There are so many #HotTakes on the future of news and tech and digital this week. Now nearly half a year distant (and what a year - 2020, ugh!) from CEO and board @mcclatchy, I'd like to add a few thoughts: 1/

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

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Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures

There is a lot of bad advice floating around online when it comes to real estate investing.

Time for a stiff drink and some stuff you might not want to hear.

A thread 👇

Most real estate influencers spend 99% of their time trying to sound smart.

They purposely make things too complicated.

When you do this for a while you can tell if a property is worth buying with a napkin and 30 seconds.

The problem with being a big real estate PE firm:

You need to do good deals year after year and deploy 10s or 100s of millions in capital.

It’s a hamster wheel making others wealthy.

The advantage of being you:

One building like this can change your life.

Buying real estate that doesn’t cashflow well because values have risen 10% / yr for 10 yrs while wages have risen 3% / yr for 10 yrs is very risky.

I don’t care how long your interest rate is “fixed” for.

Markets are cyclical. Trends change. Bankruptcy is real.

If you don’t know anyone with money and you have less than $250k of your own cash real estate isn’t the best way to make money.

Even a $500k property (like the one pictured above) requires $150k down and another $100k in cash reserves.

Piper Alpha was an originally designed as an oil producing rig in the North Sea approximately 120 miles North East of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was a fixed leg platform in water depth of 475 Feet of water. The installation sat close to 275 Feet above water to the top of the derrick.

2) It started production in December 1976 for OPCAL joint venture. OPCAL being Occidental Petroleum Caledonia, Texaco Britain, Thomson PLC, and Texas Petroleum LTD. Occidental was the majority stakeholder at 36.5%

3) Occidental being majority stakeholder took control of technical and operational duties with running and operating the rig. When oil production started in 1976 it started with a flow of 250,000 BBL/day and eventually increasing this amount to 300,000 BBL/day.

4) 300,000 BBL/day would account for approximately 10% of the UK’s oil production at the time, so needless to say it was one of the most important rigs in the area. Any gas that was flowing would be flared or consumed by gas turbine generators

5) Around 1980 there was a decision to convert the rig to also process gas along with the oil. This was a major conversion, and if it would have been scoped in from the beginning, most likely construction of the rig would have been more accommodating for gas.

2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

1/

Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond repair. Then you have to buy another one.

3/

Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is essential to protecting

Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020, when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car would lead to your actual MURDER.

The question of how TV news amplifies disinformation is often discussed but we have little concrete research on this subject. So we partnered w/ @r_macdonald & @kalevleetaru to understand how cable TV amplified Trump’s tweets. The results are interesting.

Between Jan 1 2020 and Jan 8 2021, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC spent 32 hours showing Trump’s tweets on screen, eg. blowing them up full size. This doesn’t include when anchors and correspondents mentioned things Trump had tweeted.

We then focused on the ways in which the three networks broadcast Trump’s tweets that falsely claimed the election would be fraudulent (before Nov 3) and was actually stolen (after the election).

In the weeks after the election, the cable news networks broadcast nearly three times as many Trump tweets about election fraud than they had in the nine months leading up to it. They even broadcast Trump’s old tweets after he was removed from Twitter in January.

4 points: 1) there was a drumbeat of tweets undermining the election throughout the summer. Many were broadcast & there were no labels from Twitter until middle of Sept. We need more research to understand how a foundation supporting the false narrative was laid by platforms & TV