,000+ customers. It takes a full time executive assistant and a full time Chief of Staff to keep my world in orbit right now. My email address is also not hard to figure out. In fact, I put it right on my LinkedIn page.
And yet, I get to Inbox Zero anywhere between 1–3x a week.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me how that’s possible, so I decided I’d take a little time on vacation and write this post. (Yep, sharing ideas like these are my idea of fun. 😂)
Slow the Fire Hose
People talk about the messages that appear in their inbox as if they have no control over them, and that’s not entirely true. The first thing you probably need to do is turn down the flow of messages.
Email is for messages, not for articles. There is VERY little content that I allow to flow into my inbox. Unsubscribe from all those blogs and newsletters you subscribed to. Follow them on Twitter, or drop them into Pocket. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, think about setting up a separate email account for this stuff. That isn’t an inbox; it’s your personal magazine.
Be selective on marketing. There are 10–15 brands that I have a strong connection with who I’ll let into my inbox because I actually want to hear from them. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident they will find a way to get my attention in another channel.
Kill non-essential or duplicate email notifications. Every app and service that we use is pinging us with notifications. But a lot of time, they are non-essential, or the same alert also comes as a push notification on your phone. Either change the settings in the app, or put in some email rules to kill those.
Be an aggressive unsubscriber. When you get unsolicited email you don’t want, always click unsubscribe if the link is there. Most unsub systems work with 1–2 clicks.
I know people who have followed these four tips and killed an astounding 80% of their incoming messages.
Kill the Notifications
I’m decently responsive to important things in my inbox, but the only way I got there was to massively reduce the noise, so I could hear the signal.
Turn off all the app notifications. Email shouldn’t generate banners, unread badges or sounds. Trust me, you won’t forget that your inbox exists; you don’t need any reminders to check it. Give yourself the space to do focused work and then tap your email app when you’re ready to triage your inbox.
Use the VIP feature if it’s helpful. I have my direct reports and my board members on the iOS Mail VIP list, so I get a notification on my phone if one of them emails. However, the more that our urgent stuff moves to Slack or texting, the less valuable this has become.
Free yourself from feeling obligated to respond to everything. I’m sure I miss emails from real people that go into spam, but I also get a lot of “asks” from people I don’t know. Given that I’ve committed my time to family, company and non-profit work, spending time and attention on those is breaking my commitments to others. These emails are like people who show up to your office without an appointment — you might drop everything to give them your time, but you usually can’t. Why is an email any different?
Upgrade Your Tools
I’m a big believer that high quality tools more than pay for themselves in higher productivity. There are limits to that logic, of course, but if you can make your own tool decisions, ask yourself if having a good setup can increase your productivity by 1, 2, 3%. You can do the math on that.
Use an email service with great search. You need to be able to find archived messages with ease. Nobody beats Google on this front. Both my company and personal addresses are on Gmail. I have both accounts set up in Apple Mail on my Mac, iPhone and iPad because those apps work really well when offline. But if a quick search isn’t turning up the message I need, I hop into Gmail and there it is.
Kill all those folders. I know people who make long lists of folders for every project or topic. Guess what? It takes a lot of time to archive emails that way. I have two folders (more detail below) and I still misfile things by accident once in a while. If you use an email service with great search, you do not need 85 folders in your mailbox. Put everything in one big archive, and use search to find it when you need it.
Get a to-do app. Too many people use email as a to-do list, and trust me, your inbox is awful at that. What is important gets mixed in with what is new. You constantly have to re-read the email and reinterpret what you actually need to do. My favorite to-do app right now is Asana, particularly because I can hit forward on an email, change the subject line to “call Bill re: contract terms” and hit send. Bam, it’s on the list, and I can archive that email.
If you’re in a big organization stuck on an archaic version of Exchange server, or they won’t let you use a tool like Asana, a few of these tips may be a challenge for you. You should come join Riskalyze and help us empower the world to invest fearlessly instead. 😉
Set up Text Macros
I get more sales pitches, and requests for calls or meetings with VCs, private equity firms and investment bankers, than I know what to do with. These are personal emails without unsubscribe links.
If I don’t respond, I usually get a second or third email from them. So I set up text replacements on my iPhone and, to my delight, discovered they sync to my iPad and Mac. Here are my three…
notint = Not interested but thanks; please remove. This is short, sweet and to the point. The “but thanks” disarms the person and makes them want to be polite and follow my wishes. It used to read “please remove me from your list” but that resulted in a bunch of silly replies insisting I wasn’t on a list. Shortening it did the trick.
novc = I’m sorry; I’m heads down on a bunch of initiatives and don’t have time for a call right now. Maybe in a few quarters. This has worked well for VC, PE and investment bankers. I might want to talk with them eventually, but I genuinely don’t have time to invest in a call or meeting right now. They’ll email me back in six or nine months, and my answer will either change or be the same.
nocant = I’m sorry; I’ve already made commitments I’d have to break if I tried to make a call or meeting work right now. Is there another way I can help? The last sentence is only for those I genuinely feel like I might have a way to help, like an introduction to make.
These don’t work for every circumstance, but they’re often a good starting point, and then I edit them from there.
It’s Time to Triage
Okay, we’ve got the flow of email reduced to the messages that matter. We’ve equipped ourselves with a to-do app so we can move our tasks out of the inbox. And we’ve killed the notifications so we can stop going into our email every 30 seconds. Now we’re going to triage our inbox.
Triaging is not the same as processing. We’ll get to that below. Triage is something we can do for two minutes, even if we don’t get every message triaged. We can do it on our phones while walking down the hallway. I always scan the names and subject lines, and triage the most important messages first.
And oh yes, let’s just forget the silly myth of “touch each email only once” — it’s a nice thought, but that’s for people who aren’t busy, or can do the “I only check email twice a day” thing. The rest of us need to triage first.
Here are the actions you might take while triaging.
Reply. If a very quick reply is all that is warranted — like a “Thanks” or “Great” or “On it” — I’ll reply while triaging.
Reply with a Macro. If one of my pre-written replies works, I’ll send it while triaging. Done.
Forward/Delegate. I’ll delegate things that don’t need context or deep explanation. My team is very used to getting messages from me with “please handle” or “?” as my only note.
Process Later. The “To Process” folder is my second inbox. This is where I put messages that need more than 10 seconds of work each. I don’t have time to handle them during triage, so I move them into To Process instead.
Archive or Delete. If no further action is needed, I hit archive. If it’s something I don’t need, I might hit delete instead. (On the other hand, I might put it into “To Process” if I want to unsubscribe or block the sender later.)
At the end of triage, the only things left in my inbox are the deeply urgent things that I must handle on the run, before I’ll get back to my to-do list. If my CFO needs me to call the bank, or one of my board members has sent me a note that shouldn’t wait until later, that stays in the inbox to deal with as quickly as possible. Emails from your boss or up your chain of command, unless explicitly not urgent, probably belong here!
After triaging, my inbox is often empty…but I don’t consider this Inbox Zero quite yet.
Okay, Let’s Process!
When your inbox is empty, and the critically urgent is under control, it’s time to process. I always process emails in the order they were received, oldest to newest. On a good week, I might find half an hour every day to process, and be running 2–3 days behind. On non-stop week
8 FEB 2019 · Vogue Business
Despite the recent profits warning, Apple is bolstering its investment in experiential retail, with expansive flagships, and classes and workshops in every store. "When you are serving digital natives, the thing they long for more than anything is human connection."
Big companies have created a "tragedy in retail" by becoming remote from their customers and staff.
Ahrendts urges retailers to rethink their approach: "You can’t just look at the profitability of one store or the profitability of one app or the online business. You have to put it all together: one customer, one brand.”
Angela Ahrendts stands on the snowy steps in front of the former Carnegie Library in Washington, DC. This noble construction, built between 1901 and 1903, and once filled with books, will soon become an Apple store – and something more. Alongside $1,250 iPhones and $130 Apple Pencils, the space will play host to creative workshops, sketching tours of the neighbourhood and author readings that will be live-streamed to other stores around the world.
This is retail, but not as we know it.
As chief executive of Burberry from 2006 to 2014, Ahrendts, 58, proved that a bricks-and-mortar store could appeal to the millennial generation. On London’s Regent Street in 2012, Burberry unveiled what was then hailed as the store of the future: a 44,000-square-foot space of smart mirrors and simulated rain showers.
“We bought 10,000 iPads and put them in the stores and everyone thought that was so revolutionary,” says Ahrendts. “For us it really wasn’t rocket science, we had targeted the millennial consumer and we knew that was the best way to talk to them.” Then, five years ago, she left London for Silicon Valley – and since then has been dreaming up a new vision for retail at one of the world’s largest technology companies.
Retail has never been so in need of reinvention. Since 2017 almost 10,000 stores in the US have closed their doors. Some analysts predict that by 2022 one in four US malls could be out of business. Although 2018 showed some signs of improvement, the twin threat remains: retailers around the world need to find a way to both compete with online shopping and to attract younger, more demanding customers.
It’s easy to look at Apple’s grand new fleet of flagships and be dazzled by their surfaces: the Foster + Partners-designed Champs Élysées store boasts floor-to-ceiling glass, trees in the courtyard, and a preserved carved wooden staircase connecting hyper-modern rooms. But the real difference, Ahrendts claims, is much more fundamental. Apple stores show a vision for retail in the way they help Apple build long-term customer relationships, the way they are financially accounted for and the way they connect a network of 70,000 employees across the globe.
The Apple vision
Since 2015, Apple has opened a series of high-profile flagships to promote its brand, each requiring, in the company’s words, “substantially” more investment than its typical stores. “We are now opening fewer, larger stores so that you can get the full experience of everything that’s Apple,” Ahrendts explains as we pick our way past Carnegie Library’s historic pillars and through concrete and rubble to where a hard-hat brigade are inserting beacons into the walls.
“We don’t talk a lot about it but there are thousands of beacons behind those walls,” she remarks. These location-aware sensors connect with the Apple Store app on iPhones, sending visitors a greeting when they arrive in store, and prompting them to skip the cash register and pay for purchases via the app as they approach the accessories area. (They must opt-in on the app to access these features.) “As we renovate every store we update all of the technology. We don’t want to be gimmicky, but stores need to become living, breathing spaces, not just two-dimensional boxes.”
That is now coming to life at Carnegie Library. “A few years ago I sent a photo to Tim [Cook, chief executive of Apple] saying there’s this library that Apple could turn into a community space,” she explains. “Carnegie envisioned it years ago when he had the reading room. For Apple, we’ll have field trips with busloads of kids; or they will be coming in learning to code every morning. It’s a different type of investment.”
It’s a continuation of founder Steve Jobs’s original vision. “Steve told the teams when he opened retail 18 years ago, ‘Your job is not to sell, your job is to enrich their lives and always through the lens of education.’”
Apple isn’t the only company trying its hand at “experiential retail”. Urban Outfitters has its three “Space” stores in Austin, Williamsburg and LA, which offer live gigs and flower-arranging workshops alongside avocado-shaped phone chargers. And at at the Réel Mall in Shanghai, you can learn carpentry, painting or silver jewellery-making between visits to the Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga stores next door. Ahrendts herself admires what Soho House and CitizenM have created: “They have filled this huge niche, a combination of experience and human connection."
But no company is doing experiential retail with the same level of scale or ambition as Apple. Its ‘Today at Apple’ programme offers classes, talks, concerts and workshops, each designed, in Ahrendts’s words, to “enrich lives”. The lineup is part whimsy and part inspiration, including events like “Drawing Treehouses with Foster + Partners”, fitness walks and “Make Your Own Emoji” sessions for kids. As always with Apple, the scale is breathtaking, with thousands of events held in 21 countries each week and imminent plans to expand.
“I think as humans we still need gathering places,” Ahrendts says. “And when you are serving digital natives, the thing they long for more than anything is human connection. Eye contact.”
“I’m only one person,” Ahrendts says when I ask her about the parallels between her earlier transformation of Burberry and now at Apple. “I just set the vision and I am the connector – I am the enabler if you will. The common denominator for me is always the people. I love the fact seven of my directors at Burberry have gone on to be CEOs. You put together an amazing group of people, you all share the same vision and mission and purpose of something you want to achieve together.”
“There’s a slight difference,” she adds with a smile. “We had about 11,000 people at Burberry and there’s about 70,000 in Apple Retail, but then you say, how much more can we do if we get everyone aligned? And then you say, well, how do you do that?”
The short answer is technology. At 506 stores around the world, Apple staff start their day with an app called Hello, which briefs them on the most important “need to knows” of the day, often featuring videos from Ahrendts and her team. A second app, Loop, functions as an internal social network where staff can share learnings with each other. “Someone might be selling more phones than anybody else and we ask them to share that on a 20-second video on Loop,” Ahrendts explains. “We use auto-translate and everybody in the world can see what Tom in Regent Street is doing. It’s a huge unlock, just getting all the stores to talk to one another.”
This approach to internal communication – using human-touch internal video conferences – helped employees buy into Ahrendts’s vision at Burberry.
The same formula appears to be working at Apple. “Many retailers have become so big they’re removed from their own employees. They are lucky if they keep more than 20 per cent every year. We keep nearly 90 per cent of our full-time employees. We moved 20 per cent of the people in retail last year – they got promoted, took on new positions.”
“The tragedy in retail is that it has become about numbers,” Ahrendts continues. “It’s about cost-cutting the way to prosperity instead of investing in your people, and in that environment, big isn’t always good.”
In spite of all the admiration heaped on Apple, it is not immune to the winds of change. In January, Cook sent out a profit warning citing an unexpected downturn in China towards the end of year, which briefly sent the share price tumbling. The company will release its fourth-quarter earnings forecast after the market close on Tuesday the 29th.
When asked about the warning, Ahrendts points out that Apple is primarily a phone company. The iPhone generated 62 per cent of its $266 billion in sales last year, while retail accounts for about a quarter of revenue, according to Erwan Rambourg, managing director at HSBC. “In retail, the phone is not our largest category,” says Ahrendts. “We are actually number one in the company for Mac.”
Contrary to the rest of the retail sector, Ahrendts is more concerned with the effect Apple’s stores have on its brand than how many sales they generate each day.
“From a financial perspective we look at [our stores] differently. We look at Los Angeles and say, what do we want to achieve there? Now, my big flagship may not make as much money as my store over in Century City, but I’m looking at all the customers in LA from all these different touch points. What’s the profitability for those customers in LA?
“It’s a very different way from traditional retailers, who think door by door by door,” she continues. “Who think, ‘I’m going to close that door because it wasn’t profitable.’
“One of the things we’ve had to do at Apple is to stop looking at everything on a linear basis,” she adds. “You can’t just look at the profitability of one store or the profitability of one app or the online business. You have to put it all together: one customer, one brand.
“No matter how that customer comes in and buys, you have to look at it as one P&L. This is the issue, companies try and make these stores work on a standalone basis. When someone buys online and picks up in-store the revenue goes to online and not the store, but you are doing all the work in the store. They need to look at it differently.”
Apple sends a survey to everyone who attends one of its “Today
8 FEB 2019 · Mel Magazine
While chasing a 2017 story about medical tourism and Slovakian stem cells that had already taken me to hospital facilities in Bratislava and Vienna, I wound up partying on a 283-foot yacht floating in the French Riviera. As I watched intoxicated rich people having expensive fun in their cheap white shower slippers — first rule of yacht club is there are no shoes on the yacht, which are instead piled in a big heap at the yacht’s entrance — I began to wonder, “How could anyone spend their whole life doing this?”
Then, almost on cue, seated at a table on the rear deck with Lindsay Lohan and her entourage, I spotted a dude who had, in fact, spent his entire life doing this. Alex Jimenez was a professional yacht influencer, and he was hard at work.
I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I just saw an open chair next to a lanky guy wearing a loose polo shirt and a flat-brimmed Yankees hat, and sat down in it. As everyone else gradually made their way toward the raucous festivities taking place on the foredeck, Jimenez struck up a conversation with me. He remarked that I seemed both thoughtful and decidedly out of place.
“I’m working,” I said. “I never stop working. All I can think about is work.”
“Hey, me too,” he replied. “I’m working right now.”
“I used to feel all messed up about my career,” he continued. “I was a short-haul truck driver in the Bronx, and I guess I caught the yacht bug. I’d go to a bookstore, grab a table and read everything I could about yachts. Then, on the very first weekend after I downloaded the Instagram app, right after Instagram became a thing you could download, I went to a luxury boat show and took some of pictures of the yachts. I added some hashtags, and pretty soon I had 800,000 followers. But the quantity doesn’t really matter to the folks who pay me, it’s the quality. Influential people follow me, Gulf state princes and Russian moguls who might actually be able to buy these yachts.”
Wait, what?
When Jimenez said that he was working, I assumed he was “working” the same way Lindsay Lohan was — that is, “working the crowd.” He looked important enough, wearing an expensive, custom-made watch with all of the wheels, ratchets and levers exposed.
“Nah, I’m nobody you’d know,” he assured me. “I’m here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It’s just a small part of the hustle.”
The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez’s life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins.
“The yacht we’re on right now used to be a cruise ship that they retrofitted,” he told me. “You can sleep a dozen or more people on here, and the decks can fit a bunch more, but it’s all kind of crowded.”
I mentioned that the bathrooms were both tiny, and with a hundred or so people aboard the yacht, already rather foul.
“Yeah, that’s just how it goes,” he said. “It’s an endless party, especially on the yachts that are 200 feet and up, the so-called ‘superyachts.’ Conditions are cramped, everyone’s out of their mind on some substance, and the bathrooms are being used for who knows what. There’s a kitchen and a big dining area, but good luck getting food out of there when you really want it. You’re not on here to eat a sit-down meal, even though they usually have nice dining rooms. The bars on each level are the focal points of these things.”
We took a walk around the yacht while people boozed and bumped into each other, their words slurring together and distorted further by the deep bass thump of the music playing from the upper and lower decks. Jimenez’s own cabin was indeed tiny, very nearly a capsule hotel. He showed me the heavy-duty metal suitcase where he secured his borrowed valuables, a collection of watches on loan from various business acquaintances.
“The watches are heavy on the wrist,” he said. “They’re great to look at, but their bands often cut into the wrist. And yeah, the room is small, but with my nocturnal schedule, it’s not like I sleep very much. I take maybe one picture a day and post a few Instagram stories, but I’m expected to be up on the deck, mingling with partygoers and selling the mystique of the yacht.”
Jimenez leveled with me — once upon a time, he had been excited by the idea of partying on a yacht. After all, who wouldn’t be? But now he was basically just a working stiff. He too had a home and a family, with kids he didn’t see as much as he could because his “feet were never on dry land.”
He had considerable yacht expertise and knew all the major players in the yacht world, buyers and sellers and their glorious boats. He had been on the 100-foot yachts and the 500-foot yachts, and seen yacht-related activities he assured me exceeded any fantasies, dark or light, that I could ever imagine. Yet all that meant he was now just another yacht worker, someone who punched the clock — or the pearl-faced wristwatch, in his case — the same as the kitchen staff, the bartenders and the yacht’s crew.
“You’ve seen the crew,” he told me. “It’s about 30 people on this yacht, and they’re Greek and serious as a heart attack. Nine times out of ten, the crews on these yachts are either Greek or Russian. The rich people that staff these yachts talk at length about whether it’s better to go with one or the other. They can make pretty decent money, and on a 500-footer with a 60 or 70 person crew, you’re probably talking $5,000 or $6,000 a month plus room and board.”
After years of yacht influence, the true appeal of high-class maritime life had become clear to Jimenez. “You have to be really rich to own one of these,” he said. “I mean, you have to be so rich to own a yacht that’s 300 feet or more. You can’t be rich like LeBron James, because that’s nothing. You can’t be rich like Tiger Woods or Johnny Depp. They’re not rich in super-yacht terms. We’re talking 10 percent or more of the purchase cost of the yacht paid out in upkeep every month. The brokerages and buying groups can swing it because there’s a bunch of investors, and because they charter the yachts to offset costs.
“But for the guy who owns the Eclipse [Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch], that’s not the point. He’s not chartering that thing out. It has a submarine and a missile detection system. See, the power of owning a magnificent yacht like that is in how you’re telling the world that you’re beyond buying and selling. You have more money than there is money to have. You’ve transcended. There are no frontiers left for you on dry land. I mean, true peace is only at sea.”
Jimenez, a poor Puerto Rican kid, grew up hustling. He worked 50- and 60-hour shifts at whatever job he had; he considered overtime to be a necessary part of his base pay and counts himself among those annoying grinders who dismiss 40 hours of work per week as a “part-time job.” He now made a “comfortable middle-class living,” but sitting there with me in the cabin, fretted that it could go away at any time. “This is me working a little network I’ve built using someone else’s social media platform,” he said. “If Instagram changes its algorithm slightly, there goes a bit of my business. If Instagram disconnects some of the tools I use to build and monitor my account, there goes a bit of my business. And if Instagram goes away and is replaced by something newer and better, I need to get there first, just like I did with this account. If I don’t, I’m done. I’m totally dependent on a platform that’s completely out-of-control.”
For Jimenez, Instagram is essentially a money tree that must be fertilized and harvested as much as possible before its popularity wanes. As another side hustle, he “plants” subsidiary yacht accounts, accounts with soundalike names and images, and uses cross-promotion from his primary account to grow them until they’re large enough to sell to yacht brokers or manufacturers. “I build them up and then sell them off, and my client gets a ready-made account that has real followers and legitimate engagement,” he told me. “I started focusing on that when I realized that this wasn’t just a ‘life of the party’ job, that pushing social media is something you do all day and all night long.
“I fire off these posts while I’m sitting around on the yacht, when things are very slow. I’m not in this for the fun of it, I’m not posting silly stuff. I basically do sponsored advertisements that follow a set format. I watch Instagram like a hawk to see if anything is hampering the growth of these other accounts, and to see if I’m continuing to get the activity I need on my primary posts.”
After surveying his cabin, Jimenez and I walked to the side deck and slouched over the railing. The sun had set, and we studied the well-lit coastline of Cannes. “If you could have anything at all, anything in the world, what would you want?” he asked me.
“I guess I’d want to keep writing and keep getting paid for it,” I responded.
“Well, I want to own a yacht,” Jimenez said. “I used to just want to be on yachts, because I thought the parties were cool and the technology was awesome, but now that I’ve spent a good portion of my life partying on them, I actually want to own a yacht. Owning a yacht, really owning it in full and being able to pay for its upkeep, means that you’ve somehow freed yourself from work and want. If you own the yacht that way, you’re a free man. The hustle and grind are things of the past.”
I asked him if he had plans to leave the yacht while we were in the French Riviera.
“No, I’m going to hang back here, because I’m scheduled to be on another o
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