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One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.

Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.

The key design skill is less about beautiful all-encompassing Figma documentation with all the kinds of journey maps and personas, or mastering a “process”. It’s about being so keenly situationally aware of what unknowns are in front of you so you can pick out what tools or design activities target them precisely.

It's not helpful to think of design as process of discovering, defining, ideating and delivering (or whatever version of those double diamond steps you prefer) because following those steps often does not get you closer to a solution.

We’re solving a big problem: 9 in 10 people think they should control who has access to their vehicle’s data, and that isn’t the case today. We’ve resourced the project to take a long-term approach, and are excited to begin the next chapter supporting growing the DIMO project into a movement.” Users earn rewards and access apps by connecting their cars to DIMO and streaming data into Mobility Data Unions. This allows users to negotiate for better goods and services while maintaining privacy, and it allows enterprises and developers to access customers more efficiently.

We believe cars are going to be the biggest developer platform yet — and the most impactful place to build a user-owned IoT network

new applications in insurance, vehicle sales and financing, energy grid optimization, and more.

Bioré markets some of its products in the U.S., but its ultra-popular facial sunscreen contains bemotrizinol, a chemical filter that’s popular overseas but has not yet been approved in the U.S. The substance is on a short list of those that Dobos told me have the strongest case for FDA approval—it’s widely used around the world and very effective at absorbing UV rays. Another ingredient at the top of her list is bisoctrizole, a favorite in Europe, which she said degrades more slowly in sunlight, is less readily absorbed by the wearer’s skin, and helps stabilize other UV filters when mixed with them, potentially improving their efficacy

When kids are growing up, their moral compass isn’t formed yet. So there’s a dark side to it where you’re not really allowed to make mistakes. You’re supposed to make mistakes growing up and then learn from them. It changes who you are and helps you become a better person. But now, through everything being recorded, your mistakes can be immortalized for people to see, and kids aren’t allowed to make mistakes because that stuff can be brought up to tear them down later. So it’s a strange world that we’re living in now, and we won’t really know the effects of it till down the line.

I’d be in front of camera, and Danny would be behind. Danny would do a rough cut, I’d do a final cut, and then I’d do sound effects and music. And Danny would focus on VFX and color. So, during the process, we were more involved with those departments. I did a lot more with the sound and the music, and Danny did a lot more with the color. But on set, Danny would be the main voice communicating. If I had something like a direction that differed from what he was saying, I’d speak with him first and then we’d do a take like that. It was good having two of us, especially with scenes that had a lot more people. Danny could focus on the main, and I could look at the peripheral stuff. I feel like having a co-director is a bit of a cheat code. I can’t imagine doing it all by myself.

Encyclopedias are a compendium and summary of accepted human knowledge. Their purpose is not to provide compelling and interesting articles, but to provide accurate and verifiable information. To this end, encyclopedias strive to always represent each point-of-view in a controversy with an amount of weight and credulity equal to the weight and credulity afforded to it by the best sources of information on the subject. This means that the consensus of experts in a subject will be treated as a fact, whereas theories with much less acceptance among experts, or with acceptance only among non-experts will be presented as inaccurate and untrue.

Before you even begin to try to raise the issue at a talk page, you should ask yourself "Is this article really biased, or does it accurately reflect the views of authoritative sources about this subject?" Do some research. Read the sources used by the article and find other reliable sources on the subject. Do they present the subject as controversial, or do they tend to take a side? If there's a clear controversy, what field of study would impart expertise on this, and what side do people who work in that field tend to take? Do the claims made by the article match the claims made by the sources? Depending on the answers to these questions, the article may not be biased at all.

Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy requires us to report the bad (negative) with the good (positive), and the neither-bad-nor-good, in rough proportion to what's said in reliable sources, which in this case are largely major news outlets. This is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia—a group of fundamental principles central to the function of this website. Since reliable sources are widely critical of Trump, this article reflects that. Wikipedia policy is not established at individual articles. If you think that a policy should be changed, you could try Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), although you are unlikely to be taken very seriously there without a substantial history of Wikipedia editing.

“Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses.

I think there's gathering dissatisfaction with a common set of tropes regarding personal agency and mental health. In particular, I think that the dominance of the therapeutic assumption in American life, and the role of affirmation within it, will be challenged. Currently, an inescapable American cultural mode, particularly among the educated, is one of mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.

Of course I want us to present people with alternative ways to feel about themselves and their mental health, but it can’t become just another catechism, a different checklist. There’s got to be an understanding that the human tools for confronting life are limited and contextual, some of them come from art and not from therapy, and that ultimately we’re all left to blunder along on our own paths, trying to achieve stability and self-ownership - but we’re not guaranteed to get either. So I would hope that this counter-movement would remain a matter of skeptical inquiry and not just another set of gurus.

Not getting what you want is a default and healthy status, not a tragedy, though you are perfectly within your rights to be unhappy about it, and people who do not give you everything you want are not inherently “toxic,” though you’re perfectly within your rights to be unhappy with them

Sick people have as much responsibility to manage their disorders as society has to give them the tools to manage them; you cannot ask others to give you accommodation for your disability if you refuse to take accountability for it yourself

If you want to be good to yourself, I suggest that you stop expecting society to be your therapist and go see licensed medical professionals in private to address the issues in your life that are appropriately treated that way. And if you want to be good to your society, I suggest you help to defeat the medicalization of everything, the casualization of the concept of trauma, the celebration of mental disorders, the assumption that everything that makes us unhappy is an injustice, the insistence that all conflict is abuse, and the infantilization of the human animal

Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier.

Netflix could buy 10 top quality screenplays per year with the cash they’ll spend on that one job.  They must have big plans for AI.There are also a half dozen AI job openings at Disney. And the tech-based streamers (Apple, Amazon) already have made big investments in AI. Sony launched an AI business unit in April 2020—in order to “enhance human imagination and creativity, particularly in the realm of entertainment.”

When Spotify launched on the stock exchange in 2018, it was losing around $30 million per month. Now it’s much larger, and is losing money at the pace of more than $100 million per month.

But the real problem at Spotify isn’t just convincing people to pay more. It runs much deeper. Spotify finds itself in the awkward position of asking people to pay more for a lousy interface that degrades the entire user experience.

Boredom is built into the platform, because they lose money if you get too excited about music—you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans, and they created their interface with them in mind. In other words, Spotify’s highest aspiration is to be the Applebee’s of music.

They need to prepare for a possible royalty war against record labels and musicians—yes, that could actually happen—and they do that by creating a zombie world of brain dead listeners who don’t even know what artist they’re hearing. I know that sounds extreme, but spend some time on the platform and draw your own conclusions.

Most budgets split production costs into above-the-line, below-the-line and post-production sections. Some budgets may be divided further, but it’s a good idea to use at least these main segments: Above-the-line (ATL) costs include the wages for the cast, producers, director(s) and writer(s). The costs associated with the development, rights and creation of the script are also in this section. Costs for adapting a script from some other source, such as a book or video game, would fall into this category as well. It’s important to diligently review this portion of the budget, as these fees are often contractually defined and strictly enforced. As we’ll see below, some other items in the budget are more flexible, but ATL costs are more likely to be steadfast. Below-the-line (BTL) costs generally cover the bulk of the production expenses in terms of dollar amount. BTL costs include behind-the-scenes crew members like hair and makeup stylists, grips, camera operators, location managers and production accountants. This portion also covers expenses such as office and stage rentals, camera equipment, trucks, set dressing and construction materials.

most budgets contain dozens of smaller sections, usually called accounts, for specific costs that may be relevant to the movie or show. These accounts are usually separated by department. Each department’s account is then further separated into line items. For example, the property department may be given its own account number and within that account there may be a line item for the prop master, property assistants, property rentals, property purchases, a property trailer and so on. Each line item will have its own code number and budgeted amount, allowing the department, as well as the accountant and producers, to quantify how much they can spend on each item.

A carefully laid out budget is not worth much if the same attention is not paid to categorizing and reporting expenses as they come in.

When a department needs to make a rental or purchase, they will issue a PO to the vendor providing those goods or services. A copy of the PO also goes to the producers and the accountant and will include the account code and cost of the item. This allows the accounting and production teams to estimate the spending in real time, without having to wait for an invoice to arrive from the vendor, which may take days or weeks. A PO allows the cost to be recorded right away and avoids surprise costs down the line.

Production companies also commonly issue credit cards to crew members to make smaller purchases, such as lunches and office supplies. These credit cards can be linked directly to the accounting software to rapidly track expenses, depending on the software the project is using.

If the actual expenses of certain line items exceed the budgeted amount, the department head, accountant and producers need to work together to find a solution that satisfies creative and financial concerns. This may involve shifting money from other line items in the budget, or could be as drastic as cutting or rewriting scenes, depending on the scale of the overage.

When a department head suspects that a cost for a certain scene or location may differ substantially from their budgeted amount, they should notify the accountant and producers as soon as possible. This allows all parties more time to find a solution without risking delays to the shooting schedule, which can be incredibly costly in and of itself.

The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs.

thanks to COVID a lot of people fell out of the habit of going to the movie theater, and it appears around 25% of the audience permanently found something better to do with their time; that same reality applies to TV. Just as newspapers once thought the Internet was a boon because it increased their addressable market, only to find out that it also drastically increased competition for readers’ attention, Hollywood has to face the reality that the ability to make far more shows extends not only to studios but also to literally anyone.