I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me.

“Please hold,” the caller said, “while I transfer you to my supervisor.”

It was a Wednesday in August, a little before lunch. The call came from a 212 number, which for a New Yorker could be almost anything — the school, the pharmacy, the roof guy — so I answered.

The caller asked for me by name and stated in measured tones that he was from Chase Bank and he wanted to verify transfers being made from my account to someone in Texas.

Wrong number, I said. I don’t have a Chase account.

But one was recently opened in your name, he replied, with two Zelle transfers. And minutes ago, someone tried to transfer those funds, $2,100, to San Antonio.

Now, this carried the whiff of plausibility. I’m one of some 150 million people who have access to Zelle, the payments platform that lets you send and receive money from your phone. But my scam radar was also fully operational and pinging.

“How do I know this isn’t a scam?” I asked, sounding like that guy in every movie who asks an undercover cop if he’s a cop.

He had a quick answer. Look at the number showing on your phone and Google it, he replied. “Now look up the Chase branch at 3 Times Square,” he instructed. “See the office phone number?” I did, and it matched the one on my phone’s screen.

Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information — two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10 digits.

That’s when he offered to transfer me to his supervisor. That simple phrase, familiar from countless customer-service calls, draped a cloak of corporate competence over this unfolding drama. His supervisor. I mean, would a scammer have a supervisor?

The line went mute for a few seconds, and a second man greeted me with a voice of authority. “My name is Mike Wallace,” he said, and asked for my case number from the first guy. I dutifully read it back to him.

“Yes, yes, I see,” the man said, as if looking at a screen. He explained the situation — new account, Zelle transfers, Texas — and suggested we reverse the attempted withdrawal.

I’m not proud to report that by now, he had my full attention, and I was ready to proceed with whatever plan he had in mind. 

Internet fraud has grown steadily, with 2024 setting new record-high losses — “a staggering $16.6 billion,” the F.B.I.’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center wrote in a recent report. These crimes include elaborate cryptocurrency schemes and ransomware attacks on entire cities, but phishing and spoofing — the cloning of an actual phone number — still lead the list of some 860,000 complaints last year.

Are these scams entering some sort of improved, 2.0 version of the old-school Nigerian-prince-type setup?

“I wouldn’t call it an improvement,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York offices of the F.B.I. “It’s an adaptation. As the public becomes more aware of schemes, they need to adjust.”

The man claiming to be a Chase supervisor asked me to open Zelle. Where it says, “Enter an amount,” he instructed me to type $2,100, the amount of the withdrawals he was going to help me reverse.

Then, in the “Enter phone number or email” window — where the other party in a Zelle transaction goes — he instructed me to type the case number the first caller had given me, but to leave out the four letters. Numbers only. I dutifully entered the 10 digits, but my skepticism was finally showing up.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said, somewhat apologetically. “This case number sure looks like a phone number, and I’m about to send that number $2,100.”

No, he replied, because of this important next step. In the window that says “What’s this for? ” where you might add “babysitter” or “block party donation,” he told me to enter a unique code that would alert his team that this transaction should be reversed.

It was incredibly long, and he read it out slowly — “S, T, P, P, six, seven, one, two …” — and I typed along. Now and then he even threw in some military-style lingo: “… zero, zero, Charlie, X-ray, nine, eight …”

Once we were done, he had me read the whole 19-character code back to him.

Now, he said, press “Send.”

But one word above the “What’s this for?” box containing our special code with the X-ray and the Charlie kept bothering me: “Optional.”

Then I had an idea, and asked the supervisor if he was calling from 3 Times Square. Yes, he said.

I’ll come to you, I said, and we’ll fix this together.

By then it will probably be too late, he said.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and he said that would be fine, and I hung up.

I called my bank and confirmed what I’d come to suspect. There had been no recent Zelle activity.

My jaw dropped when I went back and looked at my call history. Sixteen minutes — that’s how long they had me on the line.

In decades as a crime reporter, I’ve covered many, many scams — psychic scams, sweetheart swindles, real-estate scams, even the obscure “nanny scam,” where a fake mother reaches out to a young caregiver to try to rip her off.

I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes?

I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jordan Speer/Chase

There's Just Too Many Damn Elites

In a recent piece on James Burnham we discussed the rise of managerialism, or the idea that society is dominated neither by capitalists/owners or workers/proletariat.

Instead they are run by a middle layer of managers who have entirely different incentives from the owners or the shareholders. (...)

While Burnham introduced the concept of managerialism, Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” in her similarly-titled 1977 essay. Since her piece, the PMC has only grown in power: eating up most of the money in our society while acting rebellious and aggrieved while doing it.

Marc Andreessen called the PMC the ‘laptop class’:

Laptop Class (noun): Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs.

The professional–managerial class tends to have incomes above the average for their country, with major exceptions being academia and print journalism." [Who are compensated with power instead.]

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital.

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

Post 2008, we saw the PMC join the working class to fight the capitalists in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The majority of Occupy’s participants were college grads who had experienced massive student debt, unemployment, and downward mobility during the economic downturn. The language of “We are the 99%” reflected the fact that the movement’s participants saw themselves as part of the exploited masses.

But the Occupy movement quickly came and went. Corporations obviously didn’t support it because unlike more recent social movements, Occupy required real sacrifice on the part of the corporation. Bernie Sanders ended up losing to Hillary and that was that.

In an attempt to create these new social conflicts (anti-racism, anti-fascism, the gender wars), the PMC altogether ignored and suppressed class wars. When Nike says they’re committed to fighting anti-racism or anti-semitism, it buys them social capital that allows them to deflect against inquiries into how they treat their workers.

Over the next decade that PMC would eventually switch from working class to social justice rhetoric. After all, Wall Street couldn’t support Occupy Wall Street or broader unionization efforts while remaining in business, but they could fund activist efforts with billions of dollars while signaling to the type of elites they’d like to hire and do business with.

To further distinguish the PMC from the working class, colleges initiated the PMC into this esoteric language which made non-college goers feel left out and left behind. A great deal of what constitutes activism is an elaborate set of rules about what you can and can’t say about this or that group. The complexity of the rules is itself strategic — it’s a way of doling out power to the college grads who learned all the rules while taking away power from the non-elites who didn’t.

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them.

by Erik Torenberg |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Roblox

The world’s most beloved video-game app is also a brain-rotting, hypercommercial dystopia.

I’ve arrived in the middle of a vast expanse of what looks like green LEGO plastic subdivided into fenced lots. Mozart’s “Turkish March” plays sourcelessly over a chorus of meowing cats and squeaking mice. A signpost with my name on it indicates that one of these lots of Gumby-colored virtual earth is mine, and it is embarrassingly barren. In contrast, the neighboring garden, belonging to a stranger going by Level12Arsonist, resembles a neon Eden, bulging with glowing vines, buzzing bugs, monkeys, and exotic fruits. I plant a carrot seed and wait for it to sprout. I’m informed I can buy a “bug egg” with funds drawn directly from my in-game checking account, though I have no idea exactly how much this costs or what it might do. Level12Arsonist, in a gesture of goodwill or perhaps pity, sends me a friend request. I am currently playing one of the most popular online video games on the planet.

Grow a Garden, available on the app Roblox, is an exercise in patience. As the name suggests, the premise is almost Zen-like, requiring nothing more of players than planting seeds and waiting — and waiting some more — for them to mature. Then they harvest their crops, sell them for “Sheckles,” an in-game currency, and gradually reinvest their profits in more seeds and more waiting. Or they can simply spend real money on Robux, Roblox’s universal virtual currency, to skip the waiting altogether and transform their plot of land into a verdant oasis.

Roblox features millions of such games, many of them generated by the very children who play them. Grow a Garden — essentially a remake of the legendary time-waster FarmVille — recently smashed Fortnite’s all-time popularity record for concurrent users; at one point this summer, roughly 22 million people were playing at the same time. Grow a Garden is outpacing prestige games with development budgets approaching those of Hollywood blockbusters, put to shame by Roblox’s blocky graphics, a blurry mix of Minecraft and South Park. Grow a Garden was created by an anonymous teenager.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its primitivism, tens of millions of people around the planet love Roblox deeply, sincerely, and with more zeal than anyone loves just about anything else on the internet, their obsession spilling over into YouTube fan accounts, conferences, meetups, and a thriving industry of third-party coding studios. The platform’s popularity is staggering. In 2020, as Facebook continued to watch its share of the global adolescent attention span slide, Roblox told Bloomberg that “two-thirds of all U.S. kids between 9 and 12 years old use Roblox, and it’s played by a third of all Americans under the age of 16.” This year, Roblox reported 111.8 million average daily active users. Like many budding tech companies, it has yet to turn a profit, but it estimates it will end 2025 with around $4.5 billion in revenue and has a market capitalization of nearly $90 billion.

Where Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to create a “metaverse” failed so profoundly his company pretends it never tried in the first place, Roblox presses onward with a living and breathing metaverse that has developed organically over time and with much less Wall Street fanfare. Co-founder David Baszucki describes the company’s mission with a phrase that has the ring of early Facebook idealism: “Connecting a billion people every day with optimism and civility.”

The reality of Roblox is less benevolent. It’s difficult to define this world, which is sprawling and diverse, with any precision. Brookhaven, which has been played more than 71 billion times and typically hosts 500,000 simultaneous players, offers gamers a virtual cityscape where they can act out fantasy lives as baristas, ICE officials, or simply pedestrians. Some games are hardly games at all; I spent longer than I will ever admit in a Roblox world consisting of nothing more than users waiting on a digital line for their turn to be cradled in the arms of an unlicensed Shrek sitting on a giant outhouse toilet. (Shrek Line, at the time I write this, has been played more than 25 million times.) Many popular Roblox games lean heavily into the “brain rot” cultural genre popular among internet-addled children with gameplay mechanics seemingly designed to be as incoherent or absurd as possible. Steal a Brainrot, for example, has gamers watch a procession of 3-D models based on Italian AI-slop memes that they can then buy and steal from one another as they avoid getting hit with baseball bats or slapped by giant hands. This game has been played more than 19 billion times, according to company metrics.

Like any platform synonymous with children, Roblox has become associated with their predation. According to data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek, between 2018 and 2024, more than two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicions of abducting or abusing victims they met or groomed using Roblox. In one notorious case, a New Jersey man was sentenced to 15 years in prison after Ubering a 15-year-old girl he’d met on Roblox to his home, where he repeatedly sexually abused her. In recent months, Roblox’s stock has been buffeted by reports that it will soon face hundreds of lawsuits alleging that it has facilitated the sexual exploitation of minors, even as it touts a raft of new safety features to protect children. Furthermore, because many of its games are created by children who often see little or no remuneration, Roblox has been accused of being a largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar child-labor operation.

These are serious problems. The bad headlines, however, can obscure other issues that may not be as sensational but are nonetheless widespread, affecting the teeming millions of children who hang out unsupervised in this vast playground. Despite heightened awareness of the dangers the screen life poses to children, parents seem largely unaware that Roblox is a wholly different animal from the usual smart-phone addiction. It’s a place where some of the most insidious trends of the contemporary internet — gambling, compulsive distraction, mindless consumption, and overall enshittification — have hardened into governing realities.

Company executives say it’s a site for unparalleled creative expression. “At the very highest level, one of the things we believe about Roblox is it should be really easy to create,” VP of engineering Nick Tornow told me in an interview. “We believe in the creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone.” But what executives are less willing to acknowledge, at least among those who aren’t the company’s shareholders, is the degree to which this great unruly world created by children has since been engineered to hook them on gamified consumption. What Roblox most resembles is a mall — if a mall could be limitless, free of the confines of brick and mortar. The kids in this mall are ostensibly doing normal mall things, the stuff you may remember doing when you were that age: gossiping, listening to music, goofing around, shopping, trying on outfits — and being asked at every turn to pay for, say, plants for their garden. Roblox presents players with a lopsided choice: the thrill of watching a tomato plant grow, free of charge, or the instant gratification of a lush, instantly generated garden at a price.

And there’s so much more: a virtual universe besieged by corporations and advertisers looking not only to make money but to embed themselves deep in children’s psyches. Even a few hours spent in the game’s various and ever-multiplying worlds is enough to make the shopping malls of old look like a Quaker youth retreat. The Robloxverse is a vision of hallucinatory hypercapitalism that dazzles and entertains as it extracts money from the young and inexperienced and impatient, immersing them in a degraded iteration of the internet where slop and the market and social media are totally integrated. Roblox’s legions of devoted fans see no such thing — only a chance to play, chat, and explore. It’s unclear whether Roblox executives, or the children’s parents, even care that this might be an illusion.

by Sam Biddle, Intelligencer |  Read more:
Image: Roblox

Subscription Prices Gone Wild

Most platform subscription price are going up, not down—and many are skyrocketing.

Music streaming is one more example. Spotify’s Chief Business Officer recently offered the bland observation that price hikes are “part of our toolbox now”—and added “we’ll do it when it makes sense.”

What does that really mean?

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, Spotify subscribers should expect regular prices increases from Spotify in the future—with a boost coming every 12-24 months.

Spotify even bragged to the investment community that it’s always planning a price boost somewhere. Here again is the Chief Business Officer laying it out for us:

I want to also remind you that we take a portfolio approach. So in a sense, you could say that we raise all the time. For instance, in the last quarter we raised in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And I can report to you that on churn, we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary for Spotify.

Years ago, I claimed that streaming economics were broken, and price increases were inevitable. But I never anticipated the rapacious response of the suits in the C-suite.

The short explanation is that they do it because they can. Sure, some people cancel their subscriptions, but not enough to make a difference. Most subscribers simply put up with it.

That’s why the streamers keep boosting prices again and again. They will continue doing it until they encounter serious resistance—and they haven’t hit it yet. So I expect more of the same.

But there’s a danger to this business strategy. Look at Las Vegas, where tourism is collapsing because the casinos went too far. For a long time, the public didn’t flinch in the face of price hikes, but then it got ridiculous:

• $95 ATM fees

• $14 coffee

• $50 early check-in fees

• $30 cocktails

The casinos have now earned a reputation as exploitative price-gougers. Tourism is now down sharply—hotel occupancy has dropped 15%. The city feels “eerily empty.”

This isn’t easy to fix. Once you destroy your reputation and lose the customer’s trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That happened in an earlier day to Sears and K-Mart, and they never recovered.

Something similar may already be happening at Disney’s theme parks. Some visitors report that Disney World is empty—looking like a ghost town even during Labor Day weekend.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

[ed. May have to go back to cable (horrors). Just canceled my Amazon Prime account. See also: Is TV's Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis.]

TikTok Clock

Here comes TrumpTok.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there was a “framework for a deal” for a TikTok sale, though he has said the words “framework for a deal” eleventy-hundred times. Through the months of Trump’s insane pingponging deals with China we have learned that “framework” and “deal” are two very different things. Though at least this is better than the “handshake for a framework” Howard Lutnick said they had back in June. So on Friday are Trump and Scott Bessent really, finally going to get that deal from China on those rare earth minerals, the ones US tech companies need to make all of their AI chips, planes, and high-tech gadgets that Trump screwed them out of by self-embargoing the US? It’s concepts of a framework for maybe!

TikTok being forced under his thumb has apparently long been a wish of Trump’s, at least since app users first ground his gears back in 2020 by registering to attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no intention of showing up, causing his delicate ego embarrassment when the yuge surging crowd he was expecting turned out to be a mere trickle. He raged for TikTok to be BANNED, because something something Chinese spies, and Congress passed an act that banned the app unless its algorithm was put under the control of a US company. And Joe Biden signed it!

Remember that extra-stupid hearing with TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, with Tom Cotton refusing to accept that he is from Singapore, which is a whole different country than China, and how embarrassingly pig-ignorant the senators were about the basics of how the Internet even works?

 

But, the Chinese government doesn’t and has never owned TikTok. A Chinese man founded it and is still 20 percent of the board, but the company was never incorporated in China. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government ever had access to user data, much less that they were using it to spy on dissidents or Americans making cucumber salads.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and TikTok Inc. is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. And its servers — ORACLE servers, in fact — dish out its secret-sauce algorithm from Virginia. Sixty percent of ByteDance is currently owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors including Susquehanna International Group (majority shareholder Jeff Yass), the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, KKR, BlackRock, and Tiger Global Management; 20 percent of the firm is owned by Beijing-based founder Zhang Yiming, and 20 percent is owned by employees.

But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!

Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.

And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.

And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.

The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.

by Marcie Jones, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Guardian

[ed. I try to pay attention but this whole TikTok deal is too convoluted and politicized to make any sense. Is this some kind of sweatheart business deal, budding propaganda platform, rare-earth minerals squeeze...or what? Who knows.]

No Public Comment Allowed

No public comment or hearings on environmental review of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is cutting out a public comment process, citing a Trump administration policy aimed at ‘streamlining’ development.

Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.

The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.

BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.

“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.

Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said. [ed. How nice. God forbid the government would want us to know what it's doing.]

The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid. (...)

BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.

“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement. (...)

“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. 

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen

[ed. This is what I did (among other things) during my career. Never in my 30+ years overseeing oil and gas leasing in Alaska was the public ever excluded from commenting on lease sales or any other major federal action. Presumably this recent edict applies to the State of Alaska, as well. It isn't legal, but it's not surprising either. What happened to state's rights?]

The Uggo Police

The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.

And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.

As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?

The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.

The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait [ed. don't think so.]. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!

Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question. (...)

So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.

But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk. (...)

It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.

by B.D. McClay, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: American Eagle

[ed. Still high on winning the 'War on Christmas'. Also, have nothing against breasts.]

Uh Oh, US Farmers Totally Screwed

And that is bad news for The Groceries.

For fucking around with the world of Trump, some groups of people are reaching the find out phase faster and harder than others. And one of those groups is among the most loyal to the regime, farmers. While farm income is technically up, it’s only because of $42 billion in socialist bailout money in the form of a 720 percent increase in ad hoc disaster payments, that so far have made up more than 23 percent of Net Farm Income in 2025. But without that, farm income is down nearly 6 percent from December. And economists with the University of Illinois report that agricultural exports dropped by nearly $5 billion in just July alone.

The reason why is no mystery! Those Trump tariffs screwed over farmers coming and going, with higher input costs for supplies like seeds, fertilizer, and tractors, and lower selling prices for commodities. So far this year, China has not purchased one single, solitary soybean, opting to shop for them in friendlier Brazil, instead.

And US soybean farmers are projected to lose roughly $100 an acre this year. Nor are Mexican or Canadian companies as interested in buying the US’s corn or rice, now that retaliatory tariffs have made them more expensive. So farmers who took out loans or dipped into capital reserves expecting to sell their crops are facing the threat of bankruptcy, and in Q1 of 2025 the number of farm bankruptcies was nearly double the level of the first quarter of 2024.

Of course Trump knew full well this was going to happen, because it happened in his first term too: He levied tariffs, farm bankruptcies reached the highest level in a decade, and he ended up giving farmers a $16 billion bailout. And now Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says even more bailout money might be coming.

It would be simple to help out farmers without giving them any socialist bailout money. Quit tariffing fertilizer, for one thing! Even Chuck Grassley has noticed this.

There’s a guy who definitely writes his own posts, who surely does watch a lot of corn. In an interview with RFD-TV, he vented more:

“We’ve got this farm crisis now, and this President should deal with this farm crisis right now. I’m hearing from bankers. I’m hearing from people that are getting pressed by their bankers to maybe sell part of their farm to somebody, [so] that when they build up their equity, they might be able to buy it back. We haven’t had this kind of stress in agriculture since the 1980s.”

Another big-brain idea, quit tariffing tractors! Or even just make ONE tariff rate and stick to it. The tariffs aren’t only expensive, they’re bizarrely complicated, and of course, prone to shifting with the tides of Dear Leader’s ever-changing moods.
From the WSJ:

The effective tariff facing exporters now varies depending on a product’s metal content. For a machine worth $1 million with a 20% steel content, the rate would be 50% of $200,000 and 15% of the rest, resulting in a $220,000 levy per machine—or a 22% tariff. The U.S. has said it would review the metals tariff list every four months, adding to the uncertainty.

Or as Grassley put it:

“Putting 50% tariffs on things that have steel in them, when you can’t buy those things in the United States, and you need them for your tractor to be finally manufactured? There should be tariffs on things that you can’t get in the United States. Why drive up the price of John Deeres because of a tariff on something they need for the tractor that they can’t even get in the United States? It’s a stupid policy.”

Indeed, if the point of these tariffs is to start making more tractors in the US, why put kooky tariffs on the metal that tractors are made out of? If we were cynical, it might seem like a ploy to make farmland real cheap so big agribusiness can buy it all up.

And the shortage of farmworkers is another self-made Trump problem. When the regime isn’t humiliatingly rounding up and detaining people with and without proper work visas, it’s also allowing the ones who do have H-2A visas to work in conditions one federal judge called “a form of modern-day slavery,” where they’re frequently abused, get their wages stolen, and are threatened with a call to ICE if they complain. (...)

And then there’s how USAID is no more, and not buying farmers’ extra grain any more. Cruel as they are stupid, ayup.

Are Republicans starting to smell the disaster Trump is brewing? Polling shows more Republicans than Democrats are worried about the economy, and Trump’s approval rating on the top issue dumbshit voters picked him to fix, The Groceries, has been going down to poundtown. And his approval rating is underwater in most states, including the breadbasket ones. Even in Arkansas, it’s plunged to single digits.

Anyway, it’s tempting to laugh at the poor dumb rural folk who thought that Donald Trump, the man who went broke on casinos, was going to be their savior. He bailed them out before, so guess they just expect that he and Congress will keep on doing it.

But we all have to eat, and bad news for The Groceries is bad news for everybody. But good news, soyboys, maybe at least domestic soybeans will be real cheap.

by Marci Jones, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: Tomasz Filipek on Unsplash
[ed. For a clear explanation of why so many farmers supported Trump (knowing full well the downsides). See this:

Hot Dog University

A man in a Vienna Beef apron is lecturing into a speakerphone. Somewhere, someone scribbles notes in the margins of a Costco receipt. Elsewhere, a woman slices onions with the precision of a surgeon. A teenager in Chicago buffs his stainless steel hot dog cart until it gleams like a spaceship. A former landscape mogul-turned-cannabis-entrepreneur serves 20 custom hot dogs from a hand-built stand nestled between a ski mountain in Vermont and his dispensary. In Washington State, a Silicon Valley escapee helps his social media manager capture the perfect shot of his stand. A retired math professor counts out buns in Texas. In North Carolina, a man unfurls a 14-foot banner that reads BIG SEXY DAWGS, then opens a folding chair and waits for customers outside a rowdy college bar.

Different zip codes, different lives, but somehow, they all trace the same strange road back to a place called Hot Dog University.Yes, that’s a real place — tucked into the back of the Vienna Beef factory on Chicago’s North Side. Part classroom, part test kitchen, part pilgrimage for anyone who’s ever dreamed of slinging sausages for a living.

Every graduate of Hot Dog U knows the drill. They've studied the sacred script. They know the snap of the casing is non-negotiable. They've practiced the topping order like it’s a choreography: yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onions, tomato wedges, a pickle spear, sport peppers, and just a dash of celery salt.

And they all know the cardinal rule, taught by their P.H.D. (that’s Professor of Hot Dogs): no ketchup. Unless you still ride a tricycle (and can prove it), you're pregnant (we don’t argue with cravings), or it’s your wedding day (and we’d better see the dress).

It’s easy to laugh, until it isn’t.

This is serious business and the students at Hot Dog U are gearing up. Not just for summer, but for something bigger — independence, reinvention, the hope that if they can just get the cart to the right corner, maybe, just maybe, everything might work out.

It’s a little Ted Lasso, a little Abbott Elementary — big-hearted, scrappy, and, unexpectedly, profound. Our story begins in a classroom where the lessons are about hot dogs, sure. But this is also a story about failure and second chances, hustle and hope, and the deeply American belief that a sidewalk, a spatula, and a dream might still be enough.

In my family, hot dogs were never just food. They were in-between moments: passed across bleacher seats at ballgames, devoured at gas station stops, slightly charred at backyard cookouts. Hot dogs became shorthand for time spent together.

So when I set out to report this story, it wasn’t because I had a grand theory about encased meats. It was something more subtle: a soft spot for a food that always felt like home. And I didn’t expect to find much more than nostalgia.

But what I found at Hot Dog U wasn’t just a quirky trade school with a great logo. People arrive from burned-out careers and unexpected life turns, from family kitchens and military mess halls, carrying stories as varied as their menus. They leave with a cart, a diploma, and — if it works — a shot at something better.

There’s something quietly radical about that. In a country where “entrepreneur” has become a buzzword for tech bros and hustlers, the students at Hot Dog U are a different breed. They're working-class dreamers. Retired couples. First-generation families. People who don’t want to disrupt the industry. They just want a patch of sidewalk, a roll of napkins, and a line of hungry customers.

by Celia Aniskovich, Switchboard | Read more:
Image: Hot Dog University poster
[ed. From things I've heard it can be a pretty cutthroat business. Mostly about getting the right spot.]

The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party and Zuckerberg’s Hot Mic Reveal

On September 4, Trump summoned more than thirty of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley to the State Dining Room. At the table: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman and Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Safra Catz (Oracle), Alex Karp (Palantir), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin/Amazon), and a procession of other AI and chip executives.

The optics were unmistakable. A long table, microphones set before each oligarch, gold-rimmed plates. The ritual was familiar: like a Trump cabinet meeting, each guest took a turn praising the Leader, pledging billions in “investment,” extolling his “visionary leadership.”

The quotes read like scripted devotionals:

• Sam Altman (OpenAI): “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation President. It’s a very refreshing change.”

• Tim Cook (Apple): “Thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States.”

• Sergey Brin (Google): “It’s an incredible inflection point… that your Administration is supporting our companies instead of fighting with them.”

And the capstone: Mark Zuckerberg, seated right next to Trump, announcing a pledge of “at least $600 billion” in U.S. investment by 2028.

If it felt choreographed, that’s because it was. This was not a negotiation, not even a strategy session. It was performance—the oligarchs lining up to kiss the ring.

A Little Context, Please

To understand what this performance really means, it helps to step back and look at what these oligarchs have already done to America. For that, I turn to Mike Brock—ex-tech exec turned reluctant Cassandra—whose writing at Notes from the Circus cuts with unusual moral clarity.

Here’s Brock, in his essay The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party: How Silicon Valley Toasted American Fascism:

“To understand what these oligarchs have done to America, start with Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram. His company’s internal research showed the platform was systematically destroying teenage girls’ mental health—creating unprecedented levels of depression, self-harm, and suicide among the most vulnerable users. The data was clear, the causation documented, the human cost undeniable.

Zuckerberg buried the research and continued the optimization.

This isn’t business negligence—it’s systematic cruelty disguised as innovation. Instagram was designed to extract maximum engagement from teenage minds through carefully engineered addiction, turning the most vulnerable period of human development into a profit center for algorithmic manipulation. The teenage suicide epidemic wasn’t an unfortunate side effect; it was the predictable result of systems optimized for engagement over human welfare.

But Instagram represents something larger: the entire Silicon Valley model of turning human consciousness into commodity. Every platform, every algorithm, every “connection” technology follows the same logic—fragment attention, replace authentic relationship with algorithmic substitutes, optimize human behavior for extraction rather than flourishing.

Tim Cook’s Apple markets privacy protection while building surveillance infrastructure for authoritarian regimes. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft promises AI enhancement while developing predictive policing systems that target communities for algorithmic enforcement. Each oligarch represents a variation on the same theme: technological sophistication serving moral barbarism, innovation rhetoric disguising systematic dehumanization.”

I can’t say it any better than that. These men and women didn’t walk into the White House as neutral technologists. They walked in as the architects of an extraction economy that commodifies our attention, monetizes our despair, and treats human vulnerability as an opportunity for profit. Yes, I know that’s very cynical, but when histories of this era are written a couple of centuries from now —assuming humanity survives and histories are still being written—I believe Brock has identified the central key feature of this era. The only question is whether humanity fully collapses because of it—or some counterforce emerges to defeat or at least mitigate it.

The Hot Mic Reveal

And then came the moment that crystallized everything.

As Zuckerberg delivered his carefully prepared pledge of a $600 billion U.S. investment, a hot mic caught him whispering to Trump.

“Sorry, I wasn’t ready… I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”

It was awkward. But more than awkward, it was revealing.

Here was the supposed master of the algorithm, the man who built a trillion-dollar empire on predictive precision, fumbling to figure out what number would please Trump. This wasn’t a CEO making a business decision. It was a courtier checking with the king.

Mike Brock nailed the significance in his companion essay The Hot Mic and the Monsters:

“This isn’t business negotiation. This is a courtier asking his king what lies he’d prefer to hear, then delivering them with practiced servility to a public they view as sheep requiring management rather than citizens deserving truth.”

The hot mic stripped away the theater. It revealed the truth: the oligarchs weren’t there to shape policy. They were there to play their part in legitimizing authoritarianism through performance.

Conclusion

What we saw in the State Dining Room was not business as usual. It wasn’t “innovation,” it wasn’t “visionary leadership,” and it sure as hell wasn’t patriotism. It was a court of oligarchs kneeling before an aspiring autocrat, pledging riches and obedience in exchange for protection and privilege.

The spectacle was obscene: billionaires who’ve built fortunes by monetizing despair now rushing to sanctify the man who has turned constitutional vandalism into performance art. Zuckerberg’s hot mic didn’t just reveal stage fright — it exposed the truth of the whole evening: this was theater, not policy; flattery, not leadership; a ritual of submission masquerading as a summit of visionaries.

Mike Brock captured it with precision:

“What the hot mic moment exposes is the elaborate theater that authoritarian consolidation requires to maintain legitimacy while systematic plunder proceeds.”

That’s the point. These men aren’t independent actors shaping the future. They are props in a reality show where Trump plays Dear Leader and the oligarchs play sycophants, helping to launder authoritarianism through the language of “innovation” and “investment.”

Every once in a while, a moment cuts through the fog and shows us the rot for what it is. The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party was one of those moments — a gaudy, gold-plated warning flare. We should not look away, and we should not forget who stood at that table and kissed the ring.

by Michael D. Sellers, Deeper Look |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Be sure to visit Mike Brock's site for the original posts (and more): The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party; and, The Hot Mic and the Monsters (NFtC). See also: The art of the fawn: pouring praise on Trump is latest political phenomenon (Guardian).]

Operational Transparency: How Domino’s Pizza Tracker Conquered the Business World

In 2009, Domino’s was in trouble. Sales were in decline. Its pizza tied for last in industry taste tests with Chuck E. Cheese. A YouTube video of a store employee putting cheese up their nose had gone viral.

J. Patrick Doyle was appointed CEO a year later to oversee a turnaround with a ballsy premise: publicly admitting that their pizza sucked and showing customers that they were improving their pies. “I used to joke that if it didn’t work, I would probably be the shortest-tenured CEO in the history of American business,” Doyle told Bloomberg.

Transparency became Domino’s modus operandi. They aired ads in which Doyle and others issued mea culpas for their crummy pizza and released a documentary about revamping their recipe. They shared footage of people visiting the farms that grew Domino’s tomatoes. They used real photos sourced from customers – even of pies mangled during delivery.

For the next decade, Domino’s stock rose like dough in an oven. On his show, Stephen Colbert praised the campaign’s honesty, took a bite of a Domino’s slice, and asked, “Is that pizza, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”

Few companies have copied Domino’s “we suck” strategy. Instead, it’s another bit of transparency from Domino’s struggle era that is the great legacy of its turnaround: the pizza tracker.

You know the pizza tracker. You’ve likely used it to follow your pizza’s journey from a store to your home. But even if you haven’t, you live in the world the Domino’s pizza tracker built. Because in marketing, product development, and user experience, the pizza tracker is an icon. An inspiration. A platonic ideal that has been imitated across industries ranging from food-delivery apps to businesses where the only grease is on the hands of auto mechanics.

Show them the sausage

I enjoy restaurants with open kitchens: line cooks slicing entire carrots in a blink, chefs sipping broth and nodding approvingly, all in an elegant ballet of speed and craftsmanship.

But the business world doesn’t have many open kitchens. We receive our sneakers in the mail without ever seeing a Nike factory floor or Adidas brainstorming session. We receive cash from an ATM without any sense of the impressive technology under the hood.

Tami Kim thinks that’s a shame. An associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, she’s an advocate of an open-kitchen approach called operational transparency that she believes can increase customers’ appreciation of a product or service – and employees’ motivation and productivity too. Here’s how:

1. Open windows: Franchises like Starbucks have replaced many drive-through intercoms with cameras and video displays. In an experiment that used iPads to give students a view of cafeteria cooks fulfilling their hamburger and hot dog orders (and chefs a view of the students), Kim and her coauthors found that diners’ satisfaction increased without sacrificing speed in the kitchen.

2. Price transparency: Some e-commerce sites break down the price of their shirts or wallets by the cost of materials, labor, transportation, and tariffs – and compare their markup to the industry average. One study showed this transparency boosted sales by ~26%.

3. The “Labor Illusion”: Many AI models show a breakdown of the steps the chatbot is taking to answer your question. In another study, researchers found that travel sites like Kayak revealing their behind-the-scenes work (“Now getting results from American Airlines… from JetBlue… 133 results found so far…”) led to increased perceptions of quality and willingness to pay.

The pizza tracker came out in 2008, around when Kim and her colleagues started studying operational transparency. Domino’s declined an interview, but according to a case study on Domino’s, the tracker’s creation was spurred by the insight that online orders were more profitable – and made customers more satisfied – than phone or in-person orders. The company’s push to increase digital sales from 20% to 50% of its business led to new ways to order (via a tweet, for example) and then a new way for customers to track their order.

“With technology, it's just so much easier for companies to reveal parts of their operations without a ton of effort,” says Kim. Domino's was already tracking the status of orders on their back end, so they could show that progress to customers without disrupting operations.

“Every time we present this [research on operational transparency], we predominantly use that example because it's such a neat and successful example,” she says. (...)

A wrinkle in (pizza) time

For designer Shuya Gong, though, the magic of the pizza tracker isn’t its window into Domino’s operations. It’s how it manipulates time.

“I think the pizza tracker essentially speeds up time for you,” says Gong, formerly a design director at IDEO, a design and consulting firm.

Gong points to the return trip effect: When you go somewhere and come back via the same route, the way back feels faster. One study of the effect found that it’s likely caused by people underestimating the duration of the first leg. So when Domino’s sends its customers (slightly high undergrads, parents who promised a pizza night) lots of updates, it feels like a return trip, and therefore a shorter wait. (...)

“People want a stress-free lifestyle,” he says. “Communicating progress gives people a sense of feeling in control, because they're aware of what's going on… If you don't feel in control, you'll never be able to relax.”

by Alex Mayyasi, The Hustle | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Truth, transparency, customer engagement (control). Seems like a no-brainer. So why don't more companies do this?]

Is America Ready for Japanese-Style 7-Elevens?

The Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven is betting billions of dollars that it can expand its business in the United States by making its convenience stores more like the food meccas they are in Japan.

Convenience stores, or konbini, are an indispensable part of daily life in Japan, known for high-quality fresh food — from seasonal bento boxes to egg salad sandwiches that the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once called “pillows of love.”

Leading the push to expand Japanese-quality fresh food to 7-Eleven in North America is Stephen Dacus, a Japanese American former Walmart executive who started as chief executive of Seven & i Holdings, the 7-Eleven parent company, three months ago.

Seven & i is under intense pressure. Over the past year, it has fended off a takeover attempt by a Canadian rival. When Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle K convenience stores, withdrew its $47 billion bid in July, Seven & i’s stock price collapsed. Mr. Dacus and his team were left to to prove they can deliver growth and returns on their own.

Now, facing a stagnant and highly competitive retail market in Japan, Seven & i’s growth is expected to come from overseas. The strategy could hinge, industry experts say, on Mr. Dacus’s ability to successfully introduce Japanese-level quality foods in the more than 13,000 stores that 7-Eleven operates, franchises and licenses in North America.

“Whether it’s hot food or cold food or any kind of food, we have to lean into how we improve the quality and the experience,” Mr. Dacus said in an interview on Friday. “That’s what Japan does extraordinarily well.”

Over the next five years, Seven & i is considering investing more than $13 billion to expand overseas. In the United States, this means initiatives like refreshing existing sites, adding more than 1,000 in-store restaurants and building a network of companies to provide more of its 7-Eleven brand prepared foods.

“And we’re launching the egg sandwiches,” Mr. Dacus said. They are, he noted, the top item purchased by the millions of American visitors descending on Japan each year and visiting 7-Eleven stores.

The sandwiches are made with the fluffy Japanese “milk bread,” and a team in Texas worked with Japanese suppliers to learn how to produce it in the United States. Milk bread and Japanese mayonnaise give the egg sandwiches “the heavenly pillow thing,” Mr. Dacus said.

Seven & i’s new fresh-food push in the United States orients it squarely in a place already stocked with competition.

“Prepared food is increasingly what sets different convenience brands apart,” said Jeff Lenard, a vice president at the National Association of Convenience Stores. Prepared goods have relatively high profit margins, particularly important for convenience stores that face declining sales of traditional staples, including tobacco and gasoline, Mr. Lenard said.

In the United States, 7-Eleven is the biggest convenience store chain, but the market is fragmented. Tens of thousands of store operators compete for fresh food, not only with one another but also with fast-food retailers.

Mr. Dacus, 64, has worked in retail for more than three decades. He was on the Seven & i board of directors when he was tapped to spread overseas the qualities that make 7-Eleven so loved in Japan.

In the past, he said, “we took a low-risk, low-return approach.” Management was too focused on Japan and too hands-off with operations in other countries. “We could have been much more aggressive,” he said. “The flip side of that is there’s that much opportunity out there for us as we shift our focus.”

Industry experts and Mr. Dacus acknowledge, however, that there are a number of reasons the Japanese convenience store model cannot easily be replicated in the United States.

Two decades ago, the Japanese convenience store FamilyMart tried to introduce its concept to the West Coast, but the business struggled to adapt. The company found it difficult to convince Americans that a convenience store could be more than a gas station selling snacks. By 2015, all the stores had closed.

Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. Beyond that, “it’s the ways in which they maintain stock and freshness, attention to detail,” said Gavin Whitelaw, executive director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

by River Akira Davis, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Kentaro Takahashi

[ed. Can't wait. See also: Why 7-Eleven and Other Convenience Stores in Japan Are So Special (NYT).]

Fighting a Health Insurance Denial

Seven tips to help.

When Sally Nix found out that her health insurance company wouldn’t pay for an expensive, doctor-recommended treatment to ease her neurological pain, she prepared for battle.

It took years, a chain of conflicting decisions, and a health insurer switch before she finally won approval. She started treatment in January and now channels time and energy into helping other patients fight denials.

“One of the things I tell people when they come to me is: ‘Don’t panic. This isn’t a final no,’” said Nix, 55, of Statesville, N.C.

To control costs, nearly all health insurers use a system called prior authorization, which requires patients or their providers to seek approval before they can get certain procedures, tests and prescriptions.

Denials can be appealed, but nearly half of insured adults who received a prior authorization denial in the last two years reported the appeals process was either somewhat or very difficult, according to a July poll published by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

“It’s overwhelming by design,” because insurers know confusion and fatigue cause people to give up, Nix said. “That’s exactly what they want you to do.”

The good news is you don’t have to be an insurance expert to get results, she said. “You just need to know how to push back.”

Here are tips to consider when faced with a prior authorization denial:

1. Know your insurance plan.

Do you have insurance through your job? A plan purchased through healthcare.gov? Medicare? Medicare Advantage? Medicaid?

These distinctions can be confusing, but they matter a great deal. Different categories of health insurance are governed by different agencies and are therefore subject to different prior authorization rules.

For example, federal marketplace plans, as well as Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, are regulated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Employer-sponsored plans are regulated by the Department of Labor. Medicaid plans, administered by state agencies, are subject to both state and federal rules.

Learn the language specific to your policy. Health insurance companies do not apply prior authorization requirements uniformly across all plans. Read your policy closely to make sure your insurer is following its own rules, as well as regulations set by the state and federal government.

2. Work with your provider to appeal.

Kathleen Lavanchy, who retired in 2024 from a job at an inpatient rehabilitation hospital in the Philadelphia area, spent much of her career communicating with health insurance companies on behalf of patients.

Before you contact your health insurer, call your provider, Lavanchy said, and ask to speak to a medical care manager or someone in the office who handles prior authorization appeals.

The good news is that your doctor’s office may already be working on an appeal.

Medical staffers can act as “your voice,” Nix said. “They know all the language.”

You or your provider can request a “peer-to-peer” review during the appeals process, which allows your doctor to discuss your case over the phone with a medical professional who works for the insurance company.

3. Be organized.

Many hospitals and doctors use a system called MyChart to organize medical records, test results, and communications so that they are easily accessible. Similarly, patients should keep track of all materials related to an insurance appeal — records of phone calls, emails, snail mail, and in-app messages.

Everything should be organized, either digitally or on paper, so that it can be easily referenced, Nix said. At one point, she said, her own records proved that her insurance company had given conflicting information. The records were “the thing that saved me,” she said.

“Keep an amazing paper trail,” she said. “Every call, every letter, every name.”

Linda Jorgensen, executive director of the Special Needs Resource Project, a nonprofit offering online resources for patients with disabilities and their families, has advised patients who are fighting a denial to specifically keep paper copies of everything.

“If it isn’t on paper, it didn’t happen,” she said.

Jorgensen, who serves as a caregiver to an adult daughter with special needs, created a free form you can print to help guide you when taking notes during phone calls with your insurance company. She advised asking the insurance representative for a “ticket number” and their name before proceeding with the conversation.

The silver lining is that most denials, if appealed, are overturned. (...)

For the sake of speed, some people are turning to artificial intelligence for help crafting customizable appeal letters. (...)

4. Find an advocate.

Many states operate free consumer assistance programs, available by phone or email, which can help you file an appeal. They can explain your benefits and may intervene if your insurance company isn’t complying with requirements.

Beyond that, some nonprofit advocacy groups, such as the Patient Advocate Foundation, might help. On the foundation’s website is guidance about what to include in an appeal letter. For those battling severe disease, foundation staffers can work with you one-on-one to fight a denial.

by Lauren Sausser, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Helen Quach/Los Angeles Times

[ed. PSA for future reference.]

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). (...)

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications.

by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani
[ed. Zuckerberg should have his own chapter in the Book of Liars (a notable achievement, given the competition). See also: These People Are Weird (WWL). But there's also some good news: First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion (ArsT):]

"Today, Anthropic likely breathes a sigh of relief to avoid the costs of extended litigation and potentially paying more for pirating books. However, the rest of the AI industry is likely horrified by the settlement, which advocates had suggested could set an alarming precedent that could financially ruin emerging AI companies like Anthropic."