Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

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When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

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The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

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PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

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First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

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All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

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A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

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The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

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Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I spoke to 1,700+ people about remote work in 2020

A few predictions of what will happen in 2021

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🎟 Remote competition: @FrancisSuarez is the first person to wield the power of Twitter to attract remote talent

Almost every region that has something which would attract people to move there will do the same thing

Incentives for remote talent to move will grow quickly

⏰ Async-first: People now see offices are instantaneous gratification adult kids clubs where sync work makes it impossible to get stuff done

Tools that enable async work are the most important thing globally remote teams need. A lot of startups will try to tackle this

🏢 HQ Slashed: Companies of every size cut their commercial office space by 50-70%

People will work remotely 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week

Companies will provide a great setup at home for their workers

🤕 Injury explosion: Companies that don't provide the right tools & equipment begin to get Sued for Millions of Dollars

This rapidly becomes a key point of differentiation between companies they use to attract & retain talent

Customer friction is a huge part of running a biz.

How hard is it to engage a company to work with you?

Data-driven companies obsess over reducing this friction.

Mom-and-pop operators SUCK at this and it’s costing them millions.

Here’s what I’ve learned 👇👇👇

1985 companies have a lot of friction.

Call them. Leave message. Wait. Guy may or may not call you back. Quote by phone or email. Scan signed contract.

A self storage facility we purchased recently had a lot of this.

Drive across town M-F 9-5. Spend 20 mins. Sign paper lease.

Get a physical key and lock. Drive back. Get your unit. Mail a check each month or stop by office with cash.

Owner charged $52 a month for a 10x10. Completely full.

We instantly setup software for online rental.

No phone call necessary. Rent a unit in 4 mins from your browser.

Sign lease online. Pay online. Upload photo of DL on phone.

Go straight to your unit 24/7. Type in gate key that was sent to you by text. Lock and key waiting in unit.

We can now charge $77 a mo for the same unit. $25 more. And we rent MORE units faster.

How significant is this?

That $25 increase per unit across the board turns out to be a 35% increase in revenue.

That takes revenue from $14k a month when I buy it to $18.9k a few months later.

An extra $58k to the bottom line over the course of 12 months.

It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
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Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
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Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
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If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
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And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
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CEOs interviewing other CEOs, Public Dating Shows, @sriramk + @aarthir becoming the next great show hosts.

I cannot read 2 tweets without seeing something on Clubhouse. A new room, a thread on Elon, a bull case on their $1B eval.

Let’s take a look at the rise of Clubhouse.

Clubhouse is a live-voice chat app.

People can join different rooms, where predetermined topics are set by hosts who help moderate the discussion.

With quarantine, it gave people the space to shoot the shit and listen to high-quality conversations.

Clubhouse was founded by @pdavison and @rohanseth .

Davison’s past projects show a bias towards products based on spontaneity:

Highlight: People-meeting location app
Shorts: Reveal your whole camera roll (Acq. Pinterest 2016)
Talkshow: Instant radio call-in shows

2 weeks ago, Elon made waves by appearing on the app. With hundreds of Clubhouse rooms created beforehand to pregame the conversation like a UFC fight.

However, Clubhouse has already attracted stars to the platform, with Drake, Oprah, and Virgil Abloh all making appearances.

However, star power alone cannot be the sole explainer for Clubhouse's rise.

What are some of the other factors that have played a role in their growth?